The Life and Legacy of Harry Haywood
Thursday, February 11, 2010
By: Eugene Puryear
Part I of a Black History Month commemoration
Harry Haywood,
Black communist leader |
There is an old saying that “history is written by the
victors.” While subject to some caveat, in the history of Black Americans it
has held very true. Many books have been written about Black leaders and
activists, who were vilified or under assault during their day, but have since
been converted into harmless icons.
Lenin could have been talking about the U.S. media’s
presentation of Black History Month when he wrote, “attempts are made to
convert [great revolutionaries] into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to
say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the
"consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping
the latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its
revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”
This is particularly true of Black historical figures whose
ideology was vague enough to be manipulated into a pro-capitalist or patriotic
perspective. According to this narrative, U.S. capitalism is fully able to
resolve the country’s “racial” problems, and each of these Black leaders merely
functioned to improve capitalism’s faults.
But for every Black leader who has been canonized, there is
another who is faded into the background, relegated to footnotes, and passing
mentions in mainstream history. This is particularly true of Black communists,
whose firm commitment to the overthrow of capitalism makes them untouchable and
virtually unmentionable.
Harry Haywood, a prominent communist leader of the 20th
century, fits squarely into the latter category. Haywood was a long time member
and leader of the Communist Party-USA and other communist organizations from
the 1920’s until his death in 1985. He was the key figure in developing and
popularizing the concept that Blacks represented a separate “nation” inside the
United States. For more information on Haywood's theoretical and political contributions, click this link.
While Haywood merits almost no mention in many accounts of Black
history, his theoretical innovations probably did more than any other one
individual to frame the terms of the debate about the historical character of
the “Black community.”
Early life
Haywood was born in 1898 in what is now Omaha, Nebraska, to a
family of self-educated ex-slaves. Forced out of Omaha by racist violence,
Haywood’s family settled in Minneapolis, where he lived during his adolescence.
Faced with rampant prejudice in Minneapolis schools, Haywood ended his formal
education in the 8th grade and went to work full time, taking on a variety of
occupations.
Haywood moved to Chicago in 1915, where he soon ended up in
the National Guard, caught up in the war mobilization for WWI. He suffered all
the indignities and injustices of the Black soldiers of his time, serving in
segregated units, and training in the citadel of reaction, the Deep South.
Even while deployed in France, Haywood’s regiment could not
escape Jim Crow’s long shadow. The racist military establishment attempted to
infect the French people with prejudice and refused to allow any Black officers
to command the segregated troops. These efforts to reproduce U.S. racism in
France largely failed, and Haywood, like many other soldiers in both World
Wars, drank deeply that most powerful of intoxicants: “freedom.”
The racist mob violence that broke out in Chicago in 1919 was a formative event in Haywood's life.
|
Upon returning to the United States, Haywood walked directly
into the 1919 Chicago Race Riot. Throughout 1919 race riots raged across the
United States, with that summer being known as “Red Summer,” because of the
blood that was spilled by racist mobs. That was not the only blood that was
spilled however, and in cities and towns across the country, Black
communities—spearheaded by war veterans—organized to defend their
neighborhoods.
Harry Haywood joined other Black veterans in Chicago, who
mounted a Browning sub-machine gun in an apartment window and stood guard with
Springfield rifles. Haywood mentions this moment in his autobiography as the
most important turning point of his life. Fed up with the endless racism in U.S.
society—and believing firmly that a better world was possible—Haywood committed
himself from then on “to struggle against whatever it was that made racism
possible.”
Becoming a leading communist
Haywood came into contact with a number of radical groups of
the period, briefly becoming a member of the African Blood Brotherhood, led by
Black communists, before joining the communist party itself in the mid 1920s. A
few years later the Party chose Haywood for further studies at the Communist
International schools in Russia.
It was in the Soviet Union that Haywood began to emerge as
one of history’s most prominent Black communists. As a body dedicated to
stimulating and coordinating worldwide revolution, the Comintern emphasized the
working class’s unity with the world’s colonized and nationally oppressed
peoples. As such, the Comintern leadership was sharply critical of the CPUSA’s
almost non-existent work amongst African Americans. While a few Black activists
had joined primarily because of their attraction to the Russian Revolution,
mass work amongst Blacks was lagging.
Haywood did not attribute this problem primarily to lack of
effort, nor simply white chauvinism (although this was a considerable problem
among some members). Rather, he recognized that the Party had not undertaken
any systematic analysis of the history and state of oppression facing African
Americans. Without a theoretical framework to anchor and guide their work, the
young Communist Party was basically fumbling around.
It was here, working on various Comintern commissions that
Haywood became the key figure in elucidating what became known, perhaps
somewhat erroneously, as the “Black Belt Thesis." He also
was involved in discussions around the question of race and nationality in South
Africa.
Haywood returned to the United States in the early 1930’s
and continued to play a leading role in formulating the theoretical positions
of the Communist Party on the “Negro question.” He served for a time as the
head of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, a party sponsored
mass-organization set up to fight white supremacy. Haywood also served as an
organizer in the 1931 miners’ strike in West Virginia, building unity between
Black and white workers. He was involved in defense of the framed up Scottsboro
Boys, who were sentenced to death by Jim Crow courts in Alabama, but set free
due to mass struggle on the part of the Black and white working
population.
In 1938, Haywood also served in the Spanish Civil War along
with other left-wing volunteers who went to join the fight against fascism.
Personal confrontations with local commanders led him to return to the United
States after only six months—and were then used to demote him from the CPUSA’s
top leadership.
Haywood’s marginalization, but lasting legacy
During the late 1930s, the CPUSA moved away from the
theoretical conceptions put forward by Haywood, and began to liquidate a number
of the more successful campaigns amongst Blacks. The Party’s embrace of Popular
Front politics required that they ingratiate themselves more fully with liberal
and centrist political organizations. In the North, this led them to accept the
reformist leadership of the NAACP. In the Party’s southern work, an
accommodation with liberalism required a downgrading of the militant,
communist-led sharecroppers’ movement.
The Party by no means abandoned the struggle against racism,
and they continued to recruit large numbers of African Americans. But those
like Harry Haywood—who advocated a united front against racism that would allow
the Communists to challenge bourgeois leadership—were forced to the sidelines.
As the Cold War began to take shape after WWII, the CPUSA
reoriented again towards sharper confrontation with the capitalist class. In
this context, Haywood was able to revive his landmark theory in the 1948 book
“Negro Liberation,” written with the financial help of Paul Robeson. This,
however, was a short-lived renaissance; as the Party fell victim to the
anti-communist witch-hunt, it again oriented towards liberalism, seeking refuge
in unwelcoming organizations like the NAACP. Harry Haywood was increasingly
shunned and his revolutionary analysis of the “Negro question” was replaced
with a theoretical conception that had more in common with bourgeois liberal
currents of the period. In 1959, Haywood was expelled.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Harry Haywood continued to
defend his “Black Belt Thesis,” which became influential again in the radical
resurgence. As a new generation of activists in the Black liberation movement
and the Left studied and debated the African American national question and the
concept of “internal colonies,” the work of Harry Haywood framed the debate and
remained a vital starting point.
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