>From the early 1920s until the late 1950s, the U.S. Communist movement
was a significant pole of attraction in African American political and
cultural life. Yet students of the African American literary Left have
had access mainly to the reasons why some Black cultural and
intellectual figures were eventually dismayed by Communism, through
admonitory novels such as Chester Himes's The Lonely Crusade (1947),
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), and Richard Wright's The
Outsider (1953), reinforced by Harold Cruse's brutal polemic The
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967).
Only in the past fifteen years has a counter-trend gained momentum through the appearance of richly documented, independently critical, yet compelling explanations of just how and why the Communist movement wielded the attractive power that it did, despite all the obvious disadvantages, for Blacks as well as whites, of being regarded as a "communist." Books of the 1980s, such as those by Mark Naison and Robin D. G. Kelley, have now been augmented by the writings of Bill Mullen, James Smethurst, and William Maxwell to constitute a quantum leap forward in our ability to understand what was achieved by the symbiotic relationship of African American and Communist activists and cultural workers. However, in my view, the indispensable foundation for appreciating this entire body of new scholarship is Mark Solomon's stunning narrative of the absorption of revolutionary Black Nationalists and other Black radicals into the post-World War I Communist movement.
Solomon's highly nuanced and finely researched The Cry Was Unity treats the consequences of this co-mingling for the development of Communist ideology and activity from the early 1920s through the first year of the Popular Front. On the one hand, Solomon's book seeks to elaborate the "theory" of national oppression and the road to liberation worked out by U.S. Communists, Black and white, in their first decade and a half. On the other, his aim is equally to explore the practical activities against which the evolving theory was tested as this heroic, interracial organization rose up against white supremacism "with unprecedented passion as an indispensable requirement for achieving social progress."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_4_34/ai_70434342/
The Communist Party was the only political movement on the left in the late 1920s and 1930s to place racial justice and equality at the top of its agenda and to seek, and ultimately win, sympathy among African Americans. This historic effort to fuse red and black offers a rich vein of experience and constitutes the theme of The Cry Was Unity.
Utilizing for the first time materials related to African Americans from the Moscow archives of the Communist Inter-national (Comintern), The Cry Was Unity traces the trajectory of the black-red relationship from the end of World War I to the tumultuous 1930s. From the just-recovered transcript of the pivotal debate on African Americans at the 6th Comintern Congress in 1928, the book assesses the impact of the Congress's declaration that blacks in the rural South constituted a nation within a nation, entitled to the right of self-determination. Despite the theory's serious flaws, it fused the black struggle for freedom and revolutionary content and demanded that white labor recognize blacks as indispensable allies.
As the Great Depression unfolded, the Communists launched intensive campaigns against lynching, evictions, and discrimination in jobs and relief and opened within their own ranks a searing assault on racism. While the Party was never able to win a majority of white workers to the struggle for Negro rights, or to achieve the unqualified support of the black majority, it helped to lay the foundations for the freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.
The Cry Was Unity underscores the successes and failures of the Communist-led left and the ways in which it fought against racism and inequality. This struggle comprises an important missing page that needs to be returned to the nation's history.
Mark Solomon, an emeritus professor at Simmons College, is the author of Red and Black: Communism and Afro-Americans, 1929-1935, Death Waltz to Armageddon: E. P. Thompson and the Peace Movement, and Stopping World War II (with Michael Myerson).
400 pp.
http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/259
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