The Early Communist Party and the Fight for Black Liberation

(Quote of the Week)

In the face of the traditional indifference to black oppression among American socialists, the Bolsheviks struggled to convince Communists in the U.S. to recognize the special oppression of black people as a matter of strategic importance. In 1920, at the Second Congress of the Communist International held in Soviet Russia, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin personally urged that American Communist John Reed speak on the “Negro Question.” Reed’s speech and the Communist International’s fight against special oppression are carried forward in the Spartacist League program.

If we consider Negroes an enslaved and oppressed people, we confront two problems: on the one hand, that of a strong racial and social movement; on the other, that of a powerful proletarian labor movement that is rapidly gaining class consciousness. Negroes have no demands for national independence. All movements among the Negroes aiming for separate national existence fail, as did the Back to Africa movement of a few years ago. They consider themselves first of all Americans at home in the United States. That makes it very much simpler for Communists.

For American Communists the only correct policy toward the Negroes should be to see them primarily as workers. Despite the Negroes’ backwardness, the tasks posed for agricultural workers and tenant farmers in the South are the same as those we must solve with respect to the white agricultural proletariat. Communist propaganda work can be carried on among Negroes working in industry in the North. In both sections of the country every effort must be made to organize Negroes into common labor unions with the whites. That is the best and fastest way to break down race prejudice and foster class solidarity.

But the Communists must not stand aloof from the Negro movement for social and political equality, which is spreading quickly among the Negro masses today as race consciousness grows rapidly. Communists must use this movement to point out the futility of bourgeois equality and the necessity of social revolution—not only to free all workers from servitude but also as the only means of freeing the Negroes as an enslaved people.

—John Reed at Second Congress of the Communist International, Session 4, 26 July 1920, reprinted in John Riddell (ed.), Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Volume One (1991)