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A BLACK COMMUNIST
IN THE FREEDOM STRUGGLE
This page intentionally left blank
A BLACK
COMMUNIST
IN THE
FREEDOM
STRUGGLE
THE LIFE OF HARRY HAYWOOD

Harry Haywood
EDITED BY GWENDOLYN MIDLO HALL

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
The contents of this book were previously published in Harry Haywood,
Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist
(Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978). Copyright 1978 by Harry Haywood.

This edition copyright 2012 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haywood, Harry, 1898–1985.

A Black communist in the freedom struggle : the life of Harry Haywood /
Harry Haywood ; edited by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7905-8 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7906-5 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Haywood, Harry, 1898– 2. Communists—United States—Biography. 3. African
Americans—Biography. 4. Communism—United States—History. I. Hall,
Gwendolyn Midlo. II. Haywood, Harry, 1898–1985. Black Boshevik. III. Title.
HX84.H38A32 2012
335.43092—dc23
[B]
2012001305

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my family, Gwen, Haywood Jr., and Becky
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS

Introduction / Gwendolyn Midlo Hall ix

Abbreviations xxv

A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle

Prologue 3
1. A Child of Slaves 7
2. A Black Regiment in World War I 33
3. On to France 48
4. Searching for Answers 71
5. An Organization of Revolutionaries 103
6. A Student in Moscow 121
7. Self-Determination: The Fight for a Correct Line 138
8. Return to the Home Front: White Chauvinism under Fire 160
9. Reunion in Moscow 177
10. Sharecroppers with Guns: Organizing the Black Belt 189
11. Chicago: Against War and Fascism 211
12. The Spanish Civil War: A Call to Arms 228
13. World War II and the Merchant Marines 248
Epilogue 271

Acknowledgments 285
Notes 287
Index 301
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

The struggle against power “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
—Milan Kundera

These stories from the autobiography of Harry Haywood can give you confi-
dence that you can help make a better world. His life and his battles for African
American freedom and for justice for the poor and disempowered throughout
the world need to be better known. This beautifully written book is a remark-
able document of his times. That said, I chose to edit to this condensed version
of his original seven-hundred-page book to make it easier to read and easier for
a new generation to understand his life, what he achieved for humanity, and
the example he set. I cut much of the long theoretical debates, polemics, and
personal and political conflicts that have little meaning for most readers today.
Those who want to read the unabridged book can find the original edition in
almost any university library. With this introduction, I hope to share some of
what we have learned about the times he lived in since this book was published
thirty-five years ago and to add a few of my own thoughts about his work and
his legacy.
I presume to make the difficult choices involved in substantially shortening
his original autobiography for several reasons. First, I am a professional histori-
an. Second, we were married during the last thirty years of his life, and he is the
father of my two youngest children. Such a close personal relationship could
undermine my objectivity, I know. But I am a native of New Orleans with child-
hood memories of the civil rights and trade union battles of the 1930s and 1940s.
I was a veteran of the World War II democratic awakening with experience in
the Communist Party, which was, to a great extent, a movement of Black mari-
time and port workers in my culturally rich hometown. I was elected as a white
token member of the Executive Board of the Southern Negro Youth Congress
(SNYC) at its Southern Youth Legislature in 1946 and was an active member of
the Civil Rights Congress in New Orleans until 1949. I was a foot soldier in the

ix
 x Introduction

historic Henry A. Wallace 1948 presidential campaign in the South. Another ad-
vantage is that I have been a post-Marxist since 1963. My conversion was fueled
by the process of becoming a historian, which made me see the world as richly
concrete, complex, and changing over space and time. My belief in ideology
plunged as my understanding of consciousness and the role of the individual in
history grew. But I never told Harry because I did not want to hurt him. I hope
this combination of experience, involvement, and detachment will compensate
somewhat for questionable objectivity due to my close relationship with Harry.
You, the reader, will have to be the judge.
If we discuss the validity of ideas in the abstract, as many philosophers, his-
torians, and sociologists do, we cannot begin to appreciate Harry’s contribution
to the Black freedom movement. His life and ideas send important messages
from the past. He was part of a long Black radical tradition of armed resistance
to racist terror. Blacks had long experience defending themselves with arms,
especially in the Deep South. Black Civil War veterans and postwar militia-
men often kept their arms and defended themselves and others from Ku Klux
Klan terror. The courage, determination, and indignation of the ancestors were
passed down to their descendants. Long before Rosa Parks refused to give up
her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, many devoted, courageous people
fought for African American freedom; they remain forgotten and unsung. Rosa
Parks herself was a veteran of this older tradition. During slavery, the Civil War,
and Radical Reconstruction, there were massacres and violent battles in the
Deep South. There were also usually unpublicized underground Black power
movements for cultural resistance as well as armed self-defense against racist
terror.1 Ida B. Wells began national and international campaigns against lynch-
ing, spanning the twentieth century.2 During and after World War I, the African
Blood Brotherhood agitated for self-determination for the Black nation and
for armed self-defense against the racist massacres that escalated after World
War I.3 The New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s
stood up for Black identity and pride. Scholars, teachers, and the media rarely
mention this silenced history.4 Now conscientious, open-minded historians are
only beginning to research, write about, and publish on these movements.
Harry’s stories tell us how to fight for power for the powerless, a lesson the
vast majority of people of the world still urgently need to learn. He played a
major role in starting massive street protests for African American freedom get-
ting powerful international support. These protest tactics laid a foundation for
the Black power, armed self-defense, gender equality, and peace movements
of the 1950s through 1970s. Street protests, marches, civil disobedience, and
 Introduction xi

boycotts led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Student Nonviolent Coordinat-
ing Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Robert F.
Williams, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the Black Panthers, and Mal-
colm X, combined with the federal government’s concern about internal sta-
bility and the image of the United States abroad during the Cold War, brought
real change. Legalized racial segregation and discrimination finally ended. The
right to vote was secured for all. A brake was put on police brutality and on job,
housing, and gender discrimination, and the war in Vietnam was ended. Some
scholars believe the most crucial factor in the victories of the civil rights move-
ment was that our racist system was spoiling our image abroad during the Cold
War.5 King is rightly celebrated as the leader of the civil rights movement. But
the movement he led did not emerge out of the blue. The world-famous move-
ment beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 was rooted in many
lesser-known, older, and varied forms of protest.6
Unlike many other leaders of the movements of the 1920s—the New Negro
movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the African Blood Brotherhood, and the
Marcus Garvey movement—Harry Haywood was not a Caribbean immigrant
to New York City. He was a son of the Black working class of the industrial
Midwest with deep roots in the Black Belt South. With little formal education,
he became a self-taught working-class intellectual-activist. He lived through the
worst years of racist oppression in the United States. Born in 1898 in Omaha,
Nebraska, his parents were both born enslaved in 1860. His father was a beef-
lugger at the Cudahy meat-packing plant, and his mother was a domestic and
a caterer. The most violent and exploitative conditions prevailed in the Deep
South, especially in the Black Belt, where 80 percent of black folks lived and
worked as sharecroppers or small farmers. But the Black Belt South was also the
source of the richest culture, traditions, and history of resistance to racist terror.
Harry served in the U.S. Army during World War I, training in the South
and then going on to fight on the battlefields of France. He and his fellow Black
troops became increasingly defiant of the racist status quo. During and after the
war they defended Black communities against racist terror with arms. Along
with other members of the African Blood Brotherhood, he joined the Com-
munist Party of the United States (CPUSA) in 1923. He was sent to Moscow in
1926 to train as a revolutionary and found himself in a strategic position to get
badly needed help for the Black freedom movement. The timing was perfect.
Joseph Stalin was consolidating his power against his chief rival, Leon Trotsky,
who minimized the peasant and anticolonial movements and instead priori-
tized working-class revolutions in the advanced, industrial world. The Russian
 xii Introduction

czarist empire was composed of many oppressed and exploited ethnicities and
nations. The Soviet Union was established to win their loyalty by being sensi-
tive to their cultures and giving them the right to use their own languages in edu-
cation, culture, and government. The Communist International (Comintern)
was highly motivated to support the struggle for the freedom of Black people
in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa and was willing and able to
organize massive international support.
While Harry was studying in Moscow (1926–30), the Comintern was in-
doctrinating and giving financial aid and military training to revolutionaries
throughout the world. Asian revolutionaries were especially important in stress-
ing Black liberation in the United States. Sen Katayama (1859–1933), the famous
Japanese writer, activist, and revolutionary, was a founder of both the Commu-
nist Party of the United States and the Communist Party of Japan. He actively
promoted support for the Black freedom movement in the Comintern. Both
Sen Katayama and Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) of Vietnam had spent years living
and working in the United States. Ho Chi Minh worked in Harlem, Brooklyn,
and Boston in the United States and in London, England, and he was exposed
to the Marcus Garvey movement at its apex. Both Ho Chi Minh and Katayama
knew the sting of American racism firsthand and understood the powerful po-
tential of revolutionary Black nationalism in the United States. The Communist
Party of China was founded in Moscow, and many of its leaders were studying
at Comintern schools at the same time as Harry. Pioneer leaders of the indepen-
dence movement of India and the Black freedom movements in South Africa
and Ghana were also there.
Harry helped write a Comintern resolution that helped the Communist
Party of South Africa (CPSA) play an important role in the successful struggle
against apartheid.7 Nelson Mandela forthrightly acknowledged the unwaver-
ing support the CPSA gave the African National Congress (ANC) in the fight
to end apartheid. He wrote, “For many decades Communists were the only
political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human
beings and their equals; who were prepared to eat with us; talk with us, live with
and work with us.” The CPSA emerged as a major political party in Mandela’s
government. The Communist Parties of China and Vietnam eventually took
power. We now know the amazing military success of Vietnam against all odds
and the rise of Communist China to become one of the greatest economic pow-
ers in the world.8
Although Harry never finished elementary school, he learned to speak,
read, and write Russian better than any other U.S.-born Communist. He could
 Introduction xiii

even read literature in Russian. His mastery of the major language of the Com-
intern increased his influence. His marriage to his first love—Ina, a Russian
ballet dancer and interpreter of English—enhanced his understanding of and
love for Russia.
His greatest achievement was adapting Marxist–Leninist theory to bene-
fit the Black freedom struggle in the United States. The Black movement was
defined as a revolutionary movement in its own right, which could triumph
at its own pace independently of the working-class revolution for socialism.
By defining Blacks as an oppressed nation within the heartland of one of the
most powerful capitalist countries in the world and with strong backing by the
Comintern, he convinced reluctant white Communists in the United States
that the only road to a successful socialist revolution was by uncompromising
support for the Black freedom struggle. In 1928 and 1930 he helped draft two
Comintern resolutions prioritizing the fight for freedom in the most repressive
regions of the South, with the Black working class in the lead. The Black elite
was viewed as too eager to compromise by accepting white patronage. They
kept the movement under safe control in return for gains most attractive to
themselves rather than addressing the needs of Black workers, sharecroppers,
and farmers. Following the tradition established by Cyril B. Briggs and his Afri-
can Blood Brotherhood, these resolutions also opposed Black separatism, with
its social base in the “ghetto bourgeoisie.”9 Garveyism was characterized as an
escapist movement distracting from the struggle for rights for Blacks where
they actually lived and would remain. The slogan of self-determination for the
oppressed Black nation continues to resonate.10 As the recent experience of
Africa shows, independent nations can be thoroughly subverted and torn apart,
and their peoples and resources can be exploited without overt foreign occupa-
tion. Although much has changed during the twentieth and twenty-first centu-
ries, the role of class forces in the struggle for Black liberation speaks to current
and future issues, including the need for structural change in society to benefit
the poor and the powerless.
Before the “Negro question” was officially defined by the Comintern in Mos-
cow as a vital aspect of colonial oppression in 1928, most American socialists
and Communists considered southern workers and farmers, both Black and
white, hopelessly backward and saw them predominantly as strikebreakers.
Black and white Communists were extremely reluctant to work in the South
on the grounds that it was impossible to organize in such a dangerous and op-
pressive environment. Claude McKay’s report to the Comintern in Moscow in
1922 stated:
xiv Introduction

If we send white comrades into the South they are generally ordered
out by the Southern oligarchy and if they do not leave they are gener-
ally whipped, tarred and feathered; and if we send black comrades into
the South they generally won’t be able to get out again—they will be
lynched and burned at the stake.11

Lovett Fort-Whiteman, one of the first Black members of the CPUSA, re-
mained in the Soviet Union mainly to avoid organizing in the South. He died
in a Siberian forced-labor camp instead.12
The Comintern forced a reluctant Communist Party to organize in the
South after Blacks were declared an oppressed nation in the Black Belt entitled
to the right of self-determination. Harry Haywood was the first African Ameri-
can to understand and accept this concept. He played a major role in drafting
these resolutions and then in enforcing their implications after he returned in
1930 to the United States, where he led the Communist Party’s Negro work.
The Communist Party began to organize in the South beginning with the Gas-
tonia, North Carolina, textile strike of mainly white women in 1929. Glenda E.
Gilmore has written a definitive book about the impact of these resolutions on
the CPUSA’s organizing work in the South.13
As the leading Black member of the CPUSA and with great influence with
the Comintern in Moscow, Harry Haywood helped launch militant Black protest
movements during the 1930s, most notably the campaign to save and free the
Scottsboro Boys. These nine Black youths falsely accused of raping two white girls
were quickly found guilty by an all-white jury in Alabama and were sentenced to
death. The Scottsboro case exposed legal lynching, challenged the exclusion of
Blacks from juries, and undermined the deeply embedded image of Black men
as rapists lusting after white women. Street demonstrations for the lives and free-
dom of the Scottsboro Boys became a huge, international campaign spearheaded
by the CPUSA and firmly supported by the Comintern. All the Scottsboro Boys
were finally freed. Impressed by the Scottsboro campaign, in 1931 some share-
croppers in Alabama contacted the Southern Worker, a new newspaper published
by the Communist Party in Memphis, Tennessee, and asked for organizers.14 The
local people knew all about how to organize, including how to defend themselves
with arms. They were seeking effective outside help and received it, at least for a
few years. This powerful, largely underground movement survived and grew de-
spite widespread terroristic tortures and murders of their members in Alabama. It
won a few economic victories and spread throughout the Black Belt South, most
notably to Louisiana.
 Introduction xv

These events occurred during the Great Depression, beginning with the
Wall Street crash of 1929. The southern district of the CPUSA organized inter-
racial Unemployed Councils and hunger marches, teaching whites the need for
unity among all workers. Racial integration was strictly enforced in all organiza-
tions, meetings, and socials. By 1936, the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) was organizing interracial industrial unions in the South, relying heav-
ily on experienced Communist organizers who insisted on racially integrated
unions. Conflicts among Black, Latino, and white workers were defused.15 The
Communist Party didn’t use the word “multiculturalism.” It said “worker soli-
darity” and “fighting white chauvinism.” But it was way ahead of its time, every-
where both North and South.16
Some writers have dismissed Harry as a soulless bureaucrat within the
CPUSA. This portrayal is wrong. Harry was a totally devoted, loyal, disciplined
Communist. He insisted upon leaving the center of power in New York City
to organize coal miners in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, worked with the
Sharecroppers Union in Alabama, began Communist Party activity in Mem-
phis, and then returned to Chicago organizing Black workers on the Southside.
He was one of the few Black Communist leaders who did not depend on having
a job in the party bureaucracy. He could make a living working as a waiter, and
he often did until he was well into his sixties.
In 1933 the Comintern policy shifted to the right. The escalating fascist threat
dampened Soviet support for revolutions abroad. In 1919, Benito Mussolini
began the fascist movement in Italy and took power by terrorizing the Left and
all supporters of democracy. Adolf Hitler and his Fascist thugs took power in
Germany in 1933 with a vicious racist ideology. German persecution and exter-
mination policies first targeted Jews within Germany. But Hitler also targeted
Slavs, viewing them as inferior to Germans, and marked them for extermina-
tion. By killing them off and occupying their territories throughout eastern
Europe, Germans would have more living space. This immediate threat to the
existence of the Soviet Union and its people led it to seek alliances with the
Western democracies, softening its support for class struggle and revolutions
abroad. At its Seventh World Congress in 1935, the Comintern adopted a new
policy: the United Front against Fascism. It failed. Spain fell to fascism in 1939
despite Soviet military invention to save the Spanish Republic. Hitler’s “un-
stoppable” blitzkrieg occupied all of western Europe with breathtaking speed.
In June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. At the cost of nearly 30 million
lives, the Soviet Union crushed the German invasion. Stalin’s micromanage-
ment of the Red Army’s military campaign defeating the “unstoppable” Nazi
xvi Introduction

war machine is now indisputable, thanks to documents released from the Rus-
sian archives.17 But by 1935 Comintern support for world revolution, including
Black liberation in the United States and its leading proponents, had dried up,
which had an immediate impact in the Black Belt South.
Harry wrote:

In the years that had followed my visit to Alabama, the Sharecroppers

Union had continued to grow. In 1936, it had a membership of roughly
10,000, spread over five counties in the Alabama Black Belt. It was grow-
ing throughout the lower South with 2,500 members in Mississippi,
Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina. But in October 1936, the SCU
was dissolved and its membership merged into the Agricultural Workers
Union and the Farmers Union of Alabama. This latter was an organiza-
tion of predominantly white small farm owners and tenants based in the
northern part of the state, outside the plantation area. This union was
strongly influenced by the racist and right-wing Coughlinite forces.18

The United Front against Fascism presaged the end of the Comintern. William
Chase’s impressive book demonstrates its utter destruction by deadly, xenopho-
bic, hysterical witch hunts between 1934 and 1939; confessions were obtained
through torture and execution, and surviving victims were exiled to Siberian
forced-labor camps.19 Without support from the Comintern, Black Commu-
nists were faced with a dilemma that Harry never came to grips with. Black
working-class members had no self-determination within the Communist Party,
so their ability to exert autonomous leadership of the Black freedom struggle
became crippled.
The Soviet Union’s necessities for survival and the destruction of the Com-
intern precipitated Harry Haywood’s fall from leadership in the CPUSA. He
became an indirect victim of the purges of the Soviet military in Moscow while
he served as a commissar in the International Brigades in Spain. While recruit-
ing volunteers to defend the Loyalist government during the Spanish Civil War,
he decided he could not ask others to do what he did not do himself, so he
volunteered to go to Spain. Earl Browder, then general secretary of the CPUSA,
strongly objected and prevented his departure for several months. Browder
evidently understood at least some of the thick, murky politics in Spain that
were fueled by Soviet military incompetence and even more by Red Army com-
manders’ fear for their lives in the purges, which wiped out many of the Red
Army officers as well as the entire Comintern. Failure, criticism, even suspicion
 Introduction xvii

meant recall to Moscow for torture, execution, or exile to Siberian slave-labor

camps. Harry should have taken Browder’s advice. His experiences in Spain
nearly destroyed him. His chapter about the Spanish Civil War is informative,
but he could never see beyond the false images hiding Soviet incompetence.
He died without ever understanding what had happened to him in Spain. An
FBI agent of “known reliability” wrote that Harry was made a “scapegoat for
Soviet mistakes in Spain and then his rivals [mentioning James W. Ford] took
advantage to advance themselves into higher leadership positions.”
Harry told me only once, when he was very drunk, that he walked across
a battlefield in Brunete and saw the mangled corpses of many of the U.S. vol-
unteers, some of whom he no doubt had recruited. He never got over it. His
discussion of the Spanish Civil War weeps for the invaluable lives needlessly
lost in Spain. New research lends support to some of what he wrote. Red Army
officers not only commanded the International Brigades but controlled the
planes, tanks, artillery, rifles, and ammunition sent by the Soviet Union; the
supplies were often pledged but never arrived at the right place and time or
in the promised numbers. All the contentious publications about the Spanish
Civil War agree that time and again the Internationals, often unarmed, were
uselessly slaughtered. Harry rightfully did his best to protect his troops and
became the scapegoat for the Soviet officers’ incompetence and their fear not
of the enemy but of the purges in Moscow. “General Walter”—actually a Polish-
born Red Army general named Karol Wacław Świerczewski, one of the very few
Polish Communists to survive the terror in Moscow—was the highest-ranking
Soviet general in Spain. He explained these defeats partially by the nationalist
and linguistic insensitivity of Soviet military personnel and partially by fifth-
column infiltration behind their lines. Harry’s version coincides with “General
Walter’s” intelligence reports about the disasters at Brunete:

In the Brunete operation we did not show enough tenacity in using

the very favorable conditions of the first few days, but then had more
than was necessary later on when we were too late. We stubbornly tried
to compensate for being caught yawning with local and futile attacks
at Villafranca and Mosquite by 18th corps units that had little fighting
value.20

Harry never blamed the Soviet Union for his fall from leadership after he re-
turned to the United States. His loyalty to communism and to the Soviet Union
was unshakable. He had great integrity, but he was a true believer and a bit
xviii Introduction

naive. He fared much better than most of his mentors at the Comintern: at least
he survived physically and lived to fight another day.
Harry did indeed formally protest the useless slaughter of American troops
at the Jarama front. A diary entry by the Comintern commander Vladimir
Copic dated June 18, 1937, reports that the American commissar Harry Hay-
wood led a delegation of American officers including Steve Nelson. Haywood
informed Copic

that as a delegate of the Party it is his duty to tell me that the men have
no confidence in the co of the Brigade and want to replace me. That
if that lack of confidence is justified or not is another question and he
does not want to explore it but says it has to be considered and taken
into account as the opinion of the mass. [Harry] has already in previ-
ous discourses in the battalion incited against the co. I told him he could
communicate his views to the Division co but if he tried again to orga-
nize factional meetings in the battalion against the command, he would
be arrested and sent to Albacete.21

When Harry wrote that Copic was concerned about loss of prestige, he did not
know that for Soviet officers in Spain, being recalled to the Soviet Union was a
fatal event. Rumors, slanders, and deliberate disinformation were thick. Ernest
Hemingway wrote, “Then there was Gall, the Hungarian who ought to be shot
if you can believe half you heard . . . make it if you can believe ten percent of
what you heard.”22
Both Copic and Janos Gal were high-ranking commanders of the Interna-
tional Brigades. They suffered the same fate. Gal was relieved of his command
shortly after the Battle of Brunete and disappeared into the pit of the purges in
Moscow. Copic followed him shortly after.
Harry Haywood was formally removed from the Politbureau, the top leader-
ship body of the CPUSA, in 1938 after he returned from Spain. His dismissal was
based upon false, enduring racist reports about his supposed cowardice there.
The slander still persists that he left the Brunete battlefront without permission
and continues to resonate in almost every publication about the International
Brigades. Some of these reports are based on interviews with survivors who
demonstrate racist attitudes toward Blacks. Harry and others were resented be-
cause they were the first Black officers to lead white troops. He was criticized
for wearing an officer’s uniform and insisting on dressing neatly and properly,
in contrast to Steve Nelson, a white officer who was praised for wearing jeans.
 Introduction xix

Oliver Law, a Black officer who died leading his troops into battle, was resented
when he was promoted to officer status.

“Why Law?” Jarama veterans asked. “Law was not a Negro as I thought
of Negroes,” recalled a New York furrier. “Law was an illiterate southern
darkie, The kind you picture with a watermelon.”23

Harry drank a lot in Spain and was frightened by enemy machine-gun and ar-
tillery fire and by bombings and strafing from German and Italian planes. But
so was everybody else. The best, most unvarnished account by a soldier in the
field is by Alvah Bessie.24 Harry was no coward. He fought in three foreign wars
and in class warfare in the United States. During World War II, he joined the
National Maritime Union (NMU) and served on ships bringing troops and
supplies to fighting fronts around the world. He treats us to his sea tales about
life both aboard the ships and in port, including the especially dangerous Mur-
mansk run bringing desperately needed supplies to the Soviet Union.
When Harry’s autobiography turns to the post–World War II period, it be-
comes burdened with inner-party struggles and polemics, which are of little
interest today except to specialists in Communist history. I will try to summa-
rize the most important background here. The CPUSA was dissolved in 1944, a
dissolution inspired by delusions that the wartime alliance between the United
States and the Soviet Union would continue after the war. After the CPUSA
was restored in 1945 under the leadership of William Z. Foster, Harry was for-
mally cleared of all charges of deserting the front in Spain. The slogan of self-
determination in the Black Belt was revived, and Harry was encouraged to write
a book. His first book, Negro Liberation, contributed greatly to reviving the
Communist Party in the South, which reached its highest membership (two
thousand) after World War II. Despite vicious legal, and sometimes violent,
attacks on militant leftists beginning almost immediately after the war ended,
the revived CPUSA accomplished a lot. The Southern Negro Youth Congress
held its Southern Youth Legislature in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1946, with
wide representation from a wide range of Black youth groups. Many of those
attending became active throughout the later and more famous civil rights
movement. The Civil Rights Congress was organized in 1946 under the leader-
ship of William L. Patterson. It was especially active in the South, reviving the
work of the International Labor Defense (ILD) that had led the Scottsboro
defense years before. Harry helped Patterson with research for We Charge Geno-
cide, the Civil Rights Congress petition to the United Nations that documented
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