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ix INTRODUCTION Gwendolyn Midlo Hall The struggle against power “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” —Milan Kundera These stories from the autobiography of Harry Haywood can give you confidence that you can help make a better world. His life and his battles for African American freedom and for justice for the poor and disempowered throughout the world need to be better known. This beautifully written book is a remarkable document of his times. That said, I chose to edit to this condensed version of his original seven-hundred-page book to make it easier to read and easier for a new generation to understand his life, what he achieved for humanity, and the example he set. I cut much of the long theoretical debates, polemics, and personal and political conflicts that have little meaning for most readers today. Those who want to read the unabridged book can find the original edition in almost any university library. With this introduction, I hope to share some of what we have learned about the times he lived in since this book was published thirty-five years ago and to add a few of my own thoughts about his work and his legacy. I presume to make the difficult choices involved in substantially shortening his original autobiography for several reasons. First, I am a professional historian . Second, we were married during the last thirty years of his life, and he is the father of my two youngest children. Such a close personal relationship could undermine my objectivity, I know. But I am a native of New Orleans with childhoodmemoriesofthecivilrightsandtradeunionbattlesofthe1930sand1940s . I was a veteran of the World War II democratic awakening with experience in the Communist Party, which was, to a great extent, a movement of Black maritime and port workers in my culturally rich hometown. I was elected as a white token member of the Executive Board of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) at its Southern Youth Legislature in 1946 and was an active member of the Civil Rights Congress in New Orleans until 1949. I was a foot soldier in the x Introduction historicHenryA.Wallace1948presidentialcampaignintheSouth.Anotheradvantage is that I have been a post-Marxist since 1963. My conversion was fueled by the process of becoming a historian, which made me see the world as richly concrete, complex, and changing over space and time. My belief in ideology plunged as my understanding of consciousness and the role of the individual in history grew. But I never told Harry because I did not want to hurt him. I hope thiscombinationofexperience,involvement,anddetachmentwillcompensate somewhatforquestionableobjectivityduetomycloserelationshipwithHarry. You, the reader, will have to be the judge. If we discuss the validity of ideas in the abstract, as many philosophers, historians ,andsociologistsdo,wecannotbegintoappreciateHarry’scontribution to the Black freedom movement. His life and ideas send important messages from the past. He was part of a long Black radical tradition of armed resistance to racist terror. Blacks had long experience defending themselves with arms, especially in the Deep South. Black Civil War veterans and postwar militiamen often kept their arms and defended themselves and others from Ku Klux Klan terror. The courage, determination, and indignation of the ancestors were passed down to their descendants. Long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, many devoted, courageous people fought for African American freedom; they remain forgotten and unsung. Rosa Parks herself was a veteran of this older tradition. During slavery, the Civil War, and Radical Reconstruction, there were massacres and violent battles in the Deep South. There were also usually unpublicized underground Black power movements for cultural resistance as well as armed self-defense against racist terror.1 Ida B. Wells began national and international campaigns against lynching , spanning the twentieth century.2 During and after World War I, the African Blood Brotherhood agitated for self-determination for the Black nation and for armed self-defense against the racist massacres that escalated after World War I.3 The New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s stood up for Black identity and pride. Scholars, teachers, and the media rarely mentionthissilencedhistory.4Nowconscientious,open-mindedhistoriansare only beginning to research, write about, and publish on these movements. Harry’s stories tell us how to fight for power for the powerless, a lesson the vast majority of people of the world still urgently need to learn. He played a major role in starting massive street protests for African American freedom getting powerful international support. These protest...

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