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Prologue The CPUSA and Black America, 1919–1928 For the duration of the “Red Summer” of 1919, in the midst of the disorder that followed World War I and in the exhilaration stimulated by the Russian Revolution, white radicals in the United States kicked off the American Communist movement. Its birth was accompanied by an eruption of major race riots in this country that signaled a new militant resistance by young blacks to American racial proscription.“New Negro” intellectuals gave voice to this militancy. Some of them, expressing solidarity with the pro-Bolshevik uprisings occurring in Europe at the time, were struck by Bolshevism’s appeal not only to the working class of highly industrialized nations but also to oppressed national ethnic minorities. In spite of this interest, however, few blacks enlisted in the new radical movement. In the early years of the history of the CPUSA in the United States, this new Marxist-Leninist organization claimed few African American members. Most party devotees came from foreignlanguage federations formerly associated with the Socialist Party of America (SP). Moreover, these immigrant workers from Eastern and Southern Europe did not have much positive contact with black Americans .The source of the negligence can indeed be traced to the Socialist Party. The SP had attracted few African American members in the years before 1919.True, Eugene Debs and other prominent Socialist leaders 2 ■ Prologue were usually opponents of racial segregation, disenfranchisement, peonage , and lynching. Nevertheless, American Socialists did not emphasize work with blacks, and they often downplayed or ignored white supremacy in the form of their party’s allegiance to trade unions that discriminated against non-white workers. Historians generally agree that the SP was unwilling to combat vigorously the racial inequities among American workers. Communists in the United States, like the Socialists, at first displayed only a slight concern with black workers. They also failed to engage the young black militants who emerged on the scene in the postwar period. By the early 1920s, however, the CPUSA was defining the “Negro problem” in the United States in a global context. As an instrument of world revolution and anticolonialism, the CPUSA approached the racial situation from that broad perspective. Accordingly, black Americans combating Jim Crow and lynching were essentially no different from Africans fighting for national independence and self-determination. Not surprisingly, then, the party proved most attractive at this time to black laborers who displayed internationalist proclivities. In fact, a number of African American members of the CPUSA in the early 1920s were immigrant workers from the West Indies. Understandably, they viewed the struggles of the black working class in the United States in the larger context of non-Europeans fighting against capitalism and imperialism. During the middle of the 1920s, some leaders of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a black Socialist organization that boasted a number of black Jamaican radicals in its ranks, linked up with the CPUSA. A black Marxist organization active during the Harlem Renaissance, the ABB also opposed American participation in World War I and linked the struggle for black liberation in the United States to the battle against European colonization in Africa. In 1918, Briggs started a new magazine called The Crusade. The ABB backed the electoral campaigns of the SP candidate A. Philip Randolph and exposed lynching in the South and job discrimination in the North. Briggs believed that the African American’s true place was with the labor and that blacks would benefit from the triumph of labor and the destruction of the “Capital Civilization.” A secret revolutionary organization, the ABB’s purpose and program was the liberation of African people and the redemption of the African race. Its program emphasized racial pride, Black National- Prologue ■ 3 ism, Pan-Africanism, and an economic analysis of the African American struggle that linked it to colonialism and imperialism. By 1925, the ABB leadership had established close ties with the CPUSA. The following FBI document, which focuses on the ABB and the historical black figure Claude McKay (the FBI worried he was too close to the Communists because of his visits to the Soviet Union), reveals important historical information but no real subversion. Claude McKay (1889– 1948), a Jamaican American writer and poet, was an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He was also attracted to communism in his early life; however, he was never a member of the American Communist Party. ■ ■ ■ Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Privacy Act, File on Claude McKay Excerpt from the...

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