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

353 Pages·2012·2.647 MB·English

by  Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo;Haywood, Harry

A BLACK COMMUNIST
IN THEFREEDOM 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