Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood

by Harry Haywood, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (Editor)

Mustering out of the U.S. army in 1919, Harry Haywood stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of his life. Within months, he found himself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S. history and realized that he’d been fighting the wrong war—the real enemy was right here at home. This book is Haywood’s eloquent account of coming of age as a black man in twentieth-century America and of his political awakening in the Communist Party. For all its cultural and historical interest, Harry Haywood’s story is also noteworthy for its considerable narrative drama. The son of parents born into slavery, Haywood tells how he grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, found his first job as a shoeshine boy in Minneapolis, then went on to work as a waiter on trains and in restaurants in Chicago. After fighting in France during the war, he studied how to make revolutions in Moscow during the 1920s, led the Communist Party’s move into the Deep South in 1931, helped to organize the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, worked with the Sharecroppers’ Union, supported protests in Chicago against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, fought with the International Brigades in Spain, served in the Merchant Marines during World War II, and continued to fight for the right of self-determination for the Afro-American nation in the United States until his death in 1985. This new edition of his classic autobiography, Black Bolshevik, introduces American readers to the little-known story of a brilliant thinker, writer, and activist whose life encapsulates the struggle for freedom against all odds of the New Negro generation that came of age during and after World War I.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Social Justice

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

From Wikipedia:
Harry Haywood (February 6, 1898 - January 1985) was born in South Omaha, Nebraska to former slaves, Harriet and Haywood Hall. He was the youngest of three children. Named after his father at birth, Haywood Hall, "Harry Haywood" is a pseudonym adopted in 1925. Radicalized by the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, he was a leading African American member of both the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He is best known for his significant theoretical contributions to the Marxist national question and as a founder of the Maoist New Communist Movement.

Harry Haywood began his revolutionary career by joining the African Blood Brotherhood in 1922 followed by the Young Communist League in 1923. Shortly thereafter, in 1925 he joined the Communist Party, USA. After joining the CPUSA Haywood went to Moscow to study, first to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in 1925, then to the International Lenin School in 1927. He stayed until 1930 as a delegate to the Communist International (Comintern). There he worked on commissions dealing with the question of African Americans in the United States as well as the development of the "Native Republic Thesis" for the South African Communist Party. Haywood worked to draft the "Comintern Resolutions on the Negro Question" of 1928 and 1930, which put forward the line that African Americans in the Black Belt of the United States made up an oppressed nation, with the right to self-determination up to and including secession. He would continue to fight for this line throughout his life.

In the CPUSA, Haywood served on the Central Committee from 1927 to 1938 and on the Politburo from 1931 until 1938. He also participated in the major factional struggles internal to the CPUSA against Jay Lovestone and Earl Browder, regularly siding with William Z. Foster.

Following the death of Stalin in 1953 and Nikita Krushchev's rise to power, the CPUSA accompanied Moscow in Krushchev's policy of destalinization and "peaceful coexistence". Long an admirer of Mao Zedong, Harry Haywood was one of the pioneers of the anti-revisionist movement born out of the growing Sino-Soviet split. He was driven out of the CPUSA in the late 1950s along with many others who took firm anti-revisionist or pro-Stalin positions.

After being isolated and driven from the ranks of the CPUSA, Harry Haywood became one of the initiators of the New Communist Movement, the goal of which was to found a new vanguard Communist Party on an anti-revisionist basis, believing the CPUSA to have deviated irrevocably from Marxism-Leninism. He was one of the founders of the Provisional Organizing Committee for a Communist Party (POC), formed in New York in August, 1958 by eighty-three mostly Black and Puerto Rican delegates from the CPUSA. According to Haywood, the POC rapidly degenerated into an isolated, dogmatic, ultraleft sect, completely removed from any political practice.

He went from there to work in one of the newly formed Maoist groups of the New Communist Movement, the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). In the CP(M-L) Haywood served on the Central Committee and published, along with his other major works, his 700 page, critical autobiography, Black Bolshevik. This book became, because of its breadth and scope, an important document and through it and his other writings Haywood was able to provide ideological leadership to the New Communist Movement

Reviews

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harry is radicalized after dealing with army racism during World War I and then returning to the violence back home. Once in the Communist Party he goes for it all the way, living in Moscow, attending Comintern meetings, sitting on the CPUSA Politburo. The most exciting for me are the parts about organizing among African Americans, although Haywood is not a street-level organizer he has a lot of exciting stories to tell about rallies, meetings, strikes, trials, and demonstrations. The stories about protesting fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia feature some amazing tactics the CP used in Chicago, fighting a mayor who was a personal "friend" of Mussolini. The Spanish Civil War chapter has the usual heartbreak, this time with the twist that Haywood is firmly on Stalin's side against POUM and the anarchists... weird, but OK. Funnily enough, I was just talking with some people about how communist the Merchant Marine were during WWII and sure enough, Haywood is trying to maintain discipline in the Pacific until the book concludes with a quick and dirty criticism of the civil rights movement, this time with a more Maoist spin and some delightful Malcolm X quotes. Old Left History and some granular Black Marxism, spiced with real life stories make this a fun read.

[Julesreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

This abridged version of Haywood’s 700-some-odd autobiography (cut to 283 pages) was edited down by his later-life partner and mother of his children, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (herself a historian of slavery ranging all over the globe). In her introduction, which is thoughtful and rightfully honest, she admits to cutting out a lot of the talk of Haywood’s communist party political opinions, and at one point refers to Haywood as naive. I don’t know what her comment is in reference to—Haywood was an avowed Stalinist and supporter of the Marxist-Leninist tradition, and at one point in this abridged version, he makes a disparaging remark about Trotskyists in regard to their actions during the Spanish Civil War (I had to look up a more detailed account of Haywood’s opinion on Trotsky, and found it here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/hayw...). Her use of the word “naive” may have been largely in reference to Haywood’s avowed and undying communism, or his choice to end his book with a nod of respect to Mao Tse-tung’s effect in China and Mao’s support of the black nationalist movement in America as a key to bringing an end to US capitalism. Whatever her reason, certainly within her right to pass judgement on a man she knew intimately, I must say I found it unfortunate to disparage him in such a way. Haywood’s autobiography, even in an abridged form, is full of honest intellectual rigor over the African-American movement in America during his lifetime; how it progressed from the early 1900s to the 1930s; how the Communist Party in America both helped it and hurt it, but how the Communist Party in Russia supported it greatly; how Haywood fought it as a comrade, as a black man who wouldn’t take any racist shit from anyone, and as an intellectual willing to put in the work towards his study and his theory; as a black man in military service against fascism in WW2 and the Spanish Civil War—naive may not be wrong, but it is unfair and unnecessary. Haywood lived an incredible, courageous life, and he never compromised his communist ideals in favor of reformist short-cuts, nor did he view himself as an infallible figure. He writes honestly and critically of himself, of the Communist Party in the USA (which he says betrayed the black movement in the 1950s and 60s), and of all those US capitalists and US capitalist government “leaders” who only wanted to support the black movement in order to stop its traction as a true revolutionary movement. I only wished I had the nerve to read his massive, unabridged book, to consider his deeper thoughts on his studies and political point of view as a student in Moscow. Alas, I have already failed (aka I’m not gonna do it). Maybe some other day. This is a great book.

[Harvey Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best autobiographies I have read, great insight into the issues and explanations of nationalism versus the national question and internationalism. A must read for those grounded in theory or who seek further historical information and further their understanding the roots of African Americans in the communist movement