EARLY BLACK COMMUNISTS EXPERIENCES AND THE FAILED PROMISE

OF THE PARTY
By Khary Pestaina, NEH Seminar Communism in American Life, 2016

It should be informative to all that W.E.B Dubois ended his life in Ghana as a
full-fledged member of the Communist Party. Combatting a career which more often
than not, saw him speak, write and debate against the red, revolutionary party of
the Far East, one of the twentieth centuries most important thinkers and historians
last move may have provided a sublime, yet instructive lesson for the future. The
problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, warned Dubois in
Souls of Black Folk back in 1903i. Far from aligning himself with new and developing
Communist Party, perhaps the most powerful contemporary political movement of
his lifetime, Dubois statement along with his bourgeois Talented Tenthii theory and
ownership of the for-profit Black Swan Recordsiii branded him a reactionary leader to
some communists. And such was the stigma he carried for most of his early and
middle years lifetime and career to those on the far communist left.
Ironically, many of those who may have branded Dubois while they were fullfledged Communists in the first half of the 1900s were either kicked out, sent to the
Gulags or had abandoned the party by the fifties. So what did Dubois know or come
to understand that so many other black reds had come to reject?
"No universal selfishness can bring social good to all," Dubois said.
"Communism -- the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the
best they can contribute -- this is the only way of human life, explained Dubois in
the November 23rd, 1961 edition of the New York Timesiv. Later in that decade the
Black Panthers would recognize the same and attempt to align their structure and
practice with a contemporary version of communist methodology. Eldridge Cleaver,
the BPPs Minister of Information explained, when we say we are Marxist-Leninists
we mean that we have studied and understood the classical principle of socialism
and that we have adapted these principles to our own situation to ourselves. v
Dubois announcement paralleled with the independence of several new Third
World nations searching for structure and form. As the leftist theorist and educator
Keith O Baird wrote, Third World countries emerging from European domination
find that Marxist ideas have a compatibility and consonance with their aspirations to
full and genuine national independence and self-determination. vi For years Dubois
might have described himself as a socialist, abandoning the party designation in
support of Democrat Woodrow Wilson for President, but now at the age of 93 had
designated himself a communist. African countries like Ghana, where he would live
his last days, were among the new Third World nations who from a Marxist
perspective, correctly see themselves not as backward but as developing
societies, and can identify European capitalist rapacity as the primary cause of their
depressed socioeconomic condition.vii Dubois in his final years, could see a
potential for a new, independent from the USSR, form of communism emerging in
the Third World.

Dubois was certainly well known for his leftist politics and theories all over
the world, but even more intimately among black intelligentsia who he planned,
debated and commiserated within segregated Harlem and in other Black hearths
across the nation. Perhaps one of the most influential yet little know black leftists
was a New Yorker from the Virgin Islands called the Black Socrates, Hubert H.
Harrison. Harrison severely criticized Dubois for his decision to forget our special
grievances and close our ranks in support of the countrys mobilization for World
War 1. It is felt by all his critics that Du Bois, of all Negroes, knows best that our
"special grievances", which the War Department Bulletin describes as justifiable,
consists of lynching, segregation and disfranchisement, wrote Harrison in the July
25th, 1918 edition of The Voice, the earliest Harlem renaissance era black periodical.
Negroes of America cannot preserve either their lives, their manhood or their vote
(which is their political lives and liberties) with these things in existence argued
Harrisonviii.
Harrison had been the most forceful and influential black member of the New
York chapter of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) and the Socialist Party
of America(SPA). According to many, he was a tremendous and brilliant speaker.
The ten million Negroes of America form a group that is more essentially
proletarian than any other group, wrote Harrison in one of his few books The Negro
and the Nation. Since the Negro is the most ruthlessly exploited working class
group in America, the duty of the party to champion his cause is as clear as day. ix
By 1917, Harrison had been removed from his position in both the Wobblies and SPA
and had now begun to propagate a Race First doctrine that would soon attract the
lion of black nationalism- Marcus Garvey. Despite his description of Americas
essential proletariat, Harrison died at 44, a relatively young age, and could never be
counted among the early black radicals to venture into Communism.
One of his disciples, the Barbadian Richard B. Moore did. Often straddling the
fence between Black Nationalism and straight socialism, a tactic developed over
pints of alcohol and sincere debate at Harlems Educational Forum, also known as
the Peoples Educational Forum, the fatherless, motherless and perpetually angry
Moore became a controversial leader within the CPUSA. x He is best known for
leading and guiding the mothers of the famously ill-fated Scottsboro Boys and
constantly battling within the leadership ranks over practice and policy within the
Communist party.
Similar to Harrison, Moore questioned Dubois position on WW1. When Dubois
recommended that Afro-Americans should not align themselves with either
capitalists or labor but should stand in the middle of the road, Moore responded by
insisting that when two trains were approaching each other on the same track, to
instruct the people to get in the middle was to tell them to commit suicide. xi While
Dubois would not become a communist for another 45 years, Moores acerbic yet
witty response to Dubois mirrored the types of caustic and biting analyses Moore
would engage with other party members inside and outside the United States.
Richard B. Moore was always among the more cautious recruits into the
Communist party in the 1920s. While aware of all the difficulties experienced by his

mentor in getting white leftists to realize the essentiality of Negro Work, his
journey into the party was predicated on its ability to satisfy that demand. To Moore,
so long as racist oppression persists, so long will the more militant Afro-Americans
turn to radical parties seeking a solution to the oppressive conditions to which they
are subjected and so our idea was to go over these radical movements to find out
just what their position was in respect to Afro-American people. Finding a political
base concerned with the problems of Afro-Americans was the priority. Moore was
impressed with the success of the Russian Revolution but disillusioned by the failure
of the American Socialists, some of whom were now leaders of the Communist
movement, to come to grips with the Negro Problem. xii
The successful Bolshevik Revolution simultaneously propelled both the new
Russia-dominated Soviet Union into world leadership and opened the door to black
radicalism and militancy on the international forefront. The Communist Manifesto
advised Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The hour of triumph of proletarian
dictatorship of Europe will also be the hour of your triumph. In addition and at the
second Comintern Congress, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, had authored a
Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question, an expansion and
extension of Marxist ideology into something new. In it were two novel ideas, first to
render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and
underprivileged nations and in the colonies and another which ordered them to
assist the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement [in] backward states and
nations.xiii
Otto Huiswoud and Claude McKay were two African American delegates of
Caribbean heritage sent to the fourth Comintern in 1922. Huiswoud, of Dutch
Suriname, is considered the first black communist in the history of the newly formed
party. Previously he, along with Hubert Harrison, had been members of the Socialist
Party of America but upon the split in 1919, had become the inaugural black
member in the newly formed American Communist Party. Few images and even less
information persist about Huiswouds influence, however he, along with Richard B.
Moore, Cyrill Briggs and few others, would make-up the vanguard of blacks who
officially joined the Communist Party. World Aspects of the Negro Question, one of
the few identifiable documents written by Huiswoud, is a powerful testament to the
apt and introspective mind of one of the least visible yet influential black
communists. In it, Huiswoud decries the historic absence of concrete Marxist work
by leftist political formations while simultaneously calling for a more nuanced
approach, distinguishing the need for work in the United States among the Negro
masses to different situations and approaches to be employed on the African
continent and in the West Indies. The three distinct regions require concrete
application of the policies and tasks of the Communist parties [but] are dependent
upon the prevailing conditions in the various countries. xiv
Claude McKay, the most well-known of the two African Americans sent to
Moscow, had already made a name for himself in the bourgeoning Harlem
Renaissance as a skilled poet. His thrilling If We Must Die, written in response to Red
Summer of 1919, had become the clarion call of black militancy and resistance
against Klan terror and racial antagonism. At the 4 th Comintern, McKay made his

presence known, producing a detailed Report on the American Negro Problem. He

expertly and eloquently described the black condition in categories like state of
mind, radicalism, unions, distribution, fraternities, churches, press, economic
status, educational achievement and racial aspirations. In addition, his report
proposed a detailed budget for the work that was to be done while identifying the
African Blood Brotherhood, an indigenous, leftist, militant, and previously secret
organization that had gone public to fight the Ku Klux Klan, as the key conduit for
communist work in the United Statesxv. Additionally, McKays influence went beyond
that solitary contribution. In a letter to the General Secretary of the Comintern Vasil
Kolarov, McKay made further recommendations about the importance of selecting
the most capable individuals to lead soviet work within the black communities of
the USA.xvi
Perhaps one of the most surprising parts of McKays letter to Kolarov was his
vote of no confidence towards Cyril Briggs. Cyril Briggs, like Moore, McKay and
Huiswoud, was a West Indian immigrant member of the African Blood Brotherhood
(ABB), and as such had already prepossessed a distinguished socialist world
critique. In the Crusader, a monthly magazine that served as the public organ of the
previously shadowy ABB, Briggs, who published and edited it, had written favorably
of the Bolshevik Revolution as early as 1919. Bolshevist is an epithet that presentday reactionaries delight to fling around loosely against those who insist on thinking
for themselves and on agitating for themselvesIf to fight for ones rights is to be
Bolshevists, then we are Bolshevists, and let them make the most of it wrote Briggs
in an October 1919 edition of the Crusader.xvii Furthermore, Briggs sat atop the
leadership, along with Moore, on the Supreme Council of the ABB. McKay may not
have known but Briggs had already interpreted and written favorably on the future
Soviet position on the Negro Question, whose self-determination clause called for all
communists to support the quest for a separate, Black-Belt located nation within the
current geographical boundaries of the existing United States.
It wasnt until 1928 that former World War 1 Veteran & ABB member Harry
Haywood would write that It was the result of the unfinished bourgeois democratic
revolution of the Civil War and the betrayal of Reconstruction and that under the
conditions of imperialist and racist oppression, Blacks in the South were to acquire
all the attributes of a subject nation. Haywood wrote that African Americans in the
south are a people set apart by a common ethnic origin, economically interrelated
in various classes, united by a common historical experience, reflected in a special
culture and psychological makeup, and thus made up a distinct nation within the
United States.xviii The issue of self-determination would now become an official,
indelible part of the communist partys work relative to the Negro Question.
Haywood and his brother Otto Hall had become some of the earliest African
Americans to attend communist, Soviet universities, beginning a trend that would
separate the mode and operation of blacks within the party. Unlike the previous
cadre of early black communists, Haywood and Hall were born in the United States,
yet attended Moscows University of the Toilers of the East (KUTVA).
Another former ABB member of US birth had been Lovett Fort Whiteman. Like
Haywood and Hall, Whiteman was among the first African Americans to travel to

Moscow to study communism in 1924. Upon his return to the United States,
Whiteman had been appointed leader of the first soviet funded American vehicle to
address the Negro Question, the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), in 1925.
Based out of Chicago, unlike many of the other early black communists who
emerged from Harlem, NYC, the reportedly flamboyant and flashily dressed
Whiteman was deemed controversial and ineffective as a leader and recruiter in the
United States. By 1928, with Josef Stalin now firmly in control of the Soviet party
machine, Whiteman was recruited back to Moscow where he soon ran afoul of the
local leadership. He was sent to a Siberian gulag where he died at the age of 44, his
hands severed and preserved for later identification. xix
Like with Whiteman, many early black communists consistently found
themselves at odds with their European and white counterparts. Chauvinism or
casual racism was often blamed as the culprit but equally as culpable were shifting,
developing policies within the Soviet Union that required strict party adherence and
discipline. For the first bloc of black communists this proved a consistent irritant and
in the case of Whiteman, a death sentence. The band of early black communists,
particularly those associated with the ABB had entered the party with an
independent, defined ideology and orthodoxy, and during the first years, it
appeared that Lenins Bolshevism was open and warm to ideas and information
from the incipient class. With the death of Lenin, removal of Trotsky and ultimate
takeover of the party by Stalin, new party requirements of action and behavior
worked to stress and constrain the activities and associations that some of the early
black communists had already grown comfortable with.
All communists were asked to advance the soviet directed United Front by
the late twenties. This policy required all communists to advance Negro work and
bolster their rosters by appealing to all working class blacks. The League for the
Struggle of Negro Rights (LSNR) would eventually be created in 1930, replacing the
ANLC, with Langston Hughes as honorary president and Richard B. Moore as
General Secretary to accomplish this work. Developments within Europe and the
Americas, failure of the League of Nations and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis forced
policy changes that would rankle and confuse many of the partys African American
members. In addition the Scottsboro Case emerged in the heart of the Black Belt in
Alabama, pressing communists to show their full, earnest commitment to the ideals
that had been espoused.
A surviving petition from the LSNR addressed to U.S. President and Congress
warns, the rise of fascism teaches us all too wellHitler first outlawed the
Communist Party. Then under the false guise of fighting communism, he destroyed
the trade union movement and all other democratic associations of the German
people. There followed the brutal persecution and annihilation of the whole Jewish
people.xx The LSNR was supposed to be the model American unit for advancing the
communist agenda in the United States. Despite the fact their work was meant to
be colorless, it was agreed that advancing the Negro Question would still be a main
feature of the revised work. Within the new organization old ABB originals like Gen.
Secretary Richard B. Moore, Cyril Briggs and others would work closely with the
new, next generation of black communist leaders, most of whom had studied in

Moscow and were therefore more disciplined and attuned to following the party line.
Among this group William Patterson, James Ford and Benjamin Davis would emerge
and become leaders of future communist iterations like the National Negro Congress
(NNC).
As the thirties advanced, the new wave or second generation of black
communists took leadership. James Ford had risen in prominence and in the 1935
released two key directives that signaled a major shift in communist practice within
the U.S. The first- Development of Work within the Harlem Section, placed new
faces, disproportionately white in leadership of the Harlem organization which had
been the headquarters and most influential bastion of black communism. xxi The
second- The United Front in the Field of Negro Work, called for an expansion of the
LSNRs work, transferring key roles to the International Labor Defense organization
which headed the Scottsboro Boys legal defense. xxii Ford installed a group of
inexperienced white Communists as administrators and focused upon waging a
campaign against nationalist tendencies rather than white chauvinism, wrote
Richard B. Moore.xxiii As the thirties progressed, Moores activities and associations
with non-communists in local Harlem churches and on his support of the bourgeois
Dont Buy Where You Cant Work campaign led by future senator Adam Clayton
Powell Jr. signaled a serious reduction in the responsibilities and leadership roles
within the party for Moore.
Like Moore, Cyril Briggss independent streak ran him afoul of the new party
leaders. By the late thirties both he and Moore would be expelled from the American
Communist Party on the grounds that they were too closely aligned with Black
Nationalism. Briggs rejoined the party in 1948 after the expulsion of Earl Browder,
and remained a communist until his death in 1966. Otto Huiswoud remained a loyal
communist his entire life. During the thirties he helped establish the International
Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) in Europe.
In the end, strict doctrinarism demanded by Stalin throughout the Soviet
Unions formative years proved to be too restrictive a covenant for most of the
earliest black communists. For them, advancing equality and respect for African
American peoples remained their main objective. As Stalins Soviet empire pivoted
back and forth, first entering into a pact with Nazi, Germany then warming up to the
United States as a World War II ally before becoming a Cold War arch-nemesis, the
forever changing nature of being on the right or wrong side of Stalinism proved too
much for most. With Stalins death and the transfer of leadership to Nikolai
Kruschev and his de-Stalinization of the Soviet government, the second generation
of black communist leaders found life and purpose, even as the numbers of
American communists declined overall. Black communist leaders like James Ford,
William Patterson, Paul Robeson, Benjamin Davis, Henry Winston, Frank Marshall
Davis and others all afforded themselves key leadership roles within the party
matrix until the ends of their lives.
Critical political theorist Cedric J. Robinson wrote that all black radicals pass
through the prepossessing claims of bourgeois ideology for Western cultural
superiority with their only modestly disguised racialism But eventually emerge

convinced that a larger and different achievement was required. xxiv Such appeared
the case for Dubois whose life came to end at 93 years of age, a sworn communist.
Perhaps in the end he had come to realize what second generation of black
communists had come to understand- Communism may not have been the best, or
a perfect ideology but offered some key advantages and more correlative ideals
when compared to the history of race, violence and betrayal in the United States.
The first generation of black communists knew that. Hesitantly, and with their own
agenda items to be satisfied, they entered or strayed at the periphery of communist
membership. The World War II alliance between the United States and the United
Soviet state proved too much to take. The second generation, equipped with Soviet
education sponsored in Russia, were more able to adapt the changing policies into
everyday successes within the party.
Langston Hughes, one of the most iconoclastic personalities of the early to
mid-twentieth century may have been associated with the Communist Party.
Traveling to the Soviet Union during the thirties and drafted to participate in the illfated Black and White, a Soviet sponsored film during the Depression, Hughes had
served as the honorary President of the Communist Partys first official organization
to deal fully on the issue of representing and advocating for African Americans in
the United States- League of Struggle for Negro Rights. Hughes, like many Harlem
intellectuals and radical African Americans eager for revolutionary change, could be
found reporting against the battle over Fascism in Spain and on the roster of several
communist associated periodicals of the time, yet Hughes never officially became
one. I have never been a communist, but I soon learned that anyone visiting the
Soviet Union and speaking with favor of it upon returning is liable to be so labeled,
wrote Hughes in the December 1947 edition of the monthly Phylon. xxv
Describing the sanction and difficulty of being associated with the Communist
party during the 20th century, Hughes explained his motivation for remaining so
closely aligned with the Russian dominated ideology. I am sure none of these
things would ever have happened to me had I limited the subject matter of my
poems to roses and moonlight. But, unfortunately, I was born poor and colored and
almost all the prettiest roses Ive seen have been in rich white peoples yards, not
mine. Having already achieved the height of his fame and acclaim during previous
decades, a sanguine and reflective Hughes poetically described why so many
African Americans, like him, either became communists or remained more loosely
aligned with the revolutionary political and economic ideology that Jim Crow
America seemed so threatened by. The attraction seemed almost mutual. In the
USSR and its versions of Marxist socialism lay a powerful potential ally and suitor for
African Americas long standing need of support.
Betrayed by the failure of Reconstruction, the refusal for the American
Congress to pass an anti-lynching bill, the advent of Sun-down towns, restrictive
covenants, red-lining and open, invective contempt, African America looked to be
fertile soil for the implementation of communism in America. That is why I cannot
write exclusively about roses and moonlight sometimes in the moonlight my
brothers see a fiery cross and a circle of Klansmens hoods. Sometimes in the
moonlight a dark body swings from a lynching tree, but for his funeral there are no

roses. Hughes and others looked for solutions to their inescapable social and
political morass.
Communism was an option that ultimately failed to realize the tremendous
potential and promise for a natural alliance. Changing Soviet policies, the World
War II alliance with colonial Britain, France and White Mans Burden inheritor- the
United States of America, and perhaps the consistent threat of sanction against
black leaders, kept the communist option at the periphery of choice options.
However, as a bulwark, the existence of a consistent, deliberate investment in
creating the alliance created the context for a Cold War image concerned United
States to come to the table and make concessions with some of African Americas
long-standing grievances. The Civil Rights Movement certainly would not have been
as successful in gaining meaningful legislation and executive programs like
Affirmative Action and others had the threat of radical, black communism taking
hold not made itself relevant. How many more Scottsboro trials could the country
take?
J. Edgar Hoovers FBI was certainly concerned with the answer.
Internationally, the State department and the CIAs actions certainly belied an anticommunist practice and purpose that highlighted the importance of African
Americas decision to flirt with and partake in communist politics. The targeting of
the Black Panthers and Angela Davis, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and
the militarization against Maurice Bishops New Jewel Movement in Grenada all
speak to the important legacy of African Americas dalliances with communism,
locally and internationally. And then there was Dubois dying example.

i Summary of Souls of Black Folk, Documenting the American South, University Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2004
http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/duboissouls/summary.html
ii Talented Tenth, http://scua.library.umass.edu/duboisopedia/doku.php?
id=about:talented_tenth
iii Black Swan Records,
http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2010/novemberdecember/feature/black-swan-rising
iv Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois Joins Communist Party at 93, in New York Times, Nov. 23, 1961
found online https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/05/specials/dubois-communist.html
v Cleaver, Eldridge. On the Ideology of the Black Panther (pamphlet), Unknown Publisher,
pg.1, found in the Louise Thompson-Patterson Papers Box 2, Folder 9 at Emory
University, Stuart A. Rose Division of Manuscript, Archive and Rare Books
vi Baird, Keith E. Marxist Perspectives on the Terms of Anthropologic Discourse
Concerning Third World Countriesin State University of New York College at Buffalo,
pg.4, found in the Louise Thompson-Patterson Papers Box 1, Folder 16 at Emory
University, Stuart A. Rose Division of Manuscript, Archive and Rare Books
vii Ibid Baird pg.4
viii Fellow Worker Hubert Harrison on Industrial Workers of the World website
http://www.iww.org/history/biography/HubertHarrison/1
ix Harrison, Hubert H., The Negro and the Nation, (New York: Cosmo-Advocate Publishing
Co., 1917), pg. 21 & 22, republished by Forgotten Books 2012 PIBN 1000480707
x Turner, Joyce M., Radical Politics, in Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem:
Collected Writings, 1920-1972, eds. W. Burghardt Turner and Joyce Moore Turner,
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)
xi Ibid Turner, Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem, pg. 30
xii Ibid Turner, Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem, pg. 50-51
xiii Lenin, Vladimir A. Collected Works, Vol 31:144-151, in Marxists Internet Archive,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm
xiv Huiswould, Otto. World Aspects of the Negro Question in the Communist, 1931, pg.
132, found in the Theodore Draper Papers Box 15, Folder 9 at Emory University,
Stuart A. Rose Division of Manuscript, Archive and Rare Books

xv McKay, Claude. A Report on the American Negro Problem for the Communist
International, November 1922 found on the Online Marxist Archive
http://www.marxists.org/subject/usa/eam/index.html
xvi McKay, Claude. To General Secretary of the ECCI Vasil Kolarov from Claude McKay in
Moscow, Dec. 23, 1922. (A document from the Comintern Archive, f. 515, op. 1, d. 93, l.
92-93.) found on the Online Marxist Archive
http://www.marxists.org/subject/usa/eam/index.html
xvii Briggs, Cyril. Bolshevisms Menace: To Whom and to what?, Crusader (Feb. 1920)
xviii Haywood,, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist.
(Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978), pgs. 229-234
xix Klehr, Harvey, John Earl Haynes and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American
Communism (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998) pages 218-227
xx Petition League of Struggle for Negro Rights, undated, found in the Matt Crawford
Papers Box 9, Folder 18 at Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Division of Manuscript,
Archive and Rare Books
xxi Ford, James & Louis Sass. Development of Work within the Harlem Section,
Communist (April,1935), pgs. 312-325 found in the Theodore Draper Papers Box 15,
Folder 10 at Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Division of Manuscript, Archive and Rare
Books
xxii Ford, James. The United Front in the Field of Negro Work, Communist (Feb.,1935),
pgs. 158-173 found in the Theodore Draper Papers Box 15, Folder 10 at Emory
University, Stuart A. Rose Division of Manuscript, Archive and Rare Books
xxiii Ibid Turner, Radical Politics pg. 63
xxiv Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press , 1983), pg. 187xxv Huhges, Langston. My Adventures as a
Social Poet in Phylon, Third Quarter 1947 Vol. VIII. No.3 found in the Louise ThompsonPatterson Papers Box 1, Folder 16 at Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Division of Manuscript,
Archive and Rare Books

Suggested Reading
Baldwin, Kate A., Beyond the Color Line, (October: Duke University Press Books,
2002)
Ellis, Mark. Race War and Surveillance. Indiana University Press (Bloomington,
2001)
Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. Or Does it Explode?, Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
(Lanham, Maryland 2009)
Jackson, John G. Hubert Henry Harrison: The Black Socrates. American Atheist
Press (Austin, 1987)
James, Winston. Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in
Early Twentieth-Century America. Verson (London, 1998)
Klehr, Harvey, John Earl Haynes and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of
American Communism (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998)
Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from
Harlem to London, 1917-1939. University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill,
2011)
Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem during the Depression. University of Illinois
Press (Chicago, 2002)
Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. W.W. Norton & Company (New
York, 2010)
Patterson, William L. The Man Who Cried Genocide: An Autobiography. (New York:
International Publishers, 1971),
Perry, Jeffrey B. Hubert Harrison: the Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918.
Columbia University Press (New York, 2009)
Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill)

Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity. Communists and African Americans, 19171936. University of Mississippi Press (Jackson, 1998)
Turner, Joyce M. Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance, (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2005)
Turner, Joyce M. & Turner, W.E. Burghardt. Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in
Harlem: Collected Writings, 1920-1972. Indiana University Press (Bloomington,
1992)

xxv