During the Depression years of the early 1930s, the American Communist Party attracted significant numbers of black activists, writers and workers to its ranks. The black-led Communist paper the Liberator was both the mouthpiece and rallying point for this movement. The type of race-class politics it forged was groundbreaking at the time, but it has been consistently misunderstood and misconstrued by later historians, often writing from a ‘cold war’ perspective. Here, the development of the Liberator’s politics is closely analysed and placed in a historical context that allows its significance for black radicalism and black struggle to emerge.
Langston Hughes, ‘A new song’, Liberator (15 October 1932), p. 5.
2.
Harold Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (London, W. H. Allen, 1969), p. 187.
3.
Bill Mullen , ‘A new blueprint for African-American literary studies’, Modern Fiction Studies (Vol. 47, no. 1, Spring 2001), pp. 148-149.
4.
In opposition to hostile cold war and black nationalist histories of the period, an extensive body of work has been published by writers who emphasise a history from ‘below’. These works acknowledge the effects of Stalinism, but stress equally the activities of rank and file Communists in day-to-day struggles against racism and poverty. Philip Foner’s exhaustive studies of black working-class struggle and black working-class consciousness detail a contingent relationship between political organisation and black workers in Organised Labour and the Black Worker (New York, Praeger, 1974) and American Communism and Black Americans (Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 1987). Paul Buhle’s Marxism in the United States (New York, Verso, 1991) focuses on the ethnic diversity that characterised the American Communist movement. Mark Naison’s Communists in Harlem During the Depression (New York, Grove Press, 1985) and Robin Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990) are painstaking histories of black Communist experiences during this period, histories that stress the day-to-day activities of Communists. In The Cry was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1998), Mark Solomon has also written about rank-and-file Party members and the continually contradictory relationship between Party dictates and Party practice.
5.
Although the Liberator had three different editors and the shifting editorial staff reflected the demands of the CPUSA, it is not my intention to offer a history of the factional differences that informed these changes or to engage with the internal Party dynamics of the paper. This is covered by Mark Naison in Communists in Harlem, op. cit., pp. 109-11 and Mark Solomon, The Cry was Unity, op. cit., pp. 262-4. It is the generic tropes of black proletarian identity and interracial class solidarity that I explore here.
6.
Liberator (7 December 1929), p. 2.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Liberator (21 February 1931), p. 5.
9.
Ibid.
10.
Ibid.
11.
Liberator (15 August 1931), p. 4.
12.
Liberator (3 October 1931), p. 8.
13.
Liberator (29 March 1930), pp. 2, 4.
14.
Liberator (6 June 1931), p. 5.
15.
Liberator (25 July 1931), p. 2; (22 August 1931), p. 5.
16.
This line was, of course, modified with the rise of the Popular Front, but the Liberator’s heyday was the Third Period and even the modest gestures made towards black moderates during the ‘Hands off Ethiopia’ campaign of 1935 were conducted in terms which emphasised the ‘treachery’ of the black middle class.
17.
Harlem Liberator (13 May 1933), p. 5.
18.
Negro Liberator (29 December 1934), p. 8.
19.
The American hard Left had traditionally viewed racism as just one other aspect of class exploitation. Even the most militant class fighters, like the socialist Eugene Debs, claimed: ‘We have nothing special to offer the Negro and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the Party of the working class, regardless of colour - the working class of the whole world.’ Quoted in Sterling D. Spero and Abraham L. Harris, Black Worker (New York, Athaeneum, 1968), p. 405.
20.
Liberator (3 October 1931), p. 8.
21.
The Liberator’s evocation of black radical historical figures echoes the earlier celebratory histories of black radical achievement inaugurated by William Wells Brown in The Black Man: his antecedents, his genius and his achievements (1863) (New York, Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968).
22.
Liberator (7 December 1929), p. 3.
23.
The New York LSNR branches are listed in the Harlem Liberator (9 June 1934), p. 7.
24.
Liberator (18 January 1930), p. 2.
25.
Liberator (28 December 1929), p. 3; (5 April 1930), p. 2; (25 April 1931), p. 3; (15 October 1932), p. 3.
26.
Liberator (18 January 1930), p. 2 (emphasis added).
27.
bell hooks sources this uncompromising hate in Malcolm X; it is significant to find the articulation of it some thirty years previously in the pages of the Liberator. See bell hooks, Killing Rage (London, Penguin, 1996), p. 13.
28.
Liberator (5 April 1930), p. 4; (26 April 1930), p. 4; (3 May 1930), p. 4.
29.
Liberator (25 January 1930), p. 2.
30.
See Solomon, The Cry was Unity, op. cit., p. 165.
31.
Harlem Liberator (4 November 1935).
32.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (London and New York, Penguin Books, 1965), p. 337.
33.
Liberator (1 August 1932), p. 8.
34.
Liberator (22 February 1930), p. 3.
35.
Liberator (21 February 1931), p. 2.
36.
Liberator (29 March 1930), p. 2.
37.
Harlem Liberator (9 September 1933), p. 4.
38.
Harlem Liberator (20 May 1933), p. 4.
39.
Harlem Liberator (19 August 1933), p. 2.
40.
Harlem Liberator (18 November 1933), p. 2.
41.
Theodore Draper , ‘The class struggle: the myth of Communist professors’ , The New Republic (26 January 1987), p. 30 .
42.
H. Haywood , Black Bolshevik: the autobiography of an Afro-American Communist ( Chicago, IL, Liberator Press , 1978), p. 385.
43.
Liberator (5 April 1930), p. 2.
44.
The paper frequently promoted circulation drives in order to widen its readership, but never published sales figures. The matter of circulation is complicated further by the fact that sales figures would not necessarily be an indication of readership. Hosea Hudson points out that, as many southern black Communists were illiterate, one copy of the Liberator would often be read aloud to many comrades. See Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: his life as a Negro Communist in the South (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 102.
