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 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 We Shall Be Free written by Walter T. Howard and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking contribution to scholarship of the African American Left, We Shall Be Free! gives voice to black Communists and recognizes the intellectual contributions found in their protest writings. Walter Howard provides a fascinating documentary history of seven diverse and historically significant black Communists--B.D. Amis, Harry Haywood, James W. Ford, Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Louise Thompson Patterson, William Patterson, and Claudia Jones--who attempted to foster a black culture of resistance to white racism within the workings of the Communist Party. Howard draws on FBI files, Moscow documents, and the records of the U.S. Communist Party. He surveys these black Communists addressing a wide range of vital issues such as the Great Depression, World War II, genocide and the Cold War. We Shall Be Free! presents an important section of the African American community whose thought has been minimized, discounted, or overlooked altogether by the historical profession in general.
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 Scottsboro Case and Communism written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 legacy of the relationship between African American writers and Communism in the US is a contested one. Bergin argues that in three novels, by seminal mid-century authors (Wright, Himes and Ellison) Communism is not dismissed as incapable of meeting the demands of black political identity but is castigated for its refusal to do so. A detailed focus on the political milieu in which these texts operate challenges many of the presumptions about the ‘inability’ of Communism to comprehend racial oppression, which dominate literary critical approaches to these novels. She draws on the complex formations black political agency presumed and reproduced by American Communism during the Depression.
Download or read book Black Bolshevik written by Harry Haywood and published by Australian Geographic. This book was released on 1978 with total page 740 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 The Cry Was Unity written by Mark Solomon and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 441 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.
Download or read book Scottsboro the Firebrand of Communism written by Files Crenshaw (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 1936 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the trials of Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris and seven others, taken into custody on Mar. 25, 1931, for an alleged attack on Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. The case was heard in the Circuit Court at Scottsboro, Ala., in the Supreme Court of Alabama and on appeal was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Download or read book From the Tricontinental to the Global South written by Anne Garland Mahler and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In From the Tricontinental to the Global South Anne Garland Mahler traces the history and intellectual legacy of the understudied global justice movement called the Tricontinental—an alliance of liberation struggles from eighty-two countries, founded in Havana in 1966. Focusing on racial violence and inequality, the Tricontinental's critique of global capitalist exploitation has influenced historical radical thought, contemporary social movements such as the World Social Forum and Black Lives Matter, and a Global South political imaginary. The movement's discourse, which circulated in four languages, also found its way into radical artistic practices, like Cuban revolutionary film and Nuyorican literature. While recent social movements have revived Tricontinentalism's ideologies and aesthetics, they have largely abandoned its roots in black internationalism and its contribution to a global struggle for racial justice. In response to this fractured appropriation of Tricontinentalism, Mahler ultimately argues that a renewed engagement with black internationalist thought could be vital to the future of transnational political resistance.
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 Organizing in the Depression South written by James S. Allen and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Red International and Black Caribbean written by Margaret Stevens and published by Black Critique. This book was released on 2017 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Selected as one of openDemocracy's Best Political Books of 2017*This is the history of the black radicals who organised as Communists between the two imperialist wars of the twentieth century. It explores the political roots of a dozen organisations and parties in New York City, Mexico and the Black Caribbean, including the Anti-Imperialist League, and the American Negro Labour Congress and the Haiti Patriotic League, and reveals a history of myriad connections and shared struggle across the continent.This book reclaims the centrality of class consciousness and political solidarity amongst these black radicals, who are too often represented as separate from the international Communist movement which emerged after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Instead, it describes the inner workings of the 'Red International' in relation to struggles against racial and colonial oppression. It introduces a cast of radical characters including Richard Moore, Otto Huiswoud, Navares Sager, Grace Campbell, Rose Pastor Stokes and Wilfred Domingo.Challenging the 'great men' narrative, Margaret Stevens emphasises the role of women in their capacity as laborers; the struggles of peasants of colour; and of black workers in and around Communist parties.
Download or read book Scottsboro written by Dan T. Carter and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-09 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scottsboro tells the riveting story of one of this country's most famous and controversial court cases and a tragic and revealing chapter in the history of the American South. In 1931, two white girls claimed they were savagely raped by nine young black men aboard a freight train moving across northeastern Alabama. The young men-ranging in age from twelve to nineteen-were quickly tried, and eight were sentenced to death. The age of the defendants, the stunning rapidity of their trials, and the harsh sentences they received sparked waves of protest and attracted national attention during the 1930s. Originally published in 1970,Scottsboro triggered a new interest in the case, sparking two film documentaries, several Hollywood docudramas, two autobiographies, and numerous popular and scholarly articles on the case. In his new introduction, Dan T. Carter looks back more than thirty-five years after he first wrote about the case, asking what we have learned that is new about it and what relevance the story of Scottsboro still has in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Let Me Live written by Angelo Herndon and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The passionate prison autobiography of Angelo Herndon, Communist union organizer of the 1930s
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 Scottsboro Boys in Their Own Words written by Kwando M. Kinshasa and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of letters written by the nine African American defendants in the infamous March 1931 Scottsboro, Alabama, rape case. Though most of the defendants were barely literate and all were teenagers when incarcerated, over the course of almost two decades in prison they learned the rudiments of effective letter writing and in doing so forcefully expressed a wide range of perspectives on the falsity of the charges against them as their incarceration became a cause celebre both in the United States and internationally. Central to this book is the chronologically structured presentation of letters (1931-1950), including some correspondence from attorneys and members of Scottsboro support committees. The original grammar, syntax and vernacular of the defendants are maintained in a desire to preserve the authenticity of these letters.
