[PEN-L:3930] Black nationalism and American Communism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

While most scholarship has used the correspondence between the Kremlin and
the American Communist Party, that was made available after the collapse of
the Soviet Union, for reactionary purposes, there is at least one very
important exception. Taking advantage of archival material, Mark Solomon
has written what might be the definitive history of the CPUSA's involvement
in the black struggle during the period of the party's formation to the
beginning of the popular front turn. ("The Cry was Unity: Communists and
African Americans 1917-1936," U. of Mississippi).

Solomon is emeritus professor at Simmons College and a member of the
Committees of Correspondence. The CofC split from the CPUSA because of
objections to the dogmatism and bureaucracy of the Gus Hall regime. The
event that finally led to the formation of the CofC was Hall's support for
the coup against Gorbachev. Some of the most prominent black members of the
CP went with the CofC, including Charlene Mitchell who is co-chair of the
CofC with Manning Marable, department head of African-American studies at
Columbia University. Although Solomon is white, he explains in his
introduction why he was drawn to the black struggle:

"The environment we knew was one of spirited demonstrations to save the
lives of Rosa Ingram, Willie McGhee, the Martinsville Seven, and other
victims of a racist legal system. It included attending vibrant interracial
dances at Rockland Palace in Harlem, sitting in awe in the back of Birdland
to ask Charlie Parker to support Du Bois for the Senate, and listening to
Miles Davis, engaged by the unhip Marxist Labor Youth League, which somehow
thought that Davis's brilliant, elliptical bebop was right for dancing. All
of that had nearly disappeared by the mid-1950s. But that defiant
interracialism, grounded in the unity of cultural traditions, of shared
support for all who labored for an end to oppression at home and abroad
never died. Its special commitment to, and admiration for, black culture,
history, and community life survived and fused with a pervasive sense that
the liberation of one group was essential to the spiritual and physical
freedom of all."

What is significant, however, is that Solomon understands the progressive
character of black nationalism as well, sparing no effort to show how the
Communist Party at various points in its history embraced such initiatives.
I want to focus in one particular moment in party history, which is highly
revealing for the affinity black party members had for nationalism, namely
the African Blood Brotherhood. Despite the separatist name, this group was
the instrument of Communist Party involvement in the black struggle in the
early 1920s.

Cyril Briggs was the founder of the African Black Brotherhood. Born in 1888
on the Caribbean island of Nevis, he always considered himself a "race
man". His father was a white plantation overseer and this accounted for
Briggs's light complexion, which earned him the description of the "Angry
Blond Negro" later in life, just as Malcolm X was dubbed "Detroit Red"
before becoming a nationalist for similar reasons. Briggs moved to Harlem
in 1905 and launched a writing career, finally landing a job with the
Amsterdam News in 1912.

Briggs was swept up by the self-determination rhetoric of WWI which
inspired his editorial, "Security for Poles and Serbs, Why not for Colored
Nations?," a call for a separate black state in the United States. He was
also a strong supporter of the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916.

Briggs started a new magazine called the "Crusader" in 1918 to focus on the
struggle for self-determination and black pride. The magazine made no
distinction between such goals and more immediate social and economic
issues. It backed the Socialist Party electoral campaigns of A. Philip
Randolph and exposed lynchings in the south and job discrimination in the
north.

In the February 1919 issue, the Crusader began demonstrating a concern with
class in the Marxist sense. Comparing the forced removal of black workers
from a Pennsylvania steel town (where they had migrated to during wartime
labor shortages) to the Palmer Raid deportations of white foreign-born
radicals, The Crusader attributed such actions to the "mailed fist of
capitalism." By May and June, the magazine was equating capitalism and
colonialism, and projecting proletarian unity between black and white
workers as a way to eradicate national oppression of black people.

The direction the Crusader was taking made it receptive to the left wing of
the Socialist Party, which was about to split and form the first Communist
Party in the US in September, 1919. It was during the summer of 1919, when
antiblack riots were erupting across the United States, that Briggs finally
came to the ideological conclusions that would lead him to join the CP. He
saw national, race and class consciousness as dialectically interlinked.
While claiming that his true home was Africa, Briggs also declared that the
Negro's place was "with labor." Blacks would benefit from "the triumph of
Labor and the destruction of parasitic Capital Civilization with its
Imperialism incubus squeezing the life-blood of our race."

In the first months of American Communism, Briggs drew close to two members
of the party's underground, Otto Huiswoud and Claude McKay, who would later
become known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. (Huiswoud, another
Caribbean immigrant, was a charismatic figure in his own right. He got
involved with the Socialist Party while studying agriculture at Cornell
University. During a summer job working on a cruise ship, Huiswoud
organized a successful job action by black members of the crew for higher
pay and better working conditions.) Solomon believes that Briggs became a
party member in mid-1921. This connection influenced the direction of
Brigg's own organization, the African Blood Brotherhood, which would begin
to absorb Marxist influences.

The 1920 ABB convention defined resistance to the KKK, support for a united
front of black organizations, and promotion of higher wages and better
working conditions for black workers as paramount. While calling for
"racial self respect," it also maintained that cooperation with
"class-conscious white workers" was necessary. As the ABB drew closer to
the Communist Party, nationalistic prejudices as such became less frequent.
The Crusader, which was now the semiofficial organ of the ABB, declared
that while the oppression of blacks was more severe, blacks and Jews shared
a historic experience of persecution.

Furthermore, Briggs began to, as Solomon puts it, "...fuse his own sense of
African identity and national culture with Leninist internationalism. He
found in African antiquity the primitive communism that provided an
Afrocentric root to the vision advanced by the Third International." As
opposed to Garvey's nationalist movement, the Marxists of the ABB did not
view "Africa for the Africans" as an invitation to capitalist development.
He wrote, "Socialism and Communism [were] in practical application in
Africa for centuries before they were even advanced as theories in the
European world." Within a year or so, the ABB would have evolved into a
full-fledged black Marxist organization. Solomon describes the process:

"The Brotherhood was being drawn irresistibly into Marxism's field. The
Crusader eagerly echoed (and perhaps inspired) the Communist Toiler's
assertion that the underlying motive of whites in the Tulsa carnage was to
grab African American oil lands. Tulsa was now within the vortex of
Marxism's assault on capitalism and on those who supported the system --
white or black. There was no justice in capitalist America, the Crusader
asserted. How many more Tulsas would it take before Negroes rejected their
treacherous bourgeois allies and joined with 'the radical forces of the
world that are working for the overthrow of capitalism and the dawn of a
new day, a new heaven on earth'?

"Briggs and the New Negro radicals who gravitated into the Communist orbit
were staking out new ideological grounds on the black political landscape.
Shortly after the 'Salvation' article, Briggs joined the Communist Party
and resolved some of the article's ambiguities, softening (but not
renouncing) the nationalist temperament. He and his ABB comrades now
clearly advocated a historic shift in the objectives of the black freedom
struggle from assimilation into the bourgeois order to a socialist
transformation; in the class composition of black leadership from middle
class to proletarian; and in the class character of African American
alliances with whites, from bourgeois liberal to the working-class left.
The difficulty of the task was acknowledged in a Crusader editorial that
grappled with the pervasive suspicion among blacks about the reliability of
white labor as an ally. It said that those blacks who saw only white
hostility had been soured by false protestations of friendship in the past.
It was futile to deny that the white working-class majority was racist. At
present, it said, 'every white worker is a potential enemy of the Negro,'
but not the actual enemy. Racism existed in the working class; it had to be
rooted out so that blacks could willingly join in an alliance arising from
common interests and common ground. This view had a powerful impact on the
racial policies of American communism."

Within two or three years, the Comintern began to lay down a much more
narrow understanding of Communist Party organizational principles that
would make semi-independent formations such as the ABB impossible. Under
Zinoviev's dubious stewardship, new guidelines for "Bolshevization" were
proposed at the 5th Comintern world congress in 1924. After it was
approved, foreign language federations within the CP were abolished. Party
membership was tightly restricted to shop or neighborhood units and party
members were pressured into speaking English. On the racial front,
organizational meshing of blacks and whites was mandatory and the African
Blood Brotherhood was deemed as an exception to the "Bolshevization"
guidelines. Party work shifted to the American Negro Labor Congress.
Solomon states that this organizational-political turn pulled some blacks
in the party away from their community roots.

The "democratic centralism" which was now institutionalized in both the CP
and its rivals in the tiny Trotskyist movement implied a negative view of
independent black formations like the ABB. Whenever motion would appear in
party ranks to foster such formations, the inevitable lecture would proceed
from on top that this was a new version of the Jewish Bund that Lenin had
viewed as a threat to Bolshevik unity.

But in reality, unity can not be forced on the revolutionary movement. It
has to be generated organically through struggle from the bottom up. There
is very little likelihood that new revolutionary formations in the 21st
century will adhere to the schematic organizational principles of the
"Marxist-Leninist" variety handed down from the 1920s. It is entirely
possible that the revolutionary movement in the United States will be a
broad alliance of various working-class and nationality-based
organizations, with a kinship to such formations as the FSLN and FMLN of
the 1980s in Central America. Within these alliances, there will be
overlapping memberships and programmatic fluidity. Perhaps the best
expression of this possible new approach is the fact that the
African-American director of the AFL-CIO's education department is now the
chairman of the Black Radical Congress.

For insights into how the early Communist movement operated in such broad
parameters, I strongly recommend Mark Solomon's book, which is also
valuable for its stirring description of Communist Party involvement in a
myriad of struggles that in many ways are the antecedents for the
monumental struggle underway to save the life of Mumia Abu Jamal.

(Charles, could you please pass this on to the BRC mailing list?)




Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)