Black Bolshevik is the autobiography of Harry Haywood, the son of former slaves who became a leading member of the Communist Part USA and a pioneering theoretician on the Afro-American struggle.
The author's first-hand accounts of the Chicago race riot of 1919, the Scottsboro Boys' defense, communist work in the South, the Spanish Civil War, the battle against the revisionist betrayal of the Party, and other history-shaping events are must reading for all who are interested in Black history and the working class struggle.
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.