The American Communist Party and the “Negro Question” from the Founding of the Party to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International

During the Great Depression, the Communist Party (CP) of the United States was in the forefront of denouncing anti-black racism and discrimination. “However one judges their motives,” one historian wrote, “communists were often at the front in the battle for black rights.” In the South, communists organized black and white workers and sharecroppers and bravely fought against Jim Crow racism and capitalist oppression. In the urban North, black and white communists fought against eviction and for relief. Communists fought against the frame-up of the Scottsboro Boys, exposing and fighting Jim Crow “lynch law justice.”¹

Despite this work in the 1930s, the CP’s approach to what it called the “Negro question” during the first decade of its existence would not indicate the likelihood of such a development. Upon its founding in 1919, the CP had one black member, and throughout the 1920s it probably counted less than 100 black members out of a total membership of at least 15,000. In 1929, it still had no more than 300 black members. As a result, much of the historical studies of the intersection between blacks and communists have dealt lightly with the 1920s and focused on the 1930s, such as Mark Naison’s Communists in Harlem During the Depression and Robin Kelly’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. However, Winston James has argued that the history of black Communists from the 1930s onward “cannot be separated from the earlier existence and efforts of black socialists,” a history he labeled “understudied and largely unknown.” James’s article, as well as his earlier study of Caribbean radicalism in the United States, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, offer invaluable insight into the history of black radicalism that was the antecedent of communist activity. Nonetheless, the question is still left, how did the communists, starting from a position of such weakness, tap into this historic substratum and end up playing such an important role in black politics in the 1930s?²

The archives of the Communist International (Comintern), made available after the destruction of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, provide historians rich material with which to attempt to answer this question. Mark Solomon’s The Cry Was Unity (1998), that used sources from the Comintern archives to update the work begun in his 1972 doctoral dissertation, showed that these archives could yield important finds. Nonetheless, the bulk of Solomon’s study focused on the 1930s. Randi Storch’s Red Chicago made extensive use of Comintern sources in its fascinating treatment of the Chicago communists in the early 1930s, but neither made the issue of party policy on black oppression its emphasis, nor focused on the party’s early years. Finally, a recent article by Hakim Adi, on “The Communist International and Black Liberation in the Interwar Years,” has shown the importance of Comintern in the fight for black liberation internationally during this period, but did not focus on the details of Comintern intervention in the early party.³

Using sources from Comintern and other archives, this article examines the evolution of the communist position on the American Negro question from the formation of the communist movement in 1919 through 1924, emphasizing the interaction of a trinity of historical agents in the early communist movement. First, it examines the history and views of the early communist leadership in the United States, which was almost entirely white and largely indifferent to the Negro question. Second, it examines the first black communists who struggled to make the CP address black oppression. Finally, it examines the intervention of the leadership of the Comintern into the American CP to make its leadership understand the importance of the Negro question. It argues that the original, largely white, leadership of the CP maintained the traditional social-democratic color-blind approach of ignoring black oppression until the Comintern forced them to address the issue. At the same time, the presence of a small black communist cadre served as a mechanism within the...