Race and Revolution Bryan D

Document generated on 10/01/2021 11:11 a.m. Labour/Le Travailleur Race and Revolution Bryan D. Palmer Volume 54, 2004 URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/llt54re02 See table of contents Publisher(s) Canadian Committee on Labour History ISSN 0700-3862 (print) 1911-4842 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Palmer, B. D. (2004). Race and Revolution. Labour/Le Travailleur, 54, 193–222. All rights reserved © Canadian Committee on Labour History, 2004 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ Race and Revolution Bryan D. Palmer Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class & Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003) Max Shachtman, Race & Revolution: A Lost Chapter in American Radicalism ed ited and introduced by Christopher Phelps (London and New York: Verso, 2003) WHAT IS THE STATE of OUT understanding of the relationship of the race, or "Ne gro,"1 question, which much current scholarship rightly poses as a "white" prob lem, and the politics of United States radicalism and the revolutionary Left in the first third of the 20th century? The question is a complicated one. But it would not be out of place to suggest an irony located in the decade where the reciprocities of race and revolution were perhaps first forged unambiguously. On the one hand, the 1920s represented a shift in the meaning of the race ques tion in the United States, associated with post-World War I developments that in cluded black mobility and northern industrial migration, as well as a related effervescence of African American cultural attainment and "race" consciousness. "The Negro Question" would rightly be regarded in our times as anachronistic or worse. But this was the term used on the revolutionary Left in the 1920s and I therefore employ it throughout this essay. This was addressed, albeit problematically, and in ways that were opposed by many black communists, in Jay Lovestone, "The Great Negro Migration," Workers Monthly (February 1926), 179-184. The history of the "Great Migration" is addressed in a number of works. See, among them: Peter Gottleib, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks ' Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-1930 (Urbana and Chicago 1987); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York 1991); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration (Chicago 1991 ); Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America's Underclass from the Civil War to the Present (New York 1992). Bryan D. Palmer, "Race and Revolution," Labour/Le Travail, 54 (Fall 2004), 193-221. 194 LABOUR/LE TRAVAIL The latter was evident, at the very least, in the Harlem Renaissance, the challenge of the Marcus Garvey movement, and the publication of Alain Locke's 1925 collec tion, The New Negro: An Interpretation. A text that rightly achieved canonical sta tus in its assemblage of distinguished black literary figures and sociological writers, among them Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, W.E.B. Dubois, Charles S. Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Elsie Johnson McDougald, Arna Bontemps, Helen Johnson, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, Locke's book simulta neously announced the presence and challenge of a new, northern-based black in telligentsia that had wide-ranging political implications. On the other hand, the explosive radicalism of the immediate post-World War I years, culminating in a revolutionary rupture with the rise of communism, is usu ally not linked closely with race. Indeed, within the revolutionary Left, "the Negro Question" is conventionally depicted as a silence until, in 1928, the Communist In ternational adopted the Black Belt nation thesis, which posited the right of self-determination and self-governance of African Americans in the cot ton-producing South, where blacks had historically been concentrated demograph- ically, as well as a general struggle for justice and equality throughout the United States as a whole. A territory whose geographical boundaries were never precisely defined, but which was generally thought to be some 1600 miles long and 300 miles wide, stretching from the Tidewater to East Texas, the Black Belt encompassed roughly 191 contiguous counties and traversed 12 states. It supposedly constituted "an oppressed nation within a nation," homeland to some 5 million African Ameri cans, and potentially an attraction to a further 3 million blacks who lived in regions immediately surrounding the Black Belt.4 Chagrined by their failure to make much headway in black recruitment in the 1920s, Communists in Moscow and in the United States looked at the rising move ments of black nationalism and adapted to them. Following Joseph Stalin's some what mechanical writing on the national question, the Comintern theorist, Otto Kuusinen, a Finn who had no developed knowledge of the American South or the material circumstances of African Americans, drafted the Black Belt nation thesis, Alain Locke, The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York 1925); Nathan Huggins, Har lem Renaissance (New York 1971); Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey (Madison 1969). For early overviews of the 1919-1928 years see Wilson Record, The Negro and the Com munist Party (Chapel Hill 1951 ), 16-53; Theodore Draper, American Communism and So viet Russia (New York 1960), 315-356. These studies have been superseded by a number of recent treatments, the most thorough of which is Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Com munists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson 1998). An accessible, albeit uncritical, summary of the Black Belt nation thesis appears in Philip S. Foner and Herbert Shapiro, American Communism and Black Americans, 1930-1934 (Philadelphia 1991), esp. xi-xxix. See, as well, Earl Browder, C.A. Hathaway, Harry Haywood and the Communist Interna tional, The Communist Position on the Negro Question: Equal Rights for Negroes: Self-Determinationfor the Black Belt (New York 1932). RACE AND REVOLUTION 195 The plantation area in /W showing the percentage of total farm land in multiple units. The area shotted lor oyer 40 per cent forms the core of the Black Belt and includes the principal plantation region. The Black Belt Nation, from Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (New York 1948). positing "self-determination of the Negroes" as the pivotal plank in a new policy on "the race question": African Americans were declared "an historically developed community of people with a common language, territory, economic life and an his toric tradition reflecting itself in a common culture." Judged a modem "peasantry," Black Belt African Americans were rooted in the land and the struggle for self-determination was centrally aimed "at the destruction of the share-cropping system and at the possession of the land by the Negro toilers." The Communist Party's leading theoretician of "Negro Liberation" in the early 1930s, Sol Auer- bach, who wrote under the Party name James S. Allen, posited a kind of landed syn dicalism as the strategic direction of struggle for the realization of self-determination: "This basic contradiction can only be solved in the course of an agrarian revolution in the Black Belt when the Negro farm tenants and poor farmers will dislodge the white landowning class and take possession of the land and the farm stock and tools. With these basic weapons in their hands, they will be able to set up their own government and obtain full liberation." See, among many possible sources, The Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies: Theses Adopted at the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International (New York 1929); Jo seph Stalin, Marxism and the Colonial Question (New York 1934); "Resolution of the Com- 196 LABOUR/LE TRAVAIL Conventional wisdom thus posits a separation of race and radicalism in the pivotal decade of the 1920s. This legacy of congruent movements of dissent run ning in different directions — political, cultural, demographic — can be attributed to many factors, including white radicals' and revolutionaries' blindspots. The So cialist Party of America, for instance, addressed race weakly, and even if the social ist record is scrutinized benignly and specific ugliness not overstated (such as overt segregation and discrimination in the SP in the South and writings such as Kate Richards O'Hare's sexualized racist pamphlet, 'Nigger'Equality, with its abhor rence of the proximities evident in mills and factories of "nigger bucks" and young, white womanhood), the early 20th century radical record on race is not an easy one to excuse.6 At best, it collapsed attention to the particular oppression and height ened exploitation faced by blacks in the United States into the large context of an economic, class-ordered struggle for proletarian advance. This ended up slighting the significance of African Americans in the politics of anti-capitalist mobilization and understating the necessity of campaigning for democratic entitlements for peo ples of colour. A leading black socialist, Harlem's Hubert Harrison, noted that the Socialist Party's need to champion the cause of black Americans was a crucial test of its sin cerity. Unfortunately, the SP never rose to the occasion. Harrison would soon coun ter the traditional socialist cry of "class first" with a rejoinder that placed the accent on the need for "race consciousness" and practical struggle for racial equality. Taking his exit from the Socialist Party in 1914, Harrison founded a Radical Forum in Harlem, taught in the anarchist-influenced Modern School Movement of the martyred Spanish educator, Francisco Ferrer, advocated armed self-defence for blacks, and worked briefly in the cause of trade unionism with the American Feder ation of Labor.

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