FICKLE COURTSHIP
Jack, Homer A.
Fickle Courtship THE NEGRO AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY, by Wilson Record. University of North Carolina Press. 340 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Homer A. Jack THERE are still those among us who whisper,...
...During this period its Negro membership declined significantly...
...Reviewed by Homer A. Jack THERE are still those among us who whisper, "However evil the American Communists may be, they have been good to the Negro people...
...Less abruptly the line changed a second time...
...With the threat of Hitler, there was a united front period—with Communists snuggling up to the early New Deal, to John L. Lewis' organizing campaigns, and to the once-hated N.A.A.C.P...
...Party membership among Negroes did not increase, partly because Negroes did not like this transparent opportunism...
...Its primary aim was to keep America from aiding the allied powers...
...Record does not do what he could with the party's involvement in the Scottsboro case or with its production of disillusioned Negroes—and whites—who no longer have the fortitude to participate actively in race relations work...
...Eugene V. Debs, speaking for the Socialist Party, once said, "We have nothing special to offer the Negro...
...This is a well-documented, important book...
...Yet let no traditional Democrat or Republican feel happy about this conclusion, for as Jackie Robinson told the House Un-American Activities Committee: "Negroes were stirred up long before there was a Communist Party, and they will stay stirred up long after the party has disappeared—unless Jim Crow has disappeared by then as well...
...Why has the party so little to show for its three decades of labors...
...Foregoing much of its doctrinaire revolutionary theory, the party reached a wider Negro audience, elicited much support, and perhaps doubled its Negro membership...
...Although emphasizing ideological twists, it does give fairly long accounts of the party's concern for Negro history, the party's use of Mussolini's attack on Ethiopia, and the origins and demise of the National Congress and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare...
...Record feels that "the degree of loyalty which the Negro has given to the conservative society which discriminates against him is impressive...
...Today the Communist Party is obviously disintegrating—with Negro membership probably less than 4,000...
...The party pulled its punches and ducked any controversy which would delay "victory...
...With the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939, the CP-line changed for a third time...
...Wilson Record estimates there were less than 200 Negro members of the party by 1928...
...Then the line changed...
...But the Communist Party, organized in 1919, felt the Negroes to be one of the greatest potential resources for a revolutionary program...
...Although the party placed its entire apparatus behind the Wallace Progressive Party, it did not capture any significant percentage of the Negro vote...
...All in all, this is a valuable book and the only one fully proving the assertion that the Communists' "concern with Negro rights was always a secondary and incidental— never a fundamental—matter...
...In this second period, ending in 1935, the Communist Party made real gains— although only an estimated 2,500 Negroes were actually party members...
...This book documents a denial of that statement...
...This meant that the Negroes in the Southern States should set up their own nation...
...The fifth and final volte face came in 1945 with the epistle from Duclos, the ousting of Browder, and the admission of collective guilt by the party for its failure to struggle for Negro rights more aggressively during the war period...
...Viewing the Communist efforts in wooing the Negro, Ralph Bunche in 1941—long before he walked on the world scene—shrewdly saw that the Communist Party's "interest in the Negro is purely a tactical one dictated by political expediency...
...Yet it was unable to make significant inroads into the Negro community or to convert outstanding Negro leaders, except a handful of "red Uncle Toms...
...The party took its self-determination policy out of moth-balls...
...Hitler turned the Communist slogan, "This is not the Negro's war,' into the command, "Negroes, this is our war...
...This "red-winged Jim Crow" did not move many Negroes, but the appeals the Communists made to the Negro unemployed during the depression did...
...The "Negro question" since that time has always been prominent in party ideology and often in party program...
...The Negroes were redefined as "an oppressed nation" and the doctrine of self-determination was imported from Russia and announced as the core of the Communist program...
...During the first decade of party activity in the United States, however, no great inroads were made into the Negro community...
...As Record says of this period, "The Communists were willing to kill any organization that could not be steered along the new and rigidly defined line...
...When Hitler attacked Russia in June 1941, once more the line changed and aiding Russia and winning the war transcended all other issues...
...and though this loyalty is often undeserved, it has been peculiarly consistent...
Vol. 15 • August 1951 • No. 8
