We Shall Be Free! Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices by Walter T. Howard (review)

Walter Howard’s important collection of writing by black Communists bridges two exciting developments in scholarship to which Howard has been a long-time contributor. The first is recovery of neglected black Communists in U.S. history. The second is excavation of the archive of the Communist Party of the United States significantly expanded by the acquisition of the organization’s papers by the Tamiment Library at New York University in 2007. Howard has given shape to both trends, gathering many previously unpublished documents from seven black communists, several of whom have resurfaced in recent years as themselves subjects of major new critical studies: B. D. Amis; Harry Haywood; Benjamin J. Davis Jr.; James Ford; Louise Thompson Patterson; William L. Patterson; and Claudia Jones.

The inclusion of Claudia Jones and Louis Thompson Patterson in this collection highlights several of the virtues of Howard’s recovery project. Trinidad-born Claudia Jones, the subject of recent books by Carole Boyce-Davies and Marika Sherwood, was the leading black Communist theoretician on black women’s oppression after her recruitment to the Communist Party USA as a young woman in the 1930s. Howard takes excerpts from her 1952 essay “The Struggle for Peace in the United States,” written not long before her deportation to London by the U.S. state for her political activities. He also includes two remarkable pieces by Patterson, who played a major role in the Communist Party’s International Workers Order in the 1930s: a 1933 Crisis essay about Thompson’s work with Langston Hughes, Dorothy West, and others in the Soviet Union on the unfinished film “Black and White,” and a portion of an unpublished memoir from Patterson’s papers at Emory University. Both Jones and Patterson have been subjects of major recent studies of black women Communists by Eric McDuffie and Dayo Gore.

Patterson also collaborated with her better-known husband William in founding the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) in 1946. Patterson, himself the subject of a 2013 biography by Gerald Horne, is here represented with a long excerpt from We Charge Genocide; the Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People. Genocide was a book assembled collaboratively by members of the CRC cataloguing lynchings and acts of economic and political violence against blacks. The book was first published in 1951 by International Publishers. Howard excerpts the Tamiment Library copy of a manifesto that merits itself a full book-length study.

Howard has previously edited a collection of writings by B. D. Amis, one-time general secretary of the Communist Party’s League of Struggle for Negro Rights and editor of its newspaper The Liberator. Howard here reproduces three texts from the Comintern Archives of the Communist Party USA authored by Amis during its ultraleft “Third Period” from 1928 to 1935. Amis presents an explication of the Communist International’s argument for blacks as an oppressed national minority. That perspective was drafted in part by another contributor to Howard’s volume, Harry Haywood, who helped compose “Resolutions on the Negro Question” at the Moscow Cominterns in 1928 and 1932. In a representative Third Period document included here, Haywood militates to the 1934 Eighth Convention of the Communist Party of the USA against “Negro Reformism” as an agent of U.S. imperialism. Patterson attacks “reactionary petty-bourgeoisie utopians led by Marcus Garvey” and emphasizes the Communist Party’s organizing work against Jim Crow in the South as a key “part of the general struggles of the working class against capitalism” (53–54).

Howard prefaces the seven selected main voices with materials about Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud, both of whom participated in the Communist International debate about the “Negro” in the 1920s and ends with W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1961 letter to Communist Party head Gus Hal applying for admission. He...