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