For the duration of the “Red Summer” of 1919, in the midst of the disorder that followed World War I and in the exhilaration stimulated by the Russian Revolution, white radicals in the United States kicked off the American Communist movement. Its birth was accompanied by an eruption of major race riots in this country that signaled a new militant resistance by young blacks to American racial proscription. “New Negro” intellectuals gave voice to this militancy. Some of them, expressing solidarity with the pro-Bolshevik uprisings occurring in Europe at the time, were struck by Bolshevism’s appeal not only to the working class of highly industrialized nations but also to oppressed...

B. D. Amis (1896–1993) is virtually unknown today and often overlooked by historians. As an African American Communist, he was a major figure in the black freedom struggle during the two decades between the world wars. At the time, the American Communist Party (CP) played a significant role in fighting for the rights of African Americans. This was especially true during CP’s heyday in the late 1920s and the 1930s. In those years, Amis was, to be sure, part of the small circle of black radicals leading the struggle for workers’ rights and racial justice. In 1930, Amis became...

As a principal figure in the American Communist movement, Harry Haywood (1898–1985) stands out as a key theorist on the controversial “national question” of African Americans in the United States. In this role, he was a sharp Marxist critic of middle-class black “reformers” found in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and in the field of black journalism.

An exceptional young black intellectual, Haywood Hall Jr. joined the American Communist Party in 1925 and took “Harry Haywood” as his party pseudonym. He had, in fact, commenced his revolutionary vocation in 1922 when he enrolled in the...

During the 1930s and the years of World War II, James W. Ford (1893–1957) emerged from the CPUSA’s Harlem section as one of the most prominent black Communists in North America. Historians often refer to Ford as symbolizing the party’s attempt to construct a united front between African Americans and the white working class. This young black Communist also played the role of the champion of orthodoxy

Ford ran for vice-president on the Communist Party ticket an unprecedented three times, in 1932, 1936, and 1940. He was the first African American to run on a presidential ticket in American...

Harlem citizens elected Benjamin J. Davis Jr. (1903–1964), African American attorney and Communist, to the New York City Council in 1943. Not surprisingly, as the Cold War heated up in post–World War II America, Davis endured increasing hostility from beyond New York. Indeed, in 1951 federal authorities convicted Davis, along with ten other national CPUSA leaders, of violating the Smith Act and sentenced him to five years in federal prison.

As young man, Davis proved to be academically gifted and ambitious. Born and raised in Dawson, Georgia, he successfully completed Morehouse College’s high school program in Atlanta. Afterward,...

Louise Alone Thompson Patterson (1901–1999), born on September 9, 1901, in Chicago, graduated in 1923 with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in economics. That was no mean achievement for a woman of color in those days. Soon afterward, she taught at the Hampton Institute in Virginia but chafed under the domination of white paternalists; then she journeyed to New York, where she studied social work. She met a number of noted Harlem Renaissance writers and began a lifelong friendship with the poet Langston Hughes. She worked on several projects with Hughes and his artistic...

Born in San Francisco on August 27, 1891, William L. Patterson was a Marxist attorney, writer, and civil-rights advocate. On his mother’s side of the family, he descended from Virginia slaves. Prior to the eruption of the American Civil War, Patterson’s mother was liberated and sent west to California, where she met William’s father. Rising from a povertystricken background, young William graduated from high school in 1911 and attended the University of California for a time without graduating. In 1915, Patterson enrolled at the Hastings College of Law (University of California, San Francisco). While attending law school, he began to...

Claudia Jones (1915–1964) was a protean radical historical figure who should be remembered as a Black Nationalist, a political activist, a radical journalist, and an important American Communist. Historical opinion is coming around to the point of view that Jones is at least important as her friend Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in the history of American radicalism.

Born in the West Indies (Trinidad), Jones moved to New York City as a child, where she suffered a uniquely American poverty and oppression that only an African American woman can understand. She used her native intelligence and highly developed social conscience to...

In post–World War II America, the internal turmoil brought on by the Cold War, the Smith Act prosecutions, and the ouster of Earl Browder as general secretary led to an internal battle in which the Communist Party expelled a number of members who were accused of displaying “white chauvinism.” In 1949 and 1950, the CPUSA was driven out of the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and much of the American labor movement. A significant number of leaders of the CPUSA viewed their organizational efforts among the white working class as unsuccessful. Instead, they would now...