We Shall Be Free!: Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices

Benjamin J. Davis Jr.

Benjamin J. Davis Jr. Harlem citizens elected Benjamin J. Davis Jr. (1903–1964), African American attorney and Communist, to the New York City Council in 1943. Not surprisingly, as the Cold War heated up in post–World War II America, Davis endured increasing hostility from beyond New York. Indeed, in 1951 federal authorities convicted Davis, along with ten other national CPUSA leaders, of violating the Smith Act and sentenced him to five years in federal prison. As young man, Davis proved to be academically gifted and ambitious . Born and raised in Dawson, Georgia, he successfully completed Morehouse College’s high school program in Atlanta. Afterward, he pursued higher education at Amherst College, where he obtained his bachelor of arts degree. Subsequently, in 1930, he graduated from Harvard Law School and worked briefly as a journalist before starting a law practice in Atlanta. During the early 1930s, Davis represented Angelo Herndon, a nineteen-year-old African American communist charged with violating Georgia’s law against “attempting to incite insurrection. ” In fact, Herndon had been organizing a farmworkers’ union. Throughout the trial, Davis encountered discriminatory hostility from the judge and the white community. He was also deeply impressed by the rhetoric and courage of Herndon and his Leftist colleagues. As the trial ended, he joined the Communist Party. Convicted and sentenced to eighteen to twenty years 76 ■ Benjamin J. Davis Jr. in prison, Herndon was soon freed when the courts ruled that Georgia’s insurrection law was unconstitutional. Davis left the South in 1935 and moved to Harlem, where he worked as the editor of the Negro Liberator and, later, of the Communist Party’s newspaper, the Daily Worker. In 1943, he was elected to fill a City Council seat vacated by Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who had left to run for the U.S. Congress.Voters twice reelected Davis to his City Council seat. However, in 1949 he was expelled from the council after his Smith Act conviction. His removal from office was required under state law. Furthermore, he appealed the conviction without success over a two-year period. Subsequently, after three years and four months in the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, authorities freed Davis. In the years after his release, Davis spoke on several major college campuses and remained politically active by promoting an agenda of civil rights and economic populism. In 1962, he spoke at Harvard, Columbia, Amherst, Oberlin, and the University of Minnesota. Nonetheless , as an ironic twist in his political biography, the City College of NewYork (in the NewYork Council District he represented in the 1940s) barred Davis from speaking on its campus. After a number of student protests, however, Davis was permitted to speak on a nearby street. In the early 1960s, federal authorities charged Davis with violating the Internal Security Act. He died before the case went to trial. Davis was running for the NewYork State Senate on the People’s Party ticket when he died from lung cancer in 1964. ■ ■ ■ Special Collections: University Archives Manuscript Collection, MS 102, Box 28, State University of New York, Buffalo Reply to a Loaded Question Pamphlet: “Communists in the Struggle for Negro Rights,” in Communists in the Struggle for Negro Rights, by James W. Ford, Benjamin J. Davis Jr., William L. Patterson, and Earl Browder (NewYork: New Century Publishers, 1945). “Have Communists quit fighting for Negro rights?”—is, of course, a loaded question. Apparently, certain gentlemen on the affirmative Benjamin J. Davis Jr. ■ 77 are, at least, willing to confess that the Communists once did fight for Negro rights; and, I understand, honest confession is good for the soul. Communists have struggled along for Negro rights under the tremendous handicap of being without the eminent acknowledgement by these gentlemen of what we were doing, and have pulled through as best as they could. But we were nevertheless happy to see a past truth conceded about the Communists, even if it is done for the purpose of denying a present truth about the Communists. The real question that certain of these gentlemen on the affirmative would like to discuss is the Communists’ position in support of the war. For them the query, “Have Communists quit fighting for Negro rights?” is a smoke screen to conceal their own internal, unresolved conflict on how they stand on the war. Communists are unequivocal on this question. They regard this war as what it is— just and a patriotic people’s war of national liberation, to rid the world of fascism...