Download or read book The Cry Was Unity Communists and African Americans 19171936 written by and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Communist Party was the only political movement on the left in the late 1920s and 1930s to place racial justice and equality at the top of its agenda and to seek, and ultimately win, sympathy among African Americans. This historic effort to fuse red and black offers a rich vein of experience and constitutes the theme of The Cry Was Unity. Utilizing for the first time materials related to African Americans from the Moscow archives of the Communist Inter-national (Comintern), The Cry Was Unity traces the trajectory of the black-red relationship from the end of World War I to the tumultuous 1930s. From the just-recovered transcript of the pivotal debate on African Americans at the 6th Comintern Congress in 1928, the book assesses the impact of the Congress’s declaration that blacks in the rural South constituted a nation within a nation, entitled to the right of self-determination. Despite the theory’s serious flaws, it fused the black struggle for freedom and revolutionary content and demanded that white labor recognize blacks as indispensable allies. As the Great Depression unfolded, the Communists launched intensive campaigns against lynching, evictions, and discrimination in jobs and relief and opened within their own ranks a searing assault on racism. While the Party was never able to win a majority of white workers to the struggle for Negro rights, or to achieve the unqualified support of the black majority, it helped to lay the foundations for the freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. The Cry Was Unity underscores the successes and failures of the Communist-led left and the ways in which it fought against racism and inequality. This struggle comprises an important missing page that needs to be returned to the nation’s history. Mark Solomon, an emeritus professor at Simmons College, is the author of Red and Black: Communism and Afro-Americans, 1929-1935, Death Waltz to Armageddon: E. P. Thompson and the Peace Movement, and Stopping World War II (with Michael Myerson).

Download or read book Hammer and Hoe written by Robin D. G. Kelley and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.

Download or read book Sojourning for Freedom written by Erik S. McDuffie and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-27 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminates a pathbreaking black radical feminist politics forged by black women leftists active in the U.S. Communist Party between its founding in 1919 and its demise in the 1950s.

Download or read book Bitter with the Past but Sweet with the Dream Communism in the African American Imaginary written by Cathy Bergin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is an examination of the impact of Communism on a generation of African American writers and a consideration of how African American identity in three novels is constructed in relation to the political ideology of the Communist Party.

Download or read book Black Bolshevik written by Harry Haywood and published by University of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Bolshevik is the autobiography of Harry Haywood, the son of former slaves who became a leading member of the Communist Part USA and a pioneering theoretician on the Afro-American struggle. The author's first-hand accounts of the Chicago race riot of 1919, the Scottsboro Boys' defense, communist work in the South, the Spanish Civil War, the battle against the revisionist betrayal of the Party, and other history-shaping events are must reading for all who are interested in Black history and the working class struggle.

Download or read book Black Struggle Red Scare written by Jeff R Woods and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2003-10-31 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of the cold war, southern segregationists exploited the reigning mood of anxiety by linking the civil rights movement to an international Communist conspiracy. Jeff Woods tells a gripping story of fervent crusaders for racial equality swept into the maelstrom of the South's siege mentality, of crafty political opportunists who played upon white southerners' very real fear of Communists, and of a people who saw lurking enemies and detected red propaganda everywhere. In their strange double identity as both defiant Confederate flag-wavers fiercely protecting regional sovereignty and as American superpatriots, many southerners stood ready to defend against subversives be they red or black. Concentrating on the phenomenon at its most intense period, Woods makes vivid the fearful synergy that developed between racist forces and the anti-Communist cause, reveals the often illegal means used to wash the movement red, and documents the gross waste of public funds in pursuing an almost nonexistent threat. Though ultimately unsuccessful in convincing Americans outside of Dixie that the civil rights protests were controlled by Moscow, the southern red scare forced movement activists to distance themselves from the Marxist elements in their midst -- thereby gaining the sympathy of the American people while losing the support of some of their most passionate antiracist campaigners. A product of vast archival research and the latest literature on this increasingly popular subject, this is the first book to consider the southern red scare as a unique regional phenomenon rather than an offshoot of McCarthyism or massive resistance. Addressing the fundamental struggle of Americans to balance liberty and security in an atmosphere of racial prejudice and ideological conflict, it will be equally compelling for students of civil rights, southern history, the cold war, and American anti-Communism.

Download or read book Red Black White written by Mary Stanton and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Red, Black, White is the first narrative history of the American communist movement in the South since Robin D. G. Kelley's groundbreaking Hammer and Hoe and the first to explore its key figures and actions beyond the 1930s. Written from the perspective of the district 17 (CPUSA) Reds who worked primarily in Alabama, it acquaints a new generation with the impact of the Great Depression on postwar black and white, young and old, urban and rural Americans. After the Scottsboro story broke on March 25, 1931, it was open season for old-fashioned lynchings, legal (courtroom) lynchings, and mob murder. In Alabama alone, twenty black men were known to have been murdered, and countless others, women included, were beaten, disabled, jailed, “disappeared,” or had their lives otherwise ruined between March 1931 and September 1935. In this collective biography, Mary Stanton—a noted chronicler of the left and of social justice movements in the South—explores the resources available to Depression-era Reds before the advent of the New Deal or the modern civil rights movement. What emerges from this narrative is a meaningful criterion by which to evaluate the Reds’ accomplishments. Through seven cases of the CPUSA (district 17) activity in the South, Stanton covers tortured notions of loyalty and betrayal, the cult of white southern womanhood, Christianity in all its iterations, and the scapegoating of African Americans, Jews, and communists. Yet this still is a story of how these groups fought back, and fought together, for social justice and change in a fractured region.

Download or read book Black Communists Speak on Scottsboro written by Walter T. Howard and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-07 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On March 25, 1931, Alabama police detained nine young African AMerican men at a railroad stop not far from Scottsboro. In the process, they encountered two white women -- who promptly accused the young men of raping them. Soon after, all-white juries found the nine youths guilty and eight of them were sentenced to death. Although many Americans were outraged by the injustices of the case, the loudest voices raised in protest were those of members of the American Communist Party. Many white Communists spoke out, but black Communists took the lead in organizing public protests and legal responses. As this surprising book makes clear, they were acting at the direction of the Communist International (Comintern), which had directed them to address the "Negro problem." Now, with the opening of formerly inaccessible Communist party archives, this collection of primary documents reveals the little-known but major roles played by black Communists in the case of "the Scottsboro Boys."

Download or read book Black Liberation red Scare written by Gerald Horne and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Black Liberation/Red Scare is a study of an African-American Communist leader, Ben Davis, Jr. (1904-64). Though it examines the numerous grassroots campaigns that he was involved in, it is first and foremost a study of the man and secondarily a study of the Communist party from the 1930s to the 1960s. By examining the public life of an important party leader, Gerald Horne uniquely approaches the story of how and why the party rose - and fell." "Ben Davis, Jr., was the son of a prominent Atlanta publisher and businessman who was also the top African-American leader of the Republican party until the onset of the Great Depression. Davis was trained for the black elite at Morehouse, Amherst, and Harvard Law School. After graduating from Harvard, he joined the Communist party, where he remained as one of its most visible leaders for thirty years. In 1943, after being endorsed by his predecessor, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., he was elected to the New York City Council from Harlem and subsequently reelected by a larger margin in 1945. Davis received support from such community figures as NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, boxer Joe Louis, and musician Duke Ellington. While on the council Davis fought for rent control and progressive taxation and struggled against transit fare hikes and police brutality." "With the onset of the Red Scare and the Cold War, Davis - like the Communist party itself - was marginalized. The Cold War made it difficult for the U.S. to compete with Moscow for the hearts and minds of African-Americans while they were subjected to third-class citizenship at home. Yet in return for civil rights concessions, African-American organizations such as the NAACP were forced to distance themselves from figures such as Ben Davis. In 1949 he was ousted unceremoniously (and perhaps illegally) from the City Council. He was put on trial, jailed in 1951, and not released until 1956, when the civil rights movement was gathering momentum. His friendship with the King family, based upon family ties in Atlanta, was the ostensible cause for the FBI surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program of the FBI, which was aimed initially at the CP-USA, made sure to keep a close eye on Davis as well. But when the civil rights movement reached full strength in the 1960s Davis's controversial appearances at college campuses helped to set the stage for a new era of activism at universities." "Davis died in 1964. According to Horne, the time has now come when he, along with his good friend Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, should be regarded as a premier leader of African-Americans and the U.S. Left during the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book American Communism and Black Americans written by Philip Sheldon Foner and published by . This book was released on 1991-01 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the final text of the Resolution on the Negro Question. This work seeks to substantiate the view that the significant impact of communism in combating racism and supporting Black Liberation cannot be ignored by a student of United States history and society.

Download or read book A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle written by Harry Haywood and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary life story that encompasses the fight for African American freedom throughout the twentieth century

Download or read book Communists in Harlem During the Depression written by Mark Naison and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No socialist organization has ever had a more profound effect on black life than the Communist Party did in Harlem during the Depression. Mark Naison describes how the party won the early endorsement of such people as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and how its support of racial equality and integration impressed black intellectuals, including Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson.This meticulously researched work, largely based on primary materials and interviews with leading black Communists from the 1930s, is the first to fully explore this provocative encounter between whites and blacks. It provides a detailed look at an exciting period of reform, as well as an intimate portrait of Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, at the high point of its influence and pride.Mark Naison is professor of African American studies and history at Fordham University. He is the author of White Boy: A Memoir and co-author of The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1940_1984.

Download or read book Black Revolutionary written by Gerald Horne and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading African American Communist, lawyer William L. Patterson (1891–1980) was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the defeat of Jim Crowby virtue of his leadership of the Scottsboro campaign in the 1930s. In this watershed biography, historian Gerald Horne shows how Patterson helped to advance African American equality by fostering and leveraging international support for the movement. Horne highlights key moments in Patterson's global activism: his early education in the Soviet Union, his involvement with the Scottsboro trials and other high-profile civil rights cases of the 1930s to 1950s, his 1951 "We Charge Genocide" petition to the United Nations, and his later work with prisons and the Black Panther Party. Through Patterson's story, Horne examines how the Cold War affected the freedom movement, with civil rights leadership sometimes disavowing African American leftists in exchange for concessions from the U.S. government. He also probes the complex and often contradictory relationship between the Communist Party and the African American community, including the impact of the FBI's infiltration of the Communist Party. Drawing from government and FBI documents, newspapers, periodicals, archival and manuscript collections, and personal papers, Horne documents Patterson's effectiveness at carrying the freedom struggle into the global arena and provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century struggles for racial justice.

Download or read book The American Negro in the Communist Party written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book B D Amis African American Radical written by B. D. Amis and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2007 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American Communist B.D. Amis was a major figure in the black freedom struggle during the two decades between the world wars. At that time, the American Communist Party (CPUSA) played a significant role in fighting for the rights of African Americans. Amis was part of the small circle of black radicals leading the struggle for workers' rights and racial justice. This anthology of his key writings and speeches reveals the deep commitment to the working class by his generation of African American Marxists. His classics, such as 'Lynch Justice at Work' and 'They Shall Not Die , ' as well as his speech nominating William Z. Foster for president at the 1936 CPUSA Convention in Chicago, are included. This work also features important documents penned by Amis and found in the former Soviet archives and in the private holdings of the Amis Family. It also includes many of Amis' theoretical works found in international documents, such as the CPUSA's International Press Correspondence, and a selected bibliography on the research scholarship pertaining to African Americans and communism

Download or read book New Negro Old Left written by William J. Maxwell and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maxwell uncovers both black literature's debt to Communism and Communism's debt to black literature, reciprocal obligations first incurred during the Harlem Renaissance.

Download or read book We Shall Be Free written by Walter T. Howard and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of writings from seven historically significant black Communists who attempted to create a black culture of resistance within the workings and ideas of the Communist Party.