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

Reviewed by:
  • We Shall be Free! Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices by Walter T. Howard
  • Kerry Taylor
We Shall be Free! Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices. By Walter T. Howard. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013. 220 pages. Hardcover, $54.50.

In republishing the protest writings of seven African American members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania historian Walter T. Howard promises “to give voice to an important section of the black community whose thought has been minimized, discounted, or overlooked altogether by the historical profession in general” (ix). Howard includes contributions from high-profile Communist Party leaders such as lawyer William L. Patterson and New York City Council member Benjamin J. Davis Jr. alongside lesser-known activists like union organizer and editor B. D. Amis.

A brief introductory essay traces the CPUSA’s evolving position on African Americans, as does a chronology that spotlights major turning points in the CPUSA’s history, from its founding on the heels of the Bolshevik revolution through the 1950s when anti-Communist Smith Act convictions decimated the Party. Howard reminds us that the CPUSA had few black adherents in its first ten years, but in the late 1920s the Party embraced the principle of self-determination for African Americans living in the South and concentrated resources toward organizing black farm laborers, industrial workers, and the unemployed. The Party reached its peak of influence among African Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, as it blended union organizing with civil rights defense work. The most famous of its efforts was its high-profile campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, nine young African Americans who had been jailed for allegedly raping two white women on an Alabama train. Cold War anticommunism neutralized the Party just as the Southern civil rights movement entered a period of elevated struggle in the 1950s. All of these themes are illustrated by the documents Howard selected from collections that include FBI files, various university [End Page 400] archives, and the Comintern Archives at the Russian State Archives of Political and Social History in Moscow.

It is from this last collection that Howard publishes early 1930s speeches by Amis and longtime Party leader Harry Haywood that reflect the CPUSA’s evolving politics around what was referred to as “the national question.” These documents are central to ongoing historiographic debates among historians of American Communism regarding the degree to which the CPUSA enjoyed autonomy from the Communist International and the directives of Moscow-based party leaders. Pamphlets authored by three-time Communist Party vice presidential candidate James W. Ford remind the reader that the CPUSA was early in framing the African American freedom struggle within the context of the anticolonial struggles of Asians and Africans.

The most illuminating and engaging materials in the volume are those that reflect something of the internal lives of Party activists. A selection from Davis’s prison memoir recounts his frustrated efforts to discuss politics with his fellow prisoners. After offering a fifteen-minute discourse on the subject of war, Davis was asked by a prisoner whether he was prowar or antiwar; Davis writes, “I thought I was making myself clear, but I suspected that maybe my virtues as a popular speaker were somewhat overrated” (85–86). In a similar vein, a selection from Louise Thompson Patterson’s unpublished memoir details her efforts to build a working-class base of support beyond the group of intellectuals who were already committed to the Scottsboro campaign. These documents do more to restore fully the voices of these African American organizers than do their published writings, because they illuminate Communist practice over polemics. Similarly rewarding primary source material is hard to come by, though archives at Emory University and New York University hold oral histories with B. D. Amis and Louis Thompson Patterson. Several of the contributors to this volume also published memoirs and have been the subject of scholarly biographies. The inclusion of excerpts from the oral histories and longer passages from the memoirs might have provided the reader with a stronger sense of the internal lives of Party activists. Nevertheless, as interest in African American radicalism and the long civil rights movement remains...

pdf

Share