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211 11 CHICAGO: AGAINST WAR AND FASCISM Back in New York, I began to take stock of myself as a party leader. I had risen rapidly in the party hierarchy during the four years since my return from the Soviet Union. I was now a member of the Politburo and head of the National Negro Department. Despite the importance of my post, I was dissatisfied with myownpersonaldevelopment.True,Iwasregardedasapromisingyoungtheoretician . But I felt a lack of experience in direct mass work. Although the general orientation of the Negro Commission was toward promoting mass activities in the field of Afro-American work, I found my job mainly confined to inner-party activities. My actual work included checking on the work of the districts, particularly the Negro Commissions that existed on each district level, consulting with district leaders, training cadres, organizing education on the Afro-American question for national and district training schools, and preparing resolutions and articles on the question. I had little contact with the masses outside the party. Therefore, I had originally welcomed the decision to build the LSNR with myself as national secretary. I had expected it to be an opportunity to get into mass work. The failure of the LSNR, however, had eliminated that opportunity. I was increasingly tied down to the office on the ninth floor of the party’s national headquarters on Twelfth Street in Lower Manhattan and faced the specter of becoming an internal party functionary or bureaucrat. In this situation my relations with James Ford became strained. Ford was the only other Black Politburo member and now headed the party’s Harlem organization, a major concentration point in the party’s work among Blacks. Ford and I had disagreements over such things as assignments of cadres, but I felt the main cause of friction was Ford’s personal ambition. Ford was a man of considerable organizational ability, but Browder was able to play on his weaknesses and use him as a vehicle for winning the Black cadre to his developing liquidationist line on the Afro-American question. Thus, Ford, supported by Browder, built a power base—almost a clique—in Harlem. I felt it was impossible to work in this atmosphere. Thus I requested to be transferred to Chicago, something I had thought about before these tensions had matured. My request was approved in late 1934, and I left New York for 212 Chicago Chicago. After my departure, Ford, with Abner Berry’s assistance, took over as responsible head of the Negro Department. As head of the Negro Department, I had kept in close touch with the Chicago comrades. The party in Chicago was beginning to grow. A large number of recruits were from the disintegrating Garvey movement, obviously attracted by the party’s work among the unemployed, Scottsboro, and its program in favor of the right to self-determination. Chicago was the country’s second-largest Black city and had the greatest concentration of Black industrial workers. In the early thirties, the city was the scene of some of the fiercest battles of the unemployed. In the summer of 1930, the city was the site of the founding convention of the National Unemployed Councils. Led by Communists, the councils fought forreliefincashandjobs,unemploymentinsurance,publicworksjobsatunion wages, hot lunches for schoolchildren, a moratorium on evictions, and an end to discrimination against Blacks. Chicago’s first Unemployed Council was formedontheSouthsideinthefallof1930,withBlackworkersplayingaleading role. Blacks constituted 11 percent of the city’s population but were one-fourth of all the relief cases in the city. Chicago’s Southside Blacks were among the worst sufferers of the Depression. Chicago’s unemployed, led by the Communist Party, were exemplary in carrying out energetic activities and demonstrations. Some fifty thousand marched through the Loop to Grant Park in the summer of 1931, halting traffic and forcing police to back off from a planned confrontation. Earlier that summer there had been a mammoth march on the state capital in Springfield demanding that relief cutbacks be restored. But the real growth and consolidation of the movement followed the police murderoffourBlackworkers(AbeGray,JohnO’Neil,ThomasPaige,andFrank Armstrong) as they attempted to prevent the eviction of a seventy-year-old Black widow, Dianna Gross. This event—known as the Chicago massacre— occurred when police opened fire into a large crowd that was trying to put the woman’s furniture back into her home. A local party leader who was on the spot at the time described the tremendous demonstrations and actions that surrounded these brutal murders...

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