Eminentoes / NAACCCP
Schwartz, Stephen
There is a reason the press coverage of Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.'s appointment to the top post in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has dealt so superficially with his...
...Rep...
...he is the successor to Angela Davis as the most prominent public figure associated in recent years with the Moscow-funded, hard-line Communist Party, USA...
...CI...
...For the NAARPR, backed by the Kremlin, crafted the 1970s campaign in favor of the Chavisled "Wilmington Ten" as a specific response to Jimmy Carter's international human rights campaign, focusing on the Soviet empire's prisoners of conscience...
...Other associated names, famous for the defense of Stalinism, included that of a Hollywood Ten member, the onetime screenwriter and permanent party hack, John Howard Lawson...
...and Herbert and Bettina Aptheker, father and daughter, longtime CP partisans...
...But for a glitch in the stream of history, Mitford, whose Stephen Schwartz is a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle...
...He visited the embassy frequently while fighting the Reagan administration's support for UNITA, the Angolan anti-Communist rebels...
...That some African-Americans would use the party as a publicity asset is understandable1In the East Bay Express, a Berkeley weekly, for April 9, Mitford says she stayed in the Communist Party, which she joined in the 1940s, until she and Treuhaft publicly quit the party in 1958 because "the CP bigwigs cared not a hoot about what local community people were saying...
...For Chavis is more than an African-American militant...
...his career as a Soviet apologist continued long after his legal case...
...Proportional representation was abolished by voters in New York in 1950, to great lamentations by the comrades done in by a popular move to "get the Commies out of office...
...Lawrence V. Cott assisted in the research for this article...
...The Guinier affair involves more than extremist writings: neglected through most of the debate was discussion of her parents' careers...
...It is curious, too, that the Congressional Black Caucus specifically threatened to block aid to the former USSR if Guinier was not confirmed...
...His involvement in pro-Soviet activities far exceeds that of Johnnetta Cole, his fellow-member of the Clinton presidential transition team...
...During his UPWA period, Guinier was also a leading figure in New York's American Labor Party...
...That Chavis remains an apologist for a dead Communism is clear from a comment in the New York Times of April 11...
...After an uproar in newspapers over the next few days, Armey withdrew the remark...
...shows at the very least an alarming myopia about hard-line Communism...
...But the Chavis problem emerges not from the past threat of a now-defunct Communism but from what it says about an individual's judgment...
...The governments gifted with superior vision regarding our "hypocrisy" included, mainly, those of the USSR, East Germany, and Cuba...
...Indeed, since 1973, he has been the titular leader of a rival N-double-A, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR), which happens to be the CPUSA's legal defense arm...
...Cole, president of Atlanta's Spelman College and first in line for secretary of education, was removed from consideration when the gross nature of her long involvement with the CPUSA, the Castro regime, and the.Communist dictatorship of Grenada was exposed...
...Nobody can yet say how much of MitfordTreuhaft rubbed off on Hillary during her summer internship in 1970.1 0 ne must take into account the fact, little noted except by historians, that the CPUSA had, for many decades, a higher profile among African-Americans than in the broader strata of American society...
...All her friends are Marxists...
...Lani's father Ewart Guinier, who died last year, was a wheel-horse of American Stalinism decades before his rise to academic respectability in Harvard's Afro-American Studies department...
...1 t's thus hardly coincidental that one of the few issues on which Chavis has spoken out boldly is the Lani Guinier nomination...
...Excuse me...
...Chavis describes how he met his wife, a Dominican translator at the Angolan Embassy in Paris...
...In early June he was widely quoted as saying that "Senate Democratsdon't have the stomach to stand up to those tight-Wing Republicans...
...Army, Guinier served as an instructor at the Honolulu Labor Canteen—a CP soul-catching operation that was a focus for maritime and military agitation around the Pacific—where he taught the history of the Soviet Union...
...The Washington Post noted that "Soviet leaders point to the case as a symbol of injustice in the U.S," and when the Ten's sentences were reduced in 1978, the New York Times paraphrased Chavis himself, declaring that "the press of the Soviet Union and other Communist nations has cited the conviction of the Ten as an example of U.S...
...From 1946 to 1953 he was a high official of the United Public Workers of America, one of eleven unions expelled from the CIO in 1950 for being completely dominated by the Kremlin...
...One could say Chavis owes his job at the NAACP to Andrei Sakharov...
...Prior to his UPWA and ALP work, Guinier and his wife had been prominent leftist leaders in the then-territory of Hawaii, where the CPUSA pursued some of its most subversive projects...
...In a Senate investigation of UPWA, Guinier refused to testify whether or not he was a Communist Party member...
...In Hawaii, the Guiniers were active in efforts to assure the speedy withdrawal of American servicemen from Asia at the end of World War II, in order to leave the field open for Communist influence...
...In the late 1940s, the ALP underwent a bruising factional fight between the Stalinists grouped around the ALP's sole congressman, the notoriously corrupt Vito Marcantonio, and a group of anti-Stalinist socialists...
...I couldn't abide the idea that the U.S...
...The American Labor Party owed its political successes in no small part to the fact that New York City elections •were then run on the basis of proportional representation—precisely the system Guinier's daughter Lani would seek to impose at the national level four decades later...
...Hillary Clinton's role in these affairs is perturbing, since Chavis's jump to the NAACP from the NAARPR seems to have been accomplished via the Clinton transition team, and Hillary was reputedly the patroness of Cole...
...No direct elections of any kind were held in Angola until well after the Reagan era...
...As a Marcantonio protégé and frequent ALP candidate, Guinier threw himself into this struggle, and was even sued for libel (inconclusively) in 1949 by Eugene Connolly, a non-Stalinist ALP member of the New York city council whom Guinier had called "anti-Negro...
...The party's arts cadre was also supportive: poet Walter Lowenfels, actor John Randolph, and banjoist Pete Seeger...
...Nor was he simply an individual facing prosecution, who took his friends where he could find them...
...Others included the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers and the notorious longshoremen under Harry Bridges—whose CPUSA affiliation was confirmed in these pages last December by Harvey Klehr and John Haynes...
...Chavis appeared at the group's founding convention in 1973 as a co-vice-chairperson with Charlene Mitchell, 1968 Communist presidential candidate and in effect an overseas functionary of the Soviet government, responsible with CPUSA boss Gus Hall for running the party...
...While a warrant officer in the U.S...
...He shouldn't have...
...If that style of rhetoric sounds familiar, so will another aspect of Guinier's ALP activities...
...family ran to political extremism, might have become Hitler's sister-in-law...
...We are equally as well `prisoners of conscience.' " He said the worldwide counteroffensive in his favor had "been fostered by all governments that see the hypocrisy of our foreign policy---criticism of other countries for so-called violations of human rights when we have human rights violations within our own borders...
...to win council seats repeatedly on the open ticket of the Communist Party...
...This format allowed ALP Stalinists to win municipal seats, and even made it possible for such characters as Peter V. Cacchione and Benjamin Davis, Jr...
...The NAARPR was set up under the aegis of Angela Davis...
...Davis herself provides the most obvious example—but the easy access of such prominent CPUSA supporters as Chavis and Cole into the higher circles of political responsibility is disturbing...
...Chavis's willingness to lend himself to Soviet active measures against the U.S...
...Namely, it demonstrates an utter incomprehension of the meaning of democracy and political pluralism, two concepts that seem of obvious importance to the NAACP's work...
...In a 1977 letter to President Carter, Chavis wrote...
...Whatever the justice of the trial and verdict, the origin of the international campaign on the defendants' behalf is unarguable...
...The 1973 meeting was attended or endorsed by the entire Soviet-subsidized leadership of the CPUSA, including such illustrious Communists as John Abt and Jessica Smith, deeply involved in the Hiss/Chambers case...
...hypocrisy...
...Dick Armey of Texas, chairman of the House Republican Conference, recently told a Texas audience that Hillary Clinton "hangs around with a lot of Marxists...
...was trying to subvert a legitimately elected African government," he declared...
...The Wilmington Ten were convicted in North Carolina of arson and conspiracy to shoot at police and fire personnel during urban troubles in 1971 and 1972...
...Thus, Mitford and Treuhaft, unfazed by Stalinism, date their disillusionment from the discovery that the CP in Northern California was run by unresponsive bureaucrats...
...There is a reason the press coverage of Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.'s appointment to the top post in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has dealt so superficially with his background...
...It only recently came to light that Hillary served a law-school internship in the law firm of Robert Treuhaft, a long-term Communist Party associate in the San Francisco Bay Area, and husband of England's most famous Red Snob, the egregious Jessica Mitford...
Vol. 26 • August 1993 • No. 8
