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

Harry Haywood

Harry Haywood As a principal figure in the American Communist movement, Harry Haywood (1898–1985) stands out as a key theorist on the controversial “national question” of African Americans in the United States. In this role, he was a sharp Marxist critic of middle-class black “reformers” found in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and in the field of black journalism. An exceptional young black intellectual, Haywood Hall Jr. joined the American Communist Party in 1925 and took “Harry Haywood” as his party pseudonym. He had, in fact, commenced his revolutionary vocation in 1922 when he enrolled in the African Blood Brotherhood. Soon afterward, he joined the Young Communist League and subsequently journeyed to Moscow, where he studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East and at the International Lenin School. A talented radical theorist, Haywood focused on the issue of the political status of African Americans in the American racial caste system that had developed after the end of Reconstruction. Likewise, he dealt with the development of the Native Republic Thesis for the South African Communist Party. Haywood played a significant part in composing the Comintern’s “Resolutions on the Negro Question” in 1928 and 1930. In a clever use of the Marxist dialectical method, he cogently argued that in the Black Belt of the American South, African Americans formed an “oppressed nation” with the right to “self-determination. ” 36 ■ Harry Haywood During the heyday of American communism in the 1930s, Haywood emerged as a national leader in the American Communist movement . Indeed, he served on the party’s Central Committee (1927–1938) and in the Politburo (1931–1938). He also participated in the major factional scuffles within the CPUSA that involved the struggles centering on Jay Lovestone, Earl Browder, and William Z. Foster. Furthermore , in 1935 he led the “Hands Off Ethiopia” campaign in Chicago’s black South Side to oppose Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, and when the eleven major Communist leaders stood trial in 1949 under the Smith Act, Haywood carried out the assignment of research for the defense. ■ ■ ■ Fond 515, Files of the Communist Party of the United States in the Comintern Archives, Negro Bureau of the Comintern Report to the Eighth Convention of the Communist Party of the U.S.A., Cleveland, Ohio The Tasks of the Communist Party in Winning Working Class Leadership of the Negro Liberation Struggles, and the Fight against Reactionary Nationalist-Reformist Movements among the Negro People April 2–8, 1934 Negro Reformism: Agent of U.S. Imperialism Comrade Browder in his excellent report outlined in the clearest fashion the position of the Party on the Negro question, and laid the basis for a correct approach to our task in work among Negroes in the present period. Comrade Browder stressed the importance of the fight on two fronts against white chauvinism as the main danger and against petty bourgeois nationalism, which he correctly called the “reverse side of white chauvinism.” In my report I wish to elaborate on this question of the fight on two fronts, particularly in relation to the fight against the Negro reformist danger, which, in the present period, has become acute and menacing. Harry Haywood ■ 37 An outstanding characteristic of the present moment is the sharp increase in the activities of the Negro bourgeois reformists and petty bourgeois nationalist leaders among the Negro masses.We find that these activities have not only been intensified, but are assuming more varied and subtle forms. In addition to the official bourgeois reformist organizations and their activities, there has appeared upon the scene in the recent period numerous petty bourgeois nationalist movements. We also witness definite attempts to crystallize “Left” reformist Negro movements. This phenomenon is directly connected with the sharpening class struggle and growing radicalization of the Negro toilers. Only on this basis can it be explained. We might say that the increased activities of the Negro reformists, their attempts to strengthen nationalism among the masses, take place in direct proportion to the increase of our revolutionary influence among the Negro masses. We see that wherever we begin serious work among the Negroes, wherever our influence is extended among them, we find ourselves confronted sharply with the problem of the struggle against Negro reformist as an immediate obstacle in the revolutionization of the Negro masses, as for example, in Chicago, in St. Louis, the South, in connection with the Scottsboro campaign and the struggle against lynching. Everywhere, Negro reformists and petty bourgeois...