Harry Haywood | |
|---|---|
 Haywoodc. 1937 | |
| Born | Haywood Hall Jr. (1898-02-04)February 4, 1898 South Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. |
| Died | January 4, 1985(1985-01-04) (aged 86) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Resting place | Arlington,Virginia, U.S. |
| Education | Eastern University Lenin School |
| Occupation | Political activist |
| Political party | Communist Party USA |
| Spouse(s) | |
| Children | 2 |
| Military career | |
| Allegiance |  United States Spanish RepublicUnited States |
| Branch |  United States Army International Brigades United States Merchant Marine |
| Years of service | 1917–1919 1937 1943–1945 |
| Rank | Corporal RegimentalCommissar |
| Unit | 8th Regiment The "Abraham Lincoln" XV International Brigade |
| Battles / wars | |
Harry Haywood (February 4, 1898 – January 4, 1985) was an American political activist and a leading figure in theCommunist Party of the United States (CPUSA). He was principally known for his efforts "to bring the political philosophy of the Party in line with issues of race."[1]
In 1926, he joined with other African-American communists and traveled to theSoviet Union as a student. While there he became aCommunist International (Comintern) delegate. He stayed four years and studied theMarxist-Leninist theory of the "national question" regarding how to unify ethnic nationalities within a country's dominant culture. Haywood's work in the USSR resulted in his being selected to head the CPUSA's "Negro Department". In the 1930s he organized a movement to defend theScottsboro boys inAlabama. He made theoretical contributions to the African-American national question. He argued that blacks represented an oppressed nation inside the U.S. and had the right toself-determination. His doctrine was known as the Black Belt thesis, i.e., blacks should be able to form their ownnation-state in theBlack Belt South.[2] In the 1950s as the CPUSA platform moved away from black nationalism and separatism and towards integration, Haywood lost standing in the Party until he was expelled in 1959.[3]
Haywood fought in three wars:World War I, theSpanish Civil War, andWorld War II. He authored several books and pamphlets, includingNegro Liberation in 1948, and "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question" in 1957. After his expulsion from the CPUSA, he remained a left-wing activist. In the 1960s, he became involved in theMaoistNew Communist movement. In 1978, his autobiographyBlack Bolshevik was published.
Harry Haywood was born Haywood Hall Jr., on February 4, 1898, inSouth Omaha, Nebraska, to former slaves Harriet and Haywood Hall, from Missouri and West Tennessee, respectively.[4] They had migrated to Omaha because of jobs with the railroads and meatpacking industry, as did numerous otherSouthern blacks. South Omaha also attracted white immigrants, and ethnic Irish had established an early neighborhood there. Haywood was the youngest of three sons.[5]
In 1913 after Haywood Hall Sr. was attacked by whites, the Hall family moved toMinneapolis, Minnesota. Two years later in 1915 they moved toChicago. The younger Hall's education was limited. He never went beyond the eighth grade and had to self-educate afterward.[6] At age sixteen, he began working as a dining car waiter on theChicago and North Western Railway line.[6]
DuringWorld War I, he served with theEighth Regiment, a black U.S. regiment.[7] Upon his return to Chicago, he was radicalized by the bitterRed Summer of 1919, especially theChicago race riot, in which mostly ethnic Irish attacked blacks on theSouth Side.[8] Hall was influenced by his older brother Otto, who joined the Communist Party in 1921 and invited him to enter the secretAfrican Blood Brotherhood.[5] Hall was also affected by his reading ofVladimir Lenin'sState and Revolution. He later wrote in his autobiography that "this work was the single most important book I had read in the entire three years of my political search and was decisive in leading me to the Communist Party."[9]
Hall's military career included service in three wars. His interest in military combat began when his friends told tales of heroic feats by the Eighth Illinois, a Black National Guard Regiment.[10] In WWI, he saw action in theSoissons sector of France in the summer of 1918.[11][12] In theSpanish Civil War, he fought for thePopular Front with theAbraham Lincoln Battalion of theInternational Brigades. He held the position of Regimental Commissar in theXV International Brigade during theBattle of Brunete.[5] While in Spain he,Langston Hughes andWalter Benjamin Garland broadcast from Madrid in support of the Republican cause.[13] DuringWorld War II, Haywood was involved with theNational Maritime Union inSan Pedro, California. This led to his enlisting in 1943 in theU.S. Merchant Marines.[14]
Hall began his revolutionary career by joining theAfrican Blood Brotherhood in 1922, followed by theYoung Communist League in 1923.[15] Two years later he joined theCommunist Party, USA (CPUSA), recruited byRobert Minor.[16] Soon thereafter, Hall was sent toMoscow to "train as a revolutionary".[17] At the time, he and his CPUSA friends believed they were targets ofFBI scrutiny. When he applied for a passport, he chose to use an alias, "Harry Haywood". He said it was derived from his mother's first name (Harriet) and father's first name (Haywood), and that it would "stick with me the rest of my life."[18]
In Moscow, Haywood studied first at theCommunist University of the Toilers of the East in 1926, then at theInternational Lenin School in 1927. The anticolonial revolutionaries he met while in Moscow included Vietnamese leaderHo Chi Minh.[12] He began to advocate for the concerns of African-Americans, arguing that they were captives in the U.S. and "must embrace nationalism in order to avoid the harmful effects of integration."[3] He stayed in the USSR until 1930 as a delegate to the Communist International (Comintern).
Haywood wasGeneral Secretary of theLeague of Struggle for Negro Rights, but was active in issues affecting working-class whites as well. In the early 1930s, while head of the CPUSA Negro Department, he led the movement to support theScottsboro Boys, organized miners in West Virginia with the National Miners Union, and was a leader in the struggles of the militantSharecroppers' Union in theDeep South. In 1935 he led the "Hands offEthiopia" campaign inChicago'sBlack South Side to oppose Italy'sinvasion of Ethiopia. In the1936 House of Representatives elections, he was the CPUSA's candidate for the First Congressional District (encompassing the South Side of Chicago), but garnered only 899 votes.[19]
Haywood served on the CPUSA'sCentral Committee from 1929 to 1938, and on itsPolitburo from 1931 to 1938. He was engaged in the Party's internal factional struggles againstJay Lovestone andEarl Browder, regularly siding withWilliam Z. Foster.[20] In 1949, when eleven Communist leaders were tried under theSmith Act, Haywood was assigned the task of performing research for their defense.
During his four-year stay in theSoviet Union (1926–1930), Haywood traveled extensively in theCrimea, theCaucasus, and otherautonomous republics.[21] He got married in the USSR and became proficient in theRussian language.[22] He participated in the struggles against both theLeft Opposition headed byLeon Trotsky and theRight Opposition led byNikolai Bukharin. In these struggles and in others, Haywood was on the side ofJoseph Stalin.[23] While working as a Comintern delegate, Haywood served on commissions drafting the "Native Republic Thesis" for theSouth African Communist Party, as well as addressing the plight of Negroes in the U.S. He helped craft the "Comintern Resolutions on the Negro Question" of 1928 and 1930, which stated that African Americans in theSouth made up an oppressed nation, and therefore had the right toself-determination up to and includingsecession.[24] He would continue to fight for this position throughout his life.
He believed that a distinct African-American nation had developed, which met the criteria laid out by Stalin in hisMarxism and the National Question: a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture.[25] Because blacks in the South constituted such a nation, Haywood said the correct response was a demand for self-determination, including the right to separate from the U.S. and form an independent nation. But he disagreed withMarcus Garvey's "Back to Africa" separatist approach.[26] Instead, Haywood argued that blacks deserved full equality in their own "national territory", which historically was the South.[25] He stated that only with genuine political power—which in a Marxist sense included control of the land and otherproductive forces—could African Americans obtain genuine equality, which was a prerequisite for broaderworking-class unity.[27]
Most CPUSA members who disagreed with Haywood considered the question of African-American oppression a matter ofracial prejudice with moral roots, rather than an economic and political question of national oppression. They saw it as a problem to be solved underSocialism and in no need of special attention until after the institution of the revolutionary "dictatorship of the proletariat". They criticized Haywood for falling "into the bourgeois liberal trap of regarding the fight for equality as primarily a fight against racial prejudices of whites."[28] To this charge, he countered that the category of "race" is a mystification. He believed that relying on race and ignoring economic questions could only alienate African Americans and inhibit working-class unity.[29]
Following theGreat Migration of millions of blacks to the U.S. Northeast, Midwest, and West, accompanied by theirurbanization, critics attempted to usestatistics to counter the Black Belt thesis and show that there no longer was a black nation centered in the South. In his 1957 article, "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question", Haywood responded that the question of an oppressed nation in the South was not "mere nose counting".[30]
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Haywood's 1948 bookNegro Liberation was described at the time as "the first comprehensive volume on the Negro question in the United States by a leading Negro Marxist".[31] He argued that the root of the oppression of blacks was the unsolved agrarian question in theSouth. He believed that the unfinished bourgeois democratic revolution ofReconstruction had been betrayed in theHayes-TildenCompromise of 1877.[32] It abandoned African Americans toplantations astenant farmers andsharecroppers, faced with theRedeemer governments, the system ofJim Crow laws, and the terror of theKu Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups. According to Haywood, the rise ofimperialism leftblacks frozen as "landless, semi-slaves in the South."[32] According to Haywood's autobiography,Paul Robeson subsidized his work on the book by offering $100 a month.Negro Liberation was translated and published in Russian, Polish, German, Czech and Hungarian.[33] It was reissued in 1976 by Liberator Press, the publishing arm of theOctober League. Haywood argued that:
the position of the book was not new, but a reaffirmation of the revolutionary position developed at the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928. The heart of this position is that the problem is fundamentally a question of an oppressed nation with full rights of self-determination. It emphasized the revolutionary essence of the struggle for Black equality arising from the fact that the special oppression of Blacks is a main prop of the system of imperialist domination over the entire working class and the masses of exploited American people. Therefore the struggle for Black liberation is a component part of the struggle forproletarian revolution. It is the historic task of the working-class movement, as it advances on the road to socialism, to solve the problem of land and freedom of the Black masses.[33]
Haywood added that "What was new in the book was the thorough analysis of the concrete conditions of Black people in the post-war period. I made extensive use of population data; the 1940 census, the 1947 Plantation Count and other sources, in order to show that the present day conditions affirmed the essential correctness of the position we had formulated years before." Because of this and other works,Robert F. Williams called Haywood "one of the modern pioneers in the Black liberation struggle."[34]
Following the death of Stalin in 1953 andNikita Khrushchev's rise to power, the CPUSA embraced Khrushchev's policy ofdestalinization and "peaceful coexistence". Long an admirer ofMao Zedong, Haywood was an early champion of theanti-revisionist movement born out of the growingSino-Soviet split. He was driven out of the CPUSA in the late 1950s along with many others who took firm anti-revisionist or pro-Stalin positions.[35]
The CPUSA's decision to change its position on the African-American national question was also a key factor in Haywood's expulsion. Though the CPUSA had not been as active in the South since the dissolution of the Sharecroppers Union, in 1959 the Party officially dropped its demand for self-determination in the South for African Americans. (The demand had been briefly abandoned in 1944 when Earl Browder liquidated the Party.)[36] The CPUSA instead held that as Americancapitalism developed, so too would Black-White unity.
In 1957, Haywood wrote the polemic, "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question", but he was unsuccessful at altering the Party's direction. By 1959, although no longer a functioning Party member, he attempted to intervene one last time. He wrote "On the Negro Question", which was distributed at the Seventeenth National Convention by and in the name of African Blood Brotherhood founderCyril Briggs. Haywood's effort was not effective, however, as most of his potential allies had already been expelled from the CPUSA as part of its purge of"left"-sectarianism anddogmatism.[37]
In Haywood's view, "whitechauvinism" in the Party, rather than an accurate analysis of the economic issues, had caused the Party's change in position regarding African-American self-determination. He argued that the change prevented the CPUSA from giving appropriate leadership as theCivil Rights Movement developed. He believed the Party was lagging behind the actions of Dr.Martin Luther King Jr. and theNAACP. The Party would become even more alienated from the militantBlack Power Movement that was to follow.[38]
Haywood and his wifeGwendolyn Midlo Hall were among the founders of the Provisional Organizing Committee for a Communist Party (POC), formed inNew York City in August 1958 by 83 mostly Black andPuerto Rican and white trade unionists, mainly coal miners fromWilliamsport, Pennsylvania and maritime workers.[39] Its membership includedTheodore W. Allen, best known later for his "White skin privilege" theory. According to Haywood, the POC rapidly degenerated into an isolated, dogmatic, ultraleft sect, completely removed from any political practice.[40] Nevertheless, the POC did release many highly trained organizers from the dead hand of the CPUSA as the civil rights and the black power movement began to hit the streets. In 1964, Haywood worked in Harlem withJesse Gray, leader of the Harlem Rent Strike and Tenants' Union later elected to the New York State Legislature from Harlem. Haywood worked with Malcolm X in 1964 until his assassination in 1965, and with James Haughton and Josh Lawrence in Harlem Fight-Back, then in Oakland, California, in 1966, then in Detroit, Michigan, with theDetroit Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and theLeague of Revolutionary Black Workers.[41] Next, Haywood left for Mexico for a short time before returning permanently to the U.S. in 1970. He had been invited byVincent Harding, Director of the Institute for the Black World inAtlanta, Georgia.
In 1964, Haywood began his involvement with the New Communist Movement. Its goal was to found avanguard Communist Party on an anti-revisionist basis, believing the CPUSA to have deviated irrevocably fromMarxism-Leninism.[42] He later worked in one of the newly formedMaoist groups of the New Communist Movement, the October League, which became theCommunist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CPML).[43] Haywood served on its Central Committee.
In 1978, he published hisautobiography,Black Bolshevik, although some of his important writings and political life during the 1960s were edited out. For example, the manuscript he had written in acknowledged collaboration with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, and dedicated toRobert F. Williams, was not mentioned. This work, which circulated in mimeographed form from early 1964 throughout California and in the Deep South, influenced the armed self-defense movement against theKu Klux Klan during 1964 and 1965, and projected a slogan widely picked up throughout the South that leftists must pose their own challenge to order and stability to counter the challenge posed by the "massive resistance" of Southern politicians and racist terrorists.[citation needed]Black Bolshevik became an important book cited by scholars and read by the wider public. Through it and his other writings, Haywood providedideological leadership far beyond the New Communist Movement. His theoretical contributions had an impact on the warring factions of the left, including theLeague of Revolutionary Struggle (Marxist-Leninist), the earlyRevolutionary Communist Party, theRevolutionary Workers Headquarters and theCommunist Workers Party. Nonetheless, lack of experience,sectarianism, andvoluntarism were a major factor in keeping the young Maoist groups from taking a leadership role. In his last published article, Haywood wrote that the New Communist Movement spent too much time and energy seeking the "franchise" of governments and parties outside the U.S. without validating itself among the people of its own country.[citation needed]
Haywood's theoretical innovations have been influential in many areas includinghistorical materialism,[44] geography,[45] Marxist education,[46] and social movement theory.[47] His contributions to questions of African-American national oppression andnational liberation were highly valued by (1) the Ray O. Light Group,[48] which developed out of an anti-revisionist split from the CPUSA in 1961, (2) theFreedom Road Socialist Organization, which was formed from the mergers of several New Communist Movement groups in the 1980s, (3) theMaoist Internationalist Movement, and (4) other black revolutionaries and activists. His role in 1960s–1980s black protest movements can be studied in the Harry Haywood Papers at the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Division of theSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, and in the Harry Haywood Collection at theUniversity of Michigan'sBentley Historical Library.[43]
Haywood was married four times, first in 1920 to a Chicago woman named Hazel, but they soon separated.[49] In December 1926 in the USSR, he met Ekaterina (known as "Ina"), a ballet student and English interpreter. They married the following year, but the marriage did not last beyond his stay in the country,[50] as he was unable to obtain anexit visa for her to return with him to the U.S.[51] In Los Angeles in 1940, while recovering from a heart attack he had suffered the previous year, Haywood reconnected with Belle Lewis, whom he had worked with during aNational Miners Union strike inKentucky in 1931.[52] They married in 1940 and divorced in 1955.[5]
In 1956, he marriedGwendolyn Midlo, a Jewish Civil Rights activist fromNew Orleans,Louisiana. She later became a prominent historian of slavery in the U.S. and Latin America, and of the African diaspora. They had two children together, Haywood Hall (b. 1956) and Rebecca Hall (b. 1963). Between 1953 and 1964, Haywood and Midlo Hall collaborated on multiple articles, including some published inSoulbook, aBerkeley-based magazine.[53] In 1959, shortly before his expulsion from the Communist Party, Haywood and his family moved toMexico City where they stayed through the 1960s.[54] After late 1964, Haywood and Midlo Hall were mostly living apart, although they remained married until his death. She did not follow him into the New Communist Movement.
Haywood had a service-related disability and spent the last year of his life at aVeterans Administration medical facility. He died on January 4, 1985 of cardiac arrest, after a prolonged battle against a severe form of asthma.[35] He was buried inArlington National Cemetery inArlington, Virginia. (Columbarium Court 1, Section LL, Column 7, 2nd Row from bottom. Interred under birth name "Haywood Hall.")
The Harry Haywood papers are housed at theBentley Historical Library,University of Michigan, and at the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Division of theSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.
InRichard Wright's autobiographical novelBlack Boy (American Hunger), the rigid CPUSA leader Buddy Nealson is said to represent Haywood;[55] it is an unflattering portrayal that was a source of conflict between Haywood and Wright.[24]
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