Review, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919-1980 (Michigan State University Press, 1995)

Columbia Missourian, 1995, July 2, 1995

In August 1950, William Patterson, a prominent African-American member of the American Communist Party, testified before the House Committee on Lobbying Activities, which ordered him to turn over all records and membership lists of the Communist-front Civil Rights Congress. Patterson not only refused, but began to castigate Representative Henderson Lovelace Lanham on the evils of segregation in the congressman’s home state of Georgia. Infuriated, Lanham leaped from his seat and charged Patterson, calling him a “black son-of-a-bitch,” only to be restrained by two policemen. Lanham’s remarks were stricken from the record.

The committee cited Patterson for contempt and a grand jury ordered him to turn over the CRC records. While the case dragged on for eight months, eventually to end in a hung jury, a coalition of black church leaders and newspaper editors campaigned in support of Patterson. For many African-Americans, even those unsympathetic to communism, Patterson stood as a heroic figure for his willingness to confront American racism publicly.

The courage of American Communists, both black and white, in attacking Jim Crow policies placed them at the forefront of the struggle for integration throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Because of the party’s commitment to civil rights, an impressive array of black intellectuals, including Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Harold Cruse and W.E.B. DuBois, were at one time either members or closely aligned with the party.

But as Earl Ofari Hutchinson argues, for the majority of African Americans, Communist doctrine held little appeal because it denied the racial basis of American society. According to Marxist theory, black workers had the same fundamental interests as did the white working class. Party leader William Z. Foster, for instance, could dismiss the Ku Klux Klan as “a class instrument for the oppression of the working class, of whatever race.”

“Foster’s opinion was certainly news,” Hutchinson comments, “to the thousands of blacks who felt the rope, torch and bullets of night riders. The Klan was an instrument of racial terror aimed not just at ‘whatever race’ but at blacks. If he had been completely honest, he would have admitted that lynch mobs were not just made up of capitalists but workers, too.”

For American Communists, though, when theory and reality were out of sync, the solution was to follow the theory and ignore reality. Thus, white Communist writer Mike Gold could criticize Hughes for not writing about proper “Negro themes,” just as the party would accuse Wright of “petty bourgeois nationalism” for writing about the psychological impact of American racism.

Despite this basic misunderstanding, the CP gained widespread sympathy among some sectors of the African-American community for its willingness to speak up on black issues. The party played a prominent role in efforts to free the Scottsboro boys, nine black men accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931; in agitating for anti-lynching legislation; and in ending legal segregation. During the Depression, in such places as Chicago and Harlem, the party led the fight against tenant evictions.

Within the party, several blacks rose to positions of influence. James Ford was a star athlete at Fisk University and a decorated veteran of World War I before joining the party and gaining prominence as a speaker, eventually serving as the CP’s vice-presidential candidate in 1932 and 1936. During one campaign stop in Durham, North Carolina, the local American Legion threatened to attack Ford if he spoke. Unintimidated, Ford mounted the rostrum wearing his Army ribbons and discussed his experiences serving in a segregated unit in the war. After the speech, a group of sympathetic white students from Duke University surrounded Ford and safely escorted him to the train station.

Hutchinson relates the stories of several other African Americans who played important roles in the CP. Patterson, for instance, was an attorney with extensive experience in the labor movement. In the late 1940s, he used his position as head of the party-backed CRC to present a petition to the United Nations charging the U.S. government with genocide against African Americans. The petition was based on principles derived from the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, which defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, or religious group.” Although the white press and government officials dismissed the petition, it gained at least limited support from some black leaders, including Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for raising the issue of American racism in an international context and focusing world opinion on civil rights abuses in the United States.

Hutchinson’s book focuses primarily on the response of the black bourgeoisie, especially civil rights leaders and newspaper publishers, toward the CP, and occasionally one wishes for a clearer idea of how the black rank-and-file viewed the issue. For instance, in his book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990), Robin Kelley states that blacks in Alabama used the party as a vehicle for organizing while basing their militancy more on African-American folk culture than on Communist doctrine. More generally, though, Hutchinson is persuasive in arguing that while black workers might have supported the CP on specific issues, their fundamentally different understanding of the nature of American racism precluded any large-scale success in attracting African Americans to communism.

The relationship between the CP and African Americans is a complex mixture of cynicism and good intentions. Hutchinson subtly traces that history with an appreciation for its nuances and paradoxes.