In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chronology The CPUSA and African Americans 1917 Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, seize power in Russia. 1919 Communist Party of America (CP) and Communist Labor Party (CLP) founded in the United States. Both parties go underground in imitation of the Bolsheviks and in reply to U.S. government harassment. 1921 Under pressure from the Communist International (Comintern), the two American parties merged and form the Workers Party (WP), later renamed the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). 1919–1923 The newly founded Communist movement has almost no African American adherents. Most of its members, from various foreign-language federations of the Socialist Party of America, consists of workers who often have little or no interaction with black Americans. 1919–1925 African Blood Brotherhood (ABB). The ABB, a radical black liberation group founded in 1919 in New York City by the journalist Cyril Briggs, is established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society. 16 ■ Chronology 1920s West Indian Communists. During its early years, the CP has the greatest appeal to black workers who are internationalist in their orientation. Subsequently , in the 1920s it begins to recruit African Americans as members.The most prominent black CP members at this time are largely immigrants from the West Indies who regard the black worker’s struggle as part of the wider crusades against capitalism and imperialism. 1922 Fourth Congress of the Comintern. The poet Claude McKay (Jamaica) and Otto Huiswoud (Suriname) convince the Comintern to set up a transnational Negro Commission that seeks to unite all movements of black people battling colonialism. 1925 The American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC). The Comintern guides the CP in 1924 to renew its efforts to organize African Americans. In response, the CP forms the ANLC in 1925. The ANLC attacks the NAACP and other similar organizations as middle-class accommodationists controlled by white patrons. 1920s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). During the 1920s, the ANLC and the CP view Marcus Garvey’s UNIA as ideologically unsound. Although the CP supports Garvey’s notion of “race consciousness,” it sharply contests his support for a separate black nation and his support of black capitalism.When the party attempts to enlist followers of the UNIA, Garvey expels the CP members and sympathizers in its ranks. 1928–1935 National Self-Determination. The Sixth Congress of the Comintern (1928) changes the CPUSA’s racial policy.The party now asserts that African Americans in the Southern states make up a separate national group and that black sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the South constitute an incip- Chronology ■ 17 ient revolutionary force. Consequently, the Comintern instructs the party to press the demand for a separate nation for blacks within the so-called Black Belt, a swath of counties with a majority-black population extending from eastern Virginia and the Carolinas through central Georgia, Alabama, the delta regions of Mississippi and Louisiana, and the coastal areas of Texas. 1930s CPUSA in the Deep South. The CPUSA sends organizers to the Deep South for the first time in the late 1920s.The party focuses its energy, for the most part, on specific issues, such as the organization of miners, steelworkers, and tenant farmers; utility shutoffs; evictions; jobs; unemployment benefits ; lynching; and the pervasive system of Jim Crow. 1925–1946 The International Labor Defense (ILD). The ILD, as the established legal defense organization for the Communist movement beginning in 1925, replaces the Labor Defense Council (the party’s previous legal defense organization). Led by William L. Patterson, the ILD might best be described as the U.S. section of the International Red Aid organization. During its history, the ILD defends Sacco and Vanzetti, actively supports the civil rights and anti-lynching movements, and participates in the defense of the Scottsboro youths. In 1946, the ILD merges with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties to form the Civil Rights Congress (CRC). 1930s–1940s The Scottsboro Case. The CPUSA’s most productive work in the South is undoubtedly its defense, through the ILD, of the “Scottsboro Nine.” These young black men, detained in 1931 following a scrap with white youths, are wrongly convicted and sentenced to death after falsely being charged with raping two white women later found on the same train. 18 ■ Chronology 1930s Angelo Herndon. The Scottsboro defense is not the only concern of the ILD’s many cases in the South at that time.The ILD also defends Angelo Herndon, a CPUSA activist sentenced to death by the State of...

Share