Re: [Marxism] How Southern communists, socialists and expatriates paved the way for civil rights

["Ivan D. Drury" <ivanddrury@xxxxxxxx>]

As loathe as I am to send a link to a wikipedia site, I think this is an 
appropriate footnote to the 'Defying Dixie' review:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Williams

Williams' story (especially when read with the brief life of Lovett 
Ford-Whiteman from the review) is incredible. 

Will the embarrassing historical marks on the CP ever cease to accumulate?

-Ivan


----- Original Message ----
> From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: Ivan Drury <ivanddrury@xxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2008 9:05:56 AM
> Subject: [Marxism] How Southern communists, socialists and expatriates paved 
> the way for civil rights
> 


Born in Dallas, 
Fort-Whiteman migrated to Tuskegee, Mexico and Canada before settling
 in 
Harlem as an editor of the socialist magazine the Messenger in 1917. By
 
1919 his anarcho-syndicalism had morphed into an association with the 
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Communist Labor Party. 
After he gave a speech in St. Louis on "The Negro and the Social 
Revolution," he was convicted of sedition. Following a brief prison 
term, he moved to Chicago, where he became a Communist Party organizer 
specializing in recent black migrants from the South.

In 1924, Fort-Whiteman traveled to Moscow for the Fifth World Congress 
of the Third International, where he informed his fellow Communists
 that 
"negroes are destined to be the most revolutionary class in America." 
Enrolling in the KUTV Communist training school (a.k.a. Communist 
University of Toilers of the East), he remained in the Soviet Union for
 
eight months before returning to Chicago to recruit black Americans for
 
the KUTV and to found the American Negro Labor Congress. Time magazine 
labeled him the "Reddest of the Blacks." But later in the decade, after
 
a futile campaign to organize black workers in the South, he found 
himself on the losing side of a factional and ideological struggle for 
control of the American Communist Party. In 1930, after arguing 
unsuccessfully for a policy of separatism and self-determination in the
 
Black Belt, he essentially gave up on America, fleeing to the Soviet 
Union, where he married and worked as a science teacher. Three years 
later, he changed his mind and tried to return to the United States,
 but 
Soviet authorities refused his request. His controversial statements 
about race and class eventually led to charges of counter-revolutionary
 
heresy and banishment to a Siberian gulag, where he died of starvation 
in 1939.


      Ask a question on any topic and get answers from real people. Go to 
Yahoo! Answers and share what you know at http://ca.answers.yahoo.com

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism