Library:Black Bolshevik

Black Bolshevik: Autobiography Of An Afro-American Communist
Author	Harry Haywood
Publisher	Liberator Press
First published	January 1, 1978 Chicago Illinois
Type	Book
ISBN	9780930720537
Source	archive.org

Black Bolshevik is the autobiography of Harry Haywood, published January 1, 1978. 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.

It was dedicated to his family; his third wife, son and daughter.

"To My Family,

Gwen, Haywood, Jr., and Becky"

Acknowledgement

There have been many friends and comrades who have, directly or indirectly, helped me with the writing of this book. Unfortunately, they are too numerous to all be named here.

There are a number of young people who have helped with the editorial, research and typing tasks and helped the project along through political discussions. Special thanks to Ernie Allen, who gave yeoman help with the early chapters. Others whose assistance was indispensable include Jody and Susan Chandler, Paula Cohen, Stu Dowty and Janet Goldwasser, Paul Elitzik, Pat Fry, Gary Goff, Sherman Miller, John Schwartz, Lyn Wells and Carl Davidson. Others who gave me assistance are Renee Blakkan and Nathalie Garcia.

Over the past years, I have had discussions with several veteran comrades and friends who have helped immeasurably in jogging my memory and filling in the gaps where my own experience was lacking, I extend my warmest appreciation to Jesse Gray, Josh Lawrence, Arthur and Maude (White) Katz, John Killens, Ruth Hamlin, Frances Loman, Al Murphy, Joan Sandler, Delia Page and Jack and Ruth Shulman.

A political autobiography is necessarily shaped by experiences over the years and by comrades who helped and influenced me in the long battle for self-determination and against revisionism. My earliest political debts are to the first core of Black cadres in the CPUSA: Cyril Briggs, Edward Doty, Richard B. Moore and to my brother Otto Hall, all former members of the African Blood Brotherhood.

To Harrison George, outstanding son of the working class, charter member of the CPUSA, former editor of the Daily Worker and the Peoples' World, who gave his all to the Communist movement and died alone, victimized for his “premature" anti- revisionism.

A special tribute to my comrades in the battles against revisionism within the CPUSA and after: Al Lannon, veteran director of the Waterfront Section and member of the Central Committee of the CPUSA; Charles Loman, executive secretary of the Brooklyn Party Organization; Isidore Beagun, executive secretary of the Bronx Party Organization; Allen and Pearl Lawes, Al and Ruth Hamlin, Olga and Victor Agosto. And to my wife, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, my closest collaborator from 1953 through 1964 in the writing of manuscripts as well as in the Apolitical battles, who has since established her own reputation as historian and essayist.

A tribute to Ed Strong, former communist youth leader and director of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, whose premature death in the mid-fifties cut short his uncompromising stand within the Central Committee for the right of self-determination for the Black nation.

To the editors of Soulbook Magazine, who published my writings in 1965-66 and invited me to Oakland, California, in the spring of 1966 during the formative stages of the Black Panther movement.

To Vincent Harding, who provided me with funds to return to the U.S. from Mexico in 1970 and gave me technical and material assistance to begin this autobiography.

Thanks to John Henrik Clarke and Francisco and Elizabeth Cattlett de Mora for their enthusiasm and moral support.

To Robert Warner, Director of the Michigan Historical Collections, for his help and his sensitivity to the need to collect and preserve historically relevant materials from the Black movement in the United States.

Prologue

On July 28, 1919,1 literally stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of my life. Exactly three months after mustering out of the Army, I found myself in the midst of one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S. history. It was certainly a most dramatic return to the realities of American democracy.

It came to me then that I had been fighting the wrong war. The Germans weren’t the enemy -the enemy was right here at home. These ideas had been developing ever since I landed home in April, and a lot of other Black veterans were having the same thoughts.

I had a job as a waiter on the Michigan Central Railroad at the time. In July, I was working the Wolverine, the crack Michigan Central train between Chicago and New York. We would serve lunch and dinner on the run out of Chicago to St. Thomas, Canada, where the dining car was cut off the train. The next morning our cars would be attached to the Chicago-bound train and we would serve breakfast and lunch into Chicago.

On July 27, the Wolverine left on a regular run to St. Thomas. Passing through Detroit, we heard news that a race riot had broken out in Chicago. The situation had been tense for some time. Several members of the crew, all of them Black, had bought revolvers and ammunition the previous week when on a special to Battle Creek, Michigan. Thus, when we returned to Chicago at about 2:00 P.M. the next day (July 28). we were apprehensive about what awaited us.

The whole dining car crew, six waiters and four cooks, got off at the Twelfth Street Station in Chicago. Usually we would stay on the car while it backed out to the yards, but the station seemed a better route now. We were all tense as we passed through the station on the way to the elevated which would take us to the Southside and home. Suddenly a white trainman accosted us. “Hey, you guys going out to the Southside?”

“Yeah, so what?” I said, immediately on the alert, thinking he might start something.

“If I were you I wouldn’t go by the avenue” He meant Michigan Avenue which was right in front of the station.

“Why?”

“There’s a big race riot going on out there, and already this morning a couple of colored soldiers were killed coming in unsuspectingly. If I were you I’d keep off the street, and go right out those tracks by the lake.”

We took the trainman’s advice, thanked him, and turned toward the tracks. It would be much slower walking home, but if he were right, it would be safer. As we turned down the tracks toward the Southside of the city, towards the Black ghetto, I thought of what I had just been through in Europe and what now lay before me in America.

On one side of us lay the summer warmness of Lake Michigan. On the other was Chicago, a huge and still growing industrial center of the nation, bursting at its seams; brawling, sprawling Chicago, “hog butcher for the nation” as Carl Sandburg had called it

As we walked, I remembered the war. On returning from Europe, I had felt good to be alive. I was glad to be back with my family—Mom, Pop and my sister. At twenty-one, my life lay before me. What should I do? The only trade I had learned was waiting tables. I hadn’t even finished the eighth grade. Perhaps I should go back to France, live there and become a French citizen? After all, I hadn’t seen any Jim Crow there.

Had race prejudice in the U.S. lessened? I knew better. Conditions in the States had not changed, but we Blacks had. We were determined not to take it anymore. But what was I walking into?

Southside Chicago, the Black ghetto, was like a besieged city. Whole sections of it were in ruins. Buildings burned and the air was heavy with smoke, reminiscent of the holocaust from which I had recently returned.

Our small band, huddled like a bunch of raw recruits under machine gun fire, turned up Twenty-sixth Street and then into the heart of the ghetto. At Thirty-fifth and Indiana, we split up to go our various ways; I headed for home at Forty-second Place and Bowen. None of us returned to work until the riot was over, more than a week later.

The battle at home was just as real as the battle in France had been. As I recall, there was full-scale street fighting between Black and white. Blacks were snatched from streetcars and beaten or killed; pitched battles were fought in ghetto streets; hoodlums roamed the neighborhood, shooting at random. Blacks fought hack.

As I saw it at the time, Chicago was two cities. The one was the Chamber of Commerce’s city of the “American Miracle,” the Chicago of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. It was the new industrial city which had grown in fifty years from a frontier town to become the second largest city in the country.

The other, the Black community, had been part of Chicago almost from the time the city was founded. Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a Black trapper from French Canada, was the first settler. Later came fugitive slaves, and after the Civil War- more Blacks, fleeing from post-Reconstruction terror, taking jobs as domestics and personal servants.

The large increase was in the late 1880s through World War 1, as industry in the city expanded and as Blacks streamed north following the promise of jobs, housing and an end to Jim Crow lynching. The Illinois Central tracks ran straight through the deep South from Chicago to New Orleans, and the Panama Limited made the run every day.

Those that took the train north didn’t find a promised land. They found jobs and housing, all right, but they had to compete with the thousands of recent immigrants from Europe who were also drawn to the jobs in the packing houses, stockyards and steel mills.

The promise of an end to Jim Crow was nowhere fulfilled. In those days, the beaches on Lake Michigan were segregated. Most were reserved for whites only. The Twenty-sixth Street Beach, close to the Black community, was open to Blacks—but only as long as they stayed on their own side.

The riot had started at this beach, which was then jammed with a late July crowd. Eugene Williams, a seventeen-year-old Black youth, was killed while swimming off the white side of the beach. The Black community was immediately alive with accounts of what had happened—that he had been murdered while swimming., that a group of whites had thrown rocks at him and killed him, and that the policeman on duty at the beach had refused to make any arrests.

This incident was the spark that ignited the flames of racial animosity which had been smoldering for months. Fighting between Blacks and whites broke out on the Twenty-sixth Street beach after Williams’s death. It soon spread beyond the beach and lasted over six days. Before it was over, thirty-eight people—Black and white—were dead, 537 injured and over 1,000 homeless.

The memory of this mass rebellion is still very sharp in my mind. It was the great turning point in my life, and I have dedicated myself to the struggle against capitalism ever since. In the following pages of my autobiography, I have attempted to trace the development of that struggle in the hopes that today’s youth can learn from both our successes and failures. lt is for the youth and the bright future of a socialist USA that this book has been written.

Chapter 1

A Child of Slaves

I was born in South Omaha, Nebraska, on February 4, 1898— the youngest of the three children of Harriet and Haywood Hall. Otto, my older brother, was born in May 1891; and Eppa, my sister, in December 1896.

The 1890s had been a decade of far-reaching structural change in the economic and political life of the United States. These were fateful years in which the pattern of twentieth century subjugation of Blacks was set. A young U.S. imperialism was ready in 1898 to shoulder its share of the “white man’s burden” and take its "manifest destiny” beyond the Pacific Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. In the war against Spain, it embarked on its first "civilizing” mission against the colored peoples of the Philippines and the “mixed breeds” of Cuba and Puerto Rico. In the course of the decade and a half following the Spanish-American War, the two-faced banner of racism and imperialist “benevolence” was carried to the majority of the Caribbean countries and the whole of Latin America.

“The echo of this industrial imperialism in America,” said W. E. B. DuBois, “was the expulsion of Black men from American democracy, their subjection to caste control and wage slavery.” In 1877, the Hayes-Tilden agreement had successfully aborted the ongoing democratic revolution of Reconstruction in the South. Blacks were sold down the river, as northern capitalists, with the assistance of some former slaveholders, gained full economic and political control in the South. Henceforward, it was assured that the future development of the region would be carried out in complete harmony with the interests of Wall Street. The following years saw the defeat of the Southern based agrarian populist movement, with its promise of Black and white unity against the power of monopoly capital. The counter-revolution against Reconstruction was in full swing.

Beginning in 1890, the Southern state legislatures enacted a series of disenfranchisement laws. Within the next sixteen years, these laws were destined to completely abrogate the right of Blacks to vote. This same period saw the revival of the notorious Black Codes, the resurgence of the hooded terror of the Ku Klux Klan and the defeat for reelection in 1905 of the last Black congressman surviving the Reconstruction period. Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation in public facilities were enacted by Southern states and municipal governments. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Jim Crow in the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision in 1896, declaring that legislation is powerless to eradicate “racial instinets” and establishing the principle of “separate but equal.” This decision was only reversed in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court held that separate facilities were inherently unequal.

At the time when I was born, the Black experience was mainly a Southern one. The overwhelming majority of Black people still resided in the South. Most of the Black inhabitants of South Omaha were refugees from the twenty-year terror of the post-Re construction period. Omaha itself, despite its midwestern location, did not escape the terror completely, as indicated by the lynching of a Black man, Joe Coe, by a mob in 1891. Many people had relatives and families in the South. Some had trekked up to Kansas in 1879 under the leadership of Henry Adams of Louisiana and Moses “Pap” Singleton of Tennessee, and many had then continued further north to Omaha and Chicago.

My parents were born slaves in 1860. They were three years old at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. My Father was born on a plantation in Martin County, Tennessee, north of Memphis. The plantation was owned by Colonel Haywood Hall, whom my Father remembered as a kind and benevolent man. When the slaves were emancipated in 1863, my Grandfather, with the consent of Mr. Hall, took both the given name and surname of his former master.

I never knew Grandfather Hall, as he died before I was born. According to my Father and uncles, he was—as they said in those days—“much of a man” He was active in local Reconstruction polities and probably belonged to the Black militia. Although Tennessee did not have a Reconstruction government, there were many whites who supported the democratic aims that were pursued during the Reconstruction period.

But Tennessee was also the home of the Ku Klux Klan, where it was first organized after the Civil War. In the terror that followed the Hayes-Tilden agreement, these “night riders” had marked my Grandfather out as a “bad nigger” for lynching. At first they were deterred because of the paternalism of Colonel Hall. Many of Hall’s former slaves still lived on his plantation after the war ended, and the colonel had let it be known that he would kill the first “son-of-a-bitch” that trespassed on his property and tried to terrorize his “nigrahs.”

But the anger of the night riders, strengthened by corn liquor, finally overcame their fear of Colonel Hall. My Father, who was about fifteen at the time, described what happened. One night the Klansmen rode onto the plantation and headed straight for Grandfather’s cabin. They broke open the door and one poked his head into the darkened cabin. “Hey, Hall’s nigger-where are you?"

My Grandfather was standing inside and fired his shotgun point blank at the hooded head. The Klansman, half his head blown off, toppled onto the floor of the cabin, and his companions mounted their horses and fled. Grandmother, then pregnant, fell against the iron bed.

Grandfather got the family out of the cabin and they ran to the “big house” for protection. It was obvious they couldn’t stay in Tennessee, so the Colonel hitched up a wagon and personally drove them to safety, outside of Martin County. Some of Grandfather’s family were already living in Des Moines, Iowa, so the Hall family left by train for Des Moines the following morning. The shock of this experience was so great that Grandmother gave birth prematurely to their third child—my Uncle George who lived to be ninety-five. Grandmother, however, became a chronic invalid and died a few years after the flight from Tennessee.

Father was only in his teens when the family left for Des Moines, so he spent most of his youth there. In the late 1880s, he left and moved to South Omaha where there was more of a chance to get work. He got a job at Cudahy’s Packing Company, where he worked for more than twenty years—first as a beef-lugger (loading sides of beef on refrigerated freight cars), and then as a janitor in the main office building. Not long after his arrival, he met and married Mother—Harriet Thorpe—who had come up from Kansas City, Missouri, at about the same time.

Father was powerfully built—of medium height, but with tremendous breadth (he had a forty-six-inch chest and weighed over 200 pounds). He was an extremely intelligent man. With little or no formal schooling, he had taught himself to read and write and was a prodigious reader. Unfortunately, despite his great strength, he was not much of a fighter, or so it seemed to me. In later years, some of the old slave psychology and fear remained. He was an ardent admirer of Booker T. Washington who, in his Atlanta compromise speech of 1895, had called on Blacks to submit to the racist status quo,

Uncle George was the opposite. He would brook no insult and had been known to clean out a whole barroom when offended. The middle brother, Watt, was also a fighter and was especially dangerous if he had a knife or had been drinking. I remember both of them complaining of my Father’s timidity.

My Mother’s family also had great fighting spirit. Her father, Jerry Thorpe, was born on a plantation near Bowling Green, Kentucky. He was illiterate, but very smart and very strong. Even as an old man, his appearance made us believe the stories that were told of his strength as a young man. When he was feeling fine and happy, his exuberance would get the best of him and he’d grab the largest man around, hoist him on his shoulders, and run around the yard with him.

Grandfather Thorpe was half Creek Indian and had an Indian profile with a humped nose and high cheekbones. His hair was short and curly and he had a light brown complexion. He had a straggly white beard that he tried to cultivate into a Van Dyke. He said his father was a Creek Indian and his mother a Black plantation slave. No one knew his exact age, but we made a guess based on a story he often told us.

He was about six or seven years old when, he said, “The stars fell”

“When was that, Grandpa?”

“Oh, one night the stars fell, I remember it very clearly. The skies were all lit up by falling stars. People were scared almost out of I heir wits. The old master and mistress and all the slaves were running out on the road, falling down on their knees to pray and ask forgiveness. We thought the Judgement Day had surely come. Glory Hallelujah! It was the last fire! The next day, the ground was all covered with ashes!”

At first we thought all of that was just his imagination, something he had fantasized as a child and then remembered as a real event. But when my older brother Otto was in high school, he got interested in astronomy and came across a reference to a meteor shower of 1833. We figured out that was what Grandfather Thorpe had been talking about, so we concluded that he was born around 1825 or 1826.

Grandfather Thorpe was filled with stories, many about slavery.

“Chillen, I’ve got scars I’ll carry to my grave.” He would show us the welts on his back from slave beatings (my Grandmother also had them). Most of his beatings came from his first master in Kentucky. But he was later sold to a man in Missouri, whom he said treated him much better. This may have been due in part to his value as a slave—he was skilled both as a carpenter and cabinetmaker.

Grandfather had many stories to tell about the Civil War. He was in Missouri at the time, living in an area that was first taken by a group known as Quantrell's raiders (a guerrilla-like band of irregulars who fought for the South) and then by the Union forces.

When the Union soldiers first came into the plantations, they would call in slaves from the fields and make them sit down in the great drawing room of the house. They would then force the master and mistress and their family to cook and serve for the slaves. Grandfather told us that the soldiers would never eat any of the food that was served, because they were afraid of getting poisoned.

The master on the plantation was generally decent when it became clear that the Union forces were going to control the area for awhile. At that time, Grandfather and my Grandmother Ann lived on adjacent plantations somewhere near Moberly, Missouri. Grandfather was allowed to visit Ann on weekends. Often on Sundays when he went to make a visit, he was challenged by Union guards. They would roughly demand to know his mission. My Grandfather and Grandmother got married, with the agreement of their two masters, and eventually had a family of five daughters and two sons. Grandfather Thorpe was given a plot of land in return for his services as a carpenter, but the family soon moved into Moberly. As the children reached working age, the family began to break up, but the girls always remained very close. They came back to visit frequently and never broke family ties as the boys had.

My Mother, Harriet, was born when Grandmother was a slave on the plantation of Squire Sweeney in Howard County, Missouri. After the family moved into Moberly, Mother worked for a white family in town. She later went to St. Joseph, Missouri, to work for another white family. One day, while she was at work in St. Joseph, she heard a shot and then screams from down the street. She ran out to see what had happened. There was a great commotion and a crowd of people was gathering in front of the house next door.

The family living there went by the name of Howard—a man, wife and two children. Both the man and his wife were church members; they appeared to be a most respectable couple. Mrs. Howard had been very active in church affairs and socials. Her husband was frequently absent because, she said, he was a traveling salesman and his work took him out of town for long periods of time.

What the neighbors were not aware of was that “Mr. Howard” was none other than the legendary Jesse James. He was shot in the hack while hanging a picture in his house. The man who killed him was Robert Ford—a member of Jesse's own gang who had turned 11 a it or for a bribe offered by the Burns Detective Agency.

When my Mother did the laundry, I remember she would often ring the “Ballad of Jesse James"—a song which became popular niter his death.

Jesse James was a man—he killed many a man,

The man that robbed that Denver train.

It was a dirty little coward Who shot Mr. Howard,

And they laid Jesse James in his grave.

Oh the people held their breath When they heard of Jesse's death,

And they wondered how he came to die.

He was shot on the sly By little Robert Ford,

And they laid poor Jesse in his grave.

In 1893, my Mother went to Chicago to visit her sister and see the Exposition. She said she saw Frank James, Jesse's brother, lie was out of prison then, a very dignified old man with a long white beard. He had been hired to ride around as an attraction at one of the exhibitions.

Mother kept moving up to the north by stages. After the job in St. Joseph, she found work in St. Louis. She arrived to Find the city in a tense situation- the whole town was on the verge of a race riot. The immediate cause was the murder of an Irish cop named Brady. The Black community was elated, for Brady was a “nigger-hating cop" who carved notches on his pistol to show the number of Blacks he had killed. Brady finally met his end at the hands of a "bad" Black man who ran a gambling house in Brady's district.

The gambling, of course, was illegal. But as was often the case, The cops were paid off with a “cut" from the takings of the house. As the story was told to me, Brady and the gambler met on the street one day and got into an argument. Brady accused the gambler of not giving him his proper “cut." This was denied vehemently. Brady then threatened to close the place down. The Black man told him, “Don’t you come into my place when the game’s going on!” He then turned and walked off. The scene was witnessed by several Blacks, and the news of how the gambler had defied Brady spread immediately throughout the Black district.

This was bad stuff for Brady. It might lead to “niggers gettin’ notions,” as the cops put it. A few days passed, and Brady made his move. He went to the gambling house when the game was on and was shot dead.

Some anonymous Black bard wrote a song about it all:

Brady, why didn’t you run,

You know you done wrong.

You came in the room when the game was going on!

Brady went below looking mighty curious.

Devil said, " Where you from?”

"I'm from East St. Louis .”

"East St. Louie, come this way I’ve been expecting you every day!”

The song was immediately popular in the Black community and became a symbol of rebellious feelings. Mother said that when she arrived in St. Louis, Blacks were singing this song all over town. The police realized the danger in such “notions” and began to arrest anyone they caught singing it. Forty years later. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Carl Sandburg sing the same song as part of his repertoire of folk ballads of the midwest. I had not heard it since Mother had sung it to us.

Mother later moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and then to South Omaha. Her marriage there to my Father was her second. As a very young girl in Moberly, she had married John Harvey, but he was, to use her words, “a no-good yellah nigger, who expected me to support him.” They had one child, Gertrude, before he deserted her.

Gertie came to Omaha some time after my Mother, and married my Father’s youngest brother, George. I have a feeling that Mother promoted this match; the two hard-working, sober Hall brothers must have been quite a catch!

As I remember Mother in my childhood years, she was a small, brown-skinned woman, rather on the plumpish side, with large and beautiful soft brown eyes. She had the humped, Indian nose of the Thorpe family.

My first memory of her is hearing her sing as she did housework. She had a melodious contralto voice and what seemed to me to be an endless and varied repertoire. Much of what I know about this period, I learned from her songs. These included lullabies (“Go to Sleep You Little Pickaninny, Mamma’s Gonna Swat You if You Don’t”) and many spirituals and jubilee songs. There were also innumerable folk ballads, and the popular songs of her day like "Down at the Ball” and “Where Did You Get That Hat?” Then there was the old song the slaves sang about their masters fleeing the Union Army—“The Year of Jubilo.”

Oh darkies, have you seen the Massah with the mustache on his face?

He was gwine down de road dis mornin’ like

he's gwine to leave dis place.

Oh, de Massah run, ha ha!

And the darkies sing, ho ho!

It must be now the Kingdom cornin' and de year of Jubilo!

Mother never went to school a day in her life, but she had a phenomenal memory and was a virtual repository of Black folklore. My brother Otto taught her to read and write when she when forty years old. She told stories of life on the plantations, of the “hollers” they used. When a slave wanted to talk to a friend on n neighboring plantation, she would throw back her head and half sing, half yell: “Oh, Bes-sie, I wa-ant to see you.” Often you could hear one of the “hollers” a mile away.

When Mother was a girl, camp meetings were a big part of her life. She had songs she remembered from the meetings, like “I Don’t Feel Weary, No Ways Tired,” and she would imitate the preachers with all of their promises of fire and brimstone. Later, when we lived in South Omaha, she was very active in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. As a means of raising funds, she used to organize church theatricals. Otto would help her read the plays; she would then direct them and usually play the leading role herself. She was a natural mimic. I heard her go through entire plays from beginning to end, imitating the voices (even the male ones) and the actions of the performers.

In addition to caring for Otto, Eppa and myself, Mother got jobs catering parties for rich white families in North Omaha. She would bring us back all sorts of goodies and leftovers from these parties. Sometimes she would get together with her friends among the other domestics, and they would have a great time panning their employers and exchanging news of the white folks’ scandalous doings.

Mother had the great fighting spirit of her family. She was a strong-minded woman with great ambition for her children, especially for us boys. Eppa, who was a plain Black girl, was sensitive but physically tough, courageous, and a regular tomboy.

Worried about her future, Mother insisted that she learn the piano and arranged for her to take lessons at twenty-five cents each. Though she learned to play minor classics such as “Poet and Peasant,” arias from such operas as Aida and II Trovatore, accompanied the choir and so on, Eppa never liked music very much and was not consoled by it the way Mother was.

As a wife, Mother had a way of making Father feel the part of the man in the house. She flattered his ego and always addressed him as “Mr. Half’ in front of guests and us children.

LIFE IN SOUTH OMAHA

You ask what town I love the best.

South Omaha, South Omaha!

The fairest town of all the rest,

South Omaha, South Omaha!

Where yonder's Papillion’s limp stream

To where Missouri’s waters gleam.

Oh, fairest town, oh town of mine,

South Omaha, South Omaha!

In the early part of the century, the days of my youth, South Omaha was an independent city. In 1915, it was annexed to become part of the larger city of Omaha. Like many midwestem towns, the city took its name from the original inhabitants of the area. In this case, it was the Omaha Indians of the Sioux tribal family. The area was a camping ground of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804. It grew in importance when it became a licensed trading post and an important outfitting point during the Colorado Gold Rush. But the main growth of South Omaha came in the 1880s as the meat packing industry developed.

In 1877, the first refrigerated railroad cars were perfected. This made it possible to slaughter livestock in the midwest and ship the meat to the large markets in eastern cities. As a result, the meat packing industry grew tremendously in the midwest.

The city leaders saw the opportunity and encouraged the expanding packing industry to settle there—offering them special tux concessions and so forth. The town, situated on a plateau back from the “big muddy” (the Missouri River), began to grow. Soon it was almost an industrial suburb of Omaha and was one of the three largest packing centers in the country. All of the big packers of the time—Armour, Swift, Wilson and Cudahy—had big branches there. Cudahy’s main plant was in South Omaha.

The industry brought with it growing railroad traffic. As a boy, I watched the dozens of lines of cars as they carried livestock in from the west and butchered meat to ship out to the east. The Burlington; the Chicago and Northwestern; the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific; the Illinois Central; the Rock Island; the Union Pacific—all of these lines had terminals there. By 1910, Omaha was the fourth largest railway center in the country.

When I was born in 1898, South Omaha was a bustling town of about 20,000. Most of these 20,000 people were foreign-born and first generation immigrants. The two largest groups were the Irish and the Bohemians (or Czechs). There was a sprinkling of other Slavic groups—Poles, Russians, Serbs—as well as Germans, Greeks and Italians.

The Bohemians were the largest ethnic group in town. They lived mainly in the southern part of town, towards the river, in the Brown Park and Albright sections. One thing that impressed me was their concern with education. They were a cultured group of people. I can’t remember any of them being illiterate and they had their own newspaper. They were involved in the political wheelings and dealings of the town and were successful at it. At one time, both the mayor and chief of police were Bohemians.

The Irish were the second largest group, scattered throughout the town. The newly arrived poor "shanty” Irish would first settle on Indian Hill, near the stockyards. There were two classes of Irish the "shanty” Irish on the one hand, and the "old settlers” or "lace curtain” Irish on the other. This second group, who had settled only one generation before, was mostly made up of middle class, white collar, civil service and professional workers who lived near North Omaha. There were also a few Irish who were very rich; managers and executives who lived in Omaha proper. They had become well assimilated into the community. The tendency was for the poorer Irish to live in South Omaha, and those who had "made it” to one degree or another would move up to North Omaha or Omaha proper.

There were only a few dozen Black families in South Omaha, scattered throughout the community. There was no Black ghetto and, as I saw it, no "Negro problem.” This was due undoubtedly to our small numbers, although there was a relatively large number of Blacks living in North Omaha. The Black community there had grown after Blacks were brought in as strikebreakers during the 1894 strike in the packing industry, but no real ghetto developed until after World War I.

Our family lived in the heart of the Bohemian neighborhood in South Omaha. Nearly all our neighbors were Bohemians. They came from many backgrounds; there were workers and peasants, professionals, artists, musicians and other skilled artisans, all fleeing from the oppressive rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

They were friendly people, and kept up their language and traditions. On Saturdays, families would gather at one of the beer gardens to sing and dance. I remember watching them dance scottisches and polkas, listening to the beautiful music of their bands and orchestras, or running after their great marching bands when they were in a parade. On special occasions, they would bring out their colorful costumes. Much of their community life centered around the gymnastic clubs—Sokols or Turners’ Halls— which they had established.

There were differences in how the ethnic groups related to each other and to the Blacks in town. In those days, Indian Hill was the stomping ground of teenage Irish toughs. One day, a mob of predominantly Irish youths ran the small Greek colony out of town when one of their members allegedly killed an Irish cop. I remember seeing the Greek community leaving town one Sunday afternoon. There were men, women and children (about 100 in all) walking down the railroad tracks, carrying everything they could hold. Some of their houses had been burned and a few of them had been beaten up in town.

We should have seen the danger for us in this, but one Black man even boasted to my Father about how he had helped run the Greeks out. My Father called him a fool. “What business did you have helping that bunch of whites? Next time it might be you they run out!’’ The incident was an ominous sign of tensions that were lo come many years later.

At the time, however, our family got along well with all the immigrant families in our immediate neighborhood. I loved the sweet haunting melodies of the Irish folk ballads; “Rose of Tralce,” "Mother Machree” and many of the popular songs, like “My Irish Molly-O” and “Augraghawan, I Want to Go Back to Oregon.”

There was a Bohemian couple living next door. On occasion, Mr. Rehau would get a bit too much under his belt. He’d come home and really raise hell. When this happened, Mrs. Rehau scurried to Officer Bingham, the Black cop, to get some help. I remember one afternoon when Bingham came to lend a hand in laming him. The Bohemian was a little guy compared to him. Officer Bingham threw him down out in the yard and plunked himself down on Rehau’s back.

Dust flew as he kicked and thrashed and tried to get out from under the Black man. Bingham just “rode the storm” and when Rehau raised his head, he’d smack him around until the rebellion subsided.

“Had enough?" he’d yell at his victim. “You gonna behave now and mind what Mrs. Rehau says?" All the while, she was running around them, waving her apron.

“Beat him some more, Mr, Bingham, please! Make him be good.”

Finally, either Bingham got tired or Mr. Rehau just gave out and peace returned to the neighborhood.

“Police and community relations" were less tense then. The cops knew how to control a situation without using guns. Often this meant they'd get into actual fist fights. In those days, there was a big Black guy in town named Sam, a beef lugger like my Father. Sam was a nice quiet guy, but on occasion he'd go on a drunk and fight anyone within arm’s length (which was a big area). The cops generally handled it by fighting it out with him.

But I remember one time Sam really caused a row. He was outside a bar on J Street, up in Omaha proper. During the course of his drunk, he’d beaten up five or six of the regular cops. This called for extreme measures. Briggs, the chief of police, came to the scene to restore law and order. He marched up to Sam and threw out his chest, “Now Sam, it's time for you to behave, you hear?" He even pulled out his thirty-eight to show he meant business.

But Sam wasn’t ready to behave. He came at Briggs, intending to lay him out like he’d done with the other officers, Briggs backed up, one step at a time. “Sam, you stop. You hear me Sam? Time to stop, now." Sam forced Briggs all the way back to his carriage. Once Briggs was in, he delivered his final threat: “Sam, you come down to City Hall on Monday and see me. This just can’t happen this way."

Briggs drove off. Monday morning came and Sam went down to City Hall. He was fined for being drunk and disorderly. He didn’t fight the court and willingly paid the fine. It seemed like an unwritten agreement. The cops wouldn’t shoot when Sam went on a spree. When it was over, Sam would go and pay his fine and that would end the whole business.

Our family was the only Black family in our neighborhood, and we were pretty well insulated from the racist pressures of the outside world. As children we were only very dimly aware of what DuBois called the “veil of color between the races.”

I First became aware of the veil, not from anything that happened in the town, but from what my parents and grandparents told me of how Southern whites had persecuted Blacks and of how they had suffered under slavery. I remember Grandfather and Grandmother Thorpe showing me the scars they had on their backs from the overseer’s lash. I remember Pa reading newspaper accounts of the endless reign of lynch terror in the South, and about the 1908 riots in Springfield, Illinois.

In 1908, Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion, defeated the “great white hope.” Jim Jeffries. Pa said that it was the occasion for a new round of lynchings in the South. There were other great Black fighters—Sam Langford, Joe Jeanett and Sam McVey for instance—but Johnson was the first Black heavyweight to be able to fight for the championship and the first to win it.

He was conscious that he was a Black man in a racist world. “I’m Black, they never let me forget it. Pm Black, Til never forget it.” Jeffries had been pushed as the hope of the white race to reclaim the heavyweight crown from Johnson. When Johnson knocked out Jeffries, it was a symbol of Black defiance and self-assertion. To Blacks, the victory meant pride and hope. It was a challenge to the authority of bigoted whites and to them it called for extra measures to “keep the niggers in their place.”

To us children, Black repression seemed restricted to the South, outside the orbit of our immediate experience. As I saw it then, there was no deliberate plot of white against Black. I thought there were two kinds of white folk: good and bad, and the latter were mainly in the South. Most of those I knew in South Omaha were good people. Disillusionment came later in my life.

The friendly interracial atmosphere of South Omaha was illustrated by the presence of Officer Bingham and Officer Ballou, two Black cops in the town’s small police force. Bingham was a big, Black and jolly fellow. His beat was our neighborhood. Ballou was a tall, slim, ramrod straight and light brown-skinned Black. He was a veteran of the Black Tenth Cavalry. He had fought in the Indian wars against Geronimo and had participated in the chase for Billy the Kid. Ballou was also a veteran of the Spanish- American War. All the kids, Black and white, regarded him with a special awe and respect. Both Black officers were treated as respectable members of the community, liked by the people because they had their confidence. While they wore guns, they never seemed to use them. These cops fought tough characters with fists and clubs, pulling a gun only rarely, and then only in self- defense. It seemed that a large part of their duty was to keep the kids out of mischief.

“Officer Bingham,” the Bohemian woman across the alley would call, “would you please keep an eye on my boy Frontal. See he don’t make trouble.”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Brazda. He’s a good boy.” “

Has Haywood been a good boy?”

“Oh yes, Mrs. Hall. He’s all right.’’And he would stop for a chat. My sister Eppa, a lad called Willy Starens and I were the only Black kids in the Brown Park Elementary School. My brother Otto had already graduated and was in South Omaha High. Our schoolmates were predominantly Bohemians, with a sprinkling of Irish, German and a few Anglo-Americans. My close childhood chums included two Bohemian lads, Frank Brazda and Jimmy Rehau; an Anglo-Irish kid, Earl Power; and Willy Ziegler, who was of German parentage. We were an inseparable fivesome, in and out of each other’s homes all the time.

During my first years in school, I was plagued by asthma, and was absent from school many months at a time. The result was that I was a year behind. I finally outgrew this infirmity and became a strong, healthy boy. By the time I reached the eighth grade, I had become one of the best students in my class, sharing this honor with a Bohemian girl, Bertha Himmel. Both of us could solve any problem in arithmetic, both were good at spelling, and at interschool spelling bees our school usually won the first prize. My self-confidence was encouraged by my teachers, all of whom were white and yet uniformly kind and sympathetic.

Of course, like all kids, I had plenty of fights. But race was seldom involved. Occasionally, I would hear the word “nigger.” While it evoked anger in me, it seemed no more disparaging than the terms “bohunk,” “sheeny,” “dago,” “shanty Irish” or “poor white trash.” All were terms of common usage, interchangeable as slurring epithets on one’s ethnic background, and usually employed outside the hearing of the person in question.

In contrast to the daily life of the neighborhood, however, the virus of racism was subtly injected into the classroom at the Brown Park School I attended. The five races of mankind illustrated in our geography books portrayed the Negro with the receding forehead and prognathous jaws of a gorilla. There was a complete absence of Black heroes in the history books, supporting the inference that the Black man had contributed nothing to civilization. We were taught that Blacks were brought out of the savagery of the jungles of Africa and introduced to civilization through slavery under the benevolent auspices of the white man.

In spite of my Father’s submissive attitude, it is to him that I must give credit for scotching this big lie about the Negro’s past. His attitude grew out of his concern for our survival in a hostile environment. He felt most strongly that the Negro was not innately inferior, He perceived that his children must have some sense of self-respect and confidence to sustain them until that distant day when, through “obvious merit and just dessert,” Blacks would receive their award of equality and recognition.

Father possessed an amazing store of knowledge which he had culled from his readings. He would tell us about the Black civilizations of ancient Egypt, Ethiopia and Cush. He would quote from the Song of Solomon: “I am Black and comely, oh ye daughters of Jerusalem.” He would tell us about Black soldiers in the Civil War; about the massacre of Blacks at Fort Pillow and the battle cry they used thereafter, “Remember Fort Pillow! Remember Fort Pillow!”2 He knew about the Haitian Revolution, the defeat of Napoleon’s Army by Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dessalines and Jean Christophe. He told us about the famous Zulu chief Shaka in South Africa; about Alexandre Dumas, the great French romanticist, and Pushkin, the great Russian poet, who were both Black.

Father said that he had taught himself to read and write. He had an extensive library, which took up half of one of the walls in our subject. They included such titles as The Decisive Battles of the World The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and many histories of England, France, Germany and Russia. He had Stanley in Africa, and a number of biographies of famous men, including Napoleon, Caesar and Hannibal (who Father said was a Negro). He had Scott’s Ivanhoe and his Waverly novels; Bulwer Lytton; Alexandre Dumas’ novels and the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, and Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington.

On another wall there was a huge picture of the charge of the Twenty-fifth Black Infantry and the Tenth Cavalry at San Juan Hill, rescuing Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. There were pictures of Frederick Douglass and, of course, his hero, Booker T. Washington. He would lecture to us on history, displaying his .extensive knowledge. He was a great admirer of Napoleon. He would get into one of his lecturing moods and pace up and down with his hands behind his back before the rapt audience of my sister Eppa and myself. Talking about the Battle of Waterloo, he would say:

“Wellington was in a tough spot that day. Napoleon was about to whip him; the trouble was Blucher hadn’t shown up.”

“Who was he, Pa?”

“He was the German general who was supposed to reinforce Wellington with 13,000 Prussian troops. Wellington was getting awful nervous, walking up and down behind the lines and saying, 4Oh! If Blucher fails to come! Where is Blucher?”

“Did he Finally get there, Pa?”

“Yes, son, he finally got there and turned the tide of battle. And if he hadn’t shown up and Napoleon had won, the whole course of history would have been changed.”

It was through Father that I entered the world of books. I developed an unquenchable thirst to learn about people and their history. I remember going to the town library when I was nine or ten and asking, “Do you have a history of the world for children?” My first love became the historical novel. I loved George Henty’s books; they always dealt with the exploits of a sixteen-year-old during an important historical period. Through Henty’s heroes, I too was with Bonnie Prince Charlie, with Wellington in rite Spanish Peninsula, with Gustavus Adolphus at Lutsen in the Thirty Years War, with Clive in India and Under Drake's Flag around the world. I was also fascinated by romances of the feudal period such as When Knighthood Was in Flower and Ivanhoe. I read Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and the works of H. Rider Haggard.

I went through a definite Anglophile stage, in part due to the influence of a Jamaican named Mr. Williams who worked as assistant janitor with my Father. Mr. Williams was a huge Black man with scars all over his face. He was a former stoker in the British Navy. I was attracted by his strange accent and haughty demeanor. Evidently he saw in me an appreciative audience. I would listen with open mouth and wonder at the stories of the strange places he had seen, of his adventures in faraway lands. He was a real British patriot, a Black imperialist, if such was possible.

He would declare, “The sun never sets on the British Empire,” and then sing “Rule Brittania, Brittania Rule the Waves.” He quoted Napoleon as allegedly saying, “Britain is a small garden, but she grows some bitter weeds,” and “Give me French soldiers and British officers, and I will conquer the world.” I pictured myself as a British sailor, and read Two Years Before the Mast and Battle of Trafalgar.

“Do you think they would let me join the British Navy?” I asked Mr. Williams.

“No, my lad,” he answered, “You have to be a British citizen or subject to do that.” I was quite disappointed. But it was not only British romance that fascinated me. At about the age of twelve I became a Francophile. I read all of Dumas’ novels and quite a number of other novels about France. I had begun to read French history, which to me turned out to be as interesting as the novels and equally romantic. I read about Joan of Arc, the Hundred Years’ War, Francis I, about Catherine de Medici, the Huguenots and Admiral Coligny, the Due de Guise, the massacre of St. Bartholomew Eve or the night of the long knives; then the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, the guillotining of Charlotte Corday and the assassination of Marat.

Occasionally, the ugly reality of race would intrude upon the dream world of my childhood. I distinctly remember two such occasions. One was when a white family from Arkansas moved across the alley from us. Mr. Faught, the patriarch of the clan, was a typical red-necked peckerwood. He would sit around the store front, chawing tobacco, telling how they treated “niggers” down his way.

“They were made to stay in their place- -down in the cotton patch—not in factories taking white men’s jobs.”

As I remember, his racist harangues did not make much of an impression on the local white audience. Apparently at that time there was no feeling of competition in South Omaha because there were so few Blacks. I would also imagine that his slovenly appearance did not jibe with his white supremacist pretensions.

One day a substitute teacher took over our class. I was about ten years old. The substitute was a Southerner from Arkansas. During history class she started talking about the Civil War. The slaves, she said, did not really want freedom because they were happy as they were. They would have been freed by their masters in a few years anyway. Her villain was General Grant, whom she contrasted unfavorably with General Robert E. Lee.

“Lee was a gentleman,” she put forth, “But Grant was a cigar-smoking liquor-drinking roughneck.”

She didn’t like Sherman either, and talked about his “murdering rampage” through Georgia. I wasn't about to take all of this and challenged her.

“I don’t know about General Grant’s habits, but he did beat Lee. Besides, Lee couldn’t have been much of a gentleman; he owned slaves!”

Livid with rage, she shouted, “That’s enough —what I could say about you!”

“Well, what could you say?” I challenged. She apparently saw that wild racist statements wouldn’t work in this situation, and that I was trying to provoke her to do something like that. She cut short the argument, shouting, “That’s enough”

“Yes, that’s enough,” I sassed. During the heated exchange, I felt that I had the sympathy of most of my classmates. After school, some gathered around me and said, “You certainly told her off?”

When I told Mother she supported me. “You done right, son,” she said.

But Father was not so sure. “You might have gotten into trouble.”

I feel now that one of the reasons for my self-confidence during my childhood years, and why the racist notions of innate Black inferiority left me cold, was my older brother Otto. His example belied such claims. He was the most brilliant one in our family, and probably in all of South Omaha. He had skipped a grade both in grade school and in high school, and was a real prodigy. He was a natural poet, and won many prizes in composition. His poem on the charge of the Twenty-fifth Black Infantry and Tenth Cavalry at San Juan Hill was published in one of the Omaha dailies. Otto was praised by all of his teachers. “An unusual boy,” they said, “clearly destined to become a leader of his race.”

One day, one of his teachers and a Catholic priest called on Mother and Father to talk about Otto’s future. Otto was about fourteen at the time. They suggested that he might be good material for the priesthood, and that there was a possibility of his getting a scholarship for Creighton University, Omaha’s famous Jesuit school. The teacher suggested that if this were agreed to, he should take up Latin. My parents were extremely flattered, despite the fact that they were good Methodists (AME). Even Father, who did not seem ambitious for his children, was impressed.

But when the proposition was placed before Otto, he vehemently disagreed. He did not want to become a priest nor did he want to study Latin. He wanted, he said, to be an architect! Doctors, dentists, teachers and preachers -these were the professions for an ambitious Black in those days.

“An architect!” they exclaimed in amazement. “Who ever heard of a Black architect?”

“Who ever heard of a Black priest?” Otto retorted. (At that time there were only two or three Black priests in the entire U.S.)

“But Otto,” Mother argued,“you’ll have the support of a lot of prominent white folks. They’ll help you through college.”

But Otto would have none of it. Undoubtedly, my parents thought that they could finally wear down his opposition and that he would become more amenable in time. They did force him to take Latin, a subject he hated.

Otto stayed in school, but no longer seemed interested in his studies. He dropped out of school suddenly in his senior year. He was sixteen. He left home and got a job as a bellhop in a hotel in North Omaha’s Black community. This move cut completely the few remaining tics he had with his white age group in South Omaha.

Otto’s drop-out from high school evidently signified that he had given up the struggle to be somebody in the white world. He had become disillusioned with the white world and therefore sought identity with his own people. During my childhood years, our relationship had never been close. There was, of course, the age gap—he was seven years older. But even in later years, when we were closer and had more in common, we never talked about our childhood. I don’t know why. As a child I had been proud of his academic feats and boasted about them to my friends.

At the time he left high school Otto was the only Black in South Omaha High and was about to become its first Black graduate. Highly praised by his teachers and popular among his fellow students, he was a real showpiece in the school.

What caused him to drop out of school in his senior year? Thinking back on it, I don’t believe that it had anything to do with the attempt to make him a priest. I think that he had won that battle a couple of years before. At least, I never heard the matter mentioned again.

Otto undoubtedly had had high aspirations at one time, as evidenced by his desire to become an architect. Somewhere along the line they disappeared. Perhaps a contributing factor was the accumulating effect of Otto’s malady. On occasion, Mother would remind us that Otto had water on the brain, and that he was different from Eppa and myself. At the time, he seemed smarter than us, more independent and in rebellion against Pa’s lack of encouragement, moral support and his parental authority. Certainly in adult life Otto used to sleep about ten hours a day and very often fell asleep in meetings. He seemed to lack the ability of prolonged concentration, although whatever brain damage he may have suffered never affected the quickness of his mind and ability to grasp the nub of any question or the capacity for leadership which he showed on a number of occasions.

But more debilitating, probably, than any physical disease was the generation gap of that era—between parents of slave backgrounds and children born free, particularly in the north. Otto’s dropping out of school and his later radical political development were undoubtedly related to a conflict more intense than the ones of today.

Father was an ardent follower of Booker T. Washington. His ambitions for his sons were very modest, to put it mildly. He undoubtedly would have been satisfied if we could become good law-abiding citizens with stable jobs. He thought of jobs a notch or two above his own station, like a postal employee, a skilled tradesman, or a clerk in the civil service. The offer of a scholarship for the priesthood was, therefore, simply beyond his expectations, and I guess that the old man was deeply disappointed at Otto’s rejection of it.

Otto was quite independent and would not conform to Father’s idea of discipline. For example, he was completely turned off on the question of religion, and Father could not force him to go to church I don’t remember Otto ever going to church with the family. Father claimed that Otto was irresponsible and wild. As a result, there was mutual hostility between them. The results were numerous thrashings when Otto was young and violent quarrels between them as he grew older. Mother would usually defend Otto. Grandpa Thorpe, himself a strict disciplinarian, would warn Mother: “Hattie, you mark my words, that boy is going to lan’ in the pen.”

At some point, Otto came to the conclusion that there was no use in continuing his education. He must have felt that it was irrelevant. Opportunities for educated Blacks were few, even in North Omaha’s Black community where there were only a few professionals. In that community there were a few preachers, one doctor, one dentist and one or two teachers. Black businesses consisted of owners of several undertaking establishments, a couple of barber shops and a few pool rooms. The only other Blacks in any sort of middle class positions were a few postal employees, civil service workers, pullman porters and waiters.

Then too, Otto had passed through the age of puberty and was becoming more and more conscious of his race. Along with the natural detachment and withdrawal from childhood socializing with girls—in his case white girls who were former childhood sweethearts—Otto experienced a withdrawal and non-socialization because of his race. He ended up quite alone because there were not many Black kids his age in South Omaha. There wasn’t much contact with the Black kids from North Omaha either. As a very sensitive person on the verge of manhood, I imagine he began to feel these changes keenly.

After he dropped out of school in 1908, Otto was soon attracted to the “sportin’ life”...the pool halls and sporting houses of North Omaha. He wanted to be among Black people; he was anxious to get away from Father. Thus, he left home and got jobs as a bellhop, shoeshine boy, and busboy. He began to absorb a new way of life, stepping fully into the social life of the Black community in North Omaha. He’d evidently heeded the “call of the blood” and gone back to the race. It was not until a few years later, when I had similar experiences, that I understood that Otto had arrived at the first stage in his identity crisis and had gone to where he felt he belonged.

He would come home quite often, though, flaunting his new clothes, a “box-backed” suit—“fitting nowhere but the shoulders,” high-heeled Stacey Adams button shoes, and a stetson hat. He’d give a few dollars to Mother and some dimes to me and my sister. Sometimes he would bring a pretty girl friend with him. But most of the time, he would bring a young man, Henry Starens, who was a piano player. He played a style popular in those days, later to be known as boogie-woogie, in which the piano was the whole orchestra. He played Ma Rainey’s famous blues, “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor, Make It Where Your Man Will Never Know,” and the old favorite, “Alabama Bound.”

Alabama Bound

I'm Alabama Bound.

Oh, babe, don't leave me here,

Just leave a dime for beer.

A boy of ten at the time, I was tremendously impressed. There is no doubt that Otto’s experience served to weaken some of my childish notions about making it in the white world.

HALLEY’S COMET AND MY RELIGION

On May 4, 1910, Halley’s Comet appeared flaring down out of the heavens, its luminous tail switching to earth. It was an ominous sight.

A rash of religious revival swept Omaha. Prophets and messiahs appeared on street comers and in churches preaching the end of the world. Hardened sinners “got religion.” Backsliders renewed their faith. The comet, with its tail moving ever closer to the earth, seemed to lend credence to forecasts of imminent cosmic disaster.

Both my Mother and Father were deeply religious. Theirs was that “old time religion,” the fire-and-brimstone kind which leaned heavily on the Old Testament. It was the kind that accepted the Bible and all its legends as the literal gospel truth. We children had the “fear of the Lord” drilled into us from early age. My image of God was that of a vengeful old man who demanded unquestioned faith, strict obedience and repentant love as the price of salvation;

I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

Every Sunday, rain or shine, the family would attend services at the little frame church near the railroad tracks. For me, this was a tortuous ordeal. I looked forward to Sundays with dread. We would spend all of eight hours in church. We would sit through the morning service, then the Sunday school, after which followed a break for dinner. We returned at five for the Young People’s Christian Endeavor and finally the evening service. It was not just boredom. Fear was the dominant emotion, especially when our preacher, Reverend Jamieson, a big Black man with a beautiful voice, would launch into one of his fire-and-brimstone sermons. He would start out slowly and in a low voice, gradually raising it higher he would swing to a kind of sing-song rhythm, holding his congregation rapt with vivid word pictures. They would respond with “Hallelujah! ” “Ain’t it the truth! ” “Preach it, brother!”

He would go on in this manner for what seemed an interminable time, and would reach his peroration on a high note, winding up with a rafter-shaking burst of oratory. He would then pause dramatically amidst moans, shouts and even screams of some of the women, one or two of whom would fall out in a dead faint. Waiting for them to subside he would then, in a lowered, scarcely audible voice, reassure his flock that it was not yet too late to repent and achieve salvation. All that was necessary was to: “Repent sinners, and love and obey the Lord. Amen.” Someone would then rise and lead off with an appropriate spiritual such as:

Oh, my sins are forgiven and my soul set free-ah,

Oh, glory Halelua-a-a-a

Just let me in the kingdom when the world is all a'fi-ah.

Oh Glory Halelu!

I don't feel worried, no ways tiahd,

Oh, glory Halelu!

I remember the family Bible, a huge book which lay on the center table in the front room. The first several pages were blank, set aside for recording the vital family statistics: births, deaths, marriages. The book was filled with graphic illustrations of biblical happenings. Leafing through Genesis (which we used to call “the begats”), one came to Exodus and from there on a pageant of bloodshed and violence unfolded. Portrayed in striking colors were the interminable tribal wars in which the Israelites slew the Mennonites and Pharoah’s soldiers killed little children in march of Moses. There was the great God, Jehovah himself, whitebearded and eyes flashing, looking very much like our old cracker neighbor, Mr. Faught.

Just a couple of weeks before Halley’s comet appeared, Mother had taken us to see the silent film, Dante’s Inferno, through which I sat with open mouth horror. Needless to say, this experience did not lessen my apprehension.

The comet continued its descent, its tail like the flaming sword of vengeance. Collision seemed not just possible, but almost certain. What had we poor mortals done to incur such wrath of the Lord?

My deportment underwent a change. I did all my chores without complaint and helped Mama around the house. This was so unlike me that she didn’t know what to make of it. I overheard her telling Pa about my good behavior and how helpful I had become lately. But I hadn’t really changed. I was just scared. I was simply trying to carry out another one of God’s commandments, “Honor thy lather and thy mother that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.'’

Then one night, when the whole neighborhood had gathered as usual on the hill to watch the comet, it appeared to have ceased its movement towards the earth. We were not sure, but the next night we were certain. It had not only ceased its descent, but was definitely withdrawing. In a couple more nights, it had disappeared. A wave of relief swept over the town.

“It’s not true!” I thought to myself. “The fire and brimstone, the leering devils, the angry vengeful God. None of it is true.”

It was as if a great weight had been lifted from my mind. It was the end of my religion, although I still thought that there was most likely a supreme being. But if God existed, he was nothing like the God portrayed in our family Bible. I was no longer terrified of him. Later, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I read some of the lectures of Robert G. Ingersoll and became an agnostic, doubting the existence of a god. From there, I later moved to positive atheism.

Two years later, the great event was the sinking of the Titanic.This was significant in Omaha because one of the Brandeis brothers, owners of the biggest department store in North Omaha, went down with her. In keeping with the custom of Blacks to gloat over the misfortunes of whites, especially rich ones, some Black bard composed the "Titanic Blues":

When old John Jacob As tor left his home,

He never thought he was going to die.

Titanic fare thee well

I say fare thee well.

But disaster was more frequently reserved for the Black community. On Easter Sunday 1913, a tornado struck North Omaha. It ripped a two-block swath through the Black neighborhood, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Among the victims were a dozen or so Black youths trapped in a basement below a pool hall where they had evidently been shooting craps. Mother did not fail to point out the incident as another example of God's wrath. While I was sorry for the youths and their families (some of them were friends of Otto), the implied warning left me cold. My God-fearing days had ended with Halley's Comet.

Misfortune, however, was soon to strike our immediate family. It happened that summer, in 1913. My Father fled town after being attacked and beaten by a gang of whites on Q Street, right outside the gate of the packing plant. They told him to get out of town or they would kill him.

I remember vividly the scene that night when Father staggered through the door. Consternation gripped us at the sight. His face was swollen and bleeding, his clothes torn and in disarray. He had a frightened, hunted look in his eyes. My sister Eppa and I were alone. Mother had gone for the summer to work for her employers, rich white folks, at Lake Okoboji, Iowa.

"What happened?" we asked.

He gasped out the story of how he had been attacked and beaten.

"They said they were going to kill me if I didn't get out of town."

We asked him who "they" were. He said that he recognized some of them as belonging to the Irish gang on Indian Hill, but there were also some grown men.

"But why, Pa? Why should they pick on you?"

"Why don't we call the police?"

"That ain't goin' to do no good. We just have to leave town."

"But Pa," I said, "how can we? We own this house. We've got friends here. If you tell them, they wouldn't let anybody harm us."

Again the frightened look crossed his face.

"No, we got to go."

"Where, where will we go?"

"We'll move up to Minneapolis, your uncles Watt and George are there. I'll get work there. I'm going to telegraph your Mother to come home now."

He washed his face and then went into the bedroom and began packing his bags. The next morning he gave Eppa some money and said, "This will tide you over till your Mother comes. She'll be here in a day or two. I'm going to telegraph her as soon as I get to the depot. I'll send for you all soon."

He kissed us goodbye and left.

Only when he closed the door behind him did we feel the full impact of the shock. It had happened so suddenly. Our whole world had collapsed. Home and security were gone. The feeling of safety in our little haven of interracial goodwill had proved elusive. Now we were just homeless "niggers" on the run.

The crudest blow, perhaps, was the shattering of my image of lather. True enough, I had not regarded him as a hero. Still, however, I had retained a great deal of respect for him. He was undoubtedly a very complex man, very sensitive and imaginative. Probably he had never gotten over the horror of that scene in the cabin near Martin, Tennessee, where as a boy of fifteen he had seen his father kill the Klansman. He distrusted and feared poor whites, especially the native born and, in Omaha, the shanty Irish.

Mother arrived the next day. For her it was a real tragedy. Our home was gone and our family broken up. She had lived in Omaha for nearly a quarter of a century. She had raised her family there and had built up a circle of close friends. With her regular summer job at Lake Okoboji and catering parties the rest of the year, she had helped pay for our home. Now it was gone. We would be lucky if we even got a fraction of the money we had put into it, not to speak of the labor. Now she was to leave all this. Friends and neighbors would ask why Father had run away.

Why had he let some poor white trash run him out of town? He had friends there. Ours was an old respected family. He also had influential white patrons. There was Ed Cudahy of the family that owned the packing plant where he worked. The Cudahys had become one of the nation's big three in the slaughtering and meat packing industry. Father had known him from boyhood. There was Mr. Wilkins, general manager at Cudahy's, whom Father had known as an office boy, and who now gave Father all his old clothes.

A few days later, Mr. Cannon, a railroad man in charge of a buffet car on the Omaha and Minneapolis run and an old friend of the family, called with a message from Father. He said that Father was all right, that he had gotten a job for himself and Mother at the Minneapolis Women's Club. Father was to become caretaker and janitor, Mother was to cater the smaller parties at the club and to assist at the larger affairs. They were to live on the place in a basement apartment.

The salary was ridiculously small (I think about $60 per month for both of them) and the employers insisted that only one of us children would be allowed to live at the place. That, of course, would be Eppa. He said that Father had arranged for me to live with another family. This, he said, would be a temporary arrangement. He was sure he could find another job, and rent a house where we could all be together again. As for me, Father suggested that since I was fifteen, I could find a part-time job to help out while continuing school. Mr. Cannon said that he was to take me back to Minneapolis with him, and that Mother and Eppa were to follow in a few days.

With regards to our house, Mr. Cannon said that he knew a lawyer, an honest fellow, who for a small commission would handle its sale. Mother later claimed that after deducting the lawyer's commission and paying off a small mortgage, they only got the paltry sum of $300! This was for a five-room house with electricity and running water.

The next day, Mr. Cannon took me out to his buffet car in the railroad yards. He put me in the pantry and told me to stay there, and if the conductor looked in: "Don't be afraid, he's a friend of mine." Our car was then attached to a train which backed down to the station to load passengers. I looked out the window as we left Omaha. I was not to see Omaha again until after World War I, when I was a waiter on the Burlington Railroad.

My childhood and part of my adolescence was now behind me. I felt that I was practically on my own. What did the world hold for me—a Black youth?

Arriving in Minneapolis, I went to my new school. As I entered the room, the all-white class was singing old darkie plantation songs. Upon seeing me, their voices seemed to take on a mocking, derisive tone. Loudly emphasizing the Negro dialect and staring directly at me, they sang:

"Down in De Caunfiel—HEAH DEM darkies moan

All De darkies AM a weeping

MASSAHS in DE Cold Cold Ground"

They were really having a ball.

In my state of increased racial awareness, this was just too much for me. I was already in a mood of deep depression. With the breakup of our family, the separation from my childhood friends, and the interminable quarrels between my Mother and Father (in which I sided with Mother), I was in no mood to be kidded or scoffed at.

That was my last day in school. I never returned. I made up my mind to drop out and get a full-time job.

I was fifteen and in the second semester of the eighth grade.

Chapter 2

A Black Regiment in World War I

On the Negroes this double experience of deliberate and devilish persecution from their own countrymen, coupled with a taste of real democracy and world-old culture, was revolutionizing. They began to hate prejudice and discrimination as they had never hated it before. They began to realize its eternal meaning and complications., .they were filled with a bitter, dogged determination never to give up the fight for Negro equality in America....A new, radical Negro spirit has been born in France, which leaves us older radicals far behind. Thousands of young Black men have offered their lives for the Lilies of France and they return ready to offer them again for the Sunflowers of Afro-America. W.E.B. DuBois, June 1919

Despite my bitter encounter with racism in school, I liked Minneapolis. I was impressed by the beauty of this city with its many lakes and surrounding pine forests. The racial climate in 1913 was not as bad as my early experience in school would indicate, either. Blacks seemed to get along well, especially with the Scandinavian nationalities, who constituted the most numerous ethnic grouping in the city.

Upon quitting school, I became a part of the small Black community and completely identified with it. I found friends among Black boys and girls of my age group, attended parties, dances, picnics at Lake Minnetonka, and ice skated in the winter time. Here, as in Omaha, a ghetto had not yet fully formed, though I here were the beginnings of one in the Black community on the north side.

Included in the Black community and among my new friends were a relatively large number of mulattos, the progeny of mixed marriages between Scandinavian women and Black men. This phenomenon dated back to the turn of the century. At that time it was the fashion among wealthy white families to import Scandinavian maids. Many of these families had Black male servants— butlers, chauffeurs, etc.—and the small Black population was preponderantly male. The result was a rash of inter-marriages between the Scandinavian maids and the Black male house servants. The interracial couples formed a society called Manasseh which held well-known yearly balls. As a whole the children of this group were a hot-headed lot and seemed even more racially conscious than the rest of us.

It was in Minneapolis that I too reached a heightened stage of racial awareness. This was hastened, no doubt, by the tragic events in South Omaha and the fact that I was now an adolescent and there was the problem of girls. I had noticed that it was in the period of pubescence that a Black boy, raised even in communities of relative racial tolerance, was first confronted with the problem of race. It had been so with my brother Otto in Omaha, and now it was so with me.

During the first year after dropping out of school I worked as a bootblack, barber shop porter, bell hop and busboy, continuing in the last long enough to acquire the rudiments of the waiter's trade. At the age of sixteen, I got a j ob as dining car waiter on the Chicago Northwestern Railway. The first run was also my first trip to the big city, where I had four aunts (my Mother's sisters). All through my childhood my Mother had told stories about her first visit there at the time of the Chicago Exposition. Upon arrival, one of the older waiters on the car, Lon Holliday, took me to see the town. I'm sure he looked forward to showing a young "innocent" the ropes. After a visit to my aunts, he took me to a notorious dive on the Southside. It was the back room of a saloon at Thirty-second and State Street.

The piano man was playing "boogie woogie" style, popular in those days. The few couples on the floor were "walking the dog," "balling the jack," and so on. Then one of the dancers, a woman, called to the pianist, "Oh, Mr. Johnson, please play 'Those Dirty Motherfuckers.'" He enthusiastically complied and sang a number of verses of the bawdy tune. I almost sank through the floor in embarrassment and even amazement. Lon, who was watching, burst out laughing and he said, "Boy, you ain't seen nothing yet!"

He then took me to the famous "Mecca Flats" on Federal Street, where a rent party was in process. There he introduced me to a young woman, whom he evidently knew, and slipped her some money, saying, "Take care of my young friend here; be sure you get him back on the car in the morning. We leave for Minneapolis at 10:00 A.M."

The railroads were a way to see the country and in the months that followed I took advantage of that, working for different lines, on different runs as far west as Seattle. On one run in Montana called the Loop, the dining car shuttled between Great Falls and Butte by way of Helena, stopping at each town overnight. It was known as the "outlaw run" and I soon found out why. It attracted a number of characters wanted by police in other cities, searching for an escape or a temporary hideout.

While laying over in Butte one night, our chef murdered the parlor car porter—cut his throat while he was sleeping in the parlor car. They had been feuding for days. I went through the parlor car that morning and was the first to see the ghastly sight. The police came, but the chef had disappeared. My enthusiasm for the job was gone. It might have been me, I thought, for I had had a number of arguments with the chef about my orders.

I quit and headed back to Minneapolis, arriving there shortly after war broke out in Europe in 1914.1 was sixteen and had been avidly following the news, reading of the invasions of Belgium, France, the Battle of the Marne, etc.

One day, walking along Hennepin Avenue I saw a Canadian recruiting sergeant. He was wearing the uniform of the Princess Pat Regiment, bright red jacket and black kilt. A handsome fellow, I thought, looking like Bonnie Prince Charlie himself. He noticed me looking at him and asked, "You want to join up with the Princess Pat, my lad? We've got a number of Black boys like you in the regiment. You'll find you're treated like anyone else up there. We make no difference between Black and white in Canada."

Imagining myself in the red jacket and black kilt, I said, "Sure,I'll join."

Then looking at me closely, he asked, "How old are you?"

"Eighteen," I lied.

"Your parents living?"

"Yes."

"Well, you've got to get their consent."

"Oh, they'll agree," I said.

"They live in the city?"

"Yes."

"Well, you come back here tomorrow and bring one of them with you and I'll sign you up."

"Okay," I said, but I knew that my parents would never agree. And well it was, too, for I later learned that this regiment was among the first victims of the German mustard gas attack at Ypres, and what was left of them was practically wiped out at bloody Paschendale on the Sommes front.

Life in Minneapolis was beginning to bore me. I was anxious to get back to Chicago, "the big city," so I moved there and stayed with my Aunt Lucy at Forty-third and State. In 1915 my parents, at the urging of my Mother, also moved to Chicago, and I then stayed with them.

In Chicago I got a job as a busboy at the Tip Top Inn, then considered the finest restaurant in town. It was owned by old man Hieronymous, a famous chef, and was noted for its French cuisine and service. In the trade it was taken for granted that if you had been a waiter at the Tip Top Inn you could work anywhere in the country. After a few months I was promoted to waiter and felt that I had perfected my skills. During the next three years I worked at a number of places: the Twentieth Century Limited, the New York Central's crack train; the Wolverine (Michigan Central); the Sherman House; the old Palmer House; and the Auditorium.

During this time in Chicago I saw Casey Jones, a Black man and a legendary character known to at least four generations of Black Chicagoans. As I remember, he was partially paralyzed, probably from cerebral palsy. He would go through the streets with trained chickens, which he put through various capers, shouting, "Crabs, crabs, I got them!" He had a defect in his speech which he exploited. The audience would literally fall out at his rendering of the popular sentimental ballad, "The Curse of an Aching Heart":

You made me what I am today,

I hope you're satisfied.

You dragged and dragged me down until

a The heart within me died.

Although you're not true,

May God bless you,

That's the curse of an aching heart!

Then there was the beloved comedian, String Beans, who often appeared at the old Peking Theater at Thirty-first and State Street. The Dolly Sisters also appeared there; they were very famous at the time. Teenan Jones'slush night spot was at Thirty-fifth and State Street. Then at the Panama, another night club, I would listen to Mamie Smith sing "Shimmy-sha-Wobble, That's All," a very popular song and dance at the time.

Once, when I wanted to go back to Minneapolis to visit, I caught the Pioneer Limited—riding the rods—out of the station on the west side. This was my first experience in hoboing. I rode the rods as far as Beloit, Wisconsin.

At Beloit I got off, but was afraid to get back on because a yard dick was going around the cars. I stayed there overnight—a fairly cold night as I remember. I met a white man, a "professional" hobo, who took me in tow and told me about the trains leaving in the morning. He said we could catch a train that would pull us right into Minneapolis. It was a passenger train, and we could "ride the blinds in," that is, the space between the two Pullman cars.

We rode the blinds, reaching La Crosse, Wisconsin. On the way he warned, "You know, there's a bad dick up there in La Crosse. We gotta watch out for him." When the train pulled to a stop in La Crosse both of us hopped off. Other guys were flying out of the train from all sides—from the rods, the blinds, and there were some on top, too. But this notorious yard dick caught us. He was a rough character, and let us know it as he lined us up.

"Hey, up there!"

I was at the end of the line of about a dozen guys and was the only Black there. I had my hands in my pocket.

"Take yer hands outta yer pockets!"

I took my hands out of my pockets.

The engine's fireman was looking out, watching all of this. He called to the yard dick, "Say, Jim, let me have that young colored boy over there to slide down coal for me into Minneapolis."

The dick looked at me and scowled, "All right, you, get up there!"

He shouted to the fireman, "But see that he works!"

"I'll see to that; he'll work."

I scrambled on the engine tender and slid coal all the way to Minneapolis, where I got off at the station.

Among my new friends in Chicago were several members of the Eighth Illinois, Black National Guard Regiment. They would regale me with tall stories of their exploits on the Mexican border in the summer of 1916 when the regiment took part in a "show of force" against the Mexican Revolution. None of us, of course, knew the real issues involved.

I remember reading of the exploits of the famous Black Tenth Cavalry Regiment, which was a part of the force sent by General Funston across the border in pursuit of Pancho Villa. They had been ambushed by Villa and a number of them killed. The papers, on that occasion, had been full of accounts of the heroic Black cavalrymen and their valiant white officers. The Eighth, however, had been in the rear near San Antonio, Texas, and saw no action during the abortive campaign.

Intrigued by their experiences, I joined the Eighth Regiment in the winter of 1917. I was nineteen. The regiment, officered by Blacks from the colonel on down (many of them veterans of the four Black Regular Army regiments), gave me a feeling of pride. They had a high esprit de corps which emphasized racial solidarity. I didn't regard it just as a part of a U.S. Army unit, but as some sort of a big social club of fellow race-men. Still, I knew that we would eventually get into the war. That did not bother me; on the contrary, romance, adventure, travel beckoned. I saw possible escape from the inequities and oppression which was the lot of Blacks in the U.S. I was already a Francophile. I had read and heard about the fairness of the French with respect to the race issue. It seems now, as I look back upon it, that patriotism was the least of my motives. I was avidly following all the news of the war and it seemed certain that the U.S. was going to get involved, despite protestations of President Wilson to the contrary.

Already the press was whipping up war sentiment. Tin PanAlley joined in with a rash of jingoistic songs: "Don't Bite the Hand That's Feeding You," "Let's All Be American Now," ad nauseum. All this left us cold. However, the song that brought tears to my eyes was "Joan of Arc":

Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,

Do your eyes from the skies see the foe?

Can't you see the drooping Fleur de Lys,

Can't you hear the tears of Normandy?

Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,

Let your spirit guide us through.

Awake old France to victory!

Joan of Arc, we're calling you.

Truly, nothing was sacred to Tin Pan Alley!

The Lusitania was sunk; the U.S. declared war in April 1917. Our regiment was federalized on July 25, 1917, and in the late summer we were on our way to basic training at Camp Logan, near Houston, Texas.

A demagogic promise was widely circulated that things would be better if Blacks fought loyally. For example, there was the statement of President Wilson: "Out of this conflict you must expect nothing less than the enjoyment of full citizenship rights." This propaganda was immediately belied by the mounting wave of new lynchings in the South, which claimed thirty-eight victims in 1917 and fifty-eight in 1918. Worst of all was the East St. Louis riot in September 1917; at least forty Blacks were massacred in a bloody pogrom that lasted several days.

Then there was the mutiny-riot of the Twenty-fourth Infantry in Houston, Texas, where our regiment was to receive its basic training. Company G of our outfit was already in Houston at the time, having been sent on as an advance detachment to prepare the camp for our occupation. It was through them that I learned exactly what had happened.

Black soldiers of the Twenty-fourth Infantry, an old Regular Army regiment, had for months been subjected to insults and abuse by Houston police and civilians. The outfit had stationed its military police in Houston, who were, in theory, supposed to cooperate with local police in maintaining law and order among soldiers on leave. Instead, the Black military police found themselves the object of abuse, insults and beatings by local police. This treatment of Black MPs by racist cops was evidently encouraged by the fact that they (the Blacks) were unarmed.

A report of the special on-the-spot investigator for the NAACP published in the Crisis, its organ, reads:

In deference to the southern feeling against the arming of Negroes and because of the expected cooperation of the City Police Department, members of the provost guard were not armed, thus creating a situation without precedent in the history of this guard. A few carried clubs, but none of them had guns, and most of them were without weapons of any kind. They were supposed to call on white police officers to make arrests. The feeling is strong among the colored people of Houston that this was the real cause of the riot.

On the afternoon of August 23, two policemen, Lee Sparks and Rufe Daniels—the former known to the colored people as a brutal bully—entered the house of a respectable colored woman in an alleged search for a colored fugitive accused of crap-shooting. Failing to find him, they arrested the woman, striking and cursing her and forcing her out into the street only partly clad. While they were waiting for the patrol wagon a crowd gathered about the weeping woman who had become hysterical and was begging to know why she was being arrested.

In this crowd was a colored soldier, Private Edwards. Edwards seems to have questioned the police officers or remonstrated with them. Accounts differ on this point, but they all agree that the officers immediately set upon him and beat him to the ground with the butts of their six-shooters, continuing to beat and kick him while he was on the ground, and arrested him. In the words of Sparks himself: "I beat that nigger until his heart got right. He was a good nigger when I got through with him."

Later Corporal Baltimore, a member of the military police, approached the officers and inquired for Edwards, as it was his duty to do. Sparks immediately opened fire and Baltimore, being unarmed, fled....They followed...beat him up, and arrested him. It was this outrage which infuriated the men of the Twenty-fourth Infantry to the point of revolt.

When word of this outrage reached the camp, feeling ran high. It was by no means the first incident of the kind that had occurred.

The white officers, feeling that the men would seek revenge, ordered them disarmed. The arms were stacked in a tent guarded by a sergeant. A group of men killed the sergeant, seized their rifles, and under the leadership of Sergeant Vida Henry, an eighteen-year veteran, marched on Houston in company strength.

When the soldiers left camp their slogan was "On to the Police Station!" They entered town by way of San Felipe Street which ran through the heart of the Black community. The fact that they took this route and avoided the more direct one which lead through a white neighborhood disproved the charge by local newspapers and the police that they were out to shoot up the town and kill all whites. Their target was clearly the Houston cops. On the way to the station they shot every person who looked like a cop.

Finally meeting resistance, a battle ensued which ended with seventeen whites, thirteen of them policemen, killed. The alarm went out and a whole division of white troops, which was stationed in the camp, was sent in to round up the mutineers. Finally cornered, the men threw down their arms and surrendered, with the exception of Sergeant Vida Henry, who committed suicide rather than be taken.

The whole battalion of the Twenty-fourth Infantry, including the mutineers, was hurriedly placed aboard a guarded troop train and sent to Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Immediately upon arrival there, those involved were given a drum-head court martial. Thirteen were executed and forty-one others were sentenced to life imprisonment.

The bodies of all the executed men were sent home to their families for burial. I remember reading of the funeral of Corporal Baltimore in some little town in Illinois.

Our regiment entrained for Camp Logan with our ardor considerably dampened by these events. Indeed, we left Chicago in an angry and apprehensive mood which lasted all the way to Texas. We passed through East St. Louis in the middle of the night. Those of us who were awake were brooding about the massacre of our kinsmen which had recently taken place there. The regiment traveled in three sections, a battalion each, in old style tourist cars (sort of second-class Pullmans).

The next morning we arrived in Jonesboro, Arkansas, our first stop on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line. We were in enemy territory. For many of us it was our first time in the South. Jonesboro was a division point—all three sections of the train pulled up on sidings while the engines were being changed and the cars serviced.

It was a bright, warm and sunny Sunday morning. It seemed like the whole town had turned out at the station platform to see the strange sight of armed Black soldiers. Whites were on one side of the station platform and Blacks on the other. We pulled into the station with the windows open and our 1903 Springfield rifles on the tables in plain view of the crowd.

We were at our provocative best. We threw kisses at the white girls on the station platform, calling out to them: "Come over here, baby, give me a kiss!" "Look at that pretty redhead over there, ain't she a beaut!" And so forth.

A passenger train pulled up beside us on the next track. There, peering out the open window, was a real stereotype of an Arkansas red-neck. The sight of him was provocation enough for Willie Morgan, a huge Black in our company who was originally from Mississippi. Morgan was sitting directly across from the white man. He undoubtedly retained bitter memories of insults and persecutions from the past and quickly took advantage of what was perhaps his first opportunity to bait a cracker in his own habitat.

He reached a big ham-like hand through the window, grabbed the fellow's face and shouted, "What the hell you staring at, you peckerwood motherfucker?" The man pulled back, his hat flew off. Bending down, he recovered it and then moved quickly to the other side of his car, a frightened and puzzled look on his face. Our whole car let out a big roar.

Then a yard man, walking along the side of the car, asked, "Where are you boys going?"

"Goin' to see your momma, you cracker son-of-a-bitch!" came the reply.

The startled man looked up in amazement.

All of us were hungry. We had been given only a couple of apples for breakfast and now noticed that there were a number of shops and stores in the streets behind the station. I believe our first thought was to buy some food. The vestibule guards would not allow us to take our rifles off the cars, so we left them on our seats and proceeded to the stores in groups. As the stores became crowded, and as the storekeepers were busy serving some of our group, others started to snatch up any article in sight.

Cases of Coca-Cola, ginger ale and near-beer went back to the cars. The path to the train was strewn with loot dropped by some of the fellows. In the stores, some bought as others stole—this spontaneously evolved pattern was employed in raids on all stores in Jonesboro and at other train stops along the road to Houston.

The only serious confrontation that took place that day

involved the group I was with. We crowded into a little store and a fellow named Jeffries, one of my squad buddies, approached the storekeeper who was standing behind the counter. Putting his money down, he demanded a coke. Whereupon the guy said, 'Til serve you one, but y'all can't drink it in heah."

"Why?" Jeffries asked, innocently.

"Cause we don't serve niggahs heah."

Just as we were about to jump him and wreck the place, Jeffries, a comedian, decided to play it straight. He turned to us and said, "Now wait, fellahs, let me handle this. What the man is saying is that you don't know your place."

Turning to the storekeeper he put his money down and with feigned meekness said, "All right, mister, give me a coke. I know my place, I'll drink it outside."

"Thank goodness this nigger's got some sense," the storekeeper must have thought as he placed a coke on the counter. Jeffries snatched up the bottle and immediately hit him on the head, knocking him out cold.

We then proceeded to wreck the place. We took everything in sight. Rushing back to the train, I heard a loud crash—a plate glass window someone had smashed as a parting gift to the niggerhating storekeeper.

Up to this time we had not seen any of our officers. They had been up front in the first-class Pullmans. Many of them, we suspected, were sleeping off the after effects of the parties held on the eve of our departure. Major Hunt and Captain Hill now appeared and gave orders to the non-coms and the vestibule guards to allow no one else to leave the train.

We waved goodbye to the Blacks on the station platform. They looked frightened, sad and cowed. We were leaving, but they had to stay and face the wrath of the local crackers.

The train headed to Texarkana, where the scene was repeated though on a smaller scale. In Texarkana the train stopped only a few minutes and we raided one store near the railroad station. I was the last one out, running to the train with a box of pilfered Havana cigars in my hand. Nearing the train, I passed a couple of local whites talking about the raid. One said to the other, "You see all those niggers taking that man's stuff?"

"Yeah, I see it."

"Well, what are we going to do about it?"

I reached the train just as it was pulling out, relieved not to have been left behind to find out the answer. The next stop was Tyler, deep in the heart of Texas, scene of our most serious confrontation. Here we confronted the law in the person of the county sheriff. Tyler seemed to be a larger town than the others. It was a division point and all three sections pulled up on the sidings. As in Jonesboro, a large crowd had gathered at the station; Blacks on one side, whites on the other. Again, with our guns in view, we started flirting with the white women, throwing kisses at them and so on.

We were very hungry. There had been some foul-up in logistics so there wasn't any food on the train. All we had that day was a couple of sandwiches and some coffee. We piled off the train and headed for the stores, elbowing whites out of the way. We didn't carry our guns but many of us wore sheathed bayonets.

Major Hunt finally appeared but he was only able to stop a few of us. By that time most of us were already ransacking the stores in the immediate vicinity of the station. The path back to the station was strewn with bottles of soft drinks, hams, fruits, wrappers from the candy and cigarettes, etc. The major was frantically blowing his whistle and calling the fellows to come back to the cars. Finally we all got back and were eating our pilfered food, drinking our near-beer and soda.

Suddenly a large white man stepped forward out of the crowd. He wore a khaki uniform, a Sam Brown belt and a Colt forty-five in his holster. He approached Major Hunt and identified himself as the sheriff. (Or he might have been chief of police.) He said he intended to search the train and recover the stolen goods.

The major, a short, heavy-set Black man, said: "No, you don't. This is a military train. Any searching to be done will be done by our officers."

"I know," he said, "I want to accompany you."

"No you don't. You won't set foot on this train."

The sheriff hesitated and looked around at the crowd of white and Black. It was clearly a bitter pill for him to swallow, having for the first time in his life to take low to a Black man in front of his white constituents, as well as setting a bad example for the Blacks. He pushed the unarmed major aside and walked forward.

"Come on you peckerwood son-of-a-bitch!" we hollered from the car.

He approached the vestibule of our car where Jimmy Bland, a mean, grey-eyed and light-skinned Black was on guard.

"Back! Get back or I'll blow you apart!" Jimmy pushed the sheriff in the belly with the barrel of his rifle. To further impress upon him that the gun was loaded, he threw the bolt and ejected a bullet. The sheriff, who had doubled over from the blow, straightened up. his face ghastly white. He gasped out something to the effect that he was going to report this affair to the government and walked away. We all let out a tremendous roar.

We arrived in Houston the next day, five days after the mutiny of the Twenty-fourth. We were informed that five dollars would be docked from each man's pay to cover the damage incurred on the trip down. I believe we all felt that it was a small price to pay for the lift in morale that resulted from our forays on the trip.

We were greeted by our comrades from Company G of our battalion on arriving at Camp Logan. They had been there at the time of the mutiny-riot and gave us a detailed account of what had happened. We expected to be confronted by the hostile white population, but to our surprise, the confrontation with the Twenty-fourth seemed to have bettered the racial climate of this typical Southern town. Houston in those days was a small city of perhaps 100,000 people, not the metropolis it has now become. The whites, especially the police, had learned that they couldn't treat all Black people as they had been used to treating the local Blacks.

I can't remember a single clash between soldiers and police during our six-month stay in the area. On the contrary, if there were any incidents involving our men, the local cops would immediately call in the military police. There was also a notable improvement in the morale of the local Black population, who were quick to notice the change in attitude of the Houston cops. The cops had obviously learned to fear retaliation by Black soldiers if they committed any acts of brutality and intimidation in the Black community.

Houston Blacks were no longer the cowed, intimidated people they had been before the mutiny. They were proud of us and it was clear that our presence made them feel better. A warm and friendly relationship developed between our men and the Black community. The girls were especially proud of us. Local Blacks would point out places where some notorious, nigger-hating cop had been killed.

"See those bullet holes in the telephone pole over there," they'd say. "That's where that bad cop, old Pat Grayson, got his."

"Those Twenty-fourths certainly were sharpshooters!"

I occasionally took my laundry to an elderly woman who had known Corporal Baltimore. She told me what a nice young man he was.

"I hear he was hanged," she said.

"That's right," I replied.

Tears came to her eyes and she cluck-clucked. "He left some of his laundry here; you're about his size, you want it?"

"Yes, I'll take it."

She handed me several pairs of khaki trousers and some underwear and shirts all washed and starched and insisted that I pay only the cost of the laundry.

In Camp Logan, our Black Regiment, a part of the Thirty-third Illinois National Guard Division, went into intensive training. We had high esprit de corps. Our officers lost no opportunity to lecture us on the importance of race loyalty and race pride. They went out to disprove the ideas spread by the white brass to the effect that Black soldiers could be good, but only when officered by whites.

Our solidarity was strengthened when the Army attempted to remove Colonel Charles R. Young from the regiment. Young was the first Black West Point graduate and the highest ranking Black officer in the Regular Army. He wanted to go overseas very badly, but it was quite clear that they did not want a Black officer of his rank over there. He was examined by an Army medical board and found unfit for overseas service. We all knew it was a fraud. It was in all the Black papers and was known by Blacks throughout the country.

We men didn't let our officers down. We were out to show the whites that not only were we as good in everything as they, but better. In Camp Logan, our regiment held division championships in most of the sports: track, boxing, baseball, etc. We had the highest number of marksmen, sharpshooters and expert riflemen. Of course, there was no socializing between Blacks and whites, but it was clear that we had the respect, if not the friendship, of many of the white soldiers in the division.

In fact, despite all the efforts of the command, there was a certain degree of solidarity between Black and white soldiers in our division. In Spartanburg, North Carolina, white soldiers from New York came to the defense of their Black fellows of the Fifteenth New York when the latter were attacked by Southern whites. Many of us felt that in the case of a showdown in town with the local crackerdom, we could get support from some of the white members of our division who happened to be around. At least, we felt they would not side with the crackers against us.

The high morale of the regiment, the new tolerance (at least on the part of the local white establishment), the new spirit of Houston Blacks were all displayed during the parade of our division in downtown Houston. About two months before our departure, we received notice from headquarters that the regiment was to participate in a parade. We were to pass in review before Governor Howden of Illinois, our host governor of Texas, high brass from the War Department and other notables.

We spent a couple of days getting our clothes and equipment into shape. We washed and starched our khaki uniforms, bleached our canvas leggings snow white, cleaned and polished our rifles and side arms, shined our shoes to a mirror gloss. On the day of the parade, we marched the five miles into town, halting just before we reached the center of the city. We wiped the dust from our rifles and shoes and continued the march.

Executing perfectly the change from squad formation to platoon front, we entered the main square. With our excellent band playing the Illinois March, we passed the reviewing stand with our special rhythmic swagger which only Black troops could affect. We were greeted by a thunderous ovation from the crowds, especially the Blacks.

I believe all of Black Houston turned out that day. The next morning, the Houston Post, a white daily, headlined a story about the parade and declared that "the best looking outfit in the parade was the Negro Eighth Illinois."

Given final leave, we bid good-bye to our girls and friends in Houston. After that, security was clamped down and no one was allowed to leave the camp. A few days later, we boarded the train and were on our way to a port of embarkation. We didn't know where we were headed but suspected it was New York. Instead, five days later, we wound up in Camp Stewart near Newport News, Virginia.

In Newport News, we barely escaped a serious confrontation with some local crackers and the police. The first batches of our fellows given passes to the town were subjected to the taunts and slurs of the local cops.

"Why don't you darkies stay in camp? We don't want you downtown making trouble."

Several fights ensued. Some of the men from our regiment were arrested and others literally driven out of town. They returned to the barracks, some of them badly beaten, and told us what had happened. A repetition of the riot of the Twenty-fourth Infantry at Houston was narrowly averted, as a number of us grabbed our guns and were about to head downtown. We were turned back, however, by our officers, who intervened and pleaded with us to return to our barracks. Among them was Lt. Benote Lee, whom we all loved and respected.

"Don't play into the hands of these crackers," he said. "We'll be leaving any day now. All they want is to get us in trouble on the eve of our departure."

"How about our guys who were arrested?" we asked.

"Don't worry. We'll get them out."

We returned to the barracks and, sure enough, our comrades were returned the next day, escorted by white MPs. We spent the next days on standby orders, apparently waiting for our ship to arrive. After that, all leaves were cancelled.

It was on the same day, I believe, that we first learned that we had been separated from our Thirty-third Illinois Division. Henceforth, we were to be known as the 370th Infantry.

One morning shortly after this, we looked down into the harbor and saw three big ships. We knew then that we would soon be on our way. The following morning the regiment marched down to the dockside to board ship. Yet another incident occurred at the dock. We lined up in company front facing the harbor and halted a few yards from the fence which ran the entire length of the dock.

Facing us in front of the fence were several groups of loitering white native males, probably dockworkers. They stared at us as if we were some strange species. Our captain apparently wanted to move the company closer to the fence and gave the command, "Forward march." But he "forgot" to call "halt." That was all we needed.

We were still angry about the beating of our comrades in downtown Newport News a few days before. We marched directly into the whites, closing in on them, cursing and cuffing them with fists and rifle butts, kicking and kneeing them; in short, applying the skills of close order combat we had learned during our basic training. Of course, we didn't want to kill anybody, we just wanted to rough them up a bit.

We were finally stopped by the excited cries of our officers, "Halt! Halt!" We withdrew, opening up a path through which our victims ran or limped away. Then at the command of "Attention! Right face!" we marched along the dock in columns of two's and finally boarded the ship.

ON TO FRANCE

We sailed for France in early April 1918, on the old USS Washington, a passenger liner converted into a troop ship. I have crossed the Atlantic many times since, but I can truthfully say that I have never experienced rougher seas. Our three ships sailed out of Newport News without escort. Of course, we were worried; there were rumors of German submarines. Our anxiety was relieved when in mid-ocean we picked up two escort vessels, one of which was the battle cruiser Covington. When we reached the war zone, about three days out of Brest, a dozen destroyers took over, circling our ships all the way into port.

It took us sixteen days in all to reach Brest, France, where we arrived on April 22. We were so weak on landing that one-half of the regiment fell out while climbing the hill to the old Napoleon Barracks where we were quartered. Immediately upon our arrival, we were put to work cleaning up ourselves and our equipment, notwithstanding our weakened condition.

The next morning we passed in review before some U.S. and French big brass. The following day we boarded a train. We crossed the whole of France from east to west and detrained at Granvillars, a village in French Alsace, close to the Swiss frontier. There we found out that we had been brigaded with and were to be an integral part of the French Army.

The reason we were separated from the white Americans was, as the white brass put it, "to avoid friction." But the American command of General Pershing was not satisfied just to separate us; they tried to extend the long arm of Jim Crow to the French. The American Staff Headquarters, through its French mission, tried to make sure that the French understood the status of Blacks in the United States. Their Secret Information Bulletin Concerning Black American Troops is now notorious, though I did not learn of it until after I had returned from France. The Army of Democracy spoke to its French allies:

It is important for French officers who have been called upon to exercise command over black American troops, or to live in close contact with them, to have an exact idea of the position occupied by Negroes in the United States. The increasing number of Negroes in the United States (about 15,000,000) would create for the white race in the Republic a menace of degeneracy were it not that an impassable gulf has been made between them....

Although a citizen of the United States, the black man is regarded by the white American as an inferior being with whom relations of business or service only are possible. The black is constantly being censured for his want of intelligence and discretion, his lack of civic and professional conscience, and for his tendency toward undue familiarity.

The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly. For instance, the black American troops in France have, by themselves, given rise to as many complaints for attempted rape as the rest of the army....

Conclusion:

1. We must prevent the rise of any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black officers. We may be courteous and amiable with these last, but we cannot deal with them on the same plane as with the white American officers without deeply wounding the latter. We must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside the requirements of military service.

2. We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of [white] Americans....

3. Make a point of keeping the native cantonment population from "spoiling" the Negroes. [White] Americans become greatly incensed at any public expression of intimacy between white women with black men....Familiarity on the part of white women with black men is furthermore a source of profound regret to our experienced colonials, who see in it an overweening menace to the prestige of the white race.

Apparently this classic statement of U.S. racism was ineffectual with the French troops and people, even though it was supplemented by wild stories circulated by the white U.S. troops. These included the claim that Blacks had tails like monkeys, which was especially told to women, including those in the brothels.

Our regiment was not sorry to be incorporated into the French military. In fact, most of us thought it was the best thing that could have happened. The French treated Blacks well—that is, as human beings. There was no Jim Crow. At the time, I thought the French seemed to be free of the virulent U.S. brand of racism.

The American Command not only wanted its front line to be all white, it also wanted all regiment commanders (even those under the French) to be white. Consequently, our Black colonel, Franklin A. Dennison; our lieutenant colonel, James H. Johnson; and two of our majors (battalion commanders) were replaced by white officers. Colonel Dennison was sent back to the States, kicked upstairs, given the rank of brigadier general, and placed in command of the Officer Training Camp for Colored Men at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. Although our first reaction was anger, we became reconciled to the shift.

Our new white colonel, T. A. Roberts, seemed to be warm, paternalistic and deeply concerned about the welfare of his men. He would often make the rounds of the field kitchens, tasting the food and admonishing the cooks about ill-prepared food. He even gave instructions on how the various dishes should be cooked. Naturally, this made a great hit with the men. Our confidence in him was high because we felt that he was a professional soldier who knew his business.

I remember the day the new colonel took over. The regiment formed in the village square. Colonel Roberts introduced himself. He seemed quite modest. He said that he was honored to be our new commander and that he knew the record of our regiment dating back to 1892 and its exploits during the Spanish-American War.

"Since West Point," he said, "I have always served with colored troops—the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry." He then turned to Captain Patton, our Black regiment adjutant. "Captain Patton knows me, he was one of my staff sergeants in the old Tenth Cavalry." Patton nodded.

The colonel smiled and pointed to our top sergeant. "Over there is Mark Thompson. I remember him when he was company clerk in Troop C of the Tenth Cavalry." He went on to point out a dozen or so officers and non-coms with whom he had served in the Ninth or Tenth Cavalry. "These men will tell you where I stand with respect to the race issue and everything else. We are going into the lines soon and I am sure that the men of this regiment will pile up a record of which your people and the whole of America will be proud."

The process of integration into the French Army was thorough. The American equipment with which we had trained at home was taken away and we were issued French weapons—rifles, carbines, machine guns, automatic rifles, pistols, helmets, gas masks and knapsacks. We were even issued French rations—with the exception of the wine, which our officers apparently felt we could not handle. We got all the wine we wanted anyway from the French troops. They were issued a liter (about a quart) a day and for a few centimes could buy more at the canteen.

The regiment was completely reorganized along French lines, with a machine gun company to every battalion. My Company E of the Second Battalion was converted into Machine Gun Company No. 2. We entered a six-week period of intensive training under French instructors to master our new weapons. Our main weapon was the old air-cooled Hotchkiss. And we had to master the enemy's gun, the water-cooled Maxim.

The period of French training was not an easy one. It was a miserable spring—dark and dreary, and it rained incessantly the whole time we were there. There was a lot of illness—grippe, pneumonia and bronchitis. We lost a number of men, several from our company. The men were in a sullen mood as the time approached for the regiment to move up to the front.

Disgruntlement was often voiced in the now familiar form of "What are we doing over here? Germans ain't done nothing to us. It's those crackers we should be fighting." While we were lined up in the square one day, our captain took the occasion to comment on these sentiments.

"Well," he said, "I've been hearing all this stuff about guys saying that they weren't going to fight the Germans. Well, we certainly can't make you fight if you don't want to. But I'll tell you one thing we can and will do is take you up to the front where the Germans are, and you can use your own judgment as to whether you fight them or not."

In early June 1918, we entered the trenches at the St. Mihiel Salient near the Swiss frontier as a part of the Tenth Division of the French Army under General Mittelhauser. We were intermingled with the French troops in the Tenth Division so that our officers and men might observe and profit by close association with veteran soldiers. At that time St. Mihiel was a quiet sector. Except for occasional shelling, desultory machine gun and rifle fire, nothing much occurred. We lost no men.

It was here, however, that we made our first acquaintance with two pests—the rat and the louse—whom thereafter were our inseparable companions for our entire stay at the front. Undoubtedly there were more rats than men; there were hordes of them. Regiments and battalions of rats. They were the largest rats I had ever seen. We soon became tired of killing them; it seemed a wasted effort. Some of the rats became quite bold, even impudent. They seemed to say, "I've got as much right here as you have." They would walk along, pick up food scraps and eat them right there in front of you! The dark dug-outs were their real havens. When we slept we would keep our heads covered with blankets as protection against rat bites. This may seem flimsy protection, but we were so conditioned that we would awake at any attempt on the part of a rat to bite through the blanket. I have often wondered why there were so few rat bites. Probably the rats felt that it was not worthwhile fooling with live humans when there were so many dead ones around. We soon got used to the rats and learned to live with them.

It was the same with the lice. I woke up lousy after my first sleep in a dug-out. My reaction to the pests took the following progression: first, I was besieged by interminable itching, followed by depression. Then I began to lose appetite and weight, finally becoming quite ill. All this was within a period of a few days. Most of the fellows exhibited the same symptoms.

One might say that our illness was mainly psychological, but it was nonetheless real. Since this was a quiet front, I had no difficulty in getting permission to go back to the rear for a few hours. Foolishly, I thought if I could get cleaned up just once, I would feel a lot better. I got some delousing soap, took a bath and washed my clothes. I then returned to the front, stood machine gun watch and then went into the dug-out for a nap. Needless to say, I woke up lousy again.

I told my troubles to an old French veteran who had been assigned to my machine gun squad. "Oh, it's nothing! You must forget all about it,' he said. "You'll get used to it. I've been at the front for nearly four years and I've been lousy all the time, except when I was in the hospital or at home on leave."

I took his advice which was all to the good, because I was not to be rid of these pests until six months later during my sojourn in hospitals at Mantes-sur-Seine and Paris after the Armistice. Even then, it was only a temporary respite, for I was reinfected upon rejoining my regiment at the embarkation port of Brest. After a brief stay with the regiment, I was returned to the hospital, again deloused, only to be reinfected again on the hospital ship returning to the States. I parted company with my last louse at the debarkation hospital at Grand Central Palace in New York City.

We remained in the St. Mihiel sector about two weeks. We were then withdrawn and moved into a sector in the Argonne Forest near Verdun, site of the great battles of 1916; we arrived there in late July 1918. We were still brigaded with the Tenth French Division. The area around Verdun was a vast cemetery with a half million crosses of those who had perished in that great holocaust, each bearing the legend, Mort Pour La France.

The Argonne at that time was also a quiet sector. But it was here that we suffered our first casualty, Private Robert M. Lee of Chicago. The incident occurred during machine gun target practice. The first and second line trenches ran along parallel hills about a hundred yards apart. The French had set up a make-shift range in the valley in between the trenches. Behind the gun there was a two or three foot rise in the earth, on which a number of us French and Blacks were sitting, chewing the rag, awaiting our turn at the machine gun.

Suddenly, there was a short burst of machine gun fire. It was not from our guns. Bullets whizzed over our heads—they seemed to be coming from behind the target. All of us scrambled to get into the communication trench which opened on the valley. Second Lieutenant Binga DesMond, our platoon commander (and the University of Chicago's great sprinting star), fell from the embankment on top of me. Fortunately, he was not hit. But even with his 180 pounds on my back, I am sure I made that ten or fifteen yards to the communication trench, crawling on my hands and knees, as fast as he could have sprinted the distance!

The fire was coming from behind the target. What obviously had happened was that the Germans had cased the position of our guns and had somehow got around behind the target and waited for a pause in our target practice to open fire on us. We never found out how they did it, for none of us knew the exact topography of the place. The French of course knew it, but they had assured us that the place was safe and that they had been using the range for months.

We were crouched down, panting, in the communication trench for about five minutes after the German guns ceased fire. The French lieutenant (bless his soul) then sent a French gun crew out to get the gun. To our great surprise they also brought back Robert M. Lee. He was quite dead, with bullets right through the heart. He had evidently been hit by the first burst and had fallen forward in front of the embankment. All of us were deeply saddened by the incident.

No one spoke as we bore his body back to the rear. He was only nineteen, a very sweet fellow, and he was our first casualty. We buried him down in the valley, beside the graves of those fallen at Verdun. The funeral was quite impressive. He was given a hero's burial, with representatives both from our regiment and our French counterparts. We were especially impressed by the appearance of General Mittelhauser who came down from Division Headquarters to express condolences and appreciation to the Black troops now under his command.

THE SOISSONS SECTOR

Despite the fact that we had been in aa quiet sector, it was still the front lines with its daily tensions of anticipated attack. In the middle of August, we were pulled out of the Argonne sector and sent to rest behind the lines near Bar-le-Duc. We were deeply pleased by the hospitality and kindness extended to us by the townspeople there. They invited us into their homes and plied us with food and wine. Half-jokingly they told us to come back after the war and we could have our pick of the girls. As we did throughout our stay in France, we deported ourselves well. For pleasures of the flesh, there were a number of legal houses of prostitution, or “houses of pleasure” as they were called by the French, It was with regret that we left that area.

By this time, we had become an integral part of the French Army. Along with our French equipment, training and so forth, we had affected the style of the French poilu (doughboy). The flaps of our overcoats were buttoned back in order to give us more leg room while on the march, as was their style. Like the French infantry, we used walking sticks, which helped to ease the burden of our seventy pounds of equipment. French peasants along the road, hearing our strange language and noticing our color, would often mistake us for French colonials. Not Senegalese, who were practically all black but Algerians, Moroccans or Sudanese, We would swing along the road to the tune of our favorite marching song:

My old mistress promised me, Raise a ruckus tonight,

When she died she'd set me free, Raise a ruckus tonight.

She lived so long her head got bald, Raise a ruckus tonight.

She didn’t get to set me free at all, Raise a ruckus tonight!

Oh, come along, little children come along, While the moon is shining bright;

Get on board on down the river flow, Gonna’ raise a ruckus tonight.

But we had not escaped the long arm of American racism. We were rudely confronted with this reality upon our arrival in a small town on the Compiégne front in the department of Meuse. We entrained here for our next front. The regiment was confronted dramatically with the effects of the racist campaign launched by the American high brass,

Upon entering the town, the regiment was drawn up in battalion formation in the square, Before being assigned to billets, we were informed by the battalion commander that a Black soldier from a labor battalion had been court martialed and hanged in the very square where we were standing, It had happened just a few weeks before our arrival. His crime was the raping of a village girl. His body had been left hanging there for twenty-four hours, as a demonstration of American justice,

“As a result,” he told us, “you may find the town population hostile, In case this is so,” the major warned, “you are not to be provoked or to take umbrage at any discourtesies, but are to deport yourselves as gentlemen at all times,” In any case, we were to be there only for a few days, during which time we were to remain close to our barracks, Then, in a lowered voice, he muttered, “This is what i have been told to tell you.”

We kept close to our billets the first day or so, but then gradually ventured further into town. At first, the townsfolk seemed to be aloof, but the coolness was gradually broken down, probably as a result of our correct deportment, especially our attitude towards the children (with whom we always immediately struck up friendships). Friendly relations were finally established with the villagers. When we asked about the hanging, they shrugged the matter off,

“So what? That was only one soldier. The others were nice enough,” When asked why they had been so aloof when we first arrived, they said it was the result of the warnings of the white officers. “They didn’t want us to fraternize with the Blacks.”

Continuing the conversation, they seemed puzzled about why the sentence had been so severe and the body barbarously left exposed in the square. “Trés brutale, trés horrible!” they exclaimed. With regard to the girl, “Ah, she had been raped many times before,” one of them jeered.

After two weeks of rest, the regiment began to move by stages toward the front lines again. A few days later, we boarded a train consisting of a long line of box-cars. Each car was marked: “Quarante hommes ou huit chevaux.” (Forty men or eight horses.)

The last couple of months had been quiet and relatively pleasant, with the exception of the Lec incident and the events just related. But now, we felt, we were going into the thick of it. The premonition was confirmed the very next morning when we woke (that is, those of us who had been able to sleep in such crowded conditions),

We were passing through Chateau-Thierry. There could be no doubt about it, eventhough part of the sign had been blown away and only the word “Thierry” remained. The woods around the station and Belleau Woods, a few miles further on, looked like they had been hit by a cyclone: broken and uprooted trees, gaping shell holes, men from the Graves Registration walking around with crosses, Black Pioneers removing ammunition, All were grim reminders of the great battles that had been fought there by American troops only several weeks before.

We were on the Soissons front, where we became part of the famous Armée Mangin, General Mangin (le boucher or the butcher as he was called by the French) was commander of the Tenth Army of France, among whom were a number of shock troops; Chausseurs Alpines, Chausseurs d’Afrique (Algerians and Moroccans), Senegalese riflemen and the Foreign Legion. His army was pivotal in breaking the Hindenburg Lineabout Soissons. On this front, we were brigaded with the Fifty-ninth French Division, under the command of General Vincendon.

We bypassed Thierry and Belleau Woods and detrained at the village of Villers-Cotteréts, the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas. ‘The atmosphere was charged with expectancy, Observation balloons hung like giant sausages on the horizon. Big guns rumbled ominously in the distance, A steady stream of ambulances carrying wounded jammed the roads leading from the front. Obviously a big battle was in progress not too far away. But it turned out that we were not going into that sector. We left the village and marched west to Crépy-en-Valois. Turning north through the Compiégne Forest, we reached the Aisne River at a point near Vie-sur-Aisne and continued on to Resson-le-Long where we established our depot company. The march from the railhead to Resson took about three days. It was a forced march and covered about twenty-five kilometers (fifteen miles) a day.

This was pretty rough after the restless night we had spent on the crowded train. As one of the company wags observed, “One thing bout these kilomeeters, they sho’ will kill you if you keep on meetin’ “em.”

Our regiment spent six months in the lines in all. We took part in the fifty-nine day drive of Mangin’s Tenth Army which ended on the day of the Armistice. During that period, one or another of our units was always under fire or fighting. Our toughest battles were at the Death Valley Jump Off near the Aisne Canal, the taking of Mont Singes (Monkey Mountain which was later renamed Hill 370 in honor of our regiment), fighting at a railroad embankment northwest of Guilleminet Farm, and the advance into the Hindenburg Line at the Oise-Aisne Triangle.

It was in the battles on the Hindenburg Line that we met the strongest enemy resistance and sustained most of our losses. The enemy resistance was broken in these battles and they began a general withdrawal, at first orderly and accompanied by brief rearguard actions. Finally, there was the flight to the Belgian frontier, destroying roads and railroads on orders to impede our advance. After Laon, their flight was so precipitous that we had difficulty maintaining contact. We entered many villages which they had left the day before.

Our outfit was the first allied troops to enter the fortified city of Laon, wresting it from the Germans after four years of war. We were greeted with tremendous elation by the population, who had lived under German occupation the whole of that period.

The regiment was highly praised by the French. It won twenty-one Distinguished Service Crosses, sixty-eight Croix de Guerre and one Distinguished Service Medal. In the whole two months’ drive, casualties were 500 killed and wounded-—a total of about one-fifth of the regiment. These casualties were light when compared with those of Black regiments on other fronts. For example, the 37] st Infantry of drafted men lost 1,065 out of 2,384 men in three days’ fighting during the great September defensive on the Compiégne Front. I believe that the German resistance on these other fronts, east and west of Soissons, was more stubborn than on our front.

All of our Black regiments were fortunate to have been brigaded with the French. In this respect, the American High Command did us a big favor, unintentionally, lam sure. For as far as we were able to observe, the French made no discrimination in the treatment of Black officers and men, with whom they fraternized freely. They regarded us as brothers-in-arms.

Similarly, the French people in the villages in which we stopped or were stationed were uniformly courteous and friendly, and we made many friends, I must say that we were also on our best behavior. I don’t remember a single incident of misbehavior on the part of our men toward French villagers. The latter were quick to notice this and to contrast our gentlemanly deportment with the rudeness of the white Americans. Many of the white soldiers made no effort to hide their disdain for the French(whom they regarded as inferiors) and commonly referred to them as “frogs.”

But even as we fought, we were being stabbed in the back by the American High Command. We were not to learn, however, until our return to the States of the slanderous, racist document issued by the American General Staff Headquarters through its brainwashed French Mission (the Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops referred to earlier).

We learned also that the hanging of the Black soldier on the Compiégne Front was not an isolated incident, but part of a deliberate campaign conducted by higher and lower echelons in the American Command to influence French civilians against Blacks. The campaign focused on the effort to build up the Black rapist scare among them.

Such was a memorandum issued by headquarters of the Ninety-second Division (a Black division officered largely by whites) on August 21, 1918. Its purpose was to “prevent the presence of colored troops from being a menace to women,” The memorandum read in part:

On account of increasing frequency of the crime of rape, or attempted rape, in this Division, drastic preventive measures have become necessary... Until further notice, there will be a check of all troops of the 92nd Division every hour daily between reveille and 11 P.M,, with a written record showing how each check was made, by whom, and the result...the one mile limit regulation will be strictly enforced at all times, and no passes will be issued except to men of known reliability.

This was followed the next day by another memorandum saying that the commander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Forces “would send the 92nd Division back to the States or break it up into labor battalions as unfit to bear arms in France, if efforts to prevent rape were not taken more seriously.”

As a result, Dr. Robert R. Moton of Tuskegee was sent by President Wilson and the secretary of war to investigate the charges. He found only one case of rape in the whole division of 15,000 men. Two other men who were from labor battalions in the Ninety-second area were convicted. One of these was hanged, and I’m sure that this was the unfortunate soldier whom we saw on the Compiégne Front. General headquarters was forced to admit that the crime of rape, as later stated by Moton, “was no more prevalent among coloured soliders than among white, or any other soldiers.”

This whole racist smear of Black troops, I was to conclude later, represented but an extension to France of the anti-Black racist campaign then current in the States, It was designed to maintain Black subjugation and prevent its erosion by liberal racial attitudes of the French. Back in the States, the campaign was marked by an upturn of lynchings during the war years, with thirty-eight Black victims in 1917 and half again that number in the following year. Even then, things were working up to the bloody riots of 1919.

In contrast to all of this, the appreciation of the French for Black soldiers from the U.S. was shown by the accolade given by the French division commander, General Vincendon, to our regiment. On December 19, 1918, we were transferred from the French Army back to the American Army. On that day, General Order 4785, directed to the Fifty-ninth Division of the Army of France, was read to the officers and men of the 370th. It commended us for our contributions to France. remember being struck by the poetry of the language, it was all beautifully French to me:

We at first, in September at Mareuil-sur-Ourcg, admitted your fine appearance under arms, the precision of your review, the suppleness of your evolutions that presented to the eye the appearance of silk unrolling its waves...

Further on in remembering our dead, the communique read:

The blood of your comrades who fell on the soil of France, mixed with the blood of our soldiers, renders indissoluble the bonds of affection that unite us.

THE ROAD HOME

The road back from Soissons lay through the old battlefields where we had fought a couple of months before. Near Anizy-le Chateau there were crosses marking the graves of some of our comrades who had died in the fighting there. We paused before the graves, seeking out those of the comrades we knew. We all had the same thoughts: “What rotten luck that they should die almost in sight of victory.”

Among the crosses, there was one marked “Sergeant Theodore Gamelin.” Gamelin hadn’t died in combat. 1 remember the incident clearly, We were all lined up in some hastily dug trenches that morning, waiting for the “over the top” signal. The cooks had just distributed reserved rations. These consisted of a half-loaf of French bread (not the crispy white kind, but a coarse grayish loaf baked especially for the troops, which we called “war bread”) and a big bar of chocolate. Somehow, Gamelin had missed out on these rations. Jump-off time was drawing near. He looked around and his eyes fixed upon a private named Brown, who was sitting on the firing step, putting his rations in a knapsack. Now, Private Brown was one of those quiet, meek little fellows. He always took low, was never known to fight. But Brown was the type of man, I have observed, who can become dangerous. This is particularly true in a combat situation where one doesn’t know whether one will live five minutes longer. Gamelin, a big bullying type, an amateur boxer and very unpopular with his men, called to Brown:

“Give me some of that bread, Brown. I didn’t get my rations.”

“Now, that’s just too bad, sergeant,” Brown responded, “I’m not going to give you any of this bread. It’s not my fault you missed your rations.”

Gamelin, with one hand on his pistol, moved as though he were going to seize the bread. Brown had his rifle lying across his lap. He simply raised it and coolly pulled the trigger. The sergeant fell dead!

The platoon commander heard the commotion and ran to the spot, inquiring about what had happened. The men told him that Gamelin was trying to take Brown’s reserve rations and had made a move toward his pistol. Brown, they said, had shot in self-defense,

Obviously nothing could be done about Brown in those circumstances. So the lieutenant said, “Consider yourself under arrest, Brown. We will take this matter up after this action.”

Unfortunately, Brown was killed a few days later, The memory of this incident was on our minds as we viewed Gamelin’s grave, His helmet hung on a cross, which ironically bore the inscription “Sergeant Theodore Gamelin—Mort Pour La France (Died for France), September 1918.”

Thad gone through six months at the front without a scratch or a day of illness. But as we neared Soissons, I began to feel faint and light-headed, By the time we reached the city, I had developed quite a high fever, It was the period of the first great flu epidemic which wreaked havoc among U.S. troops in France. I reported to the infirmary and lined up with a group of about fifty men. The medical sergeant took our temperatures and then tied tags to our coats. I looked at mine and it read “influenza.” We were evacuated to a field hospital near Soissons, where I remained for about five days. After that, we boarded a hospital train and were told that we were going to the big base hospital in Paris, Now, I liked that.

I had never seen Paris and was most anxious to visit the famed city before going home. There were two of us in the compartment, another soldier from the regiment and myself, I felt a little drowsy, sol told my compartment mate that I was going to take a little nap and to wake me up when the chow came around, I “awoke” five days later in a French hospital at Mantes-sur-Seine, near Paris.

They had put me off the train as an emergency case just before Paris. I came out of a coma to find a number of strange people around my bed—nurses who were Catholic nuns, doctors and a number of patients, They were all smiling. “Thank God, young man,” said the doctor, “we thought we were going to lose you. You've been in a coma for five days, but you’re going to be all right now.”

“Where am I? Is this Paris?” I asked.

“No, this is Mantes-sur-Seine, close to Paris. They had to put you off here as an emergency case.”

“What’s wrong with me?” I asked.

“Qh, you've had a little kidney infection and it has affected your heart.”

“That sounds bad,” I said.

“Well, you’re young and have a remarkable constitution. You'll pull through all right—you’re out of danger now,” he assured me.

I remained in the hospital for about a month, receiving the kindest and most solicitous attention from nurses, doctors and patients. All seemed to regard me as their special charge, No one spoke English, but I got along all right. It was like a crash course in French, They told me I had a beautiful accent. They brought in an old lady to talk English with me, but she bored me to death, Really, my French was better than her English. She came once and didn’t return,

I was feeling much better when the head sister came to me one evening to tell me I was to leave the next morning for Paris and the American hospital at Neuilly.

“You've never been to Paris, have you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. ,

“Well, you’ve got a treat coming’

I was filled with great expectations, The next morning, after embracing all my fellow patients and exchanging warm goodbyes with the doctor and sisters, the head nurse (or sister) took me out in front of the hospital where an American ambulance was waiting.

“Hop in, buddy,” said the driver.

“Haywood, be sure to write us when you get back to Chicago,” said the sister. “Remember we are your friends and want to know how you are getting along.”

I promised that I would. As we pulled out, she stood on the road waving a white handkerchief and continued to wave it as long as we were in sight. I never wrote them, hut often thought of them.

Paris, you wondrous city! I was feeling good that morning as we pulled into the hospital at Neuilly. The hospital was situated on the Avenue Neuilly near the Boulevard de la Grande Armée, only a few blocks from the Arc de Triomphe. It was a veritable palace. I was assigned to a ward in which there were only four guys, three Australians and one white American from Wisconsin. They greeted me and gave mea run-down on the situation. They were having a hall seeing Paris, taking in all the events, theaters, race tracks, boxing and girls, I don’t believe that I saw a real sick man in that hospital. There were some of course, but they must have been secluded in some out of sight wards. We were all convalescents in our ward. A couple were recuperating from wounds received at the front,

“What do you do for money?” I asked.

“Oh, we don’t worry about that—-just stick around a while and we'll show you the ropes,”

Under their tutelage, it didn’t take me long to catch on. At that time there were dozens of rich American women, including a number from the social register in Paris. They were under the auspices of the Red Cross and had taken over the hospital and its patients as their special “war duty.” They would organize excursions, get tickets for shows, sports events, etc. Coming to the hospital in relays, they would leave huge boxes of chocolates and other goodies.

We were showered with gifts—Gillette razors, Waterman fountain pens, and even some serviceable wrist watches if you asked for them. They would come in waves. Scarcely had one group left when another would come, leaving the same gifts. The guys had it down perfect. They always left one man on watch in the ward. He was there in case the gals would come in while the others were out and receive all the presents and gifts for them. He would point to the three un oceupied beds (there were only five of us in an eight bed ward) and pretend that their occupants were out in the streets. He would suggest that the presents be left for them, also. Old Wisconsin Slim was the real genius in all this, He even hung a couple of crosses over the unoccupied beds to give more substance to the fiction that they were occupied,

Every morning we would gather all our presents, take them to the gate, and sell them fora good price to the French who gathered there to buy them. We would then return to the ward and divide the “swag.” Razors and fountain pens seemed to be rare in France at that time. The going rate for razors was about ten francs ($2) and for Waterman fountain pens even more. All this was carried out under the benign gaze of the hospital authorities.

Discipline was lax, almost nonexistent. We could stay out for two days at a time. The attitude seemed to be: let the boys have a good time, they deserve it. Besides, it’s essential for their convalescence, When we would get a little money together (about once a week), we would run out to Montmartre and the famous Rue Pigalle, “Pig Alley,” to see the girls.

As an old Francophile, I was also interested in French history and culture. I got a guidebook and spent days walking all over Paris, visiting all the historical places about which I had read, mentally reconstructing the events.

Time was passing rapidly. I had been in the hospital about two months when an administrator called me into his office.

“Well, Corporal Hall,” he said. “I hope you've been having a good time in Paris.”

“Oh yes,” I replied.

“That’s good,” he said, “We're sending you back to your regiment tomorrow.”

“Where are they?” I asked.

“They’re in Brest, waiting to embark for the voyage home.”

The next morning I got on the train at the Gare Ouest and arrived in Brest that evening. In Brest, I strolled around a bit on the waterfront and finally sat down at a sidewalk cafe. I was in no hurry to get back into the old regimental harness, I was about to order a drink when suddenly a big white MP appeared. Glowering at me, he said, “Where’s your pass, soldier?”

“Here it is. I’ve just got back from the hospital in Paris and I'm going to my outfit up on the hill,” I explained.

He grabbed it, glanced at it and shouted, “Well, get going up that hill right now. You're not supposed to hang around here.”

I left without my drink and started climbing the hill to the old Napoleon barracks where we had been eleven months before. It seemed like that had been years ago, so much had been crowded into the brief intervening period.

T rejoined my outfit. They were living in tents in what seemed to me like a swamp. The weather was miserable, a steady cold rain. The mud was ankle deep. I was greeted warmly by my comrades. I don’t think that more than half the old boys of my company were left. The rest were dead, wounded, or ill in hospitals all over France.

A couple of bottles of cognac were produced. The guys started reminiscing about what they were going to do when they got home. The news from home was bad. Discrimination and Jim Crow were rampant, worse than before. Blacks were being lynched everywhere. “Now, they want us to go to war with Japan,” observed one of the fellows. (The Hearst newspapers at the time were again raising the specter of the “yellow peril.”)

“Well,” someone said, “they won’t get me to fight their yellow peril. If it comes to that, I'll join the Japs. They are colored.” There was unanimous agreement on that point.

I bunked down that night and awoke the next morning with a high fever. I went to the infirmary and again was evacuated to a hospital. I immediately began to worry whether I would be able to return with my outfit. As I was waiting on the side of the road to hitch a ride to the hospital, I heard footsteps behind me. I turned and there was Colonel Roberts, our white commander whom I had not seen for months.

I started to spring to my feet and salute, but he motioned me to remain seated. “Corporal, you're from our regiment, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “I'm sick and going to the hospital.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I guess I got the flu.”

“Well,” he said, “you’re in no condition to walk that distance.” He hailed a passing truck and instructed the driver to take me to the hospital. “Take care, son; we’re going home soon. Try to come hack with us.” That’s the last time I saw Colonel Roberts.

A month later, while in the hospital, I picked up the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune. The headline read: “The 370th Infantry (the old Eighth Illinois) returns and is given hero’s welcome in victory parade down State Street.” I felt pretty bad, because I could imagine my old Mother standing there waiting for me to pass by, Since I hadn’t written in months, she would probably assume the worst.

I had been away from the States for quite a while, in free France so to speak, and I had become less used to the American nigger-hating way of life. But I was thrown abruptly back into reality as soon as I crossed the threshold of the American Army hospital in Brest.

It seemed to be manned by an all Southern staff: doctors, nurses, etc. All of them spoke with broad Southern accents. I was assigned a bed at one end of the ward. When I looked around, I could see only Blacks were in that end. Whites were at the other end. There were no screens, no Jim Crow signs. The Jim Crow was de facto, but nonetheless real. I also noticed that there was a large space between the Black and white sections.

After a cursory entrance examination, the doctor seemed to think that I didn’t have the flu, and upon hearing my recent medical history, he decided that it was a relapse of the old illness.

Thad no sooner gotten settled when J heard a nurse bawling out a Black soldier for being so dirty. The poor fellow had just come in from some mud hole like the one in which my regiment was situated, where there was no opportunity to bathe.

“You don’t see any of our white boys that dirty!” she shouted, her eyes flashing indignantly at what she, a white lady, was forced to put up with, For the first time, it occurred to me that our Black regiment had been put in a worse location than the whites. Now, that’s pretty hard stuff for a front-line veteran to take. If I had been ill when I came in, I was really sick now. I could feel my blood pressure and-fever mount.

There was a Black sergeant from my outfit in the same ward, He was a tall, dignified and proud looking man, convalescing from a previous illness. He wasn’t a bed patient and was therefore supposed to make his own bed. This he did, but he never seemed to do it to the satisfaction of the nurse, who kept berating him.

“Make it over, that’s not good enough.”

“I've already made it, and I’m not going to do it again.”

“Don’t talk back to me,” she shouted. “Make that bed!”

“I’m not going to,” he said.

“You dare disobey my order?” she yelled.

“I'm a front-line soldier and you don’t have to yell at me.”

She turned and walked to the office and returned with the ward doctor, a little pip-squeak of a man. Ina stentorian voice he said:

“Make that bed, soldier.” The sergeant didn’t move. The doctor looked at his watch and said, “I’m giving you two minutes to start making that bed. If you don’t, I’m going to prefer charges against you for disobeying your superior officers.”

You could see that the proud sergeant was thinking it over and coming to a decision. I could almost read his mind; it seemed that he was thinking that this wasn’t the time to die. He only had a couple more months to go.

He finally burst into tears, but he got up and made the bed. I’ve seen this sort of situation before, and I feel almost certain that had there been a loaded gun around, the sergeant might have started shooting. It would have been reported in the news as “Another nigger runs amuck.” All of us, including some of the whites, breathed a sigh of relief at this peaceful culmination of what could have been a dangerous incident. At least the nurse never bothered the sergeant after that. Undoubtedly, she sensed the inherent danger of any further provocation.

After my stay in Paris, I was seized periodically by moods of depression. These deepened and became chronic during my stay at the Brest hospital, especially after witnessing such humiliating incidents. I felt that I could never again adjust myself to the conditions of Blacks in the States after the spell of freedom from racism in France, I did not want to go back and my feeling was shared by many Black soldiers.

I thought of remaining in France, getting my discharge there and possibly becoming a French citizen. But I did not know how to go about this. Besides, I was ill, and there was my Mother whom! wanted to see again. Probably, some day, if I got well, I would come back—or so I thought as I lay in the hospital at Brest.

Finally, the day came. We were discharged from the hospital, given casual’s pay (one month’s pay), which in my case amounted to $33, and boarded the ship for home. There was no change in the Jim Crow pattern. We were merely transferred from a Jim Crow hospital to a Jim Crow hospital ship. We Blacks found ourselves quartered in a separate section of the ship. The segregation, however, did not extend to the mess hall or the lavatories (heads). I guess that would have been too much trouble. But the ship’s military command passed up no opportunity to let us know our place.

For example, on the first day out we were given tickets for mess—~-breakfast, lunch and supper. We were supposed to present them to a checker who stood at the foot of the stairway leading up to the mess hall. A Black soldier who had evidently misplaced his ticket tried to slip by the checker unnoticed, but he was not quick enough. A cracker officer who was standing by the checker hollered: “Hey, Nigger, come back here!”

The guy kept going and tried to merge into a group of us Blacks who had already passed through. Again the officer shouted, “Nigger, come back here. You, I mean. I mean the tall one over there. That nigger knows who I’m calling.” The soldier finally turned and walked back. Purple with rage, protected by his bars and white skin, the officer said, “Listen, you Black son of a bitch, where is your ticket?” Clearly, the officer had already gauged his man and concluded that there was no fight in him,

“I couldn’t find it,” said the soldier.

“Well, why didn’t you say that in the first place instead of tryin’ toslip through heah? Well, you go on back and try to find it. If you can’t, see the sergeant in charge. Don’t evah try that trick again,” said the officer. His anger seemed to ebb and a glow of self-satisfaction spread across his face. He had done his chore for the day. He had put a nigger in his place.

The seas were rough again. It was a small ship, leased from the Japanese. Most of us were seasick. The sailors were having a ball at our expense, When one of us would rush to the rail to vomit, one of them would holler, “A dollar he comes.”

One night, the ship tilted sharply and a number of us were thrown out of our bunks, The bunks were in tiers and I was in a top one, I got a pretty hard bump. The next morning on deck the sailors were talking loudly among themselves (for our benefit of course),

“Gee,” said one, “this is the roughest sea I’ve ever seen. This old pile is about to come apart, The Japs leased us the worst ship they had.”

“It just might be sabotage,” another one suggested,

“I hope we make it, but I’m not so sure,” said another,

Not being seamen, most of us were taking this seriously, A Black soldier turned to me and said, “You know man, after all I’ve been through, if this ship were to sink now almost in sight of home, I would get off and walk the water like the good Lord,”

Another voice, that of a white sergeant from Florida who had been rather friendly to us: “You know,” he drawled, “this reminds me of old Sam down home.”

Here it comes, we thought, one of those nigger jokes.

“He was up theah on the gallows with a rope around his neck and the sheriff said, ‘Well Sam, is there anything you want to say before you die?

“All T got to say sheriff, said Sam, ‘this sho’ would be a lesson to me,’ ”

The voyage proceeded uneventfully, with one exception, The gamblers among us were out to get the soldiers’ casual pay. The law of concentration of money into fewer and fewer hands was in process, This was taking place in one of the endless crap games which started in the Bay of Biscay and wound up at Sandy Hook,

IT never really gambled, even in the Army with room and board guaranteed, If you were broke, you could always borrow some money. The lender knew you couldn’t run out on him. His only risk was that you might become a casualty. But motivated by nothing more than sheer boredom, I got into the game this time.

After all, what good was $33 going to do me? To my surprise, I hit a streak of luck and over a period of a week in and out of the game, I ran my paltry grub stake up to the tremendous sum of $1200, That was the high point, after which time my luck began to peter out. Nevertheless, I left the ship with $500. It was my last gambling venture,

That morning, we lined up at the rail as our ship passed Sandy Hook and pulled into New York Harbor, It was my first view of the New York skyline, Overcome with emotion, tears welled up in my eyes, Embarrassed, I looked around and found that I was not alone. The guy next to me was obviously crying,

Our landing was a memorable one, Ship stacks were blasting, foghorns blowing, bells were ringing and fire boats were sending up great sprays of water, Passengers in ferryboats were waving and shouting greetings.

Upon docking, we were met by two reception committees of young women. A white one to receive the white soldiers and a Black one to greet us, This time segregation didn’t bother us at all, we were so pleased to see the pretty Black girls, They drew us aside as we came down the gang plank, ushered us into waiting ambulances, and drove us to Grand Central Palace which had been converted into a deharkation hospital, Leaving us in the lobby, they said goodbye and promised to come back soon and show us around.

A woman from the Red Cross took our home addresses to notify our families of our arrival. We were then escorted into a large room and told to strip off our clothes. Leaving them in the room, we then went through the delousing process. We were sprayed with some sort of chemical and washed off under showers. We were then given pajamas and a bathrobe and shown to our Jim Crow ward.

The next day, after a physical examination, we were paid off, receiving all of our back pay, In my case, it was for twelve months, amounting to about $450, This, plus the $500 I had won on the ship, seemed to me a small fortune, the largest amount of money I had ever had in my life. J was, so to speak, chafing at the bit, raring to get out and up to famed Harlem.

On the ship, I had met a Black sergeant named Patterson, who was from the 369th, the old Fifteenth New York. He had also won a considerable sum in the crap game. He suggested that we team up and go to Harlem together. He said he knew his way around there since that was where he lived before he joined the Army.

After the pay off, we were still without clothes. But a clothing salesman came around to take orders for new uniforms. Patterson and I ordered suits, for which we were measured. In a couple of hours the man was back with two brand new whip cord uniforms with chevrons and service stripes sewed on. We had also ordered shoes, which were promptly delivered, We then sneaked out of the hospital.

After we banked most of our money downtown, we took the subway up to 125th Street and visited several “Buffet Flats” (a current euphemism for a high-class whorehouse), drinking and looking over the girls. Patterson seemed to be an old friend of all the madams. They greeted him like a long lost brother. We finally wound up in one real classy joint where we stayed for four days, playing sultan-in-a-harem with the girls.

We returned to the hospital, expecting to be sharply reprimanded and restricted to quarters, but the doctor on his rounds merely asked, “Where have you boys been?” Before we could answer, he simply said, “I suggest that you stick around a day or two, we have some tests to make.”

From New York, we left for Camp Grant near Rockford, Illinois, where we were demobilized out of the service, I was discharged on April 29, 1919. After a cursory examination, I was pronounced physically fit. “What about my chronic endocarditis and chronic nephritis?” I protested,

“Oh, you're all right, you’ve overcome it all. You’re young and fit as a fiddle,” the doctor answered me. From Camp Grant I returned home to Chicago to see my parents.

REUNION WITH OTTO

Not too long after my discharge, I came home one evening to find Otto. He had just arrived after mustering out of the service at Camp Grant. We were all happy to see him, especially Mother. He showed us his honorable discharge.

“You know,” he said, “I’m lucky to get this.”

He then told stories about his harrowing experiences in a stevedore battalion in the South and then in France. The main mass of Black draftees had been relegated to these labor units, euphemistically called “service battalions,” “engineers,” “pioneer infantry,” ete.

Regardless of education or ability, young Blacks were herded indiscriminately into these stevedore outfits and faced the drudgery and hard’ work with no possibility of promotion beyond the rank of corporal. With few exceptions, the officers were KKK whites, as also were the sergeants. Many of them were plantation riding boss types, especially recruited for these jobs. Southern newspapers openly carried want ads calling for white men who had “experience in handling Negroes,” Black draftees were not only subjected to the drudgery of hard labor, but insults, abuse, and in many cases blows from white officers and sergeants.

Otto told us his worst experience was in Camp Stewart in Newport News, Virginia, where he was stationed during the terribly cold winter of 1917-18, For a considerable period after their arrival, they were forced to live in tents without floors or stoves. In most cases, they had only a blanket, some not even that.

New arrivals to the camp were forced to stand around fires outside all night or sleep under trees for partial protection from the weather, For months there were no bathing facilities nor clothing for the men, These conditions were subsequently changed as a result of protests by the men and reports by investigators.

His outfit landed in the port of St. Lazare, France, and during the great advance participated in the all-out effort to keep the front-lines supplied in the “race to Berlin.” They worked from dawn to nightfall unloading supplies, including all kinds of railroad equipment, engines, tractors and bulldozers. They built and repaired roads, warehouses and barracks. Discipline was strict; guys were thrown in the guardhouse on the most flimsy pretexts. A Black soldier seen on the street with a French woman was likely to be arrested by the MPs.

“The spirit of St. Lazare,” said one officer, “is the spirit of the South.”

Needless to say, Otto often found himself in the guard house as a result of fights, AWOLs, etc. How he escaped general court martial or imprisonment I don’t know.

His outfit was finally moved to the American military base at Le Mans, about a hundred miles from Paris. Things were somewhat better there. There were even a few “reliable” Black corporals who were allowed weekend passes to visit Paris, Otto was assigned to mess duty as a cook,

When he applied for leave, he was refused, however, “Well, I didn’t intend to come this close to Paris without seeing it,” he said, “so I went AWOL.”

He did not see much of it, however, before he was arrested by MPs. I was surprised to learn that he had been in Paris during the period that I was in the hospital in Neuilly. Most of his time in the great city was spent in the Hotel St. Anne, the notorious American military jail run by the sadistic Marine captain, “hard-boiled Smith.”

Here now, bitter and disillusioned, Otto continued his rebellion, It led him first to the Garvey movement where he served for a brief period as an officer in Garvey’s Black Legion, Then in succession, Wobblies, or Industrial Workers of the World ([WW), the African Blood Brotherhood and finally the Communist Party—joining soon after its unity convention in 1921. After returning from the service, Otto stayed at home only a short time and then moved in with some of his new friends.

Chapter 3

Searching for Answers

Back home in Chicago, I was soon working again as a waiter on the Michigan Central Railroad. As I have already mentioned, the first day of the bloody Chicago race riot (July 28, 1919) came while I was working on the Wolverine run up through Michigan, When arrived home from work that afternoon, the whole family greeted me emotionally. We were all there except for Otto. The disagreements I had had with my Father in the past were forgotten, Both my Mother and sister were weeping. Everyone was keyed up and had been worrying about my safety in getting from the station to the house.

Following our brief reunion, I tore loose from the family to find out what was happening outside. I went to the Regimental Armory at Thirty-fifth and Giles Avenue because I wanted to find some of my buddies from the regiment. The street, old Forrest Avenue, had recently been renamed in honor of Lt. Giles, a member of our outfit killed in France. I knew they would be planning an armed defense and I wanted to get in on the action. I found them and they told me of their plans. It was rumored that Irishmen from west of the Wentworth Avenue dividing line were planning to invade the ghetto that night, coming in across the tracks by way of Fifty-first Street. We planned a defensive action to meet them.

it was not surprising that defensive preparations were under way. There had been clashes before, often when white youths in “athletic clubs” invaded the Black community. These “clubs” were really racist gangs, organized by city ward heelers and precinct captains,

Once of the guys from the regiment took us to the apartment of a friend, It had a good position overlooking Fifty-first Street near State. Someone had brought a Browning submachine gun; he’d gotten it sometime before, most likely from the Regimental Armory. We didn’t ask where it had come from, or the origin of the 1903 Springfield rifles (Army issue) that appeared. We set to work mounting the submachine gun and set up watch for the invaders, Fortunately for them, they never arrived and we all returned home in the morning, The following day it rained and the National Guard moved into the Black community, so overt raids by whites did not materialize.

Ours was not the only group which used its recent Army training for self-defense of the Black community. We heard rumors about another group of veterans who set up a similar ambush, On several occasions groups of whites had driven a truck at breakneck speed up south State Street, in the heart of the Black ghetto, with six or seven men in the back firing indiscriminately at the people on the sidewalks,

The Black veterans set up their ambush at Thirty-fifth and State, waiting in a car with the engine running, When the whites on the truck came through, they pulled in behind and opened up with a machine gun, The truck crashed into a telephone pole at Thirty-ninth Street, most of the men in the truck had been shot down and the others fled, Among them were several Chicago police officers—“off duty,” of course!

I remember standing before the Angeles Flats on Thirty-fifth and Wabash where the day before four Blacks had been shot by police. It appeared that enraged Blacks had set fire to the building and were attacking some white police officers when the latter fired on them.

Along with other Blacks, I gloated over the mysterious killing of two Black cops with a history of viciousness in the Black community, They had been found dead in an alley between State and Wabash, Undoubtedly they had been killed by Blacks who had taken advantage of the confusion to settle old scores with these Black enforcers of the white man’s law.

Bewilderment and shock struck the Black community as well. I had seen Blacks standing before the burned-out buildings of their former homes, trying to salvage whatever possible, Apparent on their faces was bewilderment and anger.

The Chicago rebellion of 1919 was a pivotal point in my life, Always I had been hot-tempered and never took any insults lying down. This was even more true after the war. I had walked out of a number of jobs because of my refusal to take any crap from anyone, My experiences abroad in the Army and at home with the police left me totally disillusioned about being able to find any solution to the racial problem through the help of the government; for I had seen that official agencies of the country were among the most racist and most dangerous to me and my people.

I began to see that I had to fight; I had to commit myself to struggle against whatever it was that made racism possible. Racism, which erupted in the Chicago riot—and the bombings and terrorist attacks which preceded it---must be eliminated. My spirit was not unique--it was shared by many young Blacks at that time, The returned veterans and other young militants were all fighting back. And there was a lot to fight against, Racism reached a high tide in the summer of 1919, This was the “Red Summer” which involved twenty-six race riots across the country—“red” for the blood that ran in the streets, Chicago was the bloodiest.

The holocaust in Chicago was the worst race riot in the nation’s post-war history. But riots took place in such widely separate places as Long View, Texas, Charleston, South Carolina; Elaine, Arkansas, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Omaha, Nebraska. The flareup of racial violence in Omaha, my old home town, followed the Chicago riots by less than two months, It resulted in the lynching of Will Brown, a packing house worker, for an alleged assault on a white woman, When Omaha’s mayor, Edward P. Smith, sought to intervene, he was seized by the mob. They were close to hanging the mayor from a trolley pole when police cut the rope and rushed him to a hospital, badly injured.

The common underlying cause of riots in most of the northern cities was the racial tension caused by the migration of tens of thousands of Blacks into these centers and the competition for jobs, housing and the facilities of the city. Rather than being at a temporary peak, this outbreak of racism was more like the rising of a plateau—-it never got any higher, but it never really went down, either. Writing in the middle of a riot in Washington, D.C., that summer, the Black poet Claude McKay caught the bitter and belligerent mood of many Blacks:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursed lot.

if we must die, O let us nobly die

So that our precious blood may not be shed

Jn vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

* Okinsmen! We must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

‘The war and the riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919 left me bitter and frustrated. I felt that I could never again adjust to the situation of Black inequality. But how had it come about? Who was responsible?

Chicago in the early twenties was an ideal place and time for the education of a Black radical. As a result of the migration of Blacks during World War I, the Chicago area came to have the largest concentration of Black proletarians in the country. It was a major point of contact for these masses with the white labor movement and its advanced, radical sector. In the thirties it was to become a main testing ground for Black and white labor unity.

The city itself was the core of a vast urban industrial complex. Sprawling along the southeast shore of Lake Michigan, the area includes five Illinois counties and two in Indiana. The latter contains such industrial towns as East Chicago, Gary and Hammond. This metropolitan area contains the greatest concentration of heavy industry in the country.

By the second half of the twentieth century, it had forged into the lead of the steel-making industry, surpassing the great Monongahela Valley of Pittsburgh in the production of primary metals; including steel mill, refining and non-ferrous metals operations. There was the gigantic U.S. Steel Corporation in Gary, the Inland Steel Company plant in East Chicago and the U.S. Steel South Works, These are now the three largest steel works in the United States. The steel mills of the Chicago area supply more than 14,000 manufacturing plants,

Chicago was at that time, and remains today, the world’s largest railway center. It ranks first in the manufacture of railroad equipment, including freight and passenger cars, Pullmans, locomotives and specialized rolling stock.

The core city itself was most famous for its wholesale slaughter and meat packing industry. Chicago was known as the meat capital of the world, or in Carl Sandburg’s more homely terms, “hog butcher for the nation.”

The city’s colossal wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few men, who comprised the industrial, commercial and financial oligarchy. Among these were such giants as Judge Gary of the mighty U.S. Steel; Cyrus McCormick of International Harvester, the meat packers Philip D, Armour, Gustavus Swift and the Wilson brothers; George Pullman. of the Pullman Works; Rosenwald of Montgomery Ward; General Wood of Sears and Roebuck; the “merchant prince” Marshall Field; and Samuel Insull of utilities. These were the real rulers, Ostensible political power rested in the notoriously corrupt, gangster ridden, county political machine headed by Mayor William Hale (Big Bill) Thompson, who carried on the tradition exposed as early as 1903 by Lincoln Steffens in his book, The Shame of the Cities.

The glitter and wealth of Chicago’s Gold Coast was based on the most inhuman exploitation of the city’s largely foreign-born working force. A scathing indictment of the horrible conditions in Chicago's meat packing industry was contained in Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, published in 1910. It was inevitable that the wage slave would rebel, that Chicago should become the scene of some of the nation’s bloodiest battles in the struggle between labor and capital, The first of these clashes was the railroad strike of 1877 which erupted in pitched battles between strikers and federal troops,

Then in 1886 came the famous Haymarket riot which grew out of a strike for the eight-hour day at the McCormick reaper plant. During a protest rally, a bomb was thrown which killed one policeman and injured six others. ‘This led to the arrest of eight anarchist leaders; four were hanged, one committed suicide or was murdered in his cell, and the others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Obviously being tried and executed simply because they were labor leaders, these innocent men became a cause célebre of international labor, Thousands of visitors made yearly pilgrimages to the city where monuments to the executed men were raised, Haymarket became a rallying word for the eight-hour day. The martyrs were memorialized by the designation of the first of May as International Labor Day.

Several years later the city was the scene of the great Pullman strike led by Eugene V. Debs and his radical but lily-white American Railway Union, which precipitated a nationwide shutdown of railroads in 1894. Again the federal troops were called in and armed clashes between workers and troops ensued. ‘These battles were merely high points in the city’s long history of labor radicalism. It was the national center of the early anarcho-socialist movements. In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or Wobblies) was founded there. The IWW maintained its headquarters and edited its paper, Solidarity, there. In 1921, Chicago was to become the site of the founding convention of the Workers (Communist) Party, USA, which maintained its headquarters and the editorial offices of the Daily Worker there from 1923 to 1927.

Blacks, however, played little or no role in the turbulent early history of the Chicago labor movement. This was so simply because they were not a part of the industrial labor force. Prior to World War I, Blacks were employed mainly in the domestic or personal service occupations, untouched by labor organizations. They were not needed in industry where the seemingly endless tide of cheap European immigrant labor—Irish, Scots, English, Swedes, Germans, Poles, East Europeans and Italians—sufficed to fill the city’s manpower needs.

The only opportunity Blacks had of entering basic industry was as strikebreakers. Thus, in the early part of the century, Blacks were brought in as strikebreakers on two important occasions, the stockyards strike of 1904 and the city-wide teamsters’ strike in 1905. In the first instance, Blacks were discharged as soon as the strike was broken. After the teamsters’ strike, a relatively large number of Blacks remained. As a result of the defeat of the 1904 strike, the packing houses remained virtually unorganized for thirteen more years, and the animosities which developed toward the Black strikebreakers became a part of the racial tension of the city.

At the outbreak of World War I, the situation with respect to Chicago’s Black labor underwent a basic change, Now Blacks were needed to fill the labor vacuum caused by the war boom and the quotas on foreign immigration. Chicago's employers turned to the South, to the vast and untapped reservoir of Black labor eager to escape the conditions of plantation serfdom--exacerbated by the cotton crisis, the boll weevil plague and the wave of lynchings. The “great migrations” began and continued in successive waves through the sixties.

During the war, the occupational status of Blacks thus shifted from largely personal service to basic industry. In the tens of thousands, Blacks flocked to the stockyards and steel mills. During the war, the Black population went from 50,000 to 100,000. Successive waves of Black migration were to bring the Black population to over a million within the next fifty years. Black labor, getting its first foothold in basic industry during the war, had now become an integral part of Chicago’s industrial labor force.4

With the tapping of this vast reservoir of cheap and unskilled labor, there was no longer any need for the peasantry of eastern and southern Europe. There was, however, a difference between the position of Blacks and that of the European immigrants. The latter, after a generation or two, could rise to higher skilled and better paying jobs, to administrative and even managerial positions. They were able to leave the ethnic enclaves and disperse throughout the city—to become assimilated into the national melting pot, The Blacks, to the contrary, found themselves permanently relegated to a second-class status in the labor force, with a large group outside as a permanent surplus labor pool to be replenished when necessary from the inexhaustible reservoir of Black, poverty-ridden and land-starved peasantry of the South.

‘The employers now had in hand a new source of cheap labor, the victims of racist proscription, to use as a weapon against the workers’ movement. Indeed, this went hand in hand with the Jim Crow policies of the trade union leaders, who had been largely responsible for keeping Blacks out of basic industry in the first place.

These labor bureaucrats premised their racism on the doctrine of a natural Black inferiority, The theory of an instinctive animosity between the races was a powerful instrument for an anti-union, anti-working class, divide and rule policy. The use of racial differences was found to be a much more effective dividing instrument than the use of cultural and language differences between various white ethnic groups and the native born. As we know, ethnic conflicts proved transient as the various European nationalities became assimilated into the general population. Blacks, on the other hand, remain to this day permanently unassimilable under the present system.

Such were conditions in the days when I undertook my search for answers to the question of Black oppression and the road to liberation. Living conditions were pretty rough then, and I had gone back to my old trade of waiting tables in order to make some sort of living.

But I was restless, moody, short-tempered-—-qualities ill-suited to the trade, Naturally, I had trouble holding a job. My trouble was not with the guests so much as with my immediate superiors; captains, head waiters and dining car stewards, most of whom were white. In less than a month after the Chicago riot, I lost my job on the Michigan Central as a result of a run-in with an inspector.

The dining car inspectors were a particularly vicious breed. Their job was to see that discipline was maintained and service kept up to par. These inspectors, whom we called company spies, would board the train unexpectedly anywhere along the route, hoping to catch a member of the crew violating some regulation or not giving what they considered proper service. They would then reprimand the guilty party personally, or if the offense was sufficiently serious, would turn him in to the main office to be laid off or fired. Usually the inspector’s word was law from which there was no appeal. The dining car crew had no unions in those days.

This particular inspector (his name was McCormick) had taken a dislike to me. He had made that clear on other occasions. The feeling was mutual. Perhaps he sensed my independent attitude. He probably felt I was not sufficiently impressed by him and did not care about my job. He was right on both counts.

He boarded the Chicago-bound train one morning in Detroit, We were serving breakfast. It was just one of those days when everything went wrong. People were lined up at each end of the diner, waiting to be served. Service was slow. The guests were squawking and I was in a mean mood myself. I was cutting bread in the pantry when McCormick peered in and shouted, “Say, Hall, that silver is in terrible condition.”

The silver! What the hell is this man talking about dirty silver when I’ve got all these people out there clamoring for their breakfast. 2

“I’ve been noticing you lately,” he continued. “It looks as though you don’t want to work. If you don't like your job why in hell don't you quit?”

I took that as downright provocation. “Damn you and your job!” I exploded, advancing on him.

He turned pale and ran out of the pantry. A friend of mine in the crew grabbed me by the wrist.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Hall? Are you crazy?” It was only then that I realized that I had been waving the bread knife at the inspector.

In a few minutes, the brakeman and the conductor came into the pantry. MeCormick brought up the rear,

“That’s the one,” he said pointing at me.

Addressing me, the conductor said, “The inspector here says you threatened him with a knife. Is that true?”

I denied it, stating that I had been cutting bread when the argument started and had a knife in my hand. I wasn’t threatening him with it. My friend (who had grabbed my wrist) substantiated my story.

“Well,” said the conductor, “you’d better get your things and ride to Chicago in the coach. We don’t want any more trouble here, and the inspector has said he doesn’t want you in the dining car.”

I went up forward in the coach. I got off the train in Chicago at Sixty-third and Stony Island. I didn’t go to the downtown station, thinking that the cops might be waiting there.

So much for my job with the Michigan Central.

I went back to working sporadically in restaurants, hotels and on trains. I didn’t stay anywhere very long. The first job that I regarded as steady was the Illinois Athletic Club, where I remained for several months, 1 was beginning to settle down a little and participate in the social life of the community, attending dances, parties and visiting cabarets. The Royal Gardens, a night club on Thirty-first Street, was one of my favorite hangouts. King Oliver and Louis Armstrong were often featured there. At the Panama, on Thirty-fifth Street between State and Wabash, we went to see our favorite comedians-—Butter Beans and Susie.

It was on one of these occasions that I met my first wife, Hazel. She belonged to Chicago’s Black social elite, such as it was. Her father had died and her family was on the downgrade. Her mother was left with four children, three girls and a boy, of whom Hazel was the oldest. The other children were still teenagers, and Hazel and her mother had supported them by doing domestic work and catering for wealthy whites. I was twenty-one and she was twenty five.

Hazel was attractive, a high school graduate. She spoke good English and, as Mother said, “had good manners.” She worked for Montgomery Ward, then owned by the philanthropic Rosenwald family, the first big company to hire Blacks as office clerks. She had a nice singing voice and used to sing around at parties. Her friends were among the Black upper strata and the family belonged to the Episcopal Church on Thirty-eighth and Wabash which at that time was the church of the colored elite. We were married in 1920. I was all decked out in a rented swallowtail coat, striped pants, spats and a derby. The ceremony was impressive. Photos appeared in the Chicago Defender.

In a short time, the romance wore off. Hazel’s ambition to get ahead in the world, “to be somebody,” clashed with my love of freedom. I soon had visions of myself, a quarter century hence-making mortgage payments on a fancy house, installments on furniture, and trapped in a drab, lower middle-class existence, surrounded by a large and quarrelsome family.

The worst of it was having to put up with being kicked around on the job and taking all that crap from headwaiters and captains. I had been working at the Athletic Club for several months before I got married. Then nobody had bothered me. When I asked for time off to get married, the white headwaiter and the captain seemed delighted. “Sure Hall, that’s fine. Congratulations, Take a couple of weeks off.”

Upon my return, I immediately felt a change in their attitude, Now that I was married, they felt they had me where they wanted me. They became more and more demanding. One day at lunch I had some difficulty getting my orders out of the kitchen, and the guests were complaining—not an unusual occurrence in any restaurant. Instead of helping me out and calming down the guests, or seeing what the hang-up was in the kitchen, the captain started shouting at me in front of the guests. “What’s the matter with you, Hall? Why don’t you bring these people’s orders?”

“Can’t you see that I’m tied up in the kitchen?” I said. “Why don’t you go out and see the chef instead of hollering at me!”

All puffed up, he yelled out, “Don’t give me any of your lip or I'll snatch that badge off you!”

I jerked my badge off, threw both badge and side towel into his face, and shouted, “Take your badge and shove it!”

I was moving on him when a friend of mine, Johnson, a waiter at the next station, jumped between us, I turned away, walked down the steps, through the kitchen and into the dressing room. Johnson followed me into the dressing room a few minutes later. “Hurry up and get out of here. They’re calling the cops.” I changed and left.

My marriage went down the drain along with the job. That was a period of post-war crisis. Jobs were hard to find, and especially so for me since I had been blacklisted from several places because of my temper. 1 was no longer the same man that Hazel married, and the truth of the matter was that I wanted it that way. Her hangups were typical of Black aspirants for social status—strivers, we called them-—-who never really doubted the validity of the prejudice from which they suffered. Hazel slavishly accepted white middle class values. I, on the other hand, was looking around trying to figure out how best to maladjust

MY REBELLION

For me, the break-up of our marriage in the spring of 1920 destroyed my last ties with the old conventional way of life. I was completely disenchanted with the middle class crowd into which Hazel was trying to draw me. But more important, I not only rejected the status quo, I was determined to do something about it--to make my rebellion count.

I sought answers to a number of questions: What was the nature of the forces behind Black subjugation? Who were its main beneficiaries? Why was racism being entrenched in the north in this period? How did it differ from the South? Could the situation be altered and, if so, what were the forces for change and the program?

l renewed my search for a way to go, pressed by a driving need for a world view which would provide a rational explanation of society and a clue to securing Black freedom and dignity. My search was to continue during what must have been the most virulent and widespread racist campaign in U.S. history, The forces of racist bigotry unleashed during the riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919 were still on the march through the twenties. Indeed, they had intensified and extended their campaign.

The whole country seemed gripped in a frenzy of racist hate. Anti-Black propaganda was carried in the press, in magazine articles, literature and in theater. D.W. Griffith’s obscene movie, The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and pictured Blacks as depraved animals, was shown to millions.5 Thomas Dickson’s two novels, The Klansman (upon which Griffith’s picture was based) and The Leopard's Spots (an earlier book on the theme of the white man’s burden) were best sellers. Racist demagogues of the stripe of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina, Vardeman of Mississippi, and “Cotton” Ed Smith of South Carolina, were in demand on northern lecture platforms.

Closely behind the trumpeters of race-hate rode their cavalry, A revived Ku Klux Klan now extended to the north and made its appearance in twenty-seven states.6 This organization, embracing millions, headed the list of a whole rash of super-patriotic groups who were anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-foreign-born and anti-Black. The apostles of white, Anglo-Saxon and Nordic supremacy included in their galaxy of ethnic outcasts Asians (the “yellow peril”), Latin Americans and other foreign-born from southern and eastern Europe. Their hate propaganda pitted Protestants against Catholics, Christians against Jews, native against foreign-born, and all against the Blacks, upon whom was fixed the stigma of inherent and eternal inferiority.

It seemed as though the prophets of the “lost cause” were out to reverse their military defeat at Appomattox by the cultural subversion of the north. That they were receiving encouragement by powerful northern interests was self-evident. Tin Pan Alley added its contribution to the attack with a spate of Mammy songs, and along the same vein, “That’s Why Darkies Were Born”:

Someone had to pick the cotton,

Someone had to plant the corn,

Someone had to slave and be able to sing,

That's why darkies were born.

Though the balance is wrong,

Sull your faith must be strong,

Accept your destiny brothers, listen to me.

A main objective of the racist assault was the academic establishment. The old crude forms of racist propaganda proved inadequate in an age of advancing science. The hucksters of race hate conducted raids upon the sciences, especially upon the new disciplines-—anthropology, ethnology and psychology--in an attempt to establish a scientific foundation for the race myth.

The new “science of race” evolved and flourished during the period, Spadework for this grotesque growth had been done in the middle of the last century by the Frenchman, Count Arthur D. Gobineau, in his work, The Inequality of the Human Races (1851-1853), It was carried on by his disciple, the Englishman turned German, Houston Chamberlain, who asserted that racial mixture was a natural crime. In the U.S, early efforts in this field were the works of Knott and Glidden. Also, there was Ripley's Races of Mankind.

Carrying on in this pseudo-scientific tradition during the war and postwar years were the popular theorists Lathrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color: Against White World Supremacy (1923) and Madison Grant, The Passing of a Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History (1916). The cornerstone of this pseudo-scientific structure was Social Darwinism which was an attempt to subvert Darwin’s theory of evolution and arbitrarily apply natural selection in plant and animal society to human society. According to the Social Darwinists, led by Herbert Spencer, the British sociologist, history was a continuous struggle for existence between races. In this struggle, the Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, or Aryan civilizations naturally survived as the fittest.

The racists had a field day in history, long the area in which the heroes of the “lost cause” had their greatest, most effective concentration. They had held chairs in some of the nation’s most prestigious universities—Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, etc, Among such historians was William Archibald Dunning, who during his long tenure at Columbia miseducated generations of students by his distortions of the Reconstruction, Civil War and slave periods.7

In the academic world this pseudoscience of racism held sway with only a few open challengers. The latter seemed to be isolated voices in the wilderness, as the counter-offensive was slow in getting underway. In anthropology there was Franz Boaz’s antiracist thrust, Mind of Primitive Man. This was written in 1911, and not widely known at the time. The works of his students and colleagues-—-most notably Melville Hershovitz, The Myth of the Negro Past, Jane Weltfish, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Otto Klineburg-—-were not to appear until the next decade.

In history, the movement for revision was then decades away. It only became a trend with the Black Revolt of the sixties, Black scholars had pioneered the reexamination: W.E.B. DuBois, his tour de force, Black Reconstruction, and the epilogue, “Propaganda of History,” which contained a bitter indictment of the white historical establishment, was not to appear until the mid-thirties. J.A. Rogers, popular Black historian, had not yet appeared on the scene, Young Carter Woodson, who had founded his Association for the Study of Negro History in 1915, only began to publish the Journal of Negro History in 1916. His own important historical works were yet to come.

‘Thus, from its tap-roots in the Southern plantation system, the anti-Black virus had spread throughout the country, shaping the pattern of Black-white relationships in the industrial urban north as well. The dogma of the inherent inferiority of Blacks had permeated the national consciousness to become an integral part of the American way of life. Racist dogma, first a rationale for chattel slavery and then plantation peonage, was now carried over to the north as justification for a new system of de facto segregation.

Black subjugation, city-style Jim Crow, became fixed by the twenties, and continues up to the present day. Its components were the residential segregation of the ghetto with its inferior education, slums and the second class status of Black workers in the labor force where they were relegated to the bottom rung of the occupational ladder and prevented by discrimination from moving into better skills and higher paid jobs.

Although its purpose was not clear to me then, I later realized that the virulent racism of the period served to justify and bulwark the structure of Black powerlessness which was developing in every northern city where we had become a sizable portion of the work force,

At the time the racist deluge simply revealed great gaps in my own education and knowledge. I knew that the propaganda was a tissue of lies, but I felt the need for disproving them on the basis of scientific fact. I rejected racism—the lie of the existence in nature of superior and inferior races--and its concomitant fiction of intuitive hostility between races. For one thing, it ran counter to my own background of experience in Omaha.

Religion as an explanation for the riddles of the universe I had rejected long before. I knew that our predicament was not the result of some divine disposition and therefore that racial oppression was neither a spiritual or natural phenomenon. It was created by man, and therefore must be changed by man, How? Well, that was the question to be explored. I had only a smattering of knowledge of natural and social sciences, much of which I had gathered through reading the lectures of Robert G. Ingersoll. It was through him that I discovered Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution through natural selection.

Armed with a dictionary and a priori knowledge gleaned from Ingersoll’s popularizations, I was able to make my way through Origin of the Species. Darwin showed the origin of the species to be a result of the process of evolution and not the mysterious act of a divine creation. Here at last was a scientific refutation of religious dogma. I had at last found a basis for my atheism which had before been based mainly upon practical knowledge.

Continuing my search, I found myself attracted to other social iconoclasts or image-destroyers, and to their attacks upon established beliefs. I remember staying up all night reading Max Nordau’s Conventional Lies of Our Civilization, being thrilled by his castigation of middle class hypocrisy, prejudices and philistinism. Moving on to the contemporary scene, I discovered H.L. Mencken, “The Sage of Baltimore,” and his “smart set” crowd.

For a short while, I was an avid reader of the Mercury which he helped to establish in 1920 as a forum for his views, I was particularly delighted by his critical potshots at some of the most sacred cultural cows of what he called “the American Babbitry,” “boobocracy,” “anthropoid majority’--Menckenian sobriquets for middle class commoners. Mencken enjoyed a brief popularity among young Black radicals of the day who saw in his searing diatribes against WASP cultural idols ammunition with which to blast the claims of white supremacists. The novelty soon wore off as it became clear that Mencken’s type of iconoclasm posed no real challenge to the prevailing social structure, In fact, it was reactionary. He sought to replace destroyed idols with even more reactionary oncs, as I soon found out.

Mencken’s philosophical mentor was none other than the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, prophet of the superman, of the aristocratic minority destined to rile over the unenlightened hoardes of Untermenschen—-the “perenially and inherently unequal majority of mankind.” Most Blacks then, including myself, who flirted with Mencken never accepted him fully. The one exception was George Schuyler of the Pittsburgh Courier, who took Mencken's snobbery and reactionary politics and made a career of them which has lasted for forty years.

What confused me most were the contentions of the Social Darwinists, who claimed to be the authentic continuators of Darwin’s theories. Darwin had not dealt with the question of race per se, But it had seemed to me that his theory of evolution precluded the myth of race. How could Darwin's theory which had helped me finally and irrevocably throw aside the veil of mysticism and put the understanding of the descent of man within my grasp—how could this be used as an endorsement of racism? Perhaps I had been wrong? Was I reading into Darwin more than, what he implied?

It was my brother Otto who finally cleared me up on this point. He and I were running in different circles, but we would meet from time to time and exchange notes. Otto pointed out that Social Darwinists had distorted Darwin by mechanically transferring the laws of existence among plants and animals to the field of social and human relations. Human society had its own laws, he asserted. Ah, what were those laws? That was the subject that I wanted to explore.

“You ought to quit reading those bourgeois authors and start reading Marx and Engels,” Otto told me, suggesting also that I read Henry Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society and the works of Redpath. ’

About this time I got a job as a clerk at the Chicago Post Office. I heard that jobs were available and that veterans were given preference. Following the advice of friends, I approached S.L. Jackson of the Wabash Avenue YMCA, who at that time was a Black Republican stalwart with connections in the Madden political machine. Jackson gave me a note to some Post Office official in charge of employment. I passed the civil service examination, in which veterans were given a ten percent advantage, and was employed as a substitute clerk.

The Post Office job in those days carried considerable prestige. It was almost the only clerical job open to Blacks. Postal workers, along with waiters, Pullman porters and tradesmen, were traditionally considered a part of the Black middle class. A number of prominent community leaders came from this group. Many officers of the old Eighth Illinois were postal employees, a good percentage of them mail-carriers.

The Post Office became a refuge for poor Black students and unemployed university graduates, For some of the latter it was a sort of way-station on the road to their professional careers. Others remained, settling for regular Post Office careers. But even here opportunities were limited. Blacks held only a few supervisory positions, as advancement depended solely on the discretion of the white postmaster.

On the job I found the work extremely boring. It consisted of standing before a case eight hours a night, sorting mail. All substitutes were relegated to the night shift. It took years to get on the day shift which was preempted by the veteran employees: On the other hand, I found the company of my new young fellow workers very stimulating.

In those days the organization of Black postal employees was the Phalanx Forum. Before the war, the organization had played an important political and social role in the community. It was dominated by the conservative crowd of social climbers and political aspirants, who were the most active group among postal employees and had close ties with the local Republican machine.

Their leadership was completely incffective with respect to the job issues of Black rank-and-file employees, and it had little or no influence over the younger group of new employees, which included many veterans and students. The gap between the old, conservative crowd and the new, youthful element was sharp. Among the latter a radical sentiment was growing.

I was immediately attracted to this group among whom I was to find friends who seemed to be impelled by the same motivations as myself-—to find new answers to the problems afflicting our people. Most of those with whom I fraternized considered the postal job as temporary, a step to other careers. Our interest at the time, therefore, was not so much with the immediate economic or onthe-job needs of Black postal workers, but with the “race problem” generally. The drive for unionization of postal employees was to come later.

The issue to which we addressed ourselves was the current campaign of white racist propaganda: how to counter it on the basis of scientific truth. We saw the network of racist lies as clearly aimed at justifying Black subjugation and destroying our dignity as a people. On this question we had long, endless discussions on the job while sorting mail, at rest, during lunch breaks and on Sundays when some of us would meet. I soon identified with what I considered the more vocal segment. Among our group of aspirant intellectuals there was a medical student, a couple of law students, a dentist (whom we all called “Doc”), students of education and some intellectually oriented workers like myself. On one Sunday when we had gathered, it was suggested, I think by Joc Mabley, that we organize ourselves as an informal discussion group, and that our purpose would be to answer the racist lies on the basis of scientific truth. The idea was instantly agreed upon.

The discussion circle was loosely organized, not more than a dozen participants in all, and bent on finding answers. The moving spirits of the group were John Heath, Joe Mabley and “Doc.”

Heath was a tall, light-complexioned man with high cheekbones. He was a graduate student in the field of education, anda man whose sterling character and keen intellect we all respected. Then there was Joc Mabley, a brilliant, small Black man. He had large velvety eyes and was a college dropout. He was married and had a family-—two or three children—and had settled down to a regular Post Office job, He and Doe were the only regular postal workers in our group—the rest of us being suhstitutes. Doc had set up an office on the Southside and was trying hard to build upa clientele while working night shifts.

Originally we had planned to meet every Sunday at noon as the most convenient time for the fellows on our shift. The meeting places were to alternate between the homes or apartments of the members. When we got to procedure, the group would choose a topic of discussion and ask for volunteers or assign a member to make introductory reports, He would then have a week to prepare the report, Our original plans included the eventual organization of a forum in which the issues of the day could be debated, and the holding of social affairs. All of this proved to be too ambitious, We found it impractical to have weekly meetings and finally agreed that twice a month was more feasible. The forum idea never got off the ground.

Among us I think we had most of the answers on the question of race, that is, to all but the big lie, the onc that was most convincing to the white masses and is the cornerstone on which the whole structure stood or fell: the assertion that Blacks have no history.

A leading formulator of the lie at that time was John Burgess, professor of political science and history at Columbia University:

The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin from the point of view of political ethics is a great sophism. A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself’ succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.

We wanted to refute the slanders on the basis of scientific truth. For this, we needed more ammunition and better weapons, particularly in the field of history. It was ahout this time that I met George Wells Parker, a brilliant young Black graduate student from Omaha’s Creighton University. I was introduced to him by my brother Otto, who had known him in Omaha. He was in Chicago to visit relatives and to conduct research for his dissertation. His major was history, I believe. We found him a virtual storehouse of knowledge on the race question, especially Black history. His major objective in life was apparently to refute the prevalent racist lies and to huild Black dignity and pride, He possessed wide knowledge and seemed to have read everything.

Parker called our attention to the writings of the great anthropologist Franz Boas; the Egyptologist Virchow; to Max Mueller (philologist who formulated the Aryan myth and then rejected it); to the Frenchman Jean Finot; to Sir Harry Johnstone (British authority on African history); and to the Italian Giuseppe Serg and his theory of the Mediterranean races, arefutation of the Aryan mythology. Proponents of this myth claimed all civilizations—Indian, Near East, Egyptians—as Aryan, One wonders why the Chinese were left out, but then that would have been too palpable a fraud! It was Parker who called our attention to Herodotus (ancient Greek historian) who had described the Egyptians of his time (around 400 B.C.) as “Black and with woolly hair.”

Otto and I introduced Parker to friends and acquaintances, and I, of course, to our discussion circle. He spoke before numerous groups. Everywhere there was hunger for his knowledge. Weeven brought him before the Bugs Club Forum in Washington Park, where he led a discussion on the race question.

This brilliant young man returned to Omaha to resume his studies. The next winter he was dead. We heard it was the result of a mental breakdown. Thus was a brilliant career cut short and a potentially great scholar lost. Surviving, I believe, was only one brief paper and some notes.

GARVEY’S BACK TO AFRICA MOVEMENT

But time and tide did not stand still to wait for our answers to the social problems of the day, or for the results of our intellectual researches. While we sought arguments with which to counter the racist thrust, the masses were forging their own weapons. Their growing resistance was finally to erupt on the political scene in the grcatest mass movement of Blacks since Reconstruction,

Great masses of Blacks found the answer in the Back to Africa program of the West Indian Marcus Garvey. Under his aegis this movement was eventually diverted from the encmy at home into utopian Zionistic channels of peaceful return to Africa and the establishment of a Black state in the ancestral land.

The organizational course of the movement was Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He first launched this organization in Jamaica, British West Indies, in 1914. Coming to the USA, he founded its first section in New York City in 1917. The organization grew rapidly during the war and the immediate post-war period, At its height in the early twenties, it claimed a membership of half a million. While estimates of the organization's membership vary-—from half a million to a million—it was the largest organization in the history of U.S. Blacks. There can be no doubt that its influence extended to millions who identified wholly or partially with its programs.

What in Garvey’s program attracted these masses?

Garvey was a charismatic leader and in that tradition best articulated the sentiments and yearnings of the masses of Black people. In his UNIA he also created the vehicle for their organization, Equally important, he was a master at understanding how to use pageantry, ritual and ceremony to provide the Black peasantry with psychological relief from the daily burdens of their oppression. His apparatus included such high sounding titles as potentate, supreme deputy potentate, knights of the Nile, knights of distinguished service, the order of Ethiopia, the dukes of Nigeria and Uganda. There were Black gods and Black angels and a flag of black, red and green: “Black for the race, Red for their blood and Green for their hopes.”

The movement’s program was fully outlined in the historic Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, adopted at the first convention of the organization in New York City August 13, 1920. In the manner of the Nation of Islam and its publication Muhammad Speaks (Bilalian News), the program of Garvey combined a realistic assessment of the conditions facing Blacks with a fantasy and mystification about the solution. Along with the Back to Africa slogan, the document contained a devastating indictment of the plight of the Black peoples in the United States. Expressing the militancy of its delegates, it called for opposition to the incquality of wages betwecn Blacks and whites, it protested their cxclusion from unions, their deprivation of land, taxation without representation, unjust military service, and Jim Crow laws.

Anticipating the Black Power Revolt of the sixties, the document called for “complete control of our social institutions without the interference of any other race or races.” Reflecting the rising worldwide anti-colonial movement of the period, it called for self-determination of peoples and repudiated the loosely formed League of Nations, declaring its decisions “null and void as far as the Blacks were concerned because it seeks to deprive them of their independence.” This latter point was in reference to the assignment of mandates to European powers over African territories wrested from the Germans.

Through this atmosphere of militancy, expressing the desire of the masses to defend their rights at home, ran the incongruent theme of Back to Africa. Declared Garvey:

Being satisfied to drink of the dregs from the cup of human progress will not demonstrate our fitness as a people to exist alongside others, but when of our own initiative we strike out to build industries, governments, and ultimately empires (sic), then and only then, will we as a race prove to our Creator and to man in general that we are fit to survive and capable of shaping our own destiny. Wake up, Africa! Let us work toward the one glorious end of a free, redeemed, and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations.

Who were Garvey’s followers?

Garvey's Zionistic message was beamed mainly to the submerged Black peasantry, especially its uprooted vanguard, the new migrants in such industrial centers as New York City, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis. These masses made up the rank and file of the movement. They were embittered and disillusioned by racist terror and unemployment, and saw in Garvey’s program of Back to Africa the fulfillment of their yearnings for land and freedom to be guaranteed by a government of their own.

On the other hand, Garveyism was the trend of a section of the ghetto lower middle classes, small businessmen, shopkeepers, property holders who were pushed to the wall, ruined or threatened with ruin by the ravages of the post-war crisis, Also attracted to Garveyism were the frustrated and unemployed Black intelligentsia: professionals, doctors, lawyers with impoverished clientele, storefront preachers who had followed their flocks to the promised land of the north, and poverty stricken students.

Garveyism reflected the desperation of these strata before the ruthless encroachments of predatory white corporate interests upon their already meager markets. It reflected an attempt by them to escape from the sharpening racist oppression, the terror of race riots, the lynchings, economic and social frustrations. It was from these strata that the movement drew its leadership cadres.

The immediate pecuniary interests of this element were expressed in the form of ghetto enterprises, the organization of a whole network of cooperative enterprises, including grocery stores, laundries, restaurants, hotels and printing plants. The most ambitious was the Black Star Steamship Line. Several ships were purchased and trade relations were established with groups in the West Indies and Africa, including the Republic of Liberia.

The New York City division comprised a large segment of the intensely nationalistic West Indian immigrants. West Indians were prominent in the leadership, in Garvey's close coterie, and in the organization’s inner councils. There can be no doubt of the considerable influence of this element on the organization. But the attempt on the part of some writers to brand the movement as a foreign import with no indigenous roots is superficial and without foundation in fact. It is clear that Garveyism had both a social and economic base in Black society of the twenties. Nor was Garvey’s nationalism a new trend among Blacks—nationalist currents had repeatedly emerged, going back even before the Civil War.

A key role in the movement was also played by deeply disillusioned Black veterans who had fought an illusory battle to “make the world safe for democracy” only to return to continued and even harsher slavery. Veterans were involved in the setting up of the skeleton army for the future African state, and in such paramilitary organizations as the Universal African Legion, the Universal Black Cross Nurses, the African Motor Corps and the Black Eagle Flying Corps. Many Black radicals—even some socialistically inclined—were swept into thé Garvey movement, attracted by its militancy.

Despite his hostility toward local communists, Garvey seemed to regard the Soviet experience with some favor-at least in the early years of his movement. This probably reflected the sentiments of many of his followers. As late as 1924, in an editorial in the Negro World, he publicly mourned the passing of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, calling him “probably the world’s greatest man between 1917 and ...1924.” On that occasion, he sent a cable to Moscow “expressing the sorrow and condolence of the 400,000,000 Negroes of the world.”

‘The Garvey movement revealed the wide rift between the policies of the traditional upper class of the NAACP and associates, and the life needs of the sorely oppressed people. It represented a mass rejection of the policies and programs of this leadership, which during the war had built up false hopes and now offered no tangible proposals for meeting the rampant anti-Black violence and joblessness of the post-war period. This mood was expressed by Garvey, who denounced the whole upper class leadership, claiming that they were motivated solely by the drive for assimilation and banked their hopes for equality on the support of whites—all classes of whom, he contended, were the Black man’s enemy. The policy of this leadership, he maintained, was a policy of compromise.

It was in these conditions that Garvey, as thespokesman for the new ghetto petty bourgeoisie, seized leadership of the incipient Black revolt and diverted it into the blind alley of utopian escapism.

My contact with the movement was limited. [ had never seen Garvey. I had missed his appearance in 1919 at the Eighth Regiment Armory. I never visited the organization’s Liberty Hall headquarters. In Chicago, the movement seemed to spring up overnight, I first took serious notice of it in 1920. I listened to its orators on street corners, watched its spectacular parades through the Southside streets, The black, red and green flag of the movement was carried at the head of the parade. The parades were lively and snappy; marching were the African Legion and the Universal Black Cross Nurses in their spotless white uniforms and white veils, All marched in step with a band. It was quite impressive, but to me it was unreal and had little or no relevance to the actual problems that confronted Blacks.

From the first, the Garvey movement met heavy opposition in Chicago, The powerful Chicago Defender, edited by Robert S. Abbott, took the lead. If not the world’s greatest weekly as its masthead proclaimed, it had great influence among Chicago and Sofithern Blacks, due to its role in promoting the migration to the north. It was widely read in the South where a daily newspaper of Athens, Georgia, called it “the greatest disturbing element that has yet entered Georgia.” The Defender was relentless in its attack, throwing scorn and contempt on the movement and Garvey himself.

In addition to The Defender’s attacks, the so-called Abyssinia Affair in the summer of 1920 served to discredit the movement. The Star Order of Ethiopia and Ethiopian Missionaries to Abyssinia was an extremist split off from Chicago’s UNIA branch. The leaders of the group held a parade and rally on Thirty-fifth and Indiana. Speakers clad in loud African costume called upon the crowd to return to their African ancestral land.

To show their scorn for the U.S., they burned an American flag, and when white policemen sought to intervene, the Abyssinians shot and killed two white men and wounded a third. This incident was blown up in the white press as an armed rebellion of Blacks. It was condemned on ali sides in the Black community and by its leaders, including the editors of The Defender, who helped authorities in capturing the Abyssinian dissidents.

Despite its repudiation by the official Garvey organization, the Abyssinian affair served to muddy the Garvey image in Chicago. I was working on the New York Central at the time and heard a graphic account of the affair from my aunts when I arrived intown the next day. They lived right around the corner on Indiana Avenue.

Despite the hostile Black press and the Abyssinian affair, the UNIA grew. At its height, it claimed a Chicago membership of 9,000 devoted followers. This is probably exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the sympathizers numbered in the tens of thousands.

Our Sunday discussion group underestimated the significance of the Garvey movement and the strength it was later to reveal. We regarded it as a transient phenomenon. We applauded some of the cultural aspects of the movement—Garvey’s emphasis on race pride, dignity, self-reliance, his exultation of things Black. This was all to the good, we felt. However, we rejected in its entirety the Back to Africa program as fantastic, unreal and a dangerous diversion which could only lead to desertion of the struggle for our rights in the USA. This was our country, we strongly felt, and Blacks should not waive their just claims to equality and justice in the land to whose wealth and greatness we and our forefathers had made such great contributions.

Finally, we could not go along with Garvey’s idea about inherent racial antagonisms between Black and white. This to us seemed equivalent to ceding the racist enemy one of his main points. While it is true that I personally often wavered in the direction of race against race, I was not prepared to accept the idea as a philosophy. It did not jibe with my experience with whites.

While rejecting Garvey’s program, our ideas for a viable alternative were still vague and unformed. The most important effect the Garvey movement had on us was that it put into clear focus the questions to which we sought answers.

Who were the enemies of the Black freedom struggle? While Garvey claimed the cntire white race was the enemy, it did not escape us that he was inconsistent, being soft on white capitalists. His main target was clearly white labor and the trade union movement. According to Garvey:

It seems strange and a paradox, but the only convenient friend the Negro worker or laborer has, in America, at the present time, is the white capitalist. The capitalist being selfish---seeking only the largest profit out of labor-—is willing and glad to use Negro labor wherever possible on a scale “reasonably” below the standard white union wage....but, if the Negro unionizes himself to the level of the white worker... the choice and preference of employment is given to the white worker... If the Negro takes my advice he will organize by himself and always keep his scale of wage a little lower than the whites until he is able to become, through proper leadership, his own employer; by doing so he will keep the good will of the white employer and live a little longer under the present scheme of things.

There was no doubt that Garvey was voicing the sentiments of the vast mass of new migrant workers. And it was not that we had any compunction about strikebreaking in industries from which Blacks were barred. In fact, that had been one of the ways Blacks broke into industries such as stockyards and steel. We were also keenly aware of the Jim Crow policies of the existing trade union leadership and of the anti-Black prejudices rampant among white workers. But in casting Blacks permanently into the role of strikebreakers, Garvey was helping to further divide an already polarized situation and playing into the hands of businessmen, bankers, factory owners and the reactionary leadership of the trade unions,

My own experience with unions in the waiters’ trade was bad. Old waiters would tell us how in the first part of the century they had listened to the siren call of white union leaders. They had gone out on strike, ostensibly to better their conditions, only to find their jobs immediately taken by whites. This had been quite a serious blow because at that time, Black waiters had had jobs in most of the best hotels and in a number of fine restaurants. It is therefore understandable that in 1920, we Black waiters felt not the slightest pang of conscience in taking over the jobs of white waiters on strike at the Marygold Gardens (the old Bismark Gardens) on the Northside, one of the swankiest night spots in Chicago, It was also probably the best waiter’s job in town; in fact, so good that some of the German captains who remained on the job used to drive to and from work in Cadillacs. The strike was broken after several months, and Blacks were turned out.

Strikebreaking to me was not a philosophy or principle as Garvey contended, but an expedient forced upon Blacks by the Jim Crow policies of the bosses and the unions.

Even as Garvey was putting forward such views, times were beginning to change. Large numbers of Blacks had been brought into industry during the war and had joined unions, especially in steel and the packing houses. A new industrial unionism was developing and raising the slogan of Black and white labor unity.

My sister Eppa’s experiences in 1919 at Swift Packing Company were a case in point, She was one of the first Black women to join the union during the organizing drive of the Stockyards Labor Council, which was headed by two communists-—-William Z. Foster and Jack Johnstone. The drive was supported by John Fitzpatrick, chairman of the Chicago Federation of Labor and a bitter foe of the Jim Crow machine of Samuel Gompers’ AFL. Despite inevitable racial tensions fostered by the employers, Eppa had seen the basic unity of interest between all workers and felt strongly that the union was the best place to fight for the interests of Black workers.

In looking back at our study of the Garvey movement, it must be evaluated in light of the fact that it was our first confrontation with nationalism as a mass movement. Our mistake, which I was to find out later through my own experience and study of nationalist movements, resulted from the failure to understand the contradictory nature of the nationalism of oppressed peoples. This contradiction or dualism was inherent in the inter-class character of these movements once they assume a popular mass form.

‘They comprise various classes and social groupings with conflicting interests, tendencies and motives, all gathered under the unifying banner of national liberation, each with its own concept of that goal and how it should be attained. These conflicts, at first submerged, surface as the movement develops.

‘They are expressed in two main currents (tendencies) within the movement. First of all, there is the nationalism which reflects the interests of the basic masses~-workers and peasants—-determined to fight for liberation against the oppressor of the nation. Then there is the nationalism of the Black bourgeoisie who, while at time in conflict with the white oppressors, tend toward compromise and accommodation to protect their own weak position.

From the very beginning this dualism was reflected in the Garvey movement. A highly vocal and aggressively dominant current within the movement was the drive of the small business, professional and intellectual elements for a Black controlled economy. They sought fulfillment of this goal through withdrawal to Africa where they envisioned establishment of their own State, their right to exploit their own masses free from the overwhelming competition of dominant white capital. (A historical example of this can be seen in Liberia.) They thought they could accomplish this, presumably with the acquiescence of the American white rulers, and even the active support of some.

On the other hand, there was a grass-roots nationalism of the masses, the uprooted, dispossessed soil-tillers of the South; their poverty-ridden counterparts in the slum ghettos of the cities. ‘These masses saw in the Black nationalist state fulfillment of their age-old yearnings for land, equality and freedom through power in their own hands to guarantee and protect these freedoms. It was this indigenous, potentially revolutionary nationalism that Garvey diverted with his Back to Africa slogan.

We failed to recognize the objective conflict of interests between these class components of the movement, equating the social and political aims of the ghetto nationalists, the bourgeoisie, to that of the masses~-condemning the whole as reactionary, escapist and utopian.

These were the internal contradictions upon which the movement was to flounder and finally collapse. They were brought to a head by the subsiding of the post-war economic depression, the ushering in of the “boom,” and subsequent easing of the plight of Blacks, the partial adjustment of migrants to their new environment and their partial absorption into industry.

The main contradiction inherent in the Garvey movement from its very beginning had been the conflict between the needs of the masses to defend and advance their rights in the USA and the fantastic Back to Africa schemes of the Garvey leadership. Garvey’s emphasis on these fantastic schemes reflected his resolution of the conflict in favor of business interests and against the interests of the masses. The resources and energy of the organization were increasingly diverted to support racial business enterprises such as the Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation. The concentration on selling stock for the Black Star Steamship Line by the UNIA leadership from 1921 on neglected the immediate needs of the masses and began to erode the base of support.

Furthermore, Garvey’s response to the crisis in the movement exposed the dangerously reactionary logic of a program based upon complete separation of the races and its acceptance of the white racist doctrine of natural racial incompatibility. Pursuing the logic of this idea against the backdrop of the organization's decline inevitably drove Garvey into an alliance of expediency with the most rabid segregationists and race bigots of the period.

Thus, in 1922, Garvey sought the support of Edward Young Clark, the imperial giant of the Ku Klux Klan. This “meeting of the minds” between Garvey and the Klan was not fortuitous. It was an open secret that it took place on the basis of Garvey’s agreement to soft-pedal the struggle for equality in the U.S. in return for help in the settlement of Blacks in Africa. This ideological kinship arose from the mutual acceptance of the racist dogma of natural incompatibility of races, race purity and so forth.

In 1924 Garvey went so far seeking support for his Back to Africa program as to invite John Powell, organizer of the AngloSaxon Clubs, and other prominent racists to speak at UNIA headquarters. Garvey also publicly praised the KKK. According to W.E.B. DuBois, the Kian issued circulars defending Garvey and declared that the opposition to him was from the Catholic Church. In the late thirties, Senator Bilbo of Mississippi introduced a bill to deport thirteen million Blacks to Africa and received the support of the remnants of the Garvey organization.

The final curtain was to drop on the Garvey episode with the failure of the Black Star Linc. The movement was torn by factionalism and splits, with some of the leadership and remaining rank and file demanding that the domestic fight for equal rights be emphasized over the Back to Africa scheme of Garvey. The internal struggle drove many out of the organization and others into a multitude of splinter groups, each a variation of Garveyism itself. Taking advantage of this disarray, the government moved in.

In 1925, Garvey was framed on charges of using the mail to defraud in connection with the sale of stocks for the Black Star Line and was sent to the Atlanta federal prison for two years. He was deported to the West Indies upon release from prison. This debacle marked the end of Garveyism as an important mass movement, although the offshoots continued to exist in numbers of smaller groups advocating Garvey’s theory.

At the time, I had taken Garvey’s peculiar brand as representing nationalism in general and had simply rejected the whole ideology as a foreign import with no roots in the conditions of U.S. Blacks, Seeing only the negative features of nationalism in the UNIA, I was blind to the progressive and potentially revolutionary aspects which were to prove so important in my own later development.

Thus, the great movement that Garvey built passed into history. But nationalism, as a mass trend, persisted in the Black freedom struggle. Existing side by side with the assimilationist trend, it was eclipsed by the latter in so-called normal times while flaring up in times of stress and crisis.

The Garvey movement was the U.S. counterpart of the vast upsurge of national and colonial liberation struggles which swept the world during the war and post-war period. In this period, masses of Blacks had come to consider themselves as an oppressed nation. Garvey’s ability to capture leadership of this nationalist upsurge by default was the result of the immaturity of the revolutionary forces, Black and white. The collapse of the Garvey movement proved conclusively that the petty bourgeois ghetto nationalist current, left to itself, led only to a hopeless blind alley. Unfortunately the forces which could give Black nationalism revolutionary content and direction were only in the process of formation.

The Black working class and its spokesmen had not yet arrived on the scene as an independent force in the Black community and, therefore, was not capable of challenging either the assimilationist leadership of the NAACP or the ghetto nationalism of Garvey. Its counterparts among radical, class-conscious white labor were waging an uphill fight against the Jim Crow-minded AFL bureaucracy led by the Gompers machine. ‘These radical sections of white labor were not yet clear as to the significance of the Black freedom struggle as a revolutionary force in its own right and regarded it simply as a part of the general labor question. Coalescence of these two forces was then a decade away, destined not to take place until the crisis of the thirties.

The preceding analysis is hindsight. I didn't realize the significance of Garvey’s movement until a few years later, when, as a student in Moscow, I was assigned to a commission to prepare a resolution on the Negro question in the USA for the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928. It was in the course of these discussions that I came to the recognition of nationalism as an authentic and potentially revolutionary trend in the movement.

The assimilationist programs of the NAACP had been easy to reject. Garvey was somewhat more difficult. But while the Garvey movement was forcing me to a consideration of nationalism (which at the time I also rejected) I could not help but notice the other political developments of the period.

Most conspicuous was the concerted and vicious attack being carried out against white radicals and the trade union movement. The same forces appeared to be behind the Palmer raids of 1919 and 1920, behind the wave of racism and behind the violent union and strike busting which took place. The foreigners who were being deported, the radicals who were imprisoned and the workers throughout the country who were attacked by Pinkerton “private armies,” were white as well as Black. In Chicago, the strikes at the stockyards and the steel mills in the area particularly attracted my attention.

For me, the Garvey movement, the racists’ assault and the attacks on labor and the radical movement sharpened my political perceptions. The racial fog lifted and the face and location of the enemy was clearly outlined. I began to see that the main beneficiaries of Black subjugation also profited from the social oppression of poor whites, native and foreign-born.

The enemy was those who controlled and manipulated the levers of power; they were the super-rich, white moneyed interests who owned the nation’s factories and banks, and thus controlled its wealth, They were known by many names: the corporate elite; the industrial, financial (and robber) barons; ete. Chicago was the home base of a significant segment of this ruling class.

Here the chain of command was clear: on the political side, it extended from city hall down to the lowliest wardheeler and precinct captain and was tied in at all levels with organized crime, On the economic side, it was represented by such employer organizations as the Chicago Chamber of Commerce, by trade associations and by top management in the giant industrial plants, railroads, big commercial establishments, banks, utilities and insurance firms, Their chain of command extended down to the foremen and department heads, and on-the-job supervisors.

These levers of power also controlled education, the media, the arts and all law enforcement agencies, both military and police, At the bottom of this pyramid and hearing its weight were the working people who toiled in the steel mills, the packing plants, the railway yards, and the thousands of other sweatshops. Lowliest among these were the Blacks, pushed to the very bottom by the “divide and rule” policy of the corporate giants and their henchmen, and the complimentary Jim Crow policies and practices of the AFL trade union bureaucracy.

PASSAGES

Our postal discussion circle, which had held together scarcely three months, was breaking up. Heath, our chairman and recognized leader, was leaving. He had played the greatest role in keeping the group together. Now he had taken a job at some college in Virginia, his native state.

Differences had already developed in the group, and with Heath gone, the possibilities for reconciling them seemed slim. These differences, as I recall, were not of a political or ideological nature. ‘They were seldom expressed in the open, but were reflected in the opposition of some members to proposals for enlarging the group and moving it into the outside political arena. This opposition evidently reflected the desire of some members to retain the group as a narrow discussion circle with membership restricted by tacit understanding to those whom they, considered their intellectual peers. It seemed to me they sought to reduce it to a sort of elitist mutual admiration society. As a result of this sectarian attitude, the group hardly grew beyond its original membership of a dozen or so.

There was no doubt, though, that our association had been mutually beneficial. All of us had grown in political understanding and awareness. But up to the time of Heath’s departure, we had advanced no program for putting our newly acquired political understanding into practice. Our original plans for the organization of a forum to debate the issues of the day never got off the ground. We had not developed a program for involvement in the struggles of the community, nor, for that matter, in the immediate on-the-job problems of Black postal employees. We never even got around to deciding on a name for the group. One suggestion, that we call ourselves the “New Negro Forum,” was never acted upon.

Heath, Mabley, Doe and myself were beginning to feel the pull from the outside, the need for a broader political arena of activity, to play a more active role in the community. We were the ones who most often attended radical forums and lectures and kept abreast of what was going on in the Southside community. We often went to the Bugs Club in Washington Park (Chicago’s equivalent of London's Hyde Park), and the Dill Pickle Club on the Northside which was run by the anarchist Jack Jones.

Heath had gone. Mabley refused the chairmanship, pleading that he was tied down by his family and could not take on additional responsibilities. Doe refused to accept the honor; he was similarly tied down by his job and dental practice. But the real reason for their refusal, which they were to confide to me later, was that they had lost confidence in the group. Without Heath, they saw no future role for it. Like myself, they were attracted to the broader movement, I also declined, giving as my excuse that I was quitting the Post Office in a few days and was going back to my old job on the railroad. A chairman pro-tem was chosen; I don’t remember who.

I continued my reading along the lines which Otto had suggested. Among the books I read were Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (which Engels had used as the basis for Origins of the Family), Gustavus Meycr’s History of the Great American Fortunes, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World and Jack London’s The Iron Heel.

I also kept abreast of world events, reading about Lenin and Trotsky in revolutionary Russia. I followed the post-war colonial rebellions of Sun Yat-sen’s China, Gandhi in India, Ataturk in Turkey, the rebellion of the Riff tribes in Morocco led by Abdul Krim. There were rumblings in black Africa—strikes and demonstrations against colonial oppression. One heard such names as Kadelli and Gumede of the South African National Congress, and of Sandino in Nicaragua who fought the U.S. Marines for many years,

My fect were getting itchy. I was fed up with the Post Office and the excruciatingly monotonous nature of the work. At the same time, the night shift cramped my social life as well as my growing need for broader political activity. I quit the job without regret.

Soon after, I started work as a waiter on the Santa Fe’s Chief, the company’s crack train running to Los Angeles. It was an eightday run: three days to the coast, with a two-day layover in Los Angeles and three days back. Our crew would make three trips a month, and a layover one trip (eight days) in Chicago. This schedule gave me approximately twelve free days a month in Chicago---time enough for both political and social life. It was a hard job, but good money for those days and exciting after the drab routine of the Post Office.

Los Angeles, “Sweet Los,” as we used to call it. The Santa Fe boys, all “big spenders,” were very popular with the girls. A bevy would show up to meet us at the station every trip.

I was to remain on that run three years, which up to that time was the longest I had ever remained on one job. Upon my return from the first trip, I called Mabley and he informed me that he thought the discussion circle had dissolved. Only one or two guys showed up at the next scheduled meeting, and the pro-tem chairman himself was absent. It was dead.

My political development continued nevertheless, The runs on the Santa Fe gave ample time for discussion with my fellow crew members. Most of them, though somewhat older, were as aware as those at the Post Office with whom I had worked. I also continued to read, now studying The Communist Manifesto, Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, and Marx’s Value, Price and Profit.

The first stage of my political search was near an end. In the years since I had mustered out of the Army, I had come from being a disgruntled Black ex-soldier to being a self-conscious revolutionary looking for an organization with which to make revolution.

For three years I had listened in lecture halls, at rallies and in Washington Park to a spate of orators each claiming to meet the challenge of the times. They included the great “people’s lawyer” Clarence Darrow; Judge Fisher of the reform movement; the socialist leader Victor Berger and sundry other members of his party; the anarchist Ben Reichman, Ben Fletcher, the Black IWW orator and organizer, and assorted Garveyites. Although some had their points—for example, the fighting spirit and sincerity of the IWW impressed me-—I rejected them all.

In the spring of 1922, I approached my brother Otto, whom I knew had joined the Workers (Communist) Party shortly after its inception in 1921. I told him that I wanted to join the Party.

The fact that Otto was in the Party and had advised me from time to time on my reading had undoubtedly influenced my decision, I had a generally favorable impression of the Black communists I knew; men like Otto, the Owens brothers and Edward Doty. I was also impressed by whites like Jim Early, Sam Hammersmark, Robert Minor and his wife, Lydia Gibson. What added great weight to my favorable impression of the communists, however, was their political identity with the successful Bolshevik Revolution.

At the time it happened, I had been taken totally unaware of its significance, I first heard of it during an incident that occurred in France in August 1918. My regiment, while marching into positions on the Soissons sector, had paused fora rest. On one side of the road there was a high barbed wire fence and behind it loitered groups of soldiers in strange uniforms. Upon closer observation, it became clear that they were prisoners. They spoke in a strange tongue, but we understood from their gestures that they were asking for cigarettes, A number of us immediately responded, offering them some from our packs.

When we asked who they were, one of them replied in halting English that they were Russian Cossacks. He explained that their division, which had been fighting on the western front, had been withdrawn from the lines, disarmed and placed in quarantine, They were considered unreliable, he said, because of the revolution in Russia. At the time, I was not even sure of the meaning of the word revolution—some kind of civil disorder I conjectured. Giving the matter no further thought, we resumed our march. It was not until I had returned from France that I began reading about the Russian Revolution. From then on, I followed its course, and despite the distorted view in the U.S. press, its significance slowly dawned on me.

Here, I felt, was a tangible accomplishment and real power. Along with other Black radicals, I was impressed-—just as a later generation came to look at China, Cuba and Vietnam as models of successful struggle against tyranny, colonialism and oppression.

Thus, I was particularly attracted to the communists. True, the Party was largely white in its racial composition, with only a handful of Black members. I felt, nevertheless, that it comprised the best and most sincerely revolutionary and internationally minded elements among white radicals,and therefore formed the basis for the revolutionary unity of Blacks and whites. This was so, I believed, because it was a part of a world revolutionary movement uniting Chinese, Africans and Latin Americans with Europeans and North Americans through the Third Communist International.

The Bolsheviks had destroyed the czarist rule, established the first workers’ state, and breached the world system of capitalism over a territory comprising more than one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Most impressive as far as Blacks were concerned was that the revolution had laid the basis for solving the national and racial questions on the basis of complete freedom for the numerous nations, colonial peoples and minorities formerly oppressed by the czarist empire. Moscow had now become the focus of the colonial revolution. In the turbulence of those days, there seerned every reason to think that the energy unleashed in Russia would carry the revolution throughout the world.

In the U.S., the deluge of lies and distortions by the media, the red baiting, the Palmer raids, had not been able to hide this monumental achievement of the Russian Bolsheviks. The uninformed Black man in the street could reason that a phenomenon that evoked such fear and hatred on the part of the white supremacist rulers “couldn't be all bad.” As for me, the socialist victory confirmed my belief in the Bolshevik variety of socialism as a way out for U.S. Blacks.

I found the theory behind this achievement all there in Lenin’s State and Revolution. He developed and applied the theories of Marx and Engels on the role of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This work was the single most important book I had read in the entire three years of my political search and was decisive in leading me to the Communist Party. In this work, Lenin clarified the nature of the state and the means by which to overthrow it. His approach seemed practical and realistic; it was no longer just abstract theory.

Using Origins of the Family as a departure point, Lenin demystified and desanctified the myth of the state in capitalist society as an impartial monitor of human affairs. Rather, he exposed the state in capitalist society--and its apparatus of military, police, courts and prisons—as an instrument of ruling class domination, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

It thus followed that the job of forcibly replacing the state power of the dominant class with that of the proletariat was the paramount and indispensable task of socialist revolution. As far as I could seé, the Soviet example appeared to offer a completely clear solution to the problems facing American workers, both Black and white. I saw the elimination of racism and the achievement of complete equality for Blacks as an inevitable by product of a socialist revolution in the United States, It was at this point that I became fully resolved to make my own personal commitment to the fight for a socialist United States.

The first part of my odyssey was over.

Chapter 4

An Organization of Revolutionaries

Otto was pleased when I first told him of my desire to join the Party in the summer of 1922. He said that he had known that that i had been ready to join for some time, but he suggested that i should wait a while before joining. When I asked why, he told me about an unpleasant situation that had arisen in the Party’s Southside branch.

Most of the few Black members were concentrated in this English-speaking branch, but it seemed that a number of recent Black recruits had dropped out. They resented the paternalistic attitude displayed toward them by some of the white comrades who, Otto said, treated Blacks like children and seemed to think that the whites had all the answers, It was only a temporary situation, he assured me. The matter had been taken up before the Party District Committee; if it was not resolved there, they would take it to the Central Committee.

“And if you don’t get satisfaction there?” I queried.

“Well, then there’s the Communist International!” he teplied emphatically. “It’s as much our Party as it is theirs.”

I was properly impressed by his sincerity and by the idea that we could appeal our case to the “supreme court” of international communism, which included such luminaries as the great Lenin.

‘The Blacks who had remained in the Party had decided not to bring any new members into the branch until the matter was satisfactorily settled. I was rather surprised to hear all of this.

Clearly, membership in the Party did not automatically free whites from white supremacist ideas. Nor, for that matter, did it free Blacks from their distrust of whites. Throughout my lifetime, I found that interracial solidarity--even in the Communist Party— required a continuous ideological struggle.

Otto suggested that until the matter was cleared up I should join the African Blood Brotherhood. The ABB was a secret, all-Black, revolutionary organization to which some of the Black Party members belonged---including Otto. I later learned that the matter of white paternalism was eventually resolved to the satisfaction of the Black comrades. I don’t recall the details; I think that Arne Swabeck (the district organizer) or Robert Minor from the Central Committee finally came down and lectured the branch on the evils of race prejudice and threatened disciplinary action to the point of expulsion of comrades guilty of bringing bourgeois social attitudes into the Party.

In the meantime, I took Otto’s advice and joined the African Blood Brotherhood. He took me to see Edward Doty, then commander of the Brotherhood’s Chicago Post. Vouched for by Otto and Doty, I was taken to a meeting of the membership committee and went through the induction ceremonies. This consisted of an African fraternization ritual requiring the mixing of blood between the applicant and one of the regular members. The organization took its name from this ritual. Doty performed the ceremony; he pricked our index fingers with a needlc (I hoped it was sterilized!) and when drops of blood appeared, he rubbed them together.

Now a Blood Brother, I proceeded to take the Oath of Loyalty which contained a clause warning that divulging of any of the secrets of the organization was punishable by death. I was deeply impressed by all this; the atmosphere of great secrecy appealed to my romantic sense. There were two degrees of membership; one was automatically conferred upon joining and the second, which I took a few days later, involved the performance of some service for the organization. In my case, as I recall, it was a trivial task—-the selling of a dozen or so copies of its magazine, The Crusader.

At the time that I joined the African Blood Brotherhood, I knew little about the organization other than the fact that it wasin some way associated with the Communist Party. I do remember having read a copy or two of The Crusader before I joined the group.

Some of the history of the ABB I got from Otto and other post members, but most of it I found out much later when I met and worked with Cyril P. Briggs, the original founder of the group. The African Blood Brotherhood was founded in New York City in 1919 by a group of Black radicals under the leadership of Briggs. A West Indian (as were most of the founders), he was a former editor of the Amsterdam News, a Black New York newspaper. He quit in disagrcement over policy with the owner, who attempted to censor his anti-war editorials. Briggs’s own magazine. The Crusader, was established in 1919. The Brotherhood was organized around the magazine with Briggs as its executive head presiding over a supreme council.

The group was originally conceived as the African Blood Brotherhood “for African liberation and redemption” and was later broadened to “for immediate protection and ultimate liberation of Negroes everywhere.” As it was a secret organization, it never sought broad membership. National headquarters were in New York. Its size never exceeded 3,000. But its influence was many times greater than this; the Crusader at one time claimed a circulation of 33,000.' There was also The Crusader News Service which was distributed to two hundred Black newspapers.

Briggs, his associates--Richard B. Moore, Grace Campbell and others—-and The Crusader were among the vanguard forces for the New Negro movement, an ideological current which reflected the new mood of militancy and social awareness of young Blacks of the post-war period. In New York, the New Negro movement also included the radical magazine, The Messenger, edited by Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, and The Emancipator, edited by W.A. Domingo. Many of the groups were members of the Socialist Party or close to it politically. They espoused “economic radicalism,” an over-simplificd interpretation of Marxism which, nevertheless, enabled them to see the economic and social roots of racial subjugation. Historically, theirs was the first serious attempt by Blacks to adopt the Marxist world view and the theory of class struggle to the problems of Black Americans.

Within this broad grouping, however, there were differences which emerged later. Briggs was definitely a revolutionary nationalist; that is, he saw the solution of the “race problem” in the establishment of independent Black nation-states in Africa, the Caribbean and the United States, In America, he felt this could be achieved only through revolutionizing the whole country. This meant he saw revolutionary white workers as allies. These were elements of a program which he perceived as an alternative to Garvey’s plan of mass exodus.

A self-governing Black state on U.S. soil was a novel idea for which Briggs sent up trial balloons in the form of editorials in the Amsterdam News in 1917, of which he was then editor. Shortly after the entrance of the United States into World War I, he wrote an editorial entitled “Security of Life for Poles and Serbs—Why Not for Colored Americans?”

Briggs, however, had no definite idea for the location of the future “colored autonomous state,” suggesting at various times Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California or Nevada: Later, after President Wilson had put forth his fourteen points in January 1918, Briggs equated the plight of Blacks in the United States to nations occupied by Germany and demanded:

With what moral authority or justice can President Wilson demand that eight million Belgians be freed when for his entire first term and to the present moment of his second term he has not lifted a finger for justice and liberty for over TEN MILLION colored people, a nation within a nation, a nationality oppressed and jim-crowed, yet worthy as any other people of a square deal or failing that, a separate political existence?

He continued this theme in The Crusader. One year after the founding of the Brotherhood, Briggs shifted from the idea of a Black state on U.S. soil to the advocacy of a Black state in Africa, South America or the Caribbean, where those Blacks who wanted to could migrate. In this, he was undoubtedly on the defensive, giving ground to the overwhelming Garvey deluge then sweeping the national Black community. In 1921, Briggs was to link the struggle for equal rights of U.S. Blacks with the establishment of a Black state in Africa and elsewhere:

Just as the Negro in the United States can never hope to win equal rights with his white neighbors until Africa is liberated and a strong Negro state (or states) erected on that continent, so, too, we can never liberate Africa unless, and until, the American Section of the Negro Race is made strong enough to play the part for a free Africa that the Irish in America now play for a free Ireland.

The Brotherhood rejected Garvey’s racial separatism. They knew that Blacks needed allies and tied the struggle for equal rights to that of the progressive section of white labor. In the 1918-1919 elections, the Brotherhood supported the Socialist Party candidates, The Crusader and the ABB were ardent supporters of the Russian Revolution; they saw it as an opportunity for Blacks to identify with a powerful international revolutionary movement. It enabled them to overcome the isolation inherent in their position as a minority people in the midst of a powerful and hostile white oppressor nation. Thus, The Crusader called for an alliance with the Bolsheviks against race prejudice. In 1921, the magazine made its clearest formulation, linking the struggles of Blacks and other oppressed nations with socialism:

The surest and quickest way, then, in our opinion, to achieve the salvation of the Negro is to combine the two most likely and feasihle propositions, viz.: salvation for all Negroes through the establishment of a strong, stable, independent Negro State (along the lines of our own race genius) in Africa and elsewhere: and salvation for all Negroes (as well as other oppressed people) through the establishment of a Universal Socialist Co-operative commonwealth.

The split in the world socialist movement as a result of the First World War led to the formation of the Third (Communist) International in 1919. This split was reflected in the New Negro movement as well. Randolph and Owens, the whole Messenger crowd, remained with the social democrats of the Second International who were in opposition to the Bolshevik revolution. Members of The Crusader group--Briggs, Moore and others gravitated toward the Third International and eventually joined its American affiliate, the Communist Party. They were followed in the next year or two by Otto Hall, Lovett Fort-Whiteman and others.

The decline of the African Blood Brotherhood in the early twenties and its eventual demise coincided with the growing participation of its leadership in the activities of the Communist Party. By 1923-24, the Brotherhood had ceased to exist as an autonomous, organized cxpression of the national revolutionary trend. Its leading members became communists or close sympathizers and its posts served as one of the Party’s recruiting grounds for Blacks.

I first met Briggs upon my return from Russia in 1930. We were to strike up a lasting friendship--one that went beyond the comradeship of the Party and which extended over more than three decades, until his death in 1967. Throughout those years, we were associated on numerous projects and found ourselves on the same side of many political issues.

When I first met Briggs, he conformed to the impression that I had been given of him: a tall, impressive-looking man—so light in complexion that he was often mistaken for white. He had a large head and bushy black eyebrows. He was a man possessed of great physical and moral courage, which I was to observe on many occasions. Briggs also had a fiery temper, which was usually controlled in the case of comrades or friends.

He had one outstanding physical defect--he was a heavy stutterer. He stuttered so much that it often took him several scconds to get out the first word of a sentence, When he took the floor at meetings we would all listen attentively; no one would interrupt him because we knew he always had something important and pertinent to say. While he spoke we would cast our eyes down and look away from him to avoid making him feel self-conscious, though he never seemed to be.

We noticed that he stuttered less when he was angry, One such occasion was when Garvey rejected Briggs’s offer of cooperation. The wily Garvey saw through the maneuver for what it was-—an attempt by Briggs to gain a position from which he could better attack him. Garvey lashed out at Briggs, calling him a “white man trying to pass himself off as a Negro.”

Friends told me that this attack sent Briggs into such a rage that he mounted a soapbox at Harlem's 135th Strect and Lenox Avenue and assailed Garvey for two hours without a stutter, branding him a charlatan and a fraud. Not content with this verbal lashing of his enemy, Briggs hauled Garvey into court on the charge of defamation of character. He won the case, forcing Garvey to make a public apology and pay a fine of one dollar.

Briggs’s real forte, however, was as a kecn polemicist, a veritable master of invective. His speech handicap was a pity, because aside from the stutter he had all the qualities of a good orator. Closely associated with Briggs was Richard B. Moore, a fine orator who did much public speaking for the ABB.

What were the reasons for the decline of the ABB and its eventual absorption by the Communist Party? Why did Briggs fail to develop the program for Black self-determination in the USA? In the fifties, I had a series of talks with Briggs and asked his opinion on these questions.

His overall appraisal of the role of the Brotherhood was that it was a forerunner of the contemporary national revolutionary trend and a very positive thing. “Of course, we didn’t stop Garvey,” he said, but “we were beginning to develop a revolutionary alternative. We did put a crimp in his sails,” Briggs added.

For a while, the ABB had been a rallying center for left opposition to Garvey. Its membership included class-conscious Black workers and revolutionary intcllectuals and drew membership from both disillusioned Garveyites and radicals who never took to Garvey’s program in the first place. The main reason for de-emphasizing the idea of Black nationhood in the United States, Briggs stated, was the unfavorable relationship of forces then existing.

Garvey, with his Back to Africa program, had preempted the leadership of the mass movement and corralled most of the militants. His hold over the masses was strengthened by the anti-Black violence of the Red Summer of 1919. This gave further credence to Garvey’s contention that the U.S. was a white man’s country where Blacks could never achieve equality. Indeed, for these masses, his program for a Black state in Africa to which American Blacks could migrate seemed far less utopian than the idea of a Black state on U.S. soil.

As for the South, Briggs did not feel that such a region of entrenched racism could be projected realistically as a territorial focus of a Black nationalist state. It would not have been so accepted by the masses who were in flight from the area. For himself, he reasoned, the very idea of self-determination in the United States presupposed the support of white revolutionaries. That meant a revolutionary crisis in the country as a whole, and in that day no such prospect was in sight. In fact, white revolutionary forces were then small and weak, the target of the vicious anti-red drives of the government and employers.

In other words, he felt that Black self-determination in the United States was an idea whose time had not yet come. The communists didn’t have all the answers, and neither did we, Briggs indicated. Whites, as well as a number of Black radicals, undoubtedly underestimated the national element; socialism alone was seen as the solution. Briggs was impressed, however, by the sincerity and revolutionary ardor of the communists and by the fact that they were a detachment of Lenin’s Third Communist International. He felt that the future of the revolution in the United States and of Black liberation lay in multinational communist leadership.

Though the ABB ceased to exist as an organized, independent expression of the national revolutionary current, the tendency itself remained, awaiting the further maturing of its main driving force, the Black proletariat. By the end of the decade, the national revolutionary sentiment was to find expression in the program of the Communist Party.

By the time I joined the Brotherhood’s Chicago post in the summer of 1922, The Crusader had dropped much of its original national revolutionary orientation. Although I was then unaware of it, Briggs and the supreme council were presiding over the absorption of the organization into the Communist Party.

In Chicago, the decline of the organization was slower than elsewhere, Perhaps this was because it had a strong base among Black building-tradesmen, plumbers, electricians and bricklayers. Edward Doty, a plumber by trade, was simultaneously the ABB post commander and a leader and founder of the American Consolidated Trades Council (ACTC). The council was a federation of independent Black unions and groups in the building trades industry who had formed their own unions forthe double purpose of protecting Black workers on the job and counteracting the discriminatory policies of the white AFL craft unions dominant in the field.

Doty, a tall, muscular man, was born in Mobile, Alabama, and had come north in 1912 at the age of seventeen, According to him, most of the Black steamfitters and plumbers had learned their trades in the stockyards during the industrial boom and labor shortage that accompanied World War I. Some, however, had gotten their training at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Active in the Brotherhood along with Doty were such outstanding leaders of the Black workers’ struggle as Herman Dorsey (an electrician) and Alexander Dunlap (a plumber).

Besides the tradesmen, other members of the ABB post included a number of older radicals such as Alonzo Isabel, Norval Allen, Gordon Owens, H.V. Phillips, Otto Hall and several others. Together with Doty, they made up the communist core of the Brotherhood.

My experiences in the ABB marked my first association with Black communists. I had met some of them before, at forums and lectures; I had heard Owens speak at the Bugs Club and Dill Pickle forums, but I had never worked together with any of them before.” ‘They were mostly workers from the stockyards and other industries. One or two, like myself, were from the service trades. Like Otto, several of them had previously been in the Garvey movement. There was no doubt that they represented a politically advanced section of the Black working class. They were the types who today would be called “political activists,” the people who kept abreast of the issues in the Southside community and participated in local struggles.

I was interested to learn their backgrounds and how they had come to the revolutionary movement. I found that some of them had been among Chicago's first Marxist-oriented Black radicals and had been associated with the Free Thought Society. This society was formed immediately after the war and held regular forums. I believe its leader and founder was a young man named Tibbs. He was one of the earliest of Chicago’s Black radicals. A victim of police harassment and persecution, Tibbs was arrested during the Palmer raids in 1919 and spent several years in jailona fake charge of stealing automobile tires. This continual perseeution reduced his political effectiveness, which was as the authorities intended.

In 1920, members of the Free Thought Society took an active part in the campaign of the Independent Non-Partisan League, sponsored by The Whip and its editors. This coalition ran a full slate of candidates in the Republican primary of that year, in which they challenged the old guard Republicans of the second ward Republican organization as well as the so-called New People’s Movement of Oscar DePriest.’

The election platform called for abolition of all discrimination, for public ownership of utilities, civil service reform, women’s suffrage, children’s welfare service and “organization of labor into one union.” While they were not successful in turning back the Republican old guard, the campaign resulted in appreciable gains for some of the league’s candidates,

At that time, the main efforts of the ABB were directed at mobilizing community support for the Black ACTC tradesmen. While retaining a secret character, its members participated as individuals in campaigns on local issues. They collaborated with the Trade Union Education League (TUEL) of which Doty was a member, in its drive to organize the stockyards. The TUEL supported the demands of the ACTC. At that time, it was led by William Z. Foster and Jack Johnstone. Later to become the Trade Union Unity League, it was a gathering of the revolutionary and progressive forces within trade unions to fight against the reactionary labor bureaucracy and their collaborationist policies and Jim Crowism.

Other members of the Brotherhood participated in the cainpaign against high rents that was waged in the Southside community. This was a fight in which a white Party member, Bob Minor, and his wife, Lydia Gibson, played leading roles.

I found my experience in the Brotherhood both stimulating and rewarding. In addition to learning a lot from the communists with whom I was associated, it was here I forged my first active association with Black industrial workers. I found them literate, articulate and class conscious, a proud and defiant group which had been radicalized by. the struggles against discriminatory practices of the unions and employers. They understood the meaning of solidarity and the need for militant organization to obtain their objectives. In this, they were quite different from the people with whom I had been associated at the post office, as well as writers whom I so commonly found to be stamped with a hustler mentality. Doty and his followers in the Trades Council were pioneers in the struggle for the rights of Black workers, a struggle which has continued over half a century and remains unfinished to this day.

‘The older tradesmen finally fought their way into the unions, the electricians in 1938 and the plumbers in 1947. In the early fifties, Doty became the first Black officer in the plumbers’ union. But these gains were only token! The bars are still up against Blacks and other minority workers seeking jobs in the ninety billion dollar-a-year industry.

THE YOUNG COMMUNIST LEAGUE

My sojourn in the African Blood Brotherhood was brief about six months. I felt the need to move on. My original goal was the Communist Party. While I was in the ABB, the problem of white chauvinism in the Southside branch had been cleared up. Joining the Party was no longer a problem, after all, the Brotherhood had been but a stopover.

I was about to apply for admission when H.V. Phillips asked me to join the Young Workers (Communist) League, the youth division of the Communist Party. Phillips, I learned, was a member of the district and national committees of the League. When I told him I was just about to join the Party, he said: “That’s all right, but youre a young fellow and should be among the youth. Besides, more of us Blacks are needed in the League.”

I thought the matter over. “Why not? It’s all the same, they’re all communists.”

The next day Phillips took me to meet John Harvey, a white youth who was district organizer of the League. Harvey told me that I had been highly recommended to them by Phillips and others. He expressed delight at my decision to join and said that it fit right in with their plans since they were anxious to move forward with work among Black youth, but were handicapped by the faet that they had only a few Black members.

I expressed doubt that I could be considered a youth at the age of twenty-five.

They replied that there were a number of members my age and older in the organization. All that was needed, they assured me, was for one to have the “youth angle.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“Oh, that simply means the ability to understand youth and their problems and to be able to communicate with them.”

I was not sure I had all of these qualities, but the proposition appealed to me, So I joined the YCL in the winter of 1923. The League at that time was a close-knit fraternity of idealistic and dedicated young people determined to build a new world for future generations. When we sang the Youth International at meetings, we actually felt ourselves to be as the song proclaimed, “the youthful guardsmen of the proletariat.”

The organization was small, with only several hundred members. As I recall, Phillips and myself were the only Blacks. I was still working on the Santa Fe and on layovers I spent most of the time getting acquainted with my new comrades, attending classes, meetings and social gatherings. I was impressed by what seemed to me to be a high level of political development and by their use of Marxist terminology. It made me keenly aware of my own sketchy knowledge of Marxism and the revolutionary movement and spurred me to close the gap. A partial explanation for their political sophistication, I felt, was the fact that a large number of them, perhaps a majority, were “red diaper” babies—their parents being old revolutionaries, either members of the Party or its supporters. On the whole, they were a spirited, intelligent group, and as far as I could discern exhibited not a trace of race prejudice. Many went on to become leaders of the Party.

There was our district organizer, John Harvey, a lanky youth and one of the few WASPs; Max Shachtman, a brilliant young orator and editor of the League’s theoretical organ, the Young Worker, who was later to become first a Trotskyist and then a rabid, professional anti-communist. There was Valeria Meltz, an able young leader, and her brother; their ethnie background was Russian-American, as was that of Jim Sklar (Keller). His brothers Gus and Boris were old stalwarts in the Russian Federation and were well known. There was also Nat Kaplan (Ganley) and Gil Green. Gil was about sixteen at the time; we used to call him “the kid.” He went on to become national chairman of the YCL and later a national leader in the Party. I met a number of the League's national leaders: Johnny Williamson, a Scottish-American and national secretary, Herbert Zam, Sam Darcy, Marty Abern, Phil Herbert and others, many of whom were to become national leaders of the Party.

There was no searcity of places for meetings or for social affairs. We were on friendly terms with Jane Addams and her people at Hull House, where we sometimes met. Other times we used the halls of various language groups. We participated in and supported the activities of the Anti-Imperialist League, headed by Manny Gomez, the Party’s Latin American specialist. The main eampaign at the time: was against the invasion of Nicaragua by the U.S. Marines.

I was particularly impressed by Bob Mazut, a young Russian representative of the Young Communist International (YCI) to the League, A small, dark-complected and soft-spoken young man, Mazut hailed from Soviet Georgia, His mild manner belied his impressive background, Only twenty-five when I met him, he had fought in the Revolution and Civil War, first as a Red Partisan and then in the Red Army, in which he advanced to the rank of colonel. He spoke what we called “political English,” and we were always amused by some of his expressions. For example, | remember how we used to kid Mazut about his being sweet on a certain girl comrade, “She likes you very much,” someone would say, “but she’s a little overawed by you.”

He replied very seriously, “How can I liquidate her suspicions of me?”

He took particular interest in me. I believe Phillips and I were the first Blacks he had ever really known and for us he was the first real Soviet communist we had met. I asked questions about Russia and told him I wanted to go there and see it for myself. “You undoubtedly will,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, as if the matter were settled,

On one occasion he told me of a discussion he had had on the eve of his departure from Russia, Zinoviey, then president of the Communist International, had asked him to look closely into the Afro-American question in the United States, and to see if he could find any confirmation for his belief and that of other Russian leaders that the right of self-determination was the appropriate slogan for Black rebellion. Zinoviev added that he had long believed that the question would become the “Achilles heel of American imperialism,” I told Mazut that I liked the part about the “Achilles heel,” but I didn’t feel that the slogan of self-determination was applicable for U.S. Blacks, It was my understanding that the principle had to do with nations, and Blacks were not a national but a racial minority. To me, it smacked of Garvey’s separatism,

Mazut nevertheless raised the question of self-determination for discussion in a meeting of the Chicago District Committe of the YCL. Desirous of getting the committee’s reaction to the question, he was literally shouted down by the white comrades, “Blacks are Americans,” they said. “They want equality, not separation.” Phillips and I, the only Black members of the committee, were non-committal, And that was the end of that, They did not pursue the matter further.

In order to move forward in work with Black youth, we struck upon the idea of organizing an interracial youth forum on the Southside. The organizing committee consisted of Chi (Dum Ping), a Chinese student at the University of Chicago; a young woman official of the colored YMCA; Phillips, a white League member; and myself, During this period, J was still working on the Santa Fe, but on my layovers | devoted all my time to the forum. We had rented a small hall, decorated it and got out our publicity—leaflets, posters and an‘ad in the Chicago Defender, Our first speaker was to be John Harden, a Black radical orator, It was our first effort at mass work among young Blacks and with our youthful enthusiasm, we were certain of success. But the venture proved to be abortive.

I can still remember our shock when we came to our mecting place to find it wrecked. Furniture was smashed, posters ripped from the walls. There was no doubt in our minds that this was the work of the police who had unleashed their stool pigeons against us. Some of our non-communist friends dropped out, and the project collapsed. The idea of a forum was abandoned---temporarily, we hoped. A less ambitious plan was then agrced to.

If we could enlarge our cadres by a few more Blacks, we thought, we would have a better base from which to approach mass work. It was therefore suggested that Phillips and I approach some of our acquaintances and try to recruit them directly into the League. I eliminated my waiter friends, all of whom were too old, and approached one of my former colleagues, a postal worker, who had been in our study circle and whom I considered a likely prospect. I remember that he sat very quictly while I delivered a long lecture on the League’s program and activities and the need to get support among Black youth.

Finally interrupting me, he blurted out, “I’m sorry, Hall, but I find being Black trouble enough, but to be Black and red at the same time, well that’s just double trouble, and when you mix in the whites, why that’s triple trouble.”

At first I was rather shocked by his off-hand rebuff, considering it to be an expression of cynical opportunism. I felt that he had backslid, even from his position at the post office, but he continued in a more serious tone. Apparently he felt a deep distrust for whites and their motives. He regarded the YCL as just another organization of white “do-gooders” and saw me as their captive Negro. When I interrupted to say something about socialism, he cut me short. He said that he too was for socialism as a final solution, but that was a long way off and he would not put it beyond the whites in the United States to distort socialism in a manner in which they could remain top dogs. In any case, he believed Blacks would have to be on guard. In the meantime, he believed Blacks should retain their own organizations under their own leadership. Alliances, yes—but we ourselves must decide the terms and conditions, he said.

Our exchange had gotten off on the wrong foot. I was deeply chagrined by his charge that I was a captive of the whites and that the League was a white organization. For me, that meant that he felt that I was a “white folks’ nigger.” As I recall, I retorted by calling him a Black racialist who saw everything in terms of Black and white.

“Why not?” he replied. “Being a Negro, how else should I see things?”

After this flare-up, our tempers cooled off and we continued our discussion in calmer tones. But I was definitely on the defensive, trying to explain why I was in the League and that it was not an organization of white “do-gooders” as he had charged. It was a revolutionary, interracial vanguard organization, I asserted. Sure, we only had a few Blacks now, but our numbers would grow, I argued.

He was still skeptical and repeated that he was for socialism, but a special road toward this goal he felt was necessary for Black Americans, under their own leadership and organization.

“Do you mean a Black party?” I queried.

“Why not?” he rejoined. “It might be necessary as a safeguard for our interests.”

I had no answers to his position. There was a logic to it which I hadn't thought about.

We finally parted on friendly terms, promising to keep in touch. I left, realizing that I’d come out the worst in our exchange. I felt that I had failed in my first effort to recruit a good Black man to the League and that we still had some study to do with regards to Black nationalism.

My friend had been, as I recalled, a bitter critic of Garvey, and therefore assumed that he was hostile to Black nationalism. But now it seemed that he expressed some of Garvey’s racial separatism. Thinking the matter over, I finally camc to the conclusion that the main reason for my inability to counter his arguments was that I sensed that they contained a good measure of truth. What was most disturbing was the sense that his position was less isolated from the masses of Blacks than was my own.

Up to that point, I had failed to understand the contradictory nature of Black nationalism. I had rejected it totally as a reactionary bourgeois philosophy which, in the conditions of the U.S., had found its logical expression in Garvey’s Back to Africa program. It was therefore a diversion from the struggle for economic, social and political equality-—-the true goal of Blacks in the United States. The fight for equality, I felt, was revolutionary in that it was unattainable within the framework of U.S. capitalist society. Nationalism, moreover, was divisive and played into the hands of the reactionary racists. This, of course, did not exclude the acceptance of some of its features, such as race pride and selfreliance, which were not inconsistent with, but an essential element in, the fight for equality.

While rejecting nationalism, I also rejected the bourgeois assimilationist position of the NAACP and its associates, and their blind acceptance of white middle class values and culture. What confused me were attempts to amalgamate what I felt were two mutually contradictory elements-—--socialism and the class struggle on the one hand, and nationalism on the other. Or was the contradiction more apparent than real, I wondered. My friend’s nationalism did not go to the point of advocacy of a separate Black nation, He demanded only autonomy in leadership and organization of the Black freedom movement. Was this inconsistent with the concept of equality and class unity? Had not Blacks the right to formulate their conditions for unity? For me, this was the first time I had encountered these questions.

I attempted to reflect on my short experience in the YCL. Was there not a basis for Black distrust of even white revolutionaries? ‘The situation in the League was not as idyllic as I had first thought. There was a certain underestimation of the importance of the Black struggle against discrimination and for equal rights among both the youth and the adults of the communist movement. Behind that, I sensed there was a feeling that the Black struggle was not itself really revolutionary, but was sort of a drag on the “pure” class struggle.

This was no doubt a legacy of the old Socialist Party, Evensuch a revolutionary as Debs had said:

“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 color.” And regarding the Afro-American question: “Social equality, forsooth ... is pure fraud and serves to mask the real issue, which is not social equality, but economic freedom.” “The Socialist platform has not a word in reference to ‘social equality.’ ”

Evidently, there were a number of theoretical matters still to be cleared up on the question of the struggle for Black equality and freedom.

I joined the Party itself in the spring of 1925, recruited by Robert Minor, with the consent of the League. I had quit the Santa Fe the summer before, and, totally committed to the communist cause, I then decided to devote more time to the work and to eventually becoming a professional revolutionary. I took extra jobs on weekends and worked banquets and an occasional extra trip on the road. I was living at home with my Mother, Father and sister, who had an infant child, David. All were employed, with my Mother accepting occasional catering jobs.

Minor, whom I had known for some time, was a reconstructed white Southerner from Texas, a direct descendant of Sam Houston (first Governor of the Lone Star State), He was a former anarchist and one of the great political cartoonists of his day. His powerful cartoons were carried in the Sz. Louis Post-Dispatch, and later on in the old Masses (a cultural magazine of the left) and in the Daily Worker. Among his many talents, he was a journalist of no small ability. Having travelled widely in Europe as a news correspondent during the First World War, Minor had visited Russia during the revolutionary period and had met and spoken with Lenin.

With these impressive credentials, he was now a member of the Party’s Central Committee and responsible for its Negro work. This was understood as an interim assignment, eventually to be taken over by a Black comrade as soon as one could be developed to fill the position. The person then being groomed for the job was Lovett Fort-Whiteman, who was then in Russia taking a crash course in communist leadership. He had been an associate of Briggs on The Crusader and also worked with Randolph and Owens on The Messenger. Later, as I recall, his selection was the cause for some disgruntlement among the Black comrades.

Why was Fort-Whiteman chosen in preference to such wellknown and capable Blacks as Richard B. Moore, Otto Huiswood or Cyril P. Briggs, all of whom had revolutionary records superior to Fort-Whiteman’s? At that time, there were no Blacks on the Central Committee, and even when Fort-Whiteman returned from Russia in 1925 to take charge of Afro-American work, Minor remained responsible to the Central Committee. While not as flamboyant as Fort-Whiteman, these Black leaders had records comparable to, or better than, those of many whites on the Central Committee.

Be that as it may, of all the white comrades, Minor was best fitted for the assignment because of his wide knowledge of and close interest in the question. His intense hatred of his Southern racist background came through in some of the most powerful cartoons of the day. He had wide acquaintances among Black middle class intellectuals. Bob and his wife Lydia had turned their Southside apartment into a virtual salon where Black and white friends would gather to discuss the issues of the day. There I met various Black notables, including Dean Pickens, national field secretary of the NAACP, and Abraham Harris, then secretary of the Minneapolis Urban League. Harris would later become Chairman of the Economies Department of Howard University, and then a full professor of the same subject at the University of Chicago.

THE FOURTH CONVENTION OF THE CPUSA

It was the period immediately before the Fourth National Convention of the Communist Party. The factional fight was at its height, with the Party split between two warring camps: the Ruthenberg-Pepper group vs. the Foster-Bittelman group. The atmosphere was rife with charges and counter-charges of “right opportunism” and “left sectarianism.” This factionalism had spilled over into the League, which reflected the alignments then current within the Party.

I had stood aloof from these factions, as I did not clearly understand the issues. The question of Blacks did not seem to be directly involved. I assumed it was a clash mainly between personalities and narrow group interests, and did not reflect political principles. Each side accused the other of responsibility for the “Farmer-Labor fiasco” which left the Party isolated in its first major attempt to form a united front. I could sce no differences among the factions on the question of bolshevization of the Party.

The Comintern had recently called upon the Party to bolshevize its ranks. Among other things, this called for the reorganization of the Party on the basis of shop and street units, and the elimination of the foreign language clubs as federated organizations within the Party. These clubs remained close to the Party, however, and followed its leadership.

I was inclined to favor the Ruthenberg-Pepper group because most of the Party’s Black members--Doty, Elizabeth Griffin, Alonzo Isabel, Otto and my sister Eppa—were in that group. This, I suspected, was partly due to the influence of Bob Minor and Lydia Gibson—their work on the Southside in the tenants’ struggle of 1924, their support of Doty’s Consolidated Trades Council, and their consistent advocacy in the Party of the importance of work among Blacks. (Most of this occurred after I had Ieft the ABB and joined the YCL.)

Upon joining the Party, I immediately became part of the Ruthenberg group. Under Minor’s tutelage, I was to undergo intensive indoctrination. According to the Ruthenberg faction, Foster, Bittelman, Jack Johnstone and their allies(Cannon, Dunne and Shachtman) were opportunist, narrow-minded trade unionists lacking in Marxist theory and hence in the ability to lead a Marxist party. They said that Foster’s group, which possessed a majority of the delegates, was out to steamroll the convention and toss Ruthenberg, Pepper and Lovestone out of the leadership.

For most of us, the clincher was that the Foster group lacked the confidence of the Communist International. This latter charge, it seemed to me, was confirmed by the decisions of the Fourth Party Convention the following summer, I was a delegate to this convention from the YCL. I was to witness the intervention of the Cl in the person of its on-the-spot representative, Comrade Green (Gusev), an old Bolshevik friend and co-worker of Lenin and Stalin. For obvious security reasons, only the leaders of both factions had direct contact with him. His job was to suppress factionalism and to unite the Party on the basis of the Comintern line. I must say that he tackled this task with an expertise that was remarkable to behold.

First, he set up what was called a Parity Committee, composed of an equal number of top leaders of both factions, with himself as a neutral chairman. Since the two factions were evenly represented on the committee, his was the deciding vote. I remember that there was widespread speculation among the delegates as to which faction he would support. We didn’t have long to wait.

The convention had been in session about a week. The atmosphere was charged, passions inflamed, a split seemed imminent. Indeed, our caucus leaders had difficulty in preventing a walkout by some of the more hot-headed members. A message finally arrived in the form of a cable from the CI (which undoubtedly was sent at Gusev’s urging). The cable was presented to the Parity Committee by Gusev. It demanded that “under no circumstances” should the Foster majority “be allowed to suppress the Ruthenberg group... because,” it went on to say, “the Ruthenberg group is more loyal to the decisions of the Communist International and stands closer to its views. It has the majority or strong minority in most districts and the Foster group uses excessively mechanical and ultra-factional methods,” It further demanded that the Ruthenberg group “get not less than forty percent of the Central Executive Committee” and insisted as “an ultimatum” to the majority “that Ruthenberg retains post of Secretary...categorically insist upon Lovestone’s Central Executive Committee membership...demand retention by Ruthenberg group of co-editorship on central organ,”

The results were greeted with great jubilation by our group. Foster refused to accept the majority of the incoming Central Committee under these circumstances (in which his loyalty was questioned) and ceded leadership to the Ruthenberg group. The result was that the Ruthenberg-Pepper group retained key positions on the new Central Committee--Ruthenberg as general secretary, Lovestone as organizational secretary, Bedacht as agitprop head.

Despite factionalism, the convention marked a step forward in the work among Blacks, Although its decisions threw no new light on the question, the platform adopted did contain the most elaborate statement the Party had thus far made.

It subscribed to full equality in the relationship between Black and white workers, It advocated the right to vote, abolition of Jim Crowism in law and custom, including segregation and intermarriage laws. The main thrust of the program, however, was directed towards building Black and white labor unity on the job and in the union, Toward this end the platform asserted that:

Our Party must work among the unorganized Negro workers destroying whatever prejudice may exist against trade unions, which has been cultivated by white capitalists..(and) the Negro petty-bourgeoisie... Our Party must make itself the foremost spokesman for the real abolition of all discrimination of the as yet largely unorganized Negro workers in the same union with the white workers on the same basis of equality of membership, equality of right to employment in all branches of work and equality of pay.

The Party called for the inclusion of Black workers in the existing unions. It came out against racial separatism and dual unionism, but it declared its intention to organize Blacks into separate unions wherever they were barred from existing organizations and to use the separation as a battering ram against Black exclusion. Emphasizing the relationship between these partial demands and ultimate goals, the platform declared that the accomplishment of the above aims was not an end in itself and that on the contrary, it was the struggle for their accomplishment that was even more important:

In the course of the struggle with such demands we will demonstrate...that these aspirations can be realized only as a result of the successful class struggle against capitalism and with the establishment of the rule of the working class in the Soviet form.

It must be remembered that by this time the attempts to infiltrate the Garvey movement had proven unsuccessful and that the African Blood Brotherhood, the sole revolutionary Black organization in the field, had been dissolved. To meet the necd for an organizational vehicle to put our program into effect, the Party and the Trade Union Educational League sponsored the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC).

In the meantime, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, our man in Moscow, returned to head up the Negro work and to prepare the launching of the ANLC. H.V. Phillips, Edwards, Doty and I were assigned to the organizing committce for the congress, drafting and circulating the call, and approaching organizations for delegates. As I remember, most of the Blacks in the Party were assigned to work on the congress. Otto was not involved in these activities, as immediately after the Fourth Party Convention, he had left for Moscow with the first batch of Black students.

Fort-Whiteman was truly a fantastic figure. A brown-skinned man of medium height, Fort-Whiteman’s high cheekbones gave him somewhat of an Oriental look. He had affected a Russian style of dress, sporting a robochka (a man’s long belted shirt) which came almost to his knees, ornamental belt, high boots and a fur hat. Here was a veritable Black Cossack who could be seen sauntering along the streets of Southside Chicago. Fort-Whiteman was a graduate of Tuskegec and, as I understood, had had some training as an actor, He had been a drama critic for The Messenger and for The Crusader. There was no doubt that he was a showman; he always seemed to be acting out a part he had chosen for himself.

Upon his return from the Soviet Union, he held a number of press conferences in which he delineated plans for the American Negro Labor Congress, and as a Black communist fresh from Russia, he made good news copy.

Fort-Whiteman had taken responsibility for lining up enter tainment for the opening night of the congress. Characteristically, with his Russian affectations, he arranged for a program of Russian ballet and theater. The rest of us didn’t question what he was doing, and the incongruity of the program didn’t occur to us until the opening night.

The mecting took place in a hall on Indiana Avenue near Thirty~ first Street, in the midst of the Black ghetto, When I arrived it was packed—-perhaps 500 people or so. Inside, I was suddenly attracted by a commotion at the door. Asa member of the steering committee, I walked over to see what was the matter. Something was amiss with the “Russian ballet” which was about to enter the hall. A young blonde woman in the “ballet” had been shocked by the complexion of most of the audience, which she had apparently expected to be of another hue. Loudly, in a broad Texas accent, she exclaimed, “Ah’m not goin’ ta dance for these niggahs!”

Somebody shouted, “Throw the cracker bitches out!” and the “Russian” dance group hurriedly left the hall.

The Russian actors remained to perform a one-act Pushkin play. They, at least, were genuine Russians from the Russian Federation, But alas, it was in Russian. Of itself, the play was undoubtedly interesting, but its relevance to a Black workers’ congress was, to say the least, unclear. Although Pushkin was a Black man, he wrote as a Russian, and the characters portrayed were Russian. More significant, however, and perhaps an indication of our sectarian approach, was the fact that no Black artist appeared on the program.

Fort-Whiteman made the keynote speech outlining the purposes and tasks of the congress. He was a passable orator and received a good response. Otto Huiswood, an associate of Briggs and one of the first Blacks to join the Party, also spoke. Richard B. Moore brought the house down with an impassioned speech which reached its peroration in Claude McKay's poem, “If We Must Die.” I was spellbound by Moore; I had never heard such oratory.

That night, Phillips and I left the hall in high spirits. In fact, I was literally walking on air. At last, I felt, we were about to get somewhere in our work among Blacks. Phillips, a bit more sober than I, remarked, “Let’s wait and sec the report of the credentials committee.”

His caution was justified, for the big letdown came the following morning. The first working session of the congress convened with about forty Black and white delegates, mainly communists and close sympathizers, The crowd of 500 at the opening night rally had been mainly community people. I think it was Phillips who remarked that there was hardly a face in the working session that he didn’t recognize; most participants, sadly, were from the Chicago arca.

The organizing committee had prepared draft resolutions for the congress to consider. As we had anticipated a much larger turnout, we had made plans for a credentials committee, resolutions committee, etc. But in light of the small attendance, these resolutions and preparations took on an Alice-in-Wonderland quality. For example, according to the constitution, the group’s purpose was to “unify the efforts...of all organizations of Negro workers and farmers as well as organizations composed of both Negro and white workers and farmers."

Despite our efforts and work, the ANLC never got off the ground. Few local units were formed, resolutions and plans were never carried into action. Only its official paper, the Negro Champion, subsidized by the Party, continued for several years. Among the post-mortems undertaken on the organization was the one made by James Ford in his book, The Negro and the Democratic Front, He commented that “for the period of its existence, it (the ANLC) was almost completely isolated from the basic masses of the Negro people." Disappointment and disillusionment followed and personal differences surfaced among our group. The fact was that the congress had failed, and with it, the first efforts to build a left-led united front among Blacks.

There was a natural tendency to find seapegoats for the failure. Moore and Huiswood, the able delegates from New York, seemed to have come to Chicago witha chip on their shoulders. They made no attempt to hide their contempt for Fort-Whiteman, whom they had known in New York. They openly alluded to him as “Minor’s man Friday.” At the time, I was a bit shocked at what I felt was an attempt to malign these comrades. This was especially true of Bob Minor, whom I regarded with respect and affection. He was sort of a father figure to me.

Fort-Whiteman, on the other hand, was still an unknown quantity. My feelings about him were rather mixed. I was both repelled and fascinated by the excessive flamboyance of the man. But much later, I recalled overhearing a conversation between him and Minor during the preparations for the congress. Minor informed Fort-Whiteman that Ben Fletcher, the well-known Black IWW Leader, had expressed a desire to participate in the congress, It was evident that Bob was pleased by the response of such an important Black labor leader. Fletcher, as an IWW organizer, had played a leading role in the successful organization of Philadelphia longshoremen, His attendance would undoubtedly have attracted other Blacks in the labor movement.

Fort-Whiteman, however, vehemently opposed the idea and exclaimed, “I don’t want to work with him; I know him. He’s the kind of fellow who'll try to take over the whole show.” That ended the discussion; Fletcher was not invited. .

I didn’t know Fletcher at the time, but as I reflected back onthe incident some time later, it was clear to me that had he been allowed to participate, Fort-Whiteman would have been overshadowed. I was too new to pass judgment on Fort-Whiteman’s qualifications, but I did wonder why he was chosen over such stalwarts as Moore and Huiswood. Huiswood, as a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, was the first Black American to attend a congress of that body. (Claude McKay was also a special fraternal delegate to that congress.) Together with other delegates, Huiswood visited Lenin and became the first Black man to meet the great Bolshevik. He later became the first Black to serve as a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International.

On the whole, I was very optimistic during my early years in the Party—confident we were building the kind of party that would eventually triumph over capitalism.

Chapter 5

A Student in Moscow

Otto’s delegation of Black students to the Soviet Union caused quite a stir in the States. The FBI kept an eye on their activities and, in late summer 1925, their departure was sensationalized in the New York Times.! The article attributed a statement to Lovett Fort-Whiteman to the effect that he had sent ten Blacks to the Soviet Union to study bolshevism and prepare for careers in the communist “diplomatic service.” The article concluded with a statement calling for action against such “subversive activity.”

At the time, we all felt that any Black applying for a passport would be subjected to close scrutiny. Therefore, when I learned that I too would soon be studying in Moscow, I applied for a first names of my Mother (Harriet) and Father (Haywood). This name was to stick with me the rest of my life.

Several weeks after I received my passport, I heard the FBI had been making inquiries about me. By that time, I had become known as one of the founders of the ANLC. Therefore, as the time for my departure drew near, I hid out at the home of comrades on Chicago's Westside until arrangements were made. I went to the national office of the Communist Party, then in Chicago, and was informed by Ruthenberg or Lovestone that I should get ready to leave, Political credentials, typed on silk, were sewn into the lining of my coat sleeve. In order to avoid going through the port of New York, I left by way of Canada.

In the manner of the old Underground Railroad, I was passed on from one set of comrades to the next: from Detroit, Rudy Baker, the district organizer, forwarded me on to the Canadian Party headquarters in Toronto where Jim MacDonald and Tim Buck were in charge. They sent me on to Montreal where comrades housed me and booked passage for me to Hamburg, Germany. Boarding ship in Quebec in the late spring of 1926, I sailed on the Canadian Pacific liner, the old Empress of Scotland. From Hamburg, I took a train to Berlin, arriving on a Saturday afternoon,

Thad the address of Hazel Harrison the wife of a Chicago friend of mine who was a concert pianist studying in Berlin, where she had had her professional debut. (Years later, she was to head the Music Department at Howard University.) At that time, she was living at a boarding house near the Kurfurstendamm and I stopped there for the remainder of the weekend.

This was the first time I had been in Berlin, Germany was then emerging from post-war crisis, during which currency inflation had reached astronomical heights, resulting in the virtual expropriation of a large section of the middle class. It was common to see shabbily dressed men still trying to keep up appearances by wearing starched white collars under their patched clothing,

The owners of the boarding house, two middle-aged widows who were friends of Hazel’s, showed me a trunk filled with paper notes—-old German marks which were now worthless. This had probably represented a life’s savings.

Hazel and her two friends took me out to the Tiergarten—the famous Berlin Zoo. I was attracted by the sight of three lion cubs that had been mothered by a German police dog. The cubs were getting big, and it was clear that the “mother” was no longer able to control them. We watched for some time, fascinated. I turned around and realized that there was a crowd around us. At first I thought they were looking at the cubs, but then it became clear that Hazel and I were the center of attention. Blacks were rare in Berlin in those days-—there were only half a dozen or so, mostly from the former German colonies of the Cameroons.

Monday morning I took a cab to the headquarters of the German Party, at Karl Marx House on Rosenthallerstrasse. It was a dour, fortress-like structure, with high walls surrounding the main building which was set in the middle. I entered into the anteroom just inside the walls, in which there were a number of sturdy looking young men lounging around. When I came in, they jumped up and stood eyeing me suspicously.

They were unarmed, but I knew their weapons were within arms’ reach, This was a symbol of the times for it was not long after the Beer Hall Putsch of Hitler’s brownshirts in Munich, and the battle for the streets of Berlin had already begun. I presented my credentials to a man named Walters, who was undoubtedly the head of security.

It was on this occasion that I first met Ernst Thaelmann, a former Hamburg longshoreman and then leader of the German Communist Party. He was passing through the gate and Walters stopped him and introduced us. Thaelmann spoke fairly good English (probably acquired in his work as a seaman) and we chatted. a while. He asked after Foster, Ruthenberg and others. Wishing me good luck, he passed on his way.

Walters gave me some spending money and arranged for me to stay with some German comrades, a young couple who had an elaborate apartment. The husband ran a haberdashery store on Friedrichstrasse and was a commander in the Rote Front (the red front)---the para-military organization which the communists had organized for defense of workers against the fascists.

One day while walking down the Kurfurstendamm, I saw a cabaret billboard advertising the Black jazz band of Leland and Drayton and their Charleston dancers. It was a well-known band back. in the States. I had little money, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to stop in and hear them. I sat down at a table and ordered a beer. ‘To my dismay, the waiter said they didn’t sell beer, just wine. So | took the wine card and chose the cheapest bottle I could find.

A number of band members and dancers came over to my table and asked where I was going. When I told them I was a student going to Moscow, they said they had just returned from a six-month tour in Russia, They were the first Black jazz group that had gone to the Soviet Union. I asked if they had met Otto and the other Black students there. Yes, they had met them all and they had had good times together. So we all sat down to exchange news.

As we talked, I began to worry about the bill, and said I was low on money. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” someone said and ordered more wine. But when it came time to pay for the drinks, I got stuck with the whole tab and had to walk several miles across town to get home.

After a month in Berlin, my visa came through. I was on my way to Stettin, a city on the Baltic Sea which bordered Poland and where I boarded a small Soviet ship. After three days of some of the roughest seas I have ever experienced, we landed in Leningrad. It was April 1926, and we were already in the season of the “white nights,” when daylight lasted until late into the evening.

As we entered the Gulf of Finland the following morning, we passed the naval fortress of Kronstadt about twenty miles out from Leningrad (the site of the anti-Soviet mutiny of 1920). The ship finally docked in Leningrad. Upon landing, I presented my visa and passport to the authorities, Addressing me in English, a man in civilian dress said, “Oh, you’re going to the Comintern school in Moscow?”

“Yes,” I replied.

He immediately took me in charge and got my baggage through customs. I assumed he was a member of the security police. We left the customs building and got into an old beat-up Packard. As we drove away from the docks, he informed me that the Moscow train would not leave until eight that evening. He put me up at a hotel where I could rest and go out to see the city.

Leningrad (old St. Petersburg) was built by Czar Peter the Great in the sixteenth century and now renamed for the architect of the new socialist society. As I walked down the now famous Nevsky Prospekt, I thought of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, trying to recapture some of the dramatic scenes in that classic. I passed the Peter and Paul Fortress and then the Winter Palace---once the home of the czars and now a museum of the people. The storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 had been the crucial event in the taking of St. Petersburg by the Bolsheviks.

The people I saw passing me on the street were plainly dressed. Many of the men wore the traditional robochka and high boots; others were in European dress. Most people were dressed neatly, though shabhily, and all appeared to be well-fed. They were bright and cheerful, It seemed they went ahout with a purpose—a sharp contrast to the atmosphere of hopelessness that had pervaded Berlin, People in Leningrad looked at me---and I looked at them. By this time, I had become used to being stared at and took it as friendly curiosity. After all, a Black man was seldom seen in those parts.

After several hours, I returned to my hotel. My friend from the security police showed up promptly at seven with my train ticket and took me to the station to put me on the train to Moscow. Filled with excitement and anticipation, I got little sleep on the train and awoke early to see the Russian landscape flowing by my window— pine forests, groves of birch trees and swamps. I was in the midst of the great Russian steppes.

When we arrived in Moscow at Yaroslavsky Station, some of my traveling companions hailed a droshky and told the driver to take me to the Comintern.

Moscow at last! We drove from the station into the vast sprawling city--once the capital of old Russia and now of the new. It was a bright, sunny morning and the sun glistened off the golden church domes in the “city of a thousand churches.” It seemed a maze of narrow, cobblestone streets, intersected by broad boulevards. While Leningrad had been a distinctly European city, Moscow seemed a mixture of the Asiatic and the European—a bizarre and strange combination to me, but a cheerful one. Moscow was more Russian than the cosmopolitan Leningrad. Crowds swarmed in the streets in many different styles of dress.

We arrived at the Comintern, which was housed in an old eighteenth century structure on Ulitsa Komintern near the Kremlin, across the square from Staraya Konyushnya (the old stables of the czar). I paid the driver and entered the building. The guard at the door checked my credentials and directed me upstairs to a small office on the third floor. After producing my bonafides, I was told to take a seat, to wait for my comrades who would soon becoming for me.

About half an hour later, Otto and another Black man entered the room. I was overjoyed at the sight of him and his friend, who turned out to be a fellow student, Harold Williams. We embraced Russian style, and I began to feel more at home in this strange jand.

Otto asked about the family. An expression of sadness crossed his face, however, when I asked him about the rest of the Black students, He then informed me of Jane Golden’s serious illness. She was at that moment in a uremic coma from a kidney ailment and was not expected to live. Her husband was at her side at the hospital. (Though both were from Chicago, I had not met them before.)

The situation had saddened the whole Black student body, and for that matter, the whole school. In the course of her brief sojourn, Jane had become very popular. Otto described her in glowing terms—a real morale booster, whose spirit had helped all of them through the period of initial adjustment.

I was impressed. Here was a Black woman, not a member of the Communist Party, who had so easily become accustomed to the new Soviet socialist society. It seemed to me that there must be thousands of Black women like her in the U.S.

After we had greeted each other, we caught a droshky over to the school in order that I might register officially. In the course of the ride, the driver lashed his horse and cursed at him. I asked Otto what he was saying, and he gave a running translation: “Get up there, you son-of-a-bitch. I feed you oats while I myself eat black bread! Your sire was no good, you bastard, your momma was no good too!” This verbal and physical abuse, Otto told me, was typical of most Russian droshky drivers.

We finally arrived at the school administration which was housed in another old seventeenth century structure, built before the Revolution. It had been a finishing school for daughters of the aristocracy. Before that, it had been a boys’ school where, rumor has it, the great Pushkin had studied.

Otto introduced me to the university rector with what sounded to my untrained ear like fluent Russian. We then went to the office of the chancellor, where I was duly registered. I was now a student at the Universitet Trydyashchiysya Vostoka Imeni Stalina (the University of the Toilers of the East Named for Stalin)---Russian acronym KUTVA, Otto and I then walked to the dormitory a few blocks away where I met the other two Black students, Bankole and Farmer,

We all immediately took a streetcar to the hospital which was located on the other side of the Moscow River. There we were met by Golden and some other students who informed us that Jane Golden had just passed away that morning, Golden seemed to be in a state of shock and the doctors had given him some sedatives. We went into the hospital morgue to view her body. Bankole broke down in uncontrollable tears, I learned afterwards that Jane had been a close friend—a kind of mother to him during the period of his adjustment to this new land.

We took Golden home to the dormitory. The school collective and its leaders immediately took over the funeral arrangements. The body lay in state in the school auditorium for twenty-four hours, during which time the students thronged past.

The funeral was held the following day and the whole school turned out. The cortege seemed a mile long as it flowed past Tverskaya towards the cemetery. The students would not allow the casket to be placed upon the cart, but organizing themselves in relays every fifty yards, insisted on carrying it the distance of several miles on their shoulders,

A good portion of the American colony in Moscow was assembled at the cemetery. The chairman of the school collective, a young Georgian, delivered a stirring eulogy at the graveside. One of the students who was standing next to me made a running translation sotto voce which went something like this:

The first among her race to come to the land of socialism...in search of freedom for her oppressed peoples, former slaves... to find out how the Soviets had done it. We were happy to receive her and her comrades...condolences to her bereaved husband, our Comrade Golden, and to the rest of the Negro Students,..the whole university has suffered a great loss. Rest in peace, Jane Golden. You were with us only a short time, but all of us have benefitted from your presence and comradeship,

Turning to Golden, he said:

We Soviet people and comrades of oppressed colonial and dependent countries must carry on. We pledge our undying support to the cause of your people’s freedom. Long live the freedom fight of our Negro brothers in America! Long live the Soviet Union and its Communist Party, beacon light of the struggle for freedom of all oppressed peoples.

Golden had borne himself well at the graveside, but we didn't want him to return to his room in the students’ dormitory, which would only remind him of his grievous loss. So we went to the apartment of MacCloud, an old Wobbly friend of ours from Philadelphia, who had attended the funeral and who lived in the Zarechnaya District, across the river. He was a close friend of Big Bill Haywood and had followed the great working class leader to the Soviet Union, There we tried to drown our sorrows in good old Russian vodka, which was in plentiful supply.

Jane Golden’s funeral and the school collective’s response to her death made a profound impression on me, Through these events, crammed into the first three days of my stay in the Soviet Union, I came to know something about my fellow students and the new socialist society into which I had entered

THE BOLSHEVIKS FIGHT FOR EQUALITY OF NATIONS

KUTVA was a unique university. At the time I entered, its student body represented more than seventy nationalities and ethnic groups. It was founded by the Bolsheviks for the special purpose of training cadre from the many national and ethnic groups within the Soviet Union—the former colonial dependencies of the czarist empire—and also to train cadres from colonies and subject nations outside the Soviet Union.

The school was divided into two sections-—inner and outer. At the inner section there were Turkmenians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Bashkirs, Yakuts, Chuvashes, Kazaks, Kalmucks, Buryat-Mongols and Inner and Outer Mongolians from Soviet Asia. From the Caucasus there were Azerbaidzhanis, Armenians, Georgians,

Abkhazians and many other national and ethnic groups I had never heard of before, There were Tartars from the Crimea and the Volga region,

The national and ethnic diversity found within the Soviet Union is hard to imagine. The Revolution had opened up many areas, for example through the Trans-Caucasus Road, and as late as 1928, the existence of new groups was still being “discovered.” These nationalities were all former colonial dependencies of the czars and were referred to as the “Soviet East,” “peoples of the East,” and “borderland countries,” The inner section comprised the main and largest part of the student body in the university.

We Blacks were of course part of the outer section at the school. It included Indians, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, Persians, Egyptians, Arabs and Palestinian Jews from the Middle East, Arabs from North Africa, Algerians, Moroccans, Chinese and several Japanese (hardly a colonial people, but as revolutionaries, identified with the East).

The Chinese, several hundred strong, comprised the largest group of the outer section, This was obviously because China, bordering on the USSR, was in the first stage of its own antiimperialist revolution, a revolution receiving direct material and political support from the Soviet Union. While KUTVA trained the communist cadres from China, there was also the Sun Yat-sen University, just outside of Moscow, which trained cadres for the Kuomintang.

Among its students was the daughter of the famous Christian general, Chang Tso-lin, Several Chinese, including Chiang Kaishek’s son, studied in Soviet military schools during this period. A number of the Chinese students from KUTVA were massacred by Chiang’s troops at the Manchurian border when they returned to China shortly after Chiang’s bloody betrayal of the revoiution in 1927, Otto told me that a former girlfriend of his was among this group. As I remember, there were no Latin Americans at KUTVA during the time I was there, and the sole black African was Bankole, The student body was continually expanding, however, and later included many students from these and other areas.

We students studied the classic works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. But unlike the past schooling we had known, this whole body of theory was related to practice. Theory was not regarded as dogma, but as a guide to action.

In May 1925, Stalin had delivered an historic speech at the school, outlining KUTV A’s purpose and its main task. His lecture was the subject of continuous discussion and study. It was our introduction to the Marxist theory on the national question and its development by Lenin and Stalin.

How did the Bolsheviks transform a territory embracing onesixth of the earth’s surface—known as the “prison-house of nations” under the Czar-—into a family of nations, a free union of peoples? What was the policy pursued by the Soviets which enabled them to forge together more than a hundred different stages of social development into such extraordinary unity of effort for the building of a multinational socialist state—the kind of unity that enabled them to win the civil war within and to defeat the intervention of seventeen nations, including the United States, from without.

The starting point for us was to understand that the formation of peoples into nations is an objective law of social development around which the Bolsheviks, particularly Lenin and Stalin, had developed a whole body of theory. According to this theory, a nation is an historically constituted stable community of people, based on four main characteristics; a common territory, a common economic life, a common language and a common psychological makeup (national character) manifested in common features in a national culture, Since the development of imperial ism, the liberation of the oppressed nations has become a question whose final resolution would only come through proletarian revolution.

The guiding principle of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on the national question was to bring about the unity of the laboring masses of the various nationalities for the purpose of waging a joint struggle—first to overthrow czarism and imperialism, and then to build the new society under a working class dictatorship. The accomplishment of the latter required the establishment of equality before the law for all nationalities —with no special privileges for any one people-—and the right of the colonies and subject nations to separate.

This principle was incorporated into the law of the land in the Declaration of Rights of the People of Russia, passed a few days after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. Of course, the declaration of itself did not eliminate national inequality, which as Stalin had observed, “rested on economic inequality, historically formed.” To eliminate this historically based economic and cultural inequality imposed by the czarist regimes upon the former oppressed nations, it was required that the more developed nations assist these formerly oppressed nations and peoples to catch up with the Great Russians in economic and cultural development,

In pursuance of this aim, the new government was organized on a bicameral basis. One body was chosen on the basis of population alone, the other, the Council of Nationalities, consisted of representatives from each of the national territorial units.the autonomous Soviet republics, autonomous regions and national areas, Any policy in regard to the affairs of these formerly oppressed nations could be carried through only with the approval of the Council of Nationalities. The Communist Party, through its members, was involved in both bodies and worked to see that its policy of full equality and the right of self-determination was implemented,

As this theory was put into practice, we learned that national cultures could be expressed with a proletarian (socialist) content and that there was no antagonistic contradiction, under socialism, between national cultures and proletarian internationalism. Under the Soviets, the languages and other national characteristics of the many nationalities were developed and strengthened with the aim of drawing the formerly oppressed nationalities into full participation in the new society. Thus, the Bolsheviks upheld the principle of “proletarian in content, national in form.” Through this policy, they hoped to draw all nationalities together, acquainting each with the achievements of the others, leading to a truly universal culture, a joint product of all humanity.

This is in sharp contrast to imperialism’s policy of forcibly arresting and distorting the free development of nations in order to maintain their economic and cultural backwardness as an essential condition for the extraction of superprofits. Thus, the oppressed nations can achieve liberation only through the path of revolutionary struggle to overthrow imperialism and in alliance with the working class of the oppressor nations. Stalin, proceeding from the experience and practice of the Soviet Union, emphasized the need for the formation and consolidation of a united revolutionary front between the working class of the West and the rising revolutionary movements of the colonies.--a united front based on a struggle against a common enemy. The precondition for forming such unity is that the proletariat of the oppressor nations gives:

direct and determined support to the liberation movement of the oppressed peoples against the imperialism of its “own country,” for “no nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.” (Engels)... This support implies the advocacy, defense and implementation of the slogan of the right of nations to secession, to independent existence as states.

Without this cooperation of peoples based on mutual confidence and fraternal interrelations, it will be impossible to establish the material basis for the victory of socialism.

The test of all this theory was being proven in practice in the Soviet Union. The experience of the Bolsheviks demonstrably proved to us that socialism offered the most favorable conditions for the full development of oppressed nations and peoples.

At the time of the Revolution, there were many nationalities within the borders of the Soviet Union in which the characteristics of nationhood had not yet fully matured, and in fact had been suppressed by the czars. It was the Soviet system itself which became a powerful factor in the consolidation of these nationalities into nations, as socialist industry and collective farming created the economic basis for this consolidation.

I observed this firsthand in the Crimea and the Caucasus during my visits there in the summers of 1927 and 1928. The language and culture which had been stifled under the czarist regime were now being developed. The language of the Crimean people was a Turko-Tartar language, but before the Revolution, almost all education, such as there was, was in the Russian language. Now there were schools established which used the native language. Otto and other students made similar observations when they traveled to different areas of the Soviet Union.

In the meantime, | was having my own problems with the Russian language. On first hearing it, the language had sounded most strange to me. I could hardly understand a word and wondered if I would ever be able to master it. As the youngest Black American, I applied myself seriously to its study. The first hurdle was the Cyrillic alphabet—-its uniquely different characters intimidated me. But the crash course at KUTVA, lasting about an hour and a half per day, soon broke down this initial barrier.

In addition, I studied on my own for a couple of hours each day. I would set out to memorize twenty new words a day, Then at night, | would write them out on a sheet of paper and pin them above the mirror in my room. I would then go over them again in the morning while shaving, and during the day I would make sure to use them in conversation with the Russians.

English grammar had always seemed irrelevant to me, but I soon came to appreciate the logic of Russian grammar. In fact, I learned most of my English grammar through the study of Russian. Its rules were consistent and understandable. ‘The language soon ceased to be mysterious and revealed itself as being beautifully and simply constructed. In six months | was able to read Pravda with the help of a dictionary.

KUTVA: STRUCTURE AND STUDIES

The school structure was fairly complicated, but, as I saw it, thoroughly democratic. There was the collective, the general body which ineluded everybody in the school—from the rector, faculty, students, clerical and maintenance workers to the scrubwoman. The leading body of the collective was the bureau—-composed of representatives clected by the various groups in the university. There was also a Communist Party organization which played the leadership role at all levels.

Originally established by the Council of Nationalities, KUTVA was now a Party school, administered by the Educational Department (AGITPROP) of the Central Committee of the CPSU. There was a direct representative of the Party, called a “Party strengthener,” in the school administration, Together with the rector and a representative of the students, he was part of the “troika” which constituted the top leadership of the school.

Students had the rights of citizens, voting and participating in local elections, The school discussed and dealt with all the issues which Soviet workers and peasants discussed at their work places. As with all students who pursued courses in higher education in the Soviet Union, we at KUTVA received full room and board, clothes and a small stipend for spending money. There was, of course, no tuition, We used to attend workers’ cultural clubs and do volunteer work, like working Saturdays to help build the Moscow subways. Education for us was not an ivory tower, but a true integration into the Soviet society, where we received firsthand knowledge from our experiences.

The curriculum (which was a three-year course) was based on Marxism-Leninism; that is, the teachings of Marx and Engels as developed by Lenin. It included dialectical and historical materialism, the Marxist world concept; the Marxist theory of class struggle as the motive force of human events, the economic doctrines of Marx: value and surplus value, as a key to understanding history by revealing the economic law of motion of modern capitalist societies, Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism; theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat and its Soviet state form; the problems of socialist construction; Lenin’s theory on the peasant question-—the alliance of workers and peasants as the base for Soviet power; the national and colonial questions; and the role of the party as vanguard of the proletariat. We also studied the specifie history of the CPSU.

Our favorite teacher was Endré Sik, who taught courses on Leninism and the history of the Soviet Party. Sik was a striking young man. His distinguishing feature was a large shock of white hair, unusual for a manso young---he was probably in his thirties. He was soft-spoken and modest. We all loved Sik; he was an outgoing person who radiated warmth.

Sik was a Hungarian, a politieal refugee living in Russia, He had been a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. Captured by the Russians, he was converted to Bolshevism while in a Russian prison camp. On his release, he had gone baek to Hungary and participated in the short-lived (133 days) Hungarian Soviet government of 1919 of Béla Kun, Withthe defeat of the Béla Kun government, Sik—along with hundreds of other revolutionaries—fled to the Soviet Union. Hungarian exiles made up one of Moscow’s largest foreign colonies. In Moscow, Sik pursued an academic career. He was a graduate of the Institute of Red Professors and like many Hungarian intellectuals, he was multilingual.

For all his good nature, Sik seemed tired and harassed. He was teaching in many schools, in addition to activity in the Hungarian community. Seven years after the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet, the exiled revolutionaries were bitterly divided and factionalized, laying blame on each other for the failure of the revolution,

Sik beeame deeply interested in the question of Blacks in the United States and undertook a serious study of the question. He read all the books available and also asked the Black students at KUTVA to join with him. Unfortunately for our personal relationship, Sik and I were to find ourselves on opposite sides of the fenee in the discussion of Black Americans which took place at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in June 1928.

Our teacher of Marxist economics was a young man by the name of Rubenstein, a Russian economist in the Gosplan (Governmental Planning Commission). The star pupil in that class turned out to be our modest friend Golden. Golden, who had known nothing about Marxism before eoming to the Soviet Union, was able to grasp the intricacies of Marx’s Capital and Value, Price and Profit seemingly without effort.

A class that stands out in my memory was one on how tomakea revolution, to seize power onee the situation was ripe. This course eonsisted of a series of Jeetures by a young Red Army officer. He had been a heroie figure in the Moscow uprising of 1917 and the subsequent seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in that city. A tall, handsome young man of bourgeois background, he had been a lieutenant in the army of the Kerensky government. Like many other soldiers, he had been won over by the Bolsheviks on the basis of their demands, which reflected the needs of the people. peace, bread and land. To him, the Moscow uprising against Kerensky, led by the Bolsheviks, was a model for the coming seizure of power in the big cities of the capitalist world.

He had a large map of Moscow on the wall and would use it to illustrate how it had been done. The eall for the uprising, he said, had come to the Moseow Communist Party by telephone from Leningrad, where the revolutionary workers, sailors and army under the leadership of Lenin had overthrown the Kerensky government and seized power in that eity.

In Moscow, the Party organization, already prepared, issued a call to the people for an uprising. His regiment, stationed on the outskirts of the eity, together with red guards (workers’ militia), responded and began to march towards the center of the city. The White Guardists were concentrated in the Arbot and in the Kremlin, Here he pointed out, in Russian and other European cities, the working class districts were centered around factories on the outskirts of the city and Moseow was cireled by workers suburbs. Together with defected units of other regiments and with red guards, they marehed towards Moscow’s central area, whence fighting spread throughout the city--even into the trans-Moscow district. The reds finally wiped out the White Guardist strongholds, and the Kremlin, which had changed hands two times before in the fighting, finally surrendered,

Moscow was ours!

CLASSMATES AT KUTVA

Beeausc of the language problem, we students from outside the Soviet Union were subdivided into three main language groups: English, French and Chinese. English and French were the dominant languages of the many colonial areas represented at the university. Spanish was later added when Latin American students began to arrive. In addition to ourselves, the English-speaking group included East Indians, Koreans, Japanese and Indonesians. I had many close friends in this latter group.

One of the most interesting and brilliant was an Indian student by the name of Sakorov. (They all took Russian names because of the severe repression which they faced back home.) A former machinist in a Detroit auto plant, Sakorov had been sent to the school by the American Party.

Originally from Bombay, Sakorov had gone to sea on a British ship at the age of twelve and had been subjected to very oppressive conditions his whole career at sea. He eventually jumped ship in Baltimore and wound up working in an auto plant in Detroit. Of all the group of students, he was the closest to us Blacks, He knew first hand the plight of Blacks in the United States, and as a dark skinned Indian, he had experienced much of the same type of racial abuse while there, After he left the school, he returned to India, where he became one of the founders of the Indian Communist Party.

Later, more Indian students were to come, including one sixteen year old—a tall, lanky boy who took the name of Volkoy. He had been born in California; his parents were Sikhs who had migrated to the U.S. and worked as agricultural workers in the Imperial Valley of California. They were part of a foreign contingent of the Ghadr Party, a revolutionary nationalist party of Sikhs which had been organized in 1916. The Party would pick out young men to be future leaders; Volkov was chosen and sent to Japan for education and stayed there a year. Then he was sent to study in the Soviet Union, perhaps by the Japanese Party. He spoke Japanese and English.

Among the Indian students was a group of about half a dozen Sikhs, former professional soldiers, survivors of the Hong Kong massacre of 1926. On the pretext of quelling an “imminent mutiny,” the British colonel of the regiment stationed in Hong Kong had called the unarmed Sikh soldiers into the regimental square and turned machine guns on them. (All regiments in the Indian Army included a British machine gun company as a safeguard against mutiny.) Several hundred were killed or wounded. As I understood it, the massacre was engineered to quell the protests over conditions which were being raised by members of the Ghadr Party and its supporters.

The group who arrived in Moscow were among the few who escaped over the walls; they had fled to Shanghai where they were taken in charge by M.N. Roy, an Indian and then Comintern representative to China. Roy sent them to Moscow. These students, some of them older grey-bearded men, had spent their whole lives in the British Indian Army, They represented a special problem for the school, because most of them had had very little education of any kind. They were not brought into our class, but were put into a special group under the tutelage of Volkov, Sakorov and other of the regular Indian students,

It was my good fortune to meet many of these Indian students again in 1942, when I was in Bombay as a merchant seaman, Most of them were leading figures in the Indian revolutionary movement. Sakorov had been a defendant in one of the Merut trials, having been charged with “conspiracy against the king,” Since his return to India, he had spent eleven years in prison. Nada, another former schoolmate, was president of the Indian Friends of the Soviet Union and very active among the students and youth,

There were several Koreans and Japanese at the school, and two Indonesians. I remember Dirja particularly well. A Dutcheducated Indonesian intellectual, he was an old revolutionary who had spent many years in prison. There was another Indonesian, a young man (whose name I cannot recall), who later emerged as a communist leader and was killed in the Indonesian revolt of 1946.

Kemal Pasha (a party name conferred on him by Sakorov) was a grey-eyed Moroccan from the Riffian tribe of Abdul Krim, I met Kemal Pasha again in Paris during the Spanish Civil War. There were also two whites in the group-June Kroll, then the wife of an American communist leader, Carl Reeves; and Max Halff, a young English lad of Russian-Jewish parentage.

BLACKS IN MOSCOW

We students were a fairly congenial lot and in particular I got to know the other Black students quite well. Golden was a handsome, jet-Black man; a former Tuskegee student and a dining car waiter, He was not a member of the Communist Party, but was a good friend of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, head of the Party's Afro-American work.

Golden told me that his coming to the Soviet Union had been accidental. He had run into Fort-Whiteman, a fellow student at Tuskegee, on the streets of Chicago, Fort-Whiteman had just returned from Russia and was dressed in a Russian blouse and hoots.

As Golden related it: “I asked Fort-Whiteman what the hell he was wearing, Had he come off the stage and forgotten to change clothes? He informed me that these were Russian clothes and that he had just returned from that country.”

Golden at first thought it was a put-on, but became interested as Fort-Whiteman talked about his experiences. “Then out of the blue, he asks me if I want to go to Russia as a student. At first, I thought he was kidding, but man, I would have done anything to get off those dining cars! I was finally convinced that he was serious. ‘But I’m married,’ I told him. ‘What about my wife? ‘Why, bring her along too!’ he replied. He took me to his office at the American Negro Labor Congress, an impressive set-up with a secretary, and I was convinced, Fort-Whiteman gave me money to get passports, and the next thing I knew, a couple of weeks later we were on the boat with Otto and the others on the way to Russia. And here I am now.”

He had a keen sense of humor and kidded the rest of us a lot, particularly Otto, His Southern accent carried over into Russian, and we teased him about being the only person who spoke Russian with a Mississippi accent,

Then there was Bankole, an African who spent most of his time with the Black Americans. He was an Ashanti, from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and his family was part of the African elite.

The son of a wealthy barrister, his family had sent him to London University to study journalism, From there, he had gone to Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh.

He had been on the road to becoming a perennial student and had planned to continue at McGill University in Montreal, but was recruited to the Young Communist League in Pittsburgh. In the States, he was confronted with a racism more blatant than any he had met before. I gathered that this had struck him sharply and had been largely responsible for his move to the left,

My brother Otto had become sort of a character in the school, He was popular among the students, who immediately translated his pseudonym “John Jones” into the Russian “Ivan Ivanovich,” Otto had ahsolutely no tolerance for red tape, and he had hecome a mortal enemy of the apparatchiki (petty bureaucrats) in the school. He had built a reputation for making their lives miserable, and when they saw him coming, they would huddle in a corner; “Here comes Ivan Ivanovich. Ostorozhno (watch out)! Bolshoi skandal budyet (this guy will make a big scandal)!”

Harold Williams of Chicago was a West Indian and former seaman in the British merchant marine, He had adopted the name of Dessalines, one of the three leaders of the Haitian revolution of the 1790s. Williams had little formal education and some difficulty in grasping theory, but was instinctively a class-conscious guy.

Finally, there was Mahoney, whose name in the USSR was Jim Farmer. Farmer was a steelworker from East Liverpool, Ohio, a Communist Party member and had played a leading role in local struggles in the steel mills.

There were only eight of us Blacks in a city of 4,500,000 people. In addition to the six students, there were also two Black American women who had long residence (since before the Revolution) in Moscow.

I only knew one of the women, Emma Harris. We first met on the occasion of the death of Jane Golden. Emma was a warm, outgoing and earthy middle-aged woman, originally from Georgia. It was evident that she had once been quite handsome—of the type that in the old days we called a “teasin’ brown.” Emma had first come to Moscow as a member of a Black song and dance group, a lowly hoofer in the world of cheap vaudeville. Having been deserted by its manager, the group was left stranded in Moscow.

While the others had evidently made their way back to the States, Emma had decided to stay. She had liked the country. Here, being Black wasn’t a liability, but on the contrary, a definite asset, With her drive and ambition to be “somebody,” Emma parlayed this asset into a profitable position. She married a Russian who installed her, it seems, as a madam of a house of prostitution. It was no ordinary house, she once explained to me. “Our clients were the wealthy and nobility.” To the former hoofer, this was status.

Such was Emma’s situation in November 1917, when the Russian Bolsheviks and Red Guards moved in from the proletarjan suburbs of Moscow to capture the bourgeois inner city and the Kremlin. During some mopping-up operations, Emma’s house was raided by the Cheka (the security police). A bunch of White Guardists had holed up there and the whole group was arrested, including Emma. They were taken to the Lubyanka Prison and some of the more notorious White Guardists were summarily executed.

Emma remained in a cell for a few days. Finally she was called up before a Cheka official. He told her that they were looking into her case. Many of the people who had been arrested at her place were counter-revolutionaries and conspirators against the new Soviet state, and some had been shot. Emma disclaimed knowledge of any conspiracy and stated that she was engaged in “legitimate” business and had nothing to do with the politics of her clients.

“You know the only reason we didn’t shoot you was because you are a Negro woman,” the official said. To her surprise, he added, “You are free to go now. I advise you to try to find some useful work. Keep out of trouble.”

When we met Emma, she had become a textile worker. She lived with a young Russian woman--also a textile worker, whom I suspected was a reformed prostitute—in a two-room apartment in an old working class district near Krasnaya Vorota (Red Gate). Soon after the first Black students arrived, she sought them out and grected them like long lost kinfolk.

At least once a month, we students would pool part of the small stipends we reccived and give Emma money to shop for and prepare some old home cooking for us. On these occasions, she would regale us with stories from her past life. At times one could detect a fleeting expression of sadness, of nostalgia, for her old days of affluence. One could see that she had never become fully adjusted to the new life under the Soviets. While not openly hostile, it was clear that she was not an ardent partisan of the new regime. Knowing our sentiments, she avoided political discussion and kept her views to herself. Our feelings toward her were warmest when we first arrived, but as we developed more ties with the Russians, we went by to see her less often. But we did continue to visit her periodically; she was a sort of mother figure for us, and we all felt sorry for her. She was getting old and often expressed a desire to return to the States. She was finally able to return home after World War II.

Needless to say, Blacks attracted the curiosity of the Muscovites. Children followed us in the streets. If we paused to grect a (riend, we found ourselves instantly surrounded by curious crowds-—unabashedly staring at us. Once, while strolling down Tverskaya, Otto and I stopped to greet a white American friend and immediately found ourselves surrounded by curious Russians. It was a friendly curiosity which we took in stride. A young Russian woman stepped forward and began to upbraid and lecture the crowd.

“Why are you staring at these people? They're human beings the same as us. Do you want them to think that we’re savages? Era ne kulturnya! (That is uncultured!)” The last was an epithet and in those days a high insult.

“Eta ne po-Sovietski! (It’s not the Soviet way!)” she scolded them,

At that point, someone in the crowd calmly responded: “Well, citizeness, it’s a free country, isn’t it?”

We were not offended, but amused. We understood all this for what it was.

There was one occasion when Otto, Farmer, Bankole and I were walking down Tverskaya. Bankole, of course, stood out—attracting more attention than the rest of us with his English cut Savile Row suit, monocle and cane—a black edition of a British aristocrat. We found ourselves being followed by a group of Russian children, who shouted: “Jass Band....Jass Band!”

Otto, Farmer and I were amused at the incident and took it in stride. Bankole, however, shaking with rage at the implication, jerked around to confront them. His monocle fell off as he shouted: “Net Jass Band! Net Jass Band!” As he spoke, he hit his cane on the ground for emphasis.

Evidently, to these kids, a jazz band was not just a group of musicians, but a race or tribe of people to which we must belong. They obviously thought we were with Leland and Drayton, the musicians I had met in Berlin, They had been a big hit with the Muscovites. We pulled Bankole away, “C'mon man, cut it out, ‘They don’t mean anything.”

In the Soviet Union, remnants of national and racial prejudices from the old society were attacked by education and law. It was a crime to give or receive direct or indirect privileges, or to exercise discrimination because of race or nationality. Any manifestation of racial or national superiority was punishable by law and was regarded as a serious political offense, a social crime.

During my entire stay in the Soviet Union, I encountered only one incident of racial hostility, It was on a Moscow streetear. Several of us Black students had boarded the car on our way to spend an evening with our friend MacCloud. It was after rush hour and the car was only about half filled with Russian passengers. As usual, we were the objects of friendly curiosity. At one stop, a drunken Russian staggered aboard. Seeing us, he muttered (but loud enough for the whole car to hear) something about “Black devils in our country.”

A group of outraged Russian passengers thereupon seized him and ordered the motorman to stop the ear. It was a citizen's arrest, the first I had ever witnessed. “How dare you, you scum, insult people who are the guests of our country!”

What then occurred was an impromptu, on-the-spot meeting, where they debated what to do with the man. I was to see many of this kind of “meeting” during my stay in Russia.

It was decided to take the culprit to the police station which, the conductor informed them, was a few blocks ahead, Upon arrival there, they hustled the drunk out of the car and insisted that we Blacks, as the injured parties, come along to make the charges.

At first we demurred, saying that the man was obviously drunk and not responsible for his remarks. “No, citizens,” said a young man (who had done most of the talking), “drunk or not, we don’t allow this sort of thing in our country. You must come with us to the militia (police) station and prefer charges against this man.”

‘The car stopped in front of the station. The poor drunk was hustled off and all the passengers came along. The defendant had sobered up somewhat by this time and began apologizing before we had even entered the building. We got to the commandant of the station.

The drunk swore that he didn’t mean what he'd said. “I was drunk and angry about something else. I swear to you citizens that I have no race prejudice against those Black gospoda (gentlemen).”

We actually felt sorry for the poor fellow and we accepted his apology. We didn’t want to press the matter.

“No,” said the commandant, “we'll keep him overnight. Perhaps this will be a lesson to him

BIG BILL HAYWOOD

In addition to the students at KUTVA and the two Black women, there was a sizeable American colony in Moscow during my stay there. There were political representatives of the Communist Party USA to the Comintern, the Profintern, the Crestintern and to the departments, bureaus and secretaries of these organizations—holding jobs as translators, stenographers and researchers

Soviet cultural and publishing organizations also employed U.S, citizens, and in addition to the political groups, there were a number of technical and skilled workers who came as specialists to work for the new Soviet state. I got to know a number of the Americans during my stay, both official reps and others in the colony.

Big Bill Haywood was perhaps the most famous of these. He was organizer and founder of the IWW, and a great friend of all Blacks in Moscow. At the time I met him he was in his late fifties and quite ill, suffering from diabetes. Physically, he was only the shell of the man he had once been. He called himself a political refugee from American capitalism, As a sick man, he had fled the U.S. to avoid a ten-year frame-up prison sentence which he knew he would never have survived, Bill was blind in one eye, over which he wore a black patch. I had imagined the loss of his eye had happened in a fight with company or police thugs and was rather disappointed to learn that it was the result of a childhood accident.

In the Soviet Union he had participated in the organization of the Kuzbas Colony. This project was to reopen and operate industry in the Kuznetsk Basin in the Urals, closed during the Civil War period. The colony was located about a thousand miles from Moscow in an area of enormous coal deposits, vital to socialist industrialization. The district, with its mines and deserted chemical plants, had been established by the Soviet government as an autonomous colony. Big Bill had brought a number of American skilled workers, many of whom were old Wobblies, to reopen the plants and mines,

Big Bill became a member of the CPUSA at its founding convention in 1921, and while in the Soviet Union he was a member of the CPSU. Bill and his devoted wife, a Russian office worker, lived in the Lux Hotel---a Comintern hostelry.

His room had become a center for the gathering of American radicals, especially old Wobblies passing through or working in the Soviet Union. Here they would gather on a Saturday night and reminisce about old times and discuss current problems. Often a bunch of us Black students were present, Sometimes these sessions would carry on all night until Sunday morning. There were only a few chairs in the room, and Bill would sit in a huge armchair surrounded by people sitting on the floor. For us Blacks, listening to Big Bill was like a course on the American labor movement. He was a bitter enemy of racism, which he saw as the mainstay of capitalist domination over the U.S. working class, a continuous brake on labor unity, This attitude was reflected in the preamble of the IWW constitution, he told us, It read: “No working man or woman shall be excluded from membership in unions because of creed or color.” This was borne out in practice,

The IWW was the first labor organization in modern times to invade the South and break down racial barriers in that benighted region. He recounted his experiences in the organizing drives among Southern lumber workers in Louisiana and Texas. This resulted in the organization of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in 1910, an independent union in the lumber camps of Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, At its height this union had 25,000 members, half of them Black.

Big Bill described how the IWW broke down discrimination at the first convention of this union, He had come from the national IWW office to speak to the convention. They were all white, he said, and he inquired why no colored men were present. He was told that the Louisiana state law prohibited meetings of Black and white—the Negro brothers were meeting in another hall nearby. Bill recalled that he then told them: “Damn the law! It’s the law of the lumber bosses. Its objective is to defeat you and to keep you divided and you're not going to get anywhere by obeying the dictates of the bosses. You've got to meet together.” And the latter is exactly what they did, he told us.

I remember that a few days after one of these gatherings we telephoned to tell him that we were coming over, only to learn from his wife that he had had a stroke and was in the Kremlin hospital. She said that he was getting along OK, but couldn’t see visitors. After several weeks he returned home. Still weak, he received many of his friends, and many of the delegates to the Fourth Congress of the Profintern which was in Moscow at the time. Big Bill had been a leading participant in this organization since its inception.

Then suddenly, he was back in the hospital, where he died May 18, 1928. The whole American colony turned out for the funeral. There were delegations from the Russian Communist Party, of which he was a member, and from the various international organizations in which he had played a role. The Fourth Congress of the RILU adjourned its sessions, and representatives of trade unions from all over the world attended the funeral.

I'm sure for all us Black students, our meeting and friendship with this great man were among the most memorable experiences of our stay in Moscow, A stalwart son of the American working class, Bill’s life and battles represented its best traditions. To Blacks, he was a man who would not only stand up with you, but if need be, go down with you. This was the iron test in the fight against the common enemy, U.S, capitalism. Big Bill obviously understood from his own experience the truth of the Marxian maxim that in the U.S., “labor in the white skin can never be free as long as in the Black it is branded.”

Ina

I first met my second wife, Ekaterina—-Ina—in December 1926, We were both at a party at the home of Rose Bennett, a British woman who had married M. Petrovsky (Bennett), the chairman of the Anglo-American Commission of the Comintern and formerly Cl representative to Great Britain,

Ina was one of a group of ballet students whom Rose had invited to meet some of us KUTVA students, She was a small young woman of nineteen or twenty, shy and retiring, and sat off removed from the party. After that party, we met several times, and she told me about herself,

She was born in Vladikavkaz (in northern Caucasus), the daughter of the mayor of the town, It was one of those towns that was taken and re-taken during the Civil War, one time by the whites, then by the reds. On one occasion when the town fell to the reds, her father was accused of collaborating with the whites, The reds came and arrested him and she never saw him again, Ina was about eleven at the time; she later learned that her father had been executed,

Her uncle was a famous artist in Moscow and after her father’s execution they went there to live. Ina told me of her trip to Moscow at the height of famine and a typhus epidemic; they rode in freight cars several days through the Ukraine, and saw people dying along the road. Her uncle took charge of them and got them an apartment on Malaya Bronaya. He investigated the case of her father and discovered that a mistake had been made, and her father was posthumously exonerated. As a sort of compensation, she and her mother were regarded as “social activists,” and Ina entered school to study ballet. She later transferred from the ballet school to study English in preparation for work as a translator. We lived together in the spring of 1927 and got married the following fall, after my return from the Crimea.

In January 1927, I was stunned by the news of the death of my Mother. One morning, when I was at Ina’s house, Otto burst in. Overcome by emotion, he could hardly talk, but managed to blurt out, “Mom’s dead!” He had a letter from our sister Eppa, with a clipping of Mother’s obituary from the Chicago Defender.

Under the headline “Funeral of Mrs. Harriet Hall,” was her picture and an article which described her, a domestic worker, asa “noted club woman.” She had been a member of the Black Eastern Star and several other lodges and burial societies. The article mentioned that she was survived by her husband, daughter and two sons, the latter in Moscow.

I was overcome with grief and guilt at not being home. Deeply shocked, I had always assumed that I would return to see Mother again, Born a slave, her world had been confined to the midwest and upper South, She had once told me, “Son, I sure would like to see the ocean,” and I had glibly promised, “Oh, I'll take you there someday, Momma.” I felt that I had been her favorite; | was the responsible one, and yet I hadn’t been able to do what I had promised, Worse yet, I wasn’t even there when she died. It took me some time to get over the shock.

Chapter 6

Trotsky’s Day in Court

Apart from our academic courses, we received our first tutelage in Leninism and the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the heat of the inner-party struggle then raging between Trotsky and the majority of the Central Committee led by Stalin. We KUTVA students were not simply bystanders, but were active participants in the struggle. Most of the students—and all of our group from the U.S,—-were ardent supporters of Stalin and the Central Committee majority.

It had not always been thus. Otto told me that in 1924, a year before he arrived, a majority of the students in the school had been supporters of Trotsky. Trotsky was making a play for the Party youth, in opposition to the older Bolshevik stalwarts, With his usual demagogy, he claimed that the old leadership was betraying the revolution and had embarked on a course of “Thermidorian reaction," In this situation, he said, the students and youth were “the Party’s truest barometer,”

But by the time the Black American students arrived, the temporary attraction to Trotsky had been reversed. The issues involved in the struggle with Trotsky were discussed in the school, They involved the destiny of socialism in the Soviet Union. Which way were the Soviet people to go? What was to be the direction of their economic development? Was it possible to build a socialist economic system? These questions were not only theoretical ones, but were issues of life and death. The economic life of the country would not stand still and wait while they were being debated.

The Soviet working class, under the leadership of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, had vanquished capitalism over one-sixth of the globe; shattered its economic power; expropriated the capitalists and landlords; converted the factories, railroads and banks into public property; and was beginning to build a state-owned socialist industry. The Soviet government had begun to apply Lenin’s cooperative plans in agriculture and begun to fully develop a socialist economic system. This colossal task had to be undertaken by the workers in alliance with the masses of working peasantry.

From the October Revolution through 1921, the economic system was characterized by War Communism. Basic industry was nationalized, and all questions were subordinated to the one of meeting the military needs engendered by the civil war and the intervention of the capitalist countries.

But by 1921, the foreign powers who had attempted to overthrow the Soviets had largely been driven from Russia’s borders, It was then necessary to orient the economy toward a peace-time situation. The NEP (New Economic Policy) formulated at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 was the policy designed to guide the transition from War Communism to the building of socialism. It replaced a system of surplus appropriation with a tax in kind which would be less of a burden on the peasantry, The NEP was a temporary retreat from socialist forms: smaller industries were leased to private capital to run; peasants were allowed to sell their agricultural surplus on free markets, central control over much of the economy was lessened. All of this was necessary to have the economy function on a peace-time basis, It was a measure designed to restore the exchange of commodities between city and country which had been so greatly disrupted by the civil war and intervention. It was a temporary retreat from the attack on all remnants of capitalism, a time for the socialist state to stabilize its base area, to gather strength for another advance. A year later at the Eleventh Party Congress, Lenin declared that the retreat was ended and called on the Party to “prepare for an offensive on private capital.”

Lenin was incapacitated by a series of strokes in 1923 and couldno longer participate in the active leadership of the Party. It was precisely at this time, taking advantage of Lenin's absence, that Trotsky made his bid for leadership in the Party. Trotsky had consistently opposed the NEP and its main engineer, Lenin— attacking the measures designed to appease the peasantry and maintain the coalition between the peasants and the workers,

From late 1922 on, Trotsky made a direct attack on the whole Leninist theory of revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He denied the possibility (and necessity) of building socialism in one country, and instead characterized that theory as an abandonment of Marxist principles and a betrayal of the revolutionary movement. He postulated his own theory of “permanent revolution,” and contended that a genuine advance of socialism in the USSR would become possible only as a result of a socialist victory in the other industrially developed states.

While throwing around a good deal of left-sounding rhetoric, Trotsky’s theories were thoroughly defeatist and class-collaborationist. For instance, in the postscript to Program for Peace, written in 1922, he contended that “as long as the hourgeoisie remains in power in the other European countries, we shall be compelled, in our struggle against economic isolation, to strive for agreement with the capitalist world; at the same time it may be said with certainty that these agreements may at best help us to mitigate some of our economic ills, to take one or another step forward, but real progress of a socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the major European countries.”

At the base of this defeatism was Trotsky’s view that the peasantry would be hostile to socialism, since the proletariat would “have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations.” Thus Trotksy contended that the working class would:

come into hostile collision not only with all the bourgeois groupings which supported the proletariat during the first Stages of its revolutionary struggle, but also with the broad masses of the peasaniry with whose assistance it came into power. The contradictions in the position of a workers’ government in a backward country with an overwhelmingly peasant population could be solved only ...in the arena of the world proletarian revolution.

Therefore, it would not be possible to build socialism in a backward, peasant country like Russia. The mass of peasants would exhaust their revolutionary potential even before the revolution had completed its bourgeois democratic tasks—the breakup of the feudal landed estates and the redistribution of the land among the peasantry. This line, which underestimated the role of the peasantry, had been put forward by Trotsky as early as 1915 in his article “The Struggle for Power.” There he claimed that imperialism was causing the revolutionary role of the peasantry to decline and downgraded the importance of the slogan “Confiscate the Landed Estates.”

As it was pointed out in our classes, Trotsky portrayed the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass. He made no distinction between the masses of peasants who worked their own land (the muczhiks) and the exploiting strata who hired labor (the kulaks). His conclusions openly contradicted the strategy of the Bolsheviks, developed by Lenin, of building the worker-peasant alliance as the basis for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Further, they were at complete variance with any realistic economic or social analysis.

Trotsky’s entire position reflected a lack of faith in the strength and resources of the Soviet people, the vast majority of whom were peasants. Since it denied the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, the success of the revolution could not come from internal forces, but had to depend on the success of proletarian revolutions in the advanced nations of Western Europe. In the absence of such revolutions, the revolutionary process within the Soviet Union itself would have to be held in abeyance, and the proletariat, which had seized power with the help of the peasantry, would have to hold state power in conflict,with all other classes.

Behind Trotsky’s revolutionary rhetoric was a simplistic socialdemocratic view which regarded the class struggle for socialism as solely labor against capital. This concept of class struggle did no regard the struggle of peasant against landlord, or peasant against the Czar, as a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. This was reflected as early as 1905, in Trotsky’s slogan, “No Czar, but a Workers’ Government,” which, as Stalin had said, was “the slogan of revolution without the peasantry.”

Given the state of the revolutionary forces at the time, the position was dangerously defeatist. For instance, 1923 marked a period of recession for the revolutionary wave in Europe; it was a year of defeat for communist movements in Germany, Italy, Poland and Bulgaria. What then, Stalin asked, is left for our revolution? Shall it “vegetate in its own contradictions and rot away while waiting for the world revolution”? To that question, Trotsky had no answer. Stalin’s reply was to build socialism in the Soviet Union. The Soviet working class, allied with the peasantry, had vanquished its own bourgeoisie politically and was fully capable of doing the job economically and building up a socialist society.

Stalin’s position did not mean the isolation of the Soviet Union. The danger of capitalist restoration still existed and would exist until the advent of classless society. The Soviet people understood that they could not destroy this external danger by their own efforts, that it could only be finally destroyed as a result of a victorious revolution in at Icast several of the countries of the West. The triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union could not be final as long as the external danger existed. Therefore, the success of the revolutionary forces in the capitalist West was a vital concern of the Soviet people.

Trotsky’s scheme of permanent revolution downgraded not only the peasantry as a revolutionary force, but also the national liberation movements of oppressed peoples within the old Czarist Empire. Thus, in “The Struggle for Power,” he wrote that “imperialism does not contrapose the bourgeois nation to the old regime, but the proletariat to the bourgeois nation.”

While Trotsky de-emphasized the national colonial question in the epoch of imperialism, Lenin, on the other hand, stressed its new importance. “Imperialism,” said Lenin, means the progressively mounting oppression of the nations of the world by a handful of Great Powers; it means a period of wars between the latter to extend and consolidate the oppression of nations.”

It was not until sometime later that I was able to fully grasp the implications of Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution on the international scene. The most dramatic example was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39. The Trotskyist organivation had infiltrated the anarchist movement in Catalonia and incited revolt against the Loyalist government under the slogans of “Socialist Republic” and “Workers’ Government.” The Loyalist government, headed by Juan Negrin, a liberal Republican, was a coalition of all democratic parties. It included socialists, communists, liberal Republicans and anarchists—all in alliance against fascist counter-revolution led by Franco and backed by Hitler and Mussolini. The attempted coup against the Loyalist Government was typical of the Trotskyist attempts to short-circuit the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolutionary process. The result was a “civil war within a civil war” and, had their strategy succeeded, it would have split the democratic coalition—effec~ tively giving aid to the fascists.

In the United States I was to witness how Trotsky’s purist concept of class struggle led logically to a denial of the struggle for Black liberation as a special feature of the class struggle, revolutionary in its own right. As a result, American Trotskyists found themselves isolated from that movement during the great upsurge of the thirties. But all this was to come later.

At the time I was at KUTVA, Trotskyism had not yet emerged as an important tendency on the international scene. | did not foresee its future role as a disruptive force on the fringes of the international revolutionary movement. At that point, I wasn’t clear myself on a number of these theoretical questions. It was somewhat later when my understanding of the national and colonial question-—-particularly the Afro-American question— deepened, that the implications of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution became fully obvious to me.

We students felt that Trotsky’s position denigrated the achievement of the Soviet Revolution. We didn’t like his continual harping about Russia’s backwardness and its inability to build socialism, or his theory of permanent revolution. The Soviet Union was an inspiration for all of us, a view confirmed by our experience in the country. Everything we could see defied Trotsky’s logic,

His writings were readily available throughout the school, and the issues of the struggle were constantly on the agenda in our collective. These were discussed in our classes, as they were in factories, schools and peasant organizations throughout the country,

About once a month the collective would meet and a report would be given by Party representatives-.-sometimes local, some+ times from the rayon (region of the city) and Moscow district, and sometimes from the Central Committee itself, They would report on the latest developments in the inner-party struggles—Trotsky’s and Lenin's views on the question of the peasantry; the NEP, how it had proved its usefulness and how it was now being phased out; Trotsky’s position on War Communism and Party rules; the dictatorship of the proletariat, and whether it could be a dictatorship in alliance with the peasantry or one over the peasantry. An open discussion would be held after the report. By that time the Trotskyists at KUTVA had dwindled to a small group of bitter-enders.

The struggle raged over a period of five years (1922-27) during which time the Trotsky bloc had access to the press and Trotsky’s works were widely circulated for everyone to read. Trotsky was not defeated by bureaucratic decisions or Stalin’s control of the Party apparatus—as his partisans and Trotskyite historians claim. He had his day in court and finally lost because his whole position flew in the face of Soviet and world realities, He was doomed to defeat because his views were incorrect and failed to conform to objective conditions, as well as the needs and interests of the Soviet people.

It was my great misfortune to be out of the dormitory when the Black students were invited to attend a session of the Seventh Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, then meeting in the Kremlin in the late fall of 1926, I was out in the street at the time and couldn’t be found, so they went without me. I missed a historic occasion, my only chance to have seen Trotsky in action. I was bitterly disappointed. When I arrived back at the dormitory, Sakorov, my Indian friend, told me where they had gone. Returning in the early hours of the morning, they found me waiting for them. They described the session and the stellar performance of Trotsky.

Stalin made the report for the Russian delegation. Trotsky then asked for two hours to defend his position; he was given one. He spoke in Russian, and then personally translated and delivered his speech in German and then in French. In all, he held the floor for about three hours.

Otto said it was the greatest display of oratory he had ever heard. But despite this, Trotsky and his allies (Zinoviev and Kamenev) suffered a resounding defeat, obtaining only two votes out of the whole body. The delegates from outside the Soviet Union didn’t accept Trotsky’s view that socialism in one country was a betrayal of the revolution. On the contrary, the success of the Soviet Union in building socialism was an inspiration to the international revolution,

Otto told me that this point was made again and again in the course of the discussion. Ercoli (Togliatti), the young leader of the Italian Party, summed it up well a few days later when he defended the achievements of the Russian Party and revolution as “the strongest impetus for the revolutionary forces of the world.”

The American Party united across factional lines in support of Stalin, The Trotsky opposition, already defeated within the Soviet Union, was now shattered internationally. From there on out, it was downhill for Trotsky. I witnessed Trotsky’s opposition bloc degenerate from an unprincipled faction within the Party to a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the Party and the Soviet state. We learned of secret, illegal meetings held in the Silver Woods outside Moscow, the establishment of factional printing presses~all in violation of Party discipline. Their activities reached a high point during the November 7, 1927 anniversary of the Revolution.

At that Tenth Anniversary, Trotsky’s followers attempted to stage a counter-demonstration in opposition to the traditional celebration. I remember vividly the scene of our school contingent marching on its way to Red Square. As we passed the Hotel Moscow, Trotskyist leaflets were showered down on us, and orators appeared at the windows of the hotel shouting slogans of “Down with Stalin.”

They were answered with catcalls and booing from the crowds in the streets below. We seized the leaflets and tore them up. This attempt to rally the people against the Party was a total failure and struck no responsive chord among the masses. It was equivalent to rebellion and this demonstration was the last overt act of the Trotskyist opposition.

During the next month Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were expelled---along with seventy-five of their chief supporters. They, along with the lesser fry, were sent in exile to Siberia in Central Asia. Trotsky was sent to Alma Alta in Turkestan from where, in 1929, he was allowed to go abroad, first to Turkey and eventually to Mexico.

Later, many of Trotsky’s followers criticized themselves and were accepted back into the Party, But among them was a hard core of bitter-enders, who “criticized” themselves publicly only in order to continue the struggle against Stalin’s leadership from within the Party, Their bitterness fed on itself and they emerged later in the thirties as part of a conspiracy which wound up onthe side of Nazi Germany.

Throughout this whole struggle, we Black students at the school had been ardent supporters of the position of Stalin and the Central Committee. Most certainly we were Stalinists--whose policies we saw as the continuation of Lenin’s. Those today who use the term “Stalinist” as an epithet evade the real question: that is, were Stalin and the Central Committee correct? I believe history has proven that they were correct.

RUTHENBERG’S DEATH

In March 1927, the American community in Moscow was shocked by the news of the death of Ruthenberg, general secretary of the CPUSA. His death came suddenly, from a ruptured appendix. His last request had been that he be buried in the Kremlin walls in Moscow—a request acceded to by the Russian Communist Party, His ashes were carried to Moscow by J. Louis Engdahl, a member of the Central Committee of the U.S. Party.

The Moscow funeral was impressive. The procession entered Red Square led by a detachment of Red Cavalry. The square was crowded with thousands of Soviet workers, including the entire work force of the Ruthenberg Factory, which had been named in his honor.

We half dozen Black students, together with other members of the American colony, marched into the square immediately behind the urn, We followed it until we stood directly in front of the Lenin Mausoleum. On top of the mausoleum was the speakers’ platform, There stood Bukharin, who had recently succeeded Zinoviev as head of the Communist International: Béla Kun, leader of the abortive Hungarian Soviet of 1919; Sen Katayama, the veteran Japanese Communist; and others.

Bukharin delivered the main eulogy, followed by several speakers. Suddenly I noticed Bukharin whispering to Robert Minor, who was standing beside him. Bukharin pointed down towards our group of Blacks who were gathered below the mausoleum.

As Minor came down the steps toward us, I was a bit apprehensive, anticipating his mission. Sure enough, addressing my brother Otto, he said, “Comrade Bukharin wants one of the Negro comrades to say a few words.”

Otto pointed at me and said, “Let Harry speak.”

I felt trapped, not wanting to start an argument on such a solemn occasion, I reluctantly agreed to speak. and followed Minor back up the steps of the mausoleum, Béla Kun, a polished orator, was speaking, I was to follow. I tried to gather my thoughts, but I was not much of a speaker and certainly not prepared,

Generalities did not come easy to me, and besides, I hadn’t really known Ruthenberg, I had only met him formally on the occasion of my departure for Moscow when he had shaken my hand and wished me luck. But what could I say about him, specifically in relation to the Blacks?

I stood there amidst this array of internationally famous revolutionary leaders, and as I looked down on the thousands of faces in Red Square, panic suddenly seized me. Here was my turn to speak, but I found myself unable to utter a coherent sentence.

I remember saying something about “our great lost leader.” This being my first experience in front of a mike, the words seemed to come back and hit me in the face. Finally, after a minute or two of floundering around | said, “That's all!” and turned away from the mike in disgust and humiliation. The words “that’s all” resounded through the square loud and clear, to my further discomfiture.

And then came the moment for the translation. The translator was a young Georgian named Tival, one of Stalin’s secretaries. He was one of those people who speak half a dozen languages fluently, Tival got right into the job of translation, assuming an orator’s stance. He had a strong roaring voice, surprising for one of such diminutive stature.

Swinging his arms, apparently emphasizing points that I was supposed to have made, I must admit that he made a pretty good speech for me. Speaking two or three times longer than my two minutes of rambling, he ‘preceded each point by emphasizing, “Tovarishch Haywood skazal” (Comrade Haywood said).

The next morning, I went to the school cafeteria for breakfast, And there sat our little group of Black students. Golden had them laughing at something. He saw me and waved the day’s copy of Pravda. The headline was “Pokhorony Tovarishcha Ruthenberga” (Funeral of Comrade Ruthenberg).

Golden began reading with a straight face, but using that peculiar language of his--Russian with a Mississippi accent. The article quoted from the main speeches and went on to say, Tovarishch Harry Haywood, Americanski Negr, tozhe bystupal (Negro American comrade Harry Haywood also stepped forward with a speech).”

And Golden read one paragraph after another of the speech Tival gave for me, each paragraph starting with “Tovarishch Haywood skazal...Tovarishch Haywood skazal...Tovarisheh Haywood skazal.”

Finally Golden looked up from that paper at me, and he said, “Man, you know you ain’t skazaled a goddamned thing!”

Back home in the U.S., the death of Ruthenberg had signalled another flareup in the factional struggle within the Party. Following the intervention of the Cl at the Fourth Party Convention, there was a period of uneasy peace between the factions. But now a struggle for succession to Ruthenberg’s position as general secretary was raging hot and heavy.

Lovestone, who had been organizational secretary, was supported by the Ruthenberg stalwarts—-Max Bedacht, Ben Gitlow and John Pepper. Since Ruthenberg’s death, Lovestone (as heir apparent) had pre-empted the interim job of acting secretary. In opposition, William W. Weinstone was the candidate supported by the Foster-Cannon bloc which included Alexander Bittelman and Jack Johnstone.

Weinstone had formerly been a member of the Ruthenberg faction, but following Ruthenberg’s death, he sought the position of general secretary himself. His move offered an opportunity for the Foster-Cannon group to oppose Lovestone, whom they bitterly detested, with a candidate they believed had more of a chance of winning than did one of their old stalwarts.

We Blacks in Moscow were isolated from much of this struggle. We were sort of observers from the sidelines, and with the exception of Otto (who had entered the Party immediately after its founding convention), we didn’t have any of the old factional loyalties or political axes to grind. We generally favored the Ruthenberg leadership, although we could hardly be called ardent supporters.

Ruthenberg’s leadership had been endorsed by the CI, which gave his followers credence in our view. But Lovestone was something else again. On this, even Otto agreed. Lovestone had a reputation for being a factionalist par excellence, involved in the dirty infighting that took place. He was regarded as a hatchet man for the Ruthenberg group.

None of us in Moscow could discern any principled political differences between the two groups on the question uppermost in our minds-—the question of Black liberation. Though we had not yet fully succeeded in relating our newly acquired Marxist-Leninist perspective to the question of Blacks in the U.S., we were sure— and our studies had confirmed---that Blacks were a potentially powerful revolutionary force in the struggle against U.S. capital, Clearly the common enemy could not be defeated without a revolutionary alliance of Blacks and the class-conscious elements of the working class, It was crucial to us that Party policy be directed towards consummating that alliance. We felt, however, that both factions underestimated the revolutionary potential of Blacks and we were determined not to allow ourselves to become a political football between the two.

There had been no progress in this area since the folding of the American Negro Labor Congress in 1925, The collapse of the ANLC for us confirmed the Party’s isolation from the Black thasses, According to James Ford, a young Black Party leader, there were only about fifty Blacks in the Party at this time.

Something was definitely wrong, At the time, we were inclined to attribute the Party’s shortcomings simply to an underestimation of the importance of Afro-American work. We were not, at that point, able to discern any theoretical tendencies within the Party which served to rationalize this underestimation, We felt it was due simply to hangovers of racial prejudices of white Party members and leaders.

In Moscow, we had been in constant communication with Black comrades in the U.S. We had, in fact, set ourselves up as a sort of unofficial lobby to keep the situation with respect to Blacks continuously before the attention of the Russians and other Comintern leaders. They, for the most part, were sympathetic to our grievances.

In May 1927, Jay Lovestone (while still acting secretary of the Party) showed up in Moscow at the CI’s Eighth Plenum. During his stay, he invited us Black students to his room at the Lux Hotel to give us an informal report on the Party’s work among Blacks. He had heard, of course, of our discontent and wanted to mollify us. He also knew that the question was coming up for serious discussion at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, which was to take place the following year. There was no doubt he was out to mend his political fences.

I had my first close look at the man when we gathered in his room. He tried to give us the impression of being very frank and self-critical, He said the Party leadership, involved in factional struggles, had neglected Black struggles, had neglected AfroAmerican work, an “important phase” of the Party’s activities. But this factional phase had now at long last come to a close and the Party (under his leadership) had now hegun seriously to tackle the job of overcoming this tremendous lag in the work.

He told us that Otto Huiswood had been placed on the Central Committee and assigned as organizer for the Buffalo (western New York) district, We thought it was about time! Richard B. Moore had been placed as New England organizer for the International Labor Defense, “I cite this,” Lovestone said, “only as an earnest example of the determination of the Central Committee to remedy our default on this most important question.”

Assuming a modest air, he turned to me and said, “Last but not least, we have decided that you, Harry, as one of our bright young Negroes, are to be transferred to the Lenin School. We've had our eye on you, Harry, for some time.”

I was delighted at this news. The Lenin School had been established only the year before (1926) as a select training school for the development of leading cadres of the parties in the Communist International. But though I was delighted, I was also suspicious of the man, his cold eyes belied the warmth and modesty he tried to express. It seemed like a bid to buy me out. Otto, however, seemed to have been impressed.

Though Lovestone was a teetotaler, he had a big bottle of vodka in his room for us students. He had brought us presents-—-which was true of most visitors from the States. It was understood that a visitor would not return to the U.S. with extra things that the students in Moscow could use. Most people, and Lovestone was no exception, came prepared with things to give away. During the course of the evening, Otto had seized a few pair of socks, and Lovestone had given him a tin of pipe tobacco (and cigarettes for us all). As we were leaving, Otto looked over Lovestone’s shoes.

“Say, Jay,” he said, “you and me wear the same size shoes, don’t we? You got another pair with you?”

“Sure, Otto, sure,” said Lovestone, and produced an extra pair.

On our way home, walking down Tverskaya Boulevard towards the dormitory, we exchanged our impressions of the evening. Golden started off: “Oh, he’s full of crap. There’s no sincerity in the man.”

Otto responded, “I think you’re wrong, Golden, I think you're wrong.”

Golden said, “I saw his eyes. That’s something you didn’t see, Otto. You had too much vodka. You know I’ve always told you to go light on it—-you know you can’t handle the stuff, You remember what Vesey’s lieutenant said when the slaves rebelled in Virginia: “Beware of those wearing the old clothes of the master, for they will betray you!’ ”

I never saw Otto so furious! He turned on Golden with his fists clenched, but thought better of it. Golden was too big, I laughed, and he turned towards me, but I was his brother, At that moment a drunk Russian staggered into view and suddenly bumped into him.

Otto let his fist go and knocked the poor man down. There was a great commotion and a crowd of Russians gathered around. Some Chinese students from our school were across the street, and thinking we were being attacked by “hooligans,” rushed to our defense. We helped the man to his feet and, in the confusion, attempted to explain to the crowd what had happened. Otto said he had thought the drunk was attacking him, and it was thus that we managed to pass the thing off and return to our dorm.

Lovestone was a consummate factionalist, utterly uninhibited by scruples or principles. He finally won out in the struggle to succeed Ruthenberg, but the mantle of Ruthenberg fit him poorly; the cloven hoof was always visible. His victory was aided by the ineptitude of the Foster-Cannon-Weinstone bloc, which made several tactical blunders (of which Lovestone took full advantage). Lovestone’s friendship with Bukharin was perhaps a factor in his victory, Nikolai Bukharin had succeeded Zinoviev as the president of the Comintern. He was an erstwhile ally of Stalin in the struggle against the Trotskyist “Left” and was later to emerge as a leader of the right deviation within the Soviet Party and the Communist International. As head of the Comintern, he already had begun to line up forces for his next battle which was to break out following the Sixth Congress of the CI in 1928. His man in the U.S. was none other than Jay Lovestone.

As I have indicated, we KUTVA students in Mosccow were removed from much of the bitterness of the post-Ruthenberg struggle, and at the time, were not fully aware of its intensity. I was to be filled in with a blow-by-blow account of what went on at home by some of my classmates at the Lenin School, which | entered the following autumn.

VACATION IN THE CRIMEA

The month of August, vacation time, drew near. Our group of Black students split up and all of us (with the exception of Bankole) left Moscow, Bankole was reluctant to leave his Russian girl friend and remained in the city. Golden’s girl friend, a pretty Kazakhstanian girl, took him home to meet her people in Kazakhstan, an autonomous republic in southwest Asia, inhabited by a Turko-Mongolian people.

As for myself, I asked for and received permission to spend my vacation in the Crimea. At the Chancellor’s office, I was given money, a railroad ticket and a document entitling me to stay one month at a rest home in Yalta. I was on my own and for the first time since my arrival fourteen months before, I was separated from my fellow Black students, But I had no misgivings. By this time, I had acquired a considerable knowledge of the country and had overcome the main hurdles in the language and could speak and read Russian with some fluency. In fact, I looked forward to my journey with pleasurable expectations, I was not to be disappointed.

The Autonomous Republic of Crimea is a square-shaped peninsula jutting out into the Black Sea. At that time, it was one of the two Tartar autonomous republics; the other was Tartaria, on the Volga. I immediately fell in love with the country——its lush subtropical climate and its people. The Tartars were a darkskinned Mongolic people, descendants of the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan. When I arrived in Sevastopol, the largest city and seaport, I was struck by the dazzling brilliance of the sun against the pastel-colored buildings, the deep blue of the sea and the verdant Crimean mountains rising behind the city. Tall and stately cypress trees lined the streets. It was a busy seaport; all types of shipping could be found in the harbor from small fishing boats to Black Sea passenger liners and ocean-going freighters of the Soviet trading fleet,

As a history buff, I stopped over for a couple of days to take in the historic sites of the city and its environs, There was the Panarama, a life-like display graphically depicting the battle of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, 1854-66. (The war was fought mainly on the Crimean peninsula between Russian forces on the one hand; British, French and Turkish allies on the other.). In this battle, the allies sought to knock out the strong Russian naval base in Sevastopol through an invasion by land and bombardment by sea. The Russians lost the war, but Sevastopol remained Russian.

I drove out to Balaklava, a small village nestling on the sea a few miles southeast of Sevastopol, the scene of the disastrous charge of the British “Light Brigade,” led by Lord Cardigan and immortalized by Tennyson in his poem. Looking at the scene brought back memories of childhood school days when our class recited Tennyson’s poem aloud. I stood on Voronsov Heights overlooking the Valley of Death into which rode the six hundred. I walked over the grounds and viewed the graves of the victims of this blunder of the British officer caste. Fourteen years later, Sevastopol was to be the site of one of the most destructive and bloody battles of World War II.

My automobile ride to Yalta, about sixty kilometers further along the coast, was not only exciting, but in some parts, a frightening experience. It was mostly along a narrow road, cut out of the side of mountains, on which two cars could barely pass. In some places, one could look down to what appeared to me to be a sheer drop of two or three thousand feet into the sea below, The chauffeurs driving powerful Packards, Cadillacs and Espano-Swiss sped along the road with its many curves at breakneck speed. The obvious fact that they were expert drivers was not enough to allay my fears nor those of the other passengers.

Nearing Yalta, we passed Lavadaya, a beautiful palace built by an Italian architect during the reign of Alexander the Third. It was situated on a high cliff overlooking the sea. Later, it became the summer home of Czar Nicholas II. Now, under the Soviets, it had been converted into a rest home for local peasant leaders. The palace later housed President Roosevelt and Premier Churchill during the Yalta conference in 1945,

At last I arrived in Yalta, center of the great Crimean resort area which extended along the coast and behind which rose the Crimean Mountains. Yalta was a town of rest homes and sanitaria, mostly owned by Soviet trade unions, I was put up at a rest home which mainly housed employees of the Moscow city administration.

Immediately after registering, I put on my bathing trunks and donned the gorgeous Ashanti robe which Bankole had lent meand stepped out for a dip in the sea. I stepped out into the main street which ran alongside the seashore and headed for the beach. Although many of the Tartars of the area were dark-skinned, Blacks were rarely seen, even in these southern climes.

As I passed along I could hear remarks like, “Kak khorosho zagorelsya (How beautifully sunburnt he is)!” It was a remark I was to hear often. It was good natured, and I sensed in it a trace of envy.

The crowds were mainly vacationers from the north, who after the long, weary and cold sub-arctic winters of central Russia had fled to this semi-tropical paradise to soak up a little sunshine. Here they formed a cult of sun-worshippers bent on acquiring a suntan to display upon their return home.

A crowd of small boys followed me out to the public beach a few blocks away. Perhaps they associated me with some of the South Sea Island characters they had seen in movies and waited expectantly for an exhibition of my aquatic skills. I doffed my gorgeous robe and stepped into the water, walked out a few feet and sat down. I tumed to see expressions of amazement, disappointment, and even pity, Their bewilderment was quite natural, for I myself had never met a Russian who didn't know how to swim, These children regarded swimming to be a natural human attribute; to them, an adult who couldn't swim was regarded as sort of a cripple.

One day, while walking to the beach in Yalta, | was approached by a uniformed officer of the OGPU (federal police), “Bonjour, camarade, vous étes Sénégalais?” he asked in French.

He seemed a bit surprised when I responded in Russian, telling him that I was an American Black and a student at KUTVA in Moscow.

He said that he had noticed me several times on the streets and wondered if I were Senegalese, He had fought beside Senegalese riflemen during the world war. His Cossack regiment, he explained, was a part of a small Russian expeditionary force sent to fight with the French Army on the Western Front.

I told him that I had also fought in the war with an American Black regiment and how | had seen Russian troops in a prison camp on my way to the Soissons front in the late summer of 1918. I asked him if he had been in that camp.

He shrugged and said that it was quite possible. “They scattered us around in a number of camps; they didn’t want too many of us together in one place,” he said.

“Our Russian force,” he went on, “was small and had no real military significance.” It had been sent by the Czar as a demonstration of solidarity and friendship between Russia and Francesort of a morale booster for the French people.

“Be that as it may,” he said, “it didn’t boost our morale any to be there. In France, we fought in some of the toughest battles in the war, on the Champagne front and the Marne salient, and we suffered heavy casualties. Our fellows were homesick and confused, and didn’t know what they were fighting for so far away from Mother Russia.

“There was much grumbling and always an undercurrent of discontent, All of this was heightened towards the latter part of the war by the bad news of Russian defeats on the Eastern Front. This all came to a head with the news of the fall of the Czar. Shortly after that we were withdrawn from the front by the French, as an unreliable element. Behind the lines, we were surrounded and disarmed by Senegalese troops, and quite a number who resisted were killed or wounded. To say that we were ‘unreliable’ was an understatement; by that time, we were downright mutinous!”

The Bolshevik Party had active nuclei in the regiments. “I myself was a member of the Party,” said my new-found friend. “We followed the course of the Revolution through French newspapers and were able to glean the truth behind their distortions. We also had contact with some of the French left-socialists and with Bolshevik exiles before they returned home after the outbreak of the February Revolution. After the Armistice was signed, we were sent to Morocco and eventually Soviet ships came to take us to Odessa and home.

“The French used the Senegalese against us,” he said. “We learned later of a mutiny among the Senegalese troops in which they were shot up and disarmed by the French Blue Devils.” I had just been reading André Barbusse and was surprised to learn how widespread mutiny had been in the French Army.

“Well, c’est la guerre,” he said, “especially so an imperialist war. After all, what interest had the Senegalese in defending French imperialism? What interest did we Russian workers and muzhiks (peasants) have in fighting the Czar’s wars?”

We parted, with both of us wanting to meet again, but he had to leave town that evening and I never saw him again.

Often, we visited the local vineyards and wine cellars and tasted the local wines. It was wine country and Crimean wines were of the first quality, from the sweet ports, tokays and muscatels, to the dry red and white wines. On these outings there was always someone who had a guitar or accordion, and we sat late into the nights singing Russian folk songs and gypsy romans (love songs).

The Crimea was not just a vacationers’ haven, although tourism occupied a large place in its economy. At that time, the economy was mainly agricultural. Vineyards were constantly expanding in the mountain valleys along the southern coast. Tobacco of fine quality was grown, and there was also an important fishing industry. On the east coast of the peninsula near Kerch, there was an area of rich iron ore deposits and mines. This was to serve as the basis for the construction of the gigantic Kerch metallurgical, chemical and engineering works, contemplated in the first five year plan. It was a plan which sought to quadruple the basic capital of the republic.

With the renaissance of national cultures which accompanied the Soviet policy on the national question, the Turkic language spoken by the Tartars—which I understood was closely related to; modern Turkish—was being revived and taught in schools, A Latinized alphahet was introduced, replacing the old Arabic script. Tartar literature and culture flourished through this encouragement.

I met the Party secretary for the county, a young Tartar who took me to visit a kolkhoz (collective farm), a vineyard in this case. A hundred or more peasant families were in the collective, all winegrowers. As in all collective farms, its members were required to sell a definite amount to the government at fixed prices and were allowed to sell the surplus on the free markets.

Each family had a special plot of land which they cultivated for their own food supply. The chairman of the collective was a huge Ukrainian fellow, who showed us around and explained the wine growing process. The cultivation of grapes and making of the wine required special knowledge, which the government supplied.

The members of the collective used up-to-date wineries owned by the state and managed by expert vintners. There I was to view the intricate process of wine-making, the pressing of the grapes, the fermenting process and the bottling itself. As I remember, this particular collective specialized in dry wines—both red and white. The Crimeans insisted that their wines were as good as the French. Not being a connoisseur, I wouldn’t know, but all I can say is that they tasted good to me.

When I returned to Moscow in the fall, Otto told me of the discovery he had made on one of his trips to the southern region of the Caucasus. He had originally gone there on the invitation of one of our fellow students, a young woman from the Abkhazian Republic, a part of Georgia. After meeting some of us, she commented that they too had some Black folk down near her area in a village not very far from Sukhum, the capital of the republic on the Black Sea.

She invited Otto down to visit the region over his summer vacation, and there he met the people. He described them as being of definite black ancestry—notwithstanding a history of intertarriage with the local people. But the starsata (old man) of the tribe was Black beyond a doubt. His story went some generations back, when he and the others joined the Turkish army as Numidian mercenaries from the Sudan. After several forays into this region they deserted the Army and had settled there. The starsata himself had been in the Czar’s Cavalry with the Dikhi (wild) Division of the Caucasus Cossacks.

‘The people in the village wanted to know what was happening to “our brothers over the mountains.” Otto related to them the troubles we had gone through, described the travels “over the mountains and across the hig sea.” As the evening wore on and the local hrandy was consumed, toast after toast was drunk to “our little brother from over the hills.” Otto descrihed to them the conditions of Blacks in the U.S.—the lynchings, racism and brutality. Incensed, a few jumped up and pulled out their daggers. “You should make a revolution.”

“Why don’t you revolt?”

“Why do you put up with it?”

We were not the only ones surprised to learn about this group; it was news to the Russians in Moscow too! Several of these tribesmen later visited Moscow as a result of Otto’s visit.

Chapter 7

The Lenin School

Following my summer in the Crimea, I returned to Moscow in the fall of 1927 to attend the Lenin School. The school was located off the Arbot on what is now called Ambassadors’ Row, a few blocks down the inner ring of boulevards from the KUTVA dormitories.

The Lenin School, which was set up by the Comintern, opened in Moscow in May 1926, The plans for the school, formally called the International Lenin Course, had been reported on the previous year by Béla Kun, then head of the Educational (Agitprop) Department of the Comintern, Accordingly, the school was to train sixty to seventy qualified students both in theoretical and practical subjects, which included observations of Soviet trade unions and collective farm work, It offered a full three‘year course and a short course of one year.

It was a school of great prestige and influence within the international communist movement, Its students, mainly party functionaries of district and section level and some secondary national Icaders who could be spared for the period of study, were generally at a higher level of political development than the students at KUTVA.

I was the first Black to be assigned to the school, Others followed later; including H.V. Phillips in 1928, Leonard Patterson in the thirties, and Nzula—a Zulu intellectual and national secretary of the South African Communist Party.

The American students who entered the Lenin School in the fall of 1927 were an impressive lot, They included prominent Party leaders from the national and district level. Outstanding in the group was Charles Krumbcin, a member of the Central Commitice of the Party and formerly in charge of trade union work in Chicago and district organizer for Chicago. A steamfitter by trade and a charter member of the Party, he was one ofa group of young trade unionists who made up the Chicago Party leadership in the twenties. They were the best representatives of the radical tradition of that city’s labor movement.

Modesty and honesty were hallmarks of Charlie’s character, and he was a man of exceptional organizational and administrative ability. He was a founder of the Trade Union Education League (TUEL) and played a key role in the Chicago Federation of Labor. We developed a close and lasting friendship, and I learned a lot from him about Party history and the background of the revolutionary movement in the United States.

Margaret Cowl, Charlie's wife, was a capable Party leader and organizer. She had worked in the TUEL and was recognized particularly for her leadership in the struggle for unity of Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal miners in 1927. Later she was to head up the Party’s Women’s Commission and play an active role in the movement for a Woman’s Charter, a broad united front movement launched in 1936 which asserted the rights of women to full equality in all spheres of activity. Margaret also energetically mobilized support for the struggles of women wage workers in the needle trades, textile, electrical and other industries.

Joseph Zack had emigrated to the U.S. from Eastern Europe shortly after the First World War. Active in the first communist organization in New York, he had been section organizer of Yorktown and served on the Party’s Trade Union Commission. Zack was one of Foster’s leading trade union cadres in New York and had also been one of the first New York Party members assigned to work among Blacks, He was a bitter enemy of Lovestone, but was also critical of Foster. In 1932, he was expelled from the Party for refusing to abide by democratic centralism and by the forties had become an informant for the Dies Committee on Un-American Propaganda Activities.

Morris Childs, a Chicagoan, was a leader in trade union and Party work. He became Illinois D.O. in the thirties at the same time that I was chairman of the Cook County Committee and secretary of the Southside region. While at the Lenin School, he served as the representative of the American students to the School Bureau.

Rudy Baker, a Yugoslav comrade who later became D.O. in Pittsburgh and in Detroit, and Lena Davis (Sherer), a good friend of mine who was organizational secretary for New York in the thirties, were also at the school. All of these students were members of the Foster group. As far as I can recall, the sole Lovestone supporter in our class was Gus Sklar of Chicago, a leader in the Russian Federation.

Poor Gus was alone in the midst of Fosterites, and it must have been an unhappy experience for him. When Lovestone was expelled from the Party in 1929, Gus remained in the Soviet Union and never returned to the U.S. He served as an officer in the Red Army and was killed in the defense of Moscow during the Second World War.

The American students at the Lenin School were all experienced leaders of the U.S. Party, One might ask why so many were spared from U.S. work at a time when the Party’s position among the masses was so weak.

Actually, these students were victims of Lovestone’s purge of the Party apparatus following his victory at the Fifth Party Convention in 1927. Part of Lovestone’s strategy was to weaken his opposition on the home front by “exiling” some of its leaders to the Lenin School. His plan backfired however. In Moscow, these “exiles,” as they jokingly called themselves, were to become an effective lobby against Lovestone both in the Comintern and in the CPSU. The political winds were changing.

From the ashes of the defeated Trotskyist “left ” rose an equally dangerous, organized and secret rightist opposition headed by none other than Lovestone’s patron in the Comintern, Nikolai Bukharin. On the home front, this rightist opposition had its social base among the capitalists, the landlords and the kulaks (upper peasantry) and pushed a line that would have lopsidedly developed industry along consumer lines, to the detriment of the vast masses of Soviet people. Internationally, Bukharin greatly underestimated the war danger and the potentially revolutionary situation then developing on a world scale. At the same time, he greatly overestimated the strength and resiliency of imperialism.

The Lenin School students helped to legitimize the antiLovestone struggle in the U.S. Party by linking it up with the fight against the right deviation, then only in its incipient stage, The Lenin School was to become a strong point in the fight against this danger.

There were several other American students who had entered the Lenin School the year before. This group included Clarence Hathaway, Tom Bell, Max Salzman and Car! Reeves (the son of Mother Bloor). Of this group, Hathaway had the most imposing credentials. A machinist from Minneapolis and one of the leading people in the Trade Union Education League, Hathaway proved to be a valuable asset in the Party’s trade union work.

He was a fine organizer and speaker, particularly effective in debates, and combined these talents with a good grasp of Marxist-Leninist theory. Clearly destined for top leadership in the Party, he later served as D.O. of the New York District, became an editor of the Daily Worker and a member of the Political Bureau. Tom Bell, Hathaway’s close friend, remained in the Soviet Union, married a Russian woman and died sometime before World War Il.

William Kruse of Chicago was the principal Lovestonite in the school. For a brief period he filled in as acting rep from the Party to the Comintern in the absence of a permanent Party rep. Later, he was D,O. in Chicago under Lovestone’s leadership and was expelled from the Party with Lovestone in 1929.

The students were organized at the school by language groups, as we had been at KUTVA. In this case, the languages were English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and, later, Chinese. The whole school was a collective, comprising students, teachers, administrators and employees, The leading body was the Party Bureau, which included delegates from the various groups, including the employees. All students transferred membership from their home party to the CPSU, and were directly subject to its discipline. Party meetings were held about once a month.

Our rector was a handsome, energetic woman named Kursanova. She was a leading communist educator and was married to the old Bolshevik propagandist and CC member, E. Yaroslavsky. She was about forty at the time and had an impressive background, including civil war experiences as a machine-gunner in a detachment of Siberian partisans. Kursanova had also been a delegate to the Bolshevik Conference in April 1917 which adopted Lenin’s famous April Theses.

In addition to the Americans, others in the English-speaking section included British, Irish, Australians, a New Zealander, two Chinese, two Japanese and two Canadians—Leslie Morris and Stewart Smith, The British group included Springhall, Tanner, Black (a Welshman), Margaret Pollitt and George Brown. My special friend among the British was Springhall, known to all as “Springy,” with whom I roomed at the Lenin School.

Springy was a British naval veteran of the First World War. He had come from a poor family and his parents had chosen him fora naval career. This latter act, it seemed, was a common practice among British lower class families with several sons. At the age of twelve, therefore, he had been “given” to His Majesty's Navy to be trained as a sailor, He served through the First World War and after the Armistice was involved in a mutiny or near-mutiny among members of the fleet who protested being sent to Leningrad to intervene against the Bolshevik Revolution. At the time, Springy was about twenty-one years old. As a result of the mutiny, he was cashiered from the Navy. Apparently, the admiralty was deterred from taking any harsher measures against the mutineers because of the widespread sympathy their action had evoked among British workers.

Springy was popular with everybody, particularly among the women on the technical staff. After leaving the Lenin School, he returned to England where he rose rapidly in Party leadership. He also fought in Spain as a member of the Fifteenth International Brigade and was wounded at Jarama.

At the beginning of World War II, he served as organizational secretary of the British Party. During the early stages of the war, Springy was charged by the Churchill government with subversive activity among the armed forces. This was during the period prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when the war was still an imperialist war and we communists opposed it.

There was no defense against the charge of subversion in wartime England, and Springy was sentenced to seven years in prison, After his release, he went to China, where he did editorial work on English language publications until his death from cancer in 1953. Springy died in a Moscow hospital, where he had been sent by his Chinese comrades to make sure that everything possible could be done to save him. His ashes were returned to China and interred with a memorial stone in the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery outside Peking.

Springy introduced me to the gifted English writer, historian and Marxist scholar, Ralph Fox. A promising young theoretician, Fox was then researching material for one of his books at the Marx-Engels Institute. He died at the age of thirty-seven, fighting the fascists on the Cordova Front during the Spanish Civil War. By the end of his brief life span, he had already published a tremendous body of work.

I got a lot out of my friendship with Fox. Profiting greatly from his wide-ranging knowledge, I often consulted him on theoretical and political questions which arose during my stay at the school.

Springy and I were frequent visitors at the apartment of Fox and his wife Midge. It was there that I first met Karl Radek. A Polish expatriate, he had been an active leader in the Polish Social Democratic Party and a member of the Zimmerwald Left (those internationalists who broke off from the Second International in 1915 and were instrumental in founding the Third International). In 1915-16, Radek—along with Rosa Luxemburg—publicly disagreed with Lenin on the question of self-determination of subject nations. Radek later changed his position and fully united with the Bolshevik point of view in 1917.

Radek was part of the group that returned with Lenin to Russia via Germany in the famous “sealed coach.” He was a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and Politburo. At the time that I met him in 1928, Radek was still under a shadow politically. He had been a leading member of the Trotsky-Zinoviev opposition and was expelled from the CPSU along with the other leaders of the bloc at the Sixteenth Congress of the CPSU in December 1927. Exiled to the Urals, he publicly repudiated his earlier position and was readmitted to the Party a few months later in 1928. He was assigned as editor of Izvestia and later became the chief foreign affairs commentator in the leading Soviet papers, He was also a member of the Soviet delegation to the Comintern.

Radek, as I remember him, was a little man, appearing to be somewhat of a dandy in his English tweed jacket, plus-fours and cane, But to me, the most striking thing about him was his beard. It stretched from ear to ear, under his chin and cheeks, giving him a simian look.

His English, though accented, was fluent, When we first met, he immediately engaged me in a conversation about conditions of Blacks in the United States, which branched off into questions of Black literature, writers and the Harlem Renaissance. To my amazement, it was clear that he knew more about the latter subject than I did. I was embarrassed when he asked my opinion about certain Black writers with whom he was familiar but whom I had never even read. I found out later that Claude MeKay had been a sort of a protégé of Radek’s during the poet’s stay in the Soviet Union,

In 1937, along with several others in the Trotskyite “Left Opposition,” Radek was convicted of treason, of acting as an “agency” of German and Italian fascism and giving assistance to those who might invade the Soviet Union. He was sent to prison where he died in the forties.

Springy introduced me to many other young Britons in Moscow: such men as William Rust, who later became editor of the British Worker, Walter Tapsell, editor of the Young Worker; and George Brown. Both Brown and Tapsell were in my brigade in the Spanish Civil War and were killed in battle. Brown was killed at Brunete while I was there.

Our English-speaking section at the Lenin School included five young Irishmen, all members of the Irish Workers League, a communist-oriented group organized by Big Jim Larkin in 1923. It seems that the Irish Communist Party, founded in 1921 by Young Roderick Connolly (son of James Connolly), had collapsed. I was told that its failure was due to a lack of Marxist-Leninist theory and the inability of its members to relate their views on socialism to the specific conditions in Ireland. But there was certainly no lack of revolutionary enthusiasm and motivation among the young people I met at the Lenin School, some of whom had been members of the Irish Communist Party. The group had been sent to the Lenin School as a step towards rebuilding the Irish Party.

All five were protégés of the famous Irish revolutionary, Big Jim Larkin—most definitely a man of action and organization, not of theory. A tall, bulky man with a huge, hawk-like nose and bushy eyebrows, Larkin was one of the most colorful figures of the Irish labor movement. From his base among Dublin dockworkers, his activities as a labor leader had ranged over three continents~-from the British Isles, to Argentina, to the U.S.—and at the time that I met him, spanned more than three decades. He had been a founding member of the U.S. Party and was a member of both the Executive Committees of the Communist International and the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU or the Profintern). He was often in Moscow, where I saw him frequently.

The Irish students came from the background of the 1916 Easter Rebellion and the revolutionary movement reflected in the lives of men like Larkin and James Connolly. Among them were Sean Murray and James Larkin, Jr. (Big Jim's son). All of them had been active in the post-war independence and labor struggles. I was closest to Murray, the oldest of the group, who was a roommate of mine.

This was my first encounter with Irish revolutionaries and their experiences excited me. As members of oppressed nations, we had a lot in common. I was impressed by their idealism and revolutionary ardor and their implacable hatred of Britain’s imperialist rulers, as well as for their own traitors. But what impressed me most about them was their sense of national pride—not of the chauvinistic variety, but that of revolutionaries aware of the international importance of their independence struggle and the role of Irish workers.

Then too, they were a much older nation. Their fight against Britain had at that time been going on for 750 years. They were fond of quoting the observations of Marx and Engels on the Irish movement, such as Marx’s letter to Engels in which he said: “English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland.” Another favorite was: “No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.”!

But most of all, they liked to point out Lenin’s defense of the Easter Uprising in his reply to Karl Radek, who had called the rebellion a putsch and discounted the significance of the struggle of small nations in the epoch of imperialism. Lenin admonished Radek, stating that “a struggle capable of going to the lengths of insurrection and street fighting, of breaking down the iron discipline of the army and martial law,” on the doorstep of the imperialist metropolis itself, would be a blow against imperialism more significant than that in a remote colony.

I was shortly to find these observations applicable to the liberation movement of U.S. Blacks. As a result of my association with the Irish, I became deeply intcrested in the Irish question, seeing in it a number of parallels to U.S. Blacks. In retrospect, I am certain that this interest heightened my receptivity to the idea of a Black nation in the United States.

TEACHERS AND CLASSES

The teaching method at the school was a combination of lectures and discussions. About once a week the instructor would give a lecture to the entire English-speaking group, all twenty-five or thirty of us. Readings would be assigned, and when material was not available in English, it would be translated especially for us. I had one advantage in this regard because by this time I could read Russian fluently. Following the iccture, the instructor would delineate a number of sub-topics. Several days later, we would all get together again and one person from each group would report on its work. The instructors were often available for consultation during the time the groups were discussing and researching their topics.

There were no grades given, nor were there any examinations. At the end of the term we would have evaluation sessions, where everyone met and discussed each other’s work, including that of the teachers. It was a process of comradely criticism and self-criticism.

I found the classes exciting and challenging and the students on the whole sharp and on a high political level. I was under pressure to keep up. The English in general seemed to be a notch above most of us in political economy. This, I believe, was due to the existence of a large number of Labour Party schools which were spread throughout Britain.

Our instructor for Marxist political economy was Alexandrov, an economist for the Gosplan, the state planning agency. In our class, he was often challenged on some aspect of Marxian economics, He would often have sharp exchanges with one of the British students, I believe it was Black, over differences in interpretations of Marxian economics,

Black was a perfect foil for Alexandrov, who scemed to enjoy these tilts and invited the whole class to participate. Summing up the discussion, Alexandroy would brand Black’s position as “undialectical, mechanistic, and rooted in vulgar economism and Fabianism.” Black was stubborn, however, and prodded by Alexandrov, kept up his critical attitude for the whole first term, It was only during the evaluations at the end of the term that Black conceded that some of his positions had been in error,

Perhaps the most prominent among my teachers was Ladislaus Rudas, a noted Hungarian Marxist philosopher and scholar. Like many Hungarian intellectuals, he spoke several languages fluently. He had been a leader of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet and had come to Moscow along with Béla Kun and the other Hungarian refugees. He taught historical and dialectical materialism and his class was one of the most interesting, It prescnted history, my favorite subject, but with a different content: a Marxist-Leninist interpretation, portraying not just the role of individuals but of classes.

We had lengthy discussions on the French Revolution; the petty bourgeois dictatorship under Robespierre and the Jacobins; Saint Just and the extreme left, the Thermidor and Napoleon— “the man on the white horse.” The English Revolution and Cromwell, the Levellers, the Long Parliament. The Dutch revolution and Prince Egmont. We had extended discussions on the American revolutions---the War of Independence, the Civil War and Reconstruction.

These discussions brought out our lack of knowledge of our own U.S, history; there was a complete absence of materials which presented U.S. history from a Marxist standpoint. All I can remember is the so-called Marxist analysis in the works of James Oneal (The Workers in American History) and A.M. Simons’s Social Forces in American History.

The former I never read, but the work by Simons stands out in my memory for its gratuitous slur on U.S. Blacks, Simons claimed that the Black man did not revolt against slavery during the Civil War: “His inaction in time of crisis, his failure to play any part in the struggle that broke his shackles, told the world that he was not of those who to free themselves would strike a blow.”

I had read about the slave revolts of Gabriel, Nat Turner, and John Brown’s heroic raid on Harper’s Ferry with his band of whites, free Blacks and escaped slaves. I knew of the role of Black soldiers in the Civil War who had to overcome the opposition of the Union Army in order to fight. Simons’s book skipped over all of this,

I had come across Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization, The Beards were economic determinists who had characterized the Civil War as the Second American Revolution. The idea seemed novel at the time, all of which points up how widespread had been the distortion of the period by U.S. bourgeois historians.

My sub-group, which included Springy and the Irishman Sean Murray, had chosen the Civil War and the Reconstruction period as our subject, with myself as the reporter. Our group had long discussions, after which we consulted Rudas, who by that time had evidently done some homework of his own on the matter. He called our attention to the writings of Marx and Engels, their correspondence on the Civil War, and Mary’s series of articles in the New York Herald Tribune. After the discussions, I submitted a paper to the class, which evoked considerable discussion. On the whole it was well-received by my fellow classmates and commended by Rudas.

Perhaps our most interesting and stimulating course was on Leninism and the history of the CPSU, taught by the historian I. Mintz. A former Red Army officer, he was at the time assigned to work on a history of the CPSU. Mintz was a young Ukrainian Jew, a soft-spoken and mild-mannered little man. He had a way of illustrating his subject through his own personal experiences during the Revolution and the Civil War in the Ukraine. His appearance contrasted sharply with his role and bloody experiences in the battle for the Ukraine. His was a thrilling story, involving a meteoric rise from leader of partisans to commander of a Red Army brigade. They had fought against a whole array of anti-Soviet and interventionist forces: the White Guardist Deniken; the Cossack Hepmans, Kornilov and Kaledin; Makhno’s anarchists (who were sometimes with and sometimes against the Red Army); General Petlura and sundry gangs of marauders and pogromists; and the remnants of the German garrisons in the Ukraine.

In connection with our studies of the Bolshevik agrarian policy during the Civil War, Mintz told us of his involvement in the settling of the question of land redistribution in a Ukrainian district. This district had been reconquered by his Red Army unit from Denikin in the early winter of 1920. He gave us a general rundown of the agrarian situation at the time, the class forces in the countryside, their shifting alignment during the course of the Revolution, and the evolution of Bolshevik agrarian policy.

Kerensky’s provisional government had done nothing to solve the agrarian problem, to relieve the land hunger of the masses of peasantry. Though Kerensky’s program had promised confiscation of the big estates, once in power, the government reneged on even that level of reform.

The Bolsheviks exhorted the peasants to await the decision of the Constituent Assembly. Thus, at the time of the outbreak of the Revolution, the vast majority of the cultivatable land was still concentrated in the estates of the big landlords. The peasantry, constituting four-fifths of the population of the old Czarist Empire, was composed of three different strata. The well-to-do peasant not only owned enough land to support himself in good fashion, but also often hired labor to work his land. This group comprised only about four to five percent of the total. The poor peasant was without sufficient land to support himself and his family and often hired himself out as a laborer to the landlord or to a well-to-do peasant. The landless peasant subsisted entirely from the sale of his labor to the landlord or well-to-do peasant.

Under the slogan “Land, Bread and Peace,” the Bolsheviks cgmbined the seizure of power in the cities with the land revolution underway in the countryside. Allied with the Social Revolutionaries (SRs), the traditional party of the peasantry, the land was taken over in two phases, The first phase, nationalization and confiscation, was incorporated in the Land Decree of the All Russian Congress of Soviets, November 8, 1917. This stamped the seal of governmental endorsement on the land seizures and called for their extension.

In September 1917, Lenin declared Bolshevik support for the land program of the SRs, while pointing out that only a proletarian revolution could put even this program into practice. The SR program called for equal distribution of land among the peasants while the Bolsheviks favored collective, and eventually state-owned farms. But since the SR program represented the understanding of the majority of peasants, Lenin’s policy was to resolve this difference by “teaching the masses, and in turn learning from the masses, the practical expedient measures for bringing about such a transition.”

The day after seizing power, the Bolsheviks put this policy into practice with their November 8, 1917, Decree on Land which made the SR program into law. Within three weeks, the SRs' left wing—representing the poorer peasants—had split from the rest of the party and entered a coalition government with the Bolsheviks. In the following years, Lenin held to the basie position he stated when presenting the November 8 decree:

As a democratic government, we cannot ignore the decision of the masses of the people, even though we may disagree with it. In the fire of experience, applying the decree in practice, and carrying it out locally, the peasants will themselves realize where the truth lies... We must be guided by experience, we must allow complete freedom to the creative faculties of the masses.

It was against this background that Mintz related some of his experiences in the Ukraine. He told us that the Party in the Ukraine had not fully grasped the lessons of the agrarian revolution in Great Russia. He spoke of one occasion when his outfit had attempted to arbitrarily carry out the collectivization of all the big estates in territory occupied by their division of the Red Army; their efforts met with the stiff resistance of the local peasants, even though the peasants supported Soviet power.

The peasants insisted on the redistribution of all the estates, breaking them up among the individual peasant families, rather than taking over the large estates collectively, This occurred during the fall months of 1919, on the eve of Denikin’s final defeat, when Soviet power in the form of an “independent Ukrainian Republic” was about to be established.

It was a time when Lenin, in order to allay anti-Russian distrust and suspicion among the Ukrainian peasantry, had insisted that certain concessions be made. Both Russian and Ukrainian were to be used on an equal footing, and attempts to push back the Ukrainian language to a secondary status were to be denounced. Lenin demanded that all officials in the new republic be able to speak Ukrainian and called for the distribution of large farms among the peasants. State farms were to be created “in strictly limited numbers and of limited size and in each casein conformity with the instruments of the surrounding peasantry.”

Despite this, Mintz said, many of us Ukrainian Bolsheviks tended to downplay the nationality element in our own country. “In my own case, I had long since ceased to consider myself a Jew.” Most of them were what was called at that time “abstract internationalists”; super-internationalists who, in the name of internationalism, renounced the national element in the struggle of the Ukrainian masses.

“But we were not alone in this deviation,” Mintz told us. “Although Lenin’s policy was eventually adopted by the Central Executive Committee, it was sharply opposed by leading Ukrainian Bolsheviks such as Rakovsky and Manuilsky. What it finally came down to, in the case of our army division, was that as a result of the opposition of the peasants in the area, we were foreed to give up our plan for collectivization; we thus had to settle for having only one of the estates being set aside as a Soviet farm.”

The first part of each summer at the Lenin School was spent in practical work that related to our studies. In the course of my practical work program in the early summer of 1928, I had my first close-up ohservation of the peasant question in the USSR. I visited a peasant village in an agricultural district to talk with the people and make observations. Though hardly more than 100 versts (about 66 miles) from Moscow, it was truly in “darkest Russia,” a provincial place, isolated from the city. Few inhabitants had been as far away as Moscow.

After taking a train to the nearest station, I then had to take a droshky another twenty versts to the county seat. Arriving in the morning, I was let down in the middle of the village square. I looked around to get my bearings, and in no time at all, a crowd had gathered to stare at me.

‘The crowd grew larger by the minute; it seemed as if the whole village had turned out in the square, I could overhear remarks: “Who is he?”

“Why is he so Black?”

“What nice teeth!”

“Look, his palms are white!”

“He seems sympatichno,” remarked some.

Someone else who perhaps had done a little reading said, “Oh, he’s probably from Africa. There the sun is so hot that people who have lived there for thousands of years become black.” The crowd seemed to accept this explanation.

I stuck out my hand to a young man standing nearby. “Zdravstvuyte,” I said. “Could you direct me to the town committee?” He seemed to be surprised that I could speak Russian, but getting himself together, he directed me toa building across the square.

“Who are you? Where did you come from?” the young man asked.

“I'm an American Negro from the United States,” I replied.

Someone in the crowd remarked, “I told you he was of the Negro tribe.”

Someone else spoke up, “I thought all people in the United States were white.”

That gave me the chance to get off on my international propaganda spiel, and I jumped right in. “Oh no,” I replied. “There are twelve million Blacks in the U.S.—ahout one-tenth of the population.” I went on to tell them about Blacks inthe South, and the modern-day remnants of the plantation system: sharecropping, Jim Crow and lynch terror.

Someone remarked, “Oh, Like it was with us under the old regime.” Many of the villagers nodded their heads in agreement with this.

Just then I noticed an old woman with a cane, slowly making her way through the crowd toward where I was. The young people gave way before her, in deference to her age. When she reached the center, I watched the changes in expression on her old wrinkled face as she gazed at me. First it registered amazement at such a sight; then comprehension when she had “cased” the whole situation,

Then she spit on the ground and slammed her cane down, “Idite domoi! Go home!” she told me. “Wash your face! You should be ashamed of yourself, trying to fool the people around here!” Waving her cane at me, she then turned scornfully away. In all her ninety-odd years, she had never before seen a Black man!

TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

The first time I met Stalin was at a social gathering in the Kremlin during the World Congress of the Friends of the Soviet Union. The congress coincided with the Tenth Anniversary celebrations in the fall of 1927. The congress sessions were held at the Dom Soyusov (House of the Trade Unions), It was the greatest international gathering I had ever witnessed. There were probably more than one thousand delegates, representing countries from six continents, The most impressive delegation was the huge one (about one hundred people) from China which was headed by the young and beautiful widow of Sun Yat-sen. (Today she is vice-chairman of the National People’s Republic of China.)

I was surprised and delighted to meet my old friend Chi (Dum Ping), a former Chinese student at the University of Chicago with whom I had worked in the organization of the ill-fated Interracial Youth Forum on the Southside in 1924. He had since gone back to China and was now one of the translators for the Chinese delegation. It was Chi who introduced me to Madame Sun Yatsen. She spoke English with an American accent, which was not surprising since she had been educated in the United States.

Among the other notables we were to meet were the young Cuban revolutionary, Antonio Mella, later murdered in Mexico City by Machado’s assassins. He was a tall, wiry youth, who always had a guitar slung over his back. There was Henri Barbusse, a pale, wan man, a victim of tuberculosis, He was a great literary figure in France and wrote a biography of Stalin. There was the american novelist Theodore Dreiser, father of American realism who was there with his secretary, Ruth Epperson Kennel, a young American woman.

A special friend of us Black students was Josiah Gumede, the elderly president of the African National Congress and a descendant of Zulu chiefs. We took him in charge. Every morning we would call for him at his room at the National Hotel on Tverskaya (now Gorky Street) and escort him to the congress sessions. We also accompanied him on the rounds of parties held by the various delegations. He must have been about sixty at the time, but was big, strong and healthy and never seemed to tire.

The gala occasion for the whole congress was the Evening of National Culture, It consisted of an elaborate pageant of folk dances from the various Soviet republics and autonomous regions. The dancers were all in their traditional costumes, a striking array of color and diversity. On this occasion, our Soviet hosts went all out for their foreign guests.

The hall in the Dom Soyusov had been converted into a huge banquet room. We were seated before tables loaded with various kinds of liquor, including of course, the best vodka and zakuskas; appetizers of all kinds—cheeses, herrings, caviar, cold sturgeon and cold meats. Then came dinner, from soup to dessert.

The banquet finally ended. Most of us were in somewhat of a stupor from food and drink, Our group, which included our teacher Sik, was leaving the hall amidst the din of a thousand people talking and laughing. On our way out we stopped and chatted with numerous delegates.

Gumede was the chief attraction; he had given a stirring speech at a session of the congress a few days before. As I recall, we were nearing the door when we were stopped and greeted by the old Cossack cavalryman, Marshall Budenny. He was a short, powerful, bow-legged man, with a large ferocious black mustache. He was also in a merry mood.

“Tell the chief,” he said, grasping Gumede’s hand, “that we stand ready to come to his support anytime he needs us!”

“Thank you, thank you,” beamed Gumede.

At that moment, someone approached us, I believe it was Tival, Stalin’s seeretary, and informed us that we were invited to a party in the Kremlin.

We walked the short distance across the square to the Kremlin. Once within the Kremlin walls, we were guided into one of the old palaces and then taken upstairs to a small hall. It was a longroom with an arched ceiling reaching almost to the floors on the sides. It looked to me as though it could have been a throne room of one of the old czars.

There were perhaps fifty people in the room. In the center there was a large table loaded with the traditional zakuskas, fruits and drinks. It was sort of a buffet; chairs were not directly at the table but rather were along the walls on each side.

There in the center on one side was Stalin, with a number of people seated beside him, He rose, shook our hands, and after we were introduced, welcomed us, “Be our guests.” He was a short, thick-set man, as T remember, dressed in a neat tan suit with a military collar and boots shined to glisten.

He motioned us to the vacant chairs on the other side of the room. On that side were a number of folk dancers and musicians, presumably participants in the earlier festivities, Somebody introduced Gumede as an African Zulu chief from the congress, and the dancers probably thought we were all from the same tribe. Gumede, however, was the center of attention, surrounded by the daricers, who insisted on being photographed with him.

They gathered around him—a couple sitting on his lap and others behind him with their arms around him, Stalin, observing all this from the other side of the room, seemed amused. Later on, Stalin got up, bid us all good-night and walked out. As I remember, it was quite a relaxed evening with no political discussion. We left shortly after Stalin departed and were driven home by a chauffeur from the Kremlin car pool.

Another version of this occasion was given, I believe by Sik, who insisted that Otto had danced with Stalin that evening. I don’t doubt Sik’s word, but I certainly don’t remember seeing it. Otto didn’t remember the incident either, But I do know that in Russia it was not uncommon for one man to dance with another on festive occasions, As I recall, the hall became more crowded, and I was attracted by a group of folk dancers who offered to help us students with our Russian,

Afterwards Sik kept reminding Otto, “Don’t you remember, Otto, you asked Stalin to dance, and you danced around the hall with him several times, That was a memorable occasion; how could you forget it?”

As for Gumede, he returned home a firm supporter of the Soviet Union. Everywhere he went, he gave glowing reports of his visit there. In January 1928, he told an ANC rally that “I have seen the new world to come, where it has already begun. I have been to the new Jerusalem."

One day in December, Otto called me and said he had inst gotten a call to pick up a young Black woman, Maude White, who was to be a student at KUTVA. She was waiting at the station. He asked me if I'd like to go along and I readily agreed, looking forward with pleasure to meeting this woman—the first Black woman since Jane Golden to study in the Soviet Union.

We rented a droshky and proceeded to the station. It was a cold winter night, the temperature was somewhere around thirty-five below zero. When we got there, we saw the young Black woman, She was about nineteen, standing in the unheated station, she was a strikingly pretty, brown-skinned woman with huge dark eyes.

She had on a seal skin coat, silk stockings and pumps, and by time we got there she was practically hysterical with the cold. "Get me out of here,” she shouted. Otto and I looke at each other, both thinking the same thing—we're going to have a rough time with this one.

We couldn't have been more wrong. Maude got right into the swing of things at school. She was a very popular suger ae stayed in Moscow for three years. We later learned that she ha been a school teacher before coming to Moscow, On returning to the States, she became an outstanding Party cadre and a life-long friend of mine.

Chapter 8

Self-Determination: The Fight for a Correct Line

Towards the end of 1927, Nasanov returned to the Soviet Union after a sojourn in the United States as the representative of the Young Communist International. I had known him briefly in the States before my departure for Russia. Nasanov was one of a group of YCI workers who had been sent on missions to several countries. He had considerable experience with respect to the national and colonial question and was considered an expert on these matters.

Nasanov's observations had convinced him that U.S. Blacks were essentially an oppressed nation whose struggle for equality would ultimately take an autonomous direction and that the content of the Black liberation movement was the completion of the agrarian and democratic revolution in the South—a struggle which was left unresolved by the Civil War and betrayal of Reconstruction. Therefore, it was the duty of the Party to channel the movement in a revolutionary direction by raising and supporting the slogan of the right of self-determination for Afro-Americans in the Black Belt, the area of their greatest concentration.

Upon his return, Nasanov sought me out and it was he, I believe, who first informed me that I had been elected to the National Committee of the YCL back in the States. In the months ahead, we were to become close friends. Through him, I met a number of YCI people, mostly Soviet comrades who held the same position as Nasanov did on the national question. They seemed to be pushing to have the matter reviewed at the forthcoming Sixth Congress of the Comintern. And as it later became clear to me, they were anxious to recruit at least one Black to support their position.

As I have indicated before, the position was not entirely new to me. I was present at the meeting of the YCL District Committee in Chicago in 1924 when Bob Mazut (then YCI rep to the U.S.), at the behest of Zinoviev, had raised the question of self-determination At that time, he had been shouted down by the white comrades. (See Chapter Four.)

Sen Katayama had told us Black KUTVA students that Lenin had regarded U.S. Blacks as an oppressed nation and referred us to his draft resolution on the national and colonial question which was adopted by the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920. Otto and other Black students had also told me that they got a similar impression from their meeting with Stalin at the Kremlin shortly after their arrival in the Soviet Union.

All of this seemed tentative to me. No one had elaborated the position fully and Nasanoy was the first person I met who attempted to argue it definitively. But all of these arguments, and especially Nasanov’s prodding, set me to thinking and confronted me with the need to apply concretely my newly-acquired Marxist-Leninist knowledge on the national-colonial question to the condition of Blacks in the United States,

To me, the idea of a Black nation within U.S. boundaries seemed far-fetched and not consonant with American reality. I saw the solution through the incorporation of Blacks into U.S. society on the basis of complete equality, and only socialism could bring this to pass. There was no doubt in my mind that the path to freedom for us Blacks led directly to socialism, uncluttered by any interim stage of self-determination or Black political power. The unity of Black and white workers against the common enemy, U.S. capitalism, was the motor leading toward the dual goal of Black. freedom and socialism.

I felt that it was difficult enough to build this unity, without adding to it the gratuitous assumption of a non-existent Black nation, with its implication of a separate state on U.S. soil. To do so, I felt, was to create new and unnecessary roadblocks to the already difficult path to Black and white unity.

Socialism, I reasoned, was not in contradiction to the movement for Black cultural identity, expressed in the cultural renaissance of the twenties and in Garvey’s emphasis on race pride and history (which I regarded as one of the positive aspects of that movement), Socialism for U.S. Blacks did not imply loss of cultural identity any more than it did for the Jews of the Soviet Union, among whom I had witnessed the proliferation of the positive features of Jewish culture—theater, literature and language.

The Jews were not considered a nation because they were not concentrated in any definite territory; they were regarded as a national minority and Birobidzhan was set aside as a Jewish autonomous province. Such a bolstering of self-respect, dignity and self-assertion on the part of a formerly oppressed minority people was a necessary stage in the development of a universal culture which would amalgamate the best features of all national groups. This was definitely the policy of the Soviet Union with regard to formerly oppressed nationalities and ethnic groups.

Like the Jews, I reasoned, the position of U.S. Blacks was that of an oppressed race, though at the time I am sure I would have been hard-pressed to define precisely what was meant by that phrase. The main factor in the oppression of Jews under the Czar had been the religious factor; the main factor with U.S, Blacks was race. Blacks lacked some of the essential attributes of a nation which had been defined by Stalin in his classic work, Marxism and the National Question.

Most assuredly, one could argue that among Blacks there existed elements of a special culture and also a common language (English). But this did not add up to a nation, I reasoned. Missing was the all-important aspect of a national territory. Even if one agreed that the Black Belt, where Blacks were largely concentrated, rightfully belonged to them, they were in no geographic position to assert their right of self-determination.

I could see many analogies between the national problem in the old Czarist Empire and the problem of U.S. Blacks, but the analogy floundered on this question of territory. For the subject nations of the old Czarist Empire were situated either on the border of the oppressing Great Russian nation or were completely outside it. But American Blacks were set down in the very midst of the oppressing white nation, the strongest capitalist power on earth. Faced with this, it was no wonder that most nationalist movements up until then had taken the road of a separate state outside the United States. How then could one convince U.S. Blacks that the right of self-determination was a realistic program?

Nasanov and his young friends answered my arguments over the course of a series of discussions and were quick to pick out the flaws in my position, They contended that I was guilty of an ahistoric approach with respect to the elements of nationhood. Certainly, some of the attributes of a nation were weakly developed in the case of U.S. Blacks. But that was the case with most oppressed peoples precisely because the imperialist policy of national oppression is directed towards artificially and forcibly retaining the economic and cultural backwardness of the colonial peoples as a condition for their super-exploitation. My mistake had been to ignore Lenin’s dictum that in the epoch of imperialism it was essential to differentiate between the oppressor and the oppressed nations,

They further contended that I had presented the matter as though self-determination were solely a question for Blacks. | had therefore separated the Black rebellion from the struggle for socialism in the United States. In fact, it was a constituent part of the latter struggle or, more precisely, a special phase of the struggle of the American working class for socialism.

My argument added up to a defense of the current position of the U.S. Party, albeit I had embellished the position somewhat against Nasanov's criticisms. Up to this point, the Black students had not challenged the Party’s line on Afro-American work, We reasoned that the Party’s default in the work among Blacks was not the result of an incorrect line, but came from a failure to carry out in practice its declared line. We believed that this failure was due to an underestimation of the importance of work among Blacks, which came from an underestimation of the revolutionary potential of the struggle of the Black masses for equality. All this resulted from the persistence of remnants of white racist ideology vathin the ranks of the Party, including some of its leadership.

Nasanoy and some of his friends agreed with us that the American CP did underestimate the revolutionary potential of the Black struggle for equality. But, they maintained, this underestimation came from a fundamentally incorrect social-democratic line, rather than from white chauvinism, They said that I had stood the whole matter on its head: I had presented the incorrect policies as the result of subjective white chauvinist attitudes; whereas, they pointed out that the white chauvinist attitudes persisted precisely because the Party’s line was fundamentally incorrect in that it denied the national character of the question.

“Our American comrades seem to think that only the direct struggle for socialism is revolutionary,” they told me, “and that the national movement detracts from that struggle and is therefore reactionary.” This, they pointed out, was an American version of the “pure proletarian revolution” concept; they referred me to Lenin’s polemic against Radek on the question of self-determination.

The Bolsheviks also criticized my formulation of the matter as primarily a race question. To call the matter a race question, they said, was to fall into the bourgeois liberal trap of regarding the fight for equality as primarily a fight against racial prejudices of whites. This slurred over the economic and social roots of the question and obscured the question of the agrarian democratic revolution in the South, which was pivotal to the struggle for Black equality throughout the country. They pointed out that it was wrong to counterpose the struggle for equality to the struggle for self-determination. For in fact, in the South, self-determination for Blacks (political power in their own hands) was the guarantee of equality.

HISTORY OF THE QUESTION IN THE COMINTERN

In these discussions with my young friends, which extended over the course of several months, I became keenly aware of the gaps in my understanding of Marxist-Leninist theory on the national-colonial question. I was to find, as Nasanov and others had indicated, that the idea of Blacks as an oppressed nation was not new in the Comintern. Though Stalin was undoubtedly the person pushing the position at the time, it had not originated with him, but with Lenin himself.

It first appeared in Lenin’s “Draft Theses on the National Colonial Question” which he submitted to the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920. The draft, which was later adopted, called upon the communist parties to “render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations (for example, Ireland, the American Negroes, etc.) and in. the colonies.”

Some have argued that Lenin’s reference to U.S. Blacks as a subject nation was merely a tentative deduction. When he submitted his draft, he asked the delegates for opinions and suggestions on fifteen points, one of which was “Negroes in America,”4

Tt was recorded, however, that the Colonial Commission of the congress, which Lenin himself headed and in which Sen Katayama was a leading member, held lengthy discussions on the question of U.S, Blacks,5

John Reed, the American author, was a delegate and participated in the discussion, apparently in opposition to Lenin’s formulations. In fact, he made two speeches, one in the commis-~ sion and one to the congress, contending that the problem of U.S. Blacks was that of “both a strong race movement and a strong proletarian workers’ movement which is rapidly developing in class consciousness.”6 Equating all national movements among Blacks to Garvey’s Back to Africa separatism, he contended that “a movement which struggles for a separate national existence has no success among the Negroes, like the ‘Back to Africa’ movement, for example.....” and that Blacks “consider themselves above all Americans, they feel at home in the United States. This makes the tasks of communists very much easier.”7

But despite Reed’s objections, the reference to American Blacks as an oppressed nation remained in the resolution as finally