On January 5, 2015, the Forward had this long pious op/ed that begins: “When filmmakers choose what to include or exclude from the stories they tell, their choices often have repercussions beyond the drama on the screen. In films based on real-life events, omissions can seriously distort the way we remember the past. “Selma,” a film directed by Ava DuVernay, offers an ambitious portrait of Martin Luther King by zeroing in on a pivotal moment in the black voting rights struggle. The negative way in which President Lyndon Johnson is portrayed has already sparked significant controversy, but the narrative strategy of the film leads to a glaring omission that has not yet surfaced: the contribution that thousands of white people, many of them Jewish, made to the Civil Rights Movement.”
Understandably, the op/ed does not mention the CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA) promotion of Civil Rights going back to the 1920s and the dominant role that Jews played in American communism.
The Communist Party USA, ideologically committed to foster a Socialist revolution in the United States, played a significant role in defending the civil rights of African Americans during its most influential years of the 1930s and 1940s. In that period, the African-American population was still concentrated in the South, where they were largely disenfranchised, excluded from the political system, and oppressed under Jim Crow laws…
In its early days, the party had the greatest appeal among black workers with an internationalist bent. From 1920 it began to intensively recruit African Americans as members. The most prominent black Communist Party members at this time were largely immigrants from the West Indies, who viewed a black worker struggle as being part of the broader campaigns against capitalism and imperialism.
At the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Claude McKay, a Jamaican poet, and Otto Huiswoud, born in Suriname, persuaded the Comintern to set up a multinational Negro Commission that sought to unite all movements of blacks fighting colonialism. Harry Haywood, [1] an American communist drawn out of the ranks of the African Blood Brotherhood, a socialist group with a large number of Jamaican émigrés in its leadership, also played a leading role. McKay persuaded the founders of the Brotherhood to affiliate with the Communist Party in the early 1920s. The African Blood Brotherhood claimed to have almost 3,500 members; relatively few of them, however, joined the party.
The Comintern directed the American party in 1924 to redouble its efforts to organize African Americans…
The Sixth Congress of the Comintern held in 1928 changed the party’s policy drastically; it claimed that blacks in the United States were a separate national group and that black farmers in the South were an incipient revolutionary force. The Comintern ordered the party to press the demand for a separate nation for blacks within the so-called “Black Belt”, a swath of counties with a majority-black population extending from eastern Virginia and the Carolinas through central Georgia, Alabama, the delta regions of Mississippi and Louisiana and the coastal areas of Texas…
The party’s most widely reported work in the South was its defense, through the International Labor Defense (ILD), of the “Scottsboro Boys”, nine black men arrested in 1931 in Scottsboro, Alabama after a fight with some white men also riding the rails. They were convicted and sentenced to death for allegedly raping two white women on the same train. None of the defendants had shared the same boxcar as either of the women they were charged with raping.
The International Labor Defense was the first to offer its assistance. William L. Patterson, a black attorney who had left a successful practice to join the Communist Party, returned from training in the Soviet Union to run the ILD. After fierce disputes with the NAACP, with the ILD seeking to mount a broad-based political campaign to free the nine while the NAACP followed a more legalistic strategy, the ILD took control of the defendants’ appeals. The ILD attracted national press attention to the case, and highlighted the racial injustices in the region…
The Scottsboro defense was one of the ILD’s many cases in the South at that time: it also defended Angelo Herndon, a Communist Party activist sentenced to death by the State of Georgia for treason due to his advocacy of national self-determination for blacks in the Black Belt. The ILD also demanded retribution from state governments for the families of lynching victims, for their failure to protect blacks. It pushed for due process for criminal defendants. For a period of time in the early and mid-1930s, the ILD was the most active defender of blacks’ civil rights in the South; it was the most popular party organization among African Americans…
The party was also active in campaigning on issues concerning black Americans outside of the South. The CPUSA made a point of campaigning against racial segregation, both in the independent unions they were organizing during the Third Period and in the American Federation of Labor unions they were attacking. The party also made a concerted effort to weed out all forms of racism within its own membership, conducting a well-publicized trial of a Finnish member of a foreign-language federation in Harlem, who had acted insensitively toward blacks.
The CPUSA organized among African Americans in the North on their local issues; it was, for example, either the first or one of the most active organizations in campaigning against evictions of tenants, for unemployment benefits, and against police brutality. In other instances during this period, the Communist Party joined in existing campaigns, such as the economic boycott, under the slogan of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work,” launched against Jewish and Italian businesses in Harlem that refused to hire African-American workers…
Communists joined with labor and civil rights groups to form the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which campaigned for civil rights and socialism. A New York City school teacher and party member, Abel Meeropol, wrote the song “Strange Fruit” to dramatize the horrors of lynching in the South, which had reached a peak around the turn of the century.
The party tailored its campaign for unity against fascism to appeal to the black community, as in the case of its opposition to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Black members went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War; the Lincoln Brigade was the first military force of Americans to include blacks and whites integrated on an equal basis and black officers commanding white troops…
The Communist Party made the fight against racism within the labor movement and Jim Crow outside it one of its consistent principles from the early 1920s forward. While maintaining a position against white supremacy, the Party made special efforts to organize black miners in the strikes its National Miners Union led in western Pennsylvania in 1928…
During the Popular Front era the party attracted support from a number of the brightest lights in African-American literature, including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, some of whom joined the party, only to break with it in later years. Paul Robeson, a vocal defender of the Soviet Union, apparently never joined the party, but was loyal to at least a few of its members including Ben Davis who was jailed under The Smith Act.
The Communist Party also took up benign issues. The party’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, started agitating for integration of major league baseball in the mid-1930s. The party also made a point of integrating its dances and other social events and continued to ostracize and expel members accused of “white chauvinism”…
In 1946, the NNC and the ILD merged to form the Civil Rights Congress. The CRC continued its activities during the height of postwar attacks on the Communist Party, denouncing discrimination in the judicial system, segregated housing, and other forms of discrimination that blacks faced in both the North and the South.
