Lovett Fort-Whiteman | |
|---|---|
 Fort-Whiteman at the founding of the ANLC, 1925. | |
| Born | December 3, 1889 |
| Died | January 13, 1939(1939-01-13) (aged 49) |
| Occupation(s) | Political activist, Communist International functionary |
Lovett Huey Fort-Whiteman (3 December 1889 – 13 January 1939) was an American political activist and functionary for theCommunist International (Comintern).
The firstAfrican American to attend a Comintern training school in theSoviet Union in 1924, Fort-Whiteman was later named the first national organizer of theAmerican Negro Labor Congress, amass organization (front group) of theCommunist Party USA. Fort-Whiteman was once called "the reddest of the blacks" byTime magazine.
Fort-Whiteman was accused of being aTrotskyist and died of malnutrition while imprisoned in agulag in theSoviet Union.
Lovett Huey Fort-Whiteman was born inDallas,Texas on December 3, 1889. His father, Moses Whiteman, was born intoslavery inSouth Carolina and relocated to Texas at some time prior to 1887, where he worked as a janitor and a small scale cattle rancher.[1] At the age of 35, Moses Whiteman married the 15-year-old Elizabeth Fort.[1] Lovett was the first of the couple's children.[1]
Fort-Whiteman received a better education than was common for many African American children of the era in the Dallas public schools, attending one of the few high schools in the American South in that day open to black attendance.[1] Following graduation from high school, Fort-Whiteman enrolled at theTuskegee Institute inTuskegee, Alabama, probably about 1906, from which he graduated as amachinist.[1]
Following completion of his studies at Tuskegee, Fort-Whiteman gained admission toMeharry Medical College inNashville, Tennessee, with a view to becoming a medical doctor, but he did not complete the course of studies at that institution.[1]
By 1910, his father having died, Fort-Whiteman had moved with his mother and younger sister to theHarlem area ofNew York City, where he worked as a hotel bellman to support the family while harboring dreams of becoming a professional actor.[1]
Soon abandoning his dramatic ambitions, Fort-Whiteman next spent two or three years in theYucatán Peninsula ofMexico, where he worked as an accounting clerk for a rope manufacturer, gaining fluency in theSpanish language and studying the rudiments ofFrench.[1]
Fort-Whiteman was deeply inspired by theMexican Revolution which swept the Yucatán in the spring of 1915, advancing a reform program over the staunch opposition of wealthy landowners and theCatholic church.[2] He became a committed adherent to the idea of radical transformation of society through trade unions,syndicalism, as a member of an organization calledCasa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker, or COM).[2] When the COM attempted to further deepen the nature of the revolution by launching a strike against the new government of Yucatán, it was destroyed in the aftermath.[2]
In 1917, Fort-Whiteman left Yucatán as a sailor bound first forHavana,Cuba before proceeding toHalifax,Nova Scotia, Canada.[2] He disembarked there and made his way to the city ofMontreal, adopting thepseudonym "Harry W. Fort" and discreetly reentering the United States under the guise of a railroad dining car waiter.[2]
Back in New York City, Fort-Whiteman became well acquainted with leading blacksocialistsA. Philip Randolph andChandler Owen, publishers of the magazineThe Messenger.[2] He enrolled for courses at theRand School of Social Science, a socialist school operated by theSocialist Party of America,[2] joining the party himself.[3] While at the Rand School Fort-Whiteman met others who would become prominent in the world radical movement in ensuing years, including Japanese émigréSen Katayama andOtto Huiswoud, a recent transplant fromBritish Guiana.[4]
Picking up the pen as the new "Dramatic Editor" ofThe Messenger in 1918, Fort-Whiteman was among those at the epicenter of theHarlem Renaissance, a multi-sided and dynamic black cultural movement dedicated to artistic and political development of the so-called "New Negro".[4] Fort-Whiteman even tried his hand as a writer, publishing two works of fiction inThe Messenger provocatively dealing with interracial amorous relations.[4]
Another who Fort-Whiteman met in this period wasanarchist cartoonistRobert Minor, another expatriate from Texas.[5] Minor visitedSoviet Russia in 1918 where he had seen theBolshevik Revolution at close quarters.[5] Fort-Whiteman followed his friend into theCommunist Labor Party of America shortly after the time of its formation in September 1919.[5]
In October 1919, Fort-Whiteman was arrested in St. Louis speaking to a small gathering attended by a small handful of party members infiltrated by an informer from military intelligence.[5] As a prominent black Communist agitator, Fort-Whiteman came under close scrutiny from theBureau of Investigation as a "dangerous agitator."[6] Fort-Whiteman was charged with violation of theEspionage Act for having explicitly advocated "resistance to the United States" — although Fort-Whiteman denied ever having used such a phrase in his St. Louis speech.[3] Fort-Whiteman ultimately remained in jail for months after his arrest but seems to have escaped a lengthy prison term.[7]
From 1920 to 1922, the American communist movement eked out a covert, underground existence, with Fort-Whiteman presumably retaining party membership through the succession of mergers and splits which ensued. He reemerged in the public eye in February 1923 as a member of the editorial staff ofThe Messenger, although his affiliation with theWorkers Party of America (WPA), a legal communist organization established around the first day of 1922, seems to have remained an unpublicized fact.[7] Fort-Whiteman only publicly acknowledged his communist affiliation in January 1924 with the publication of an article inThe Daily Worker, official English-language newspaper of the WPA.[7]
In February 1924, Fort-Whiteman was tapped as one of 250 delegates to the "Negro Sanhedrin", a Chicago convention dedicated to issues of concern to black members of the working class, in which the WPA played a significant organizing role through its New York-based affiliate, theAfrican Blood Brotherhood (ABB), headed byCyril Briggs[8] Fort-Whiteman served as speaker for the WPA/ABB caucus and forward the organization's program, calling for an end to racial segregation in housing, binding contracts to protect tenant farmers, an end to colonialism in Africa, and US government recognition of the Soviet Union.[9]
During the 1920s, a so-called "Great Migration" of African Americans moving from the South to urban centers of the Northern United States took place. The American communist movement sought to capitalize upon the health and safety problems which ensued, initiating a short-livedmass organization (front group) known as the Negro Tenants Protective League to agitate for rent strikes and other forms of activity as a means of spurring change.[10] Fort-Whiteman, by then a top leader of the Communist Party in its "Negro work," addressed the founding convention of this group in Chicago on March 31, 1924 along with other top-level Workers Party officials, includingRobert Minor andOtto Huiswoud.[10]
In the spring of 1925, Fort-Whiteman joined his Workers (Communist) Party comrades Otto Hall andOtto Huiswoud as one of 17 black signatories of an official call for establishment of theAmerican Negro Labor Congress (ANLC).[11] Established by the Communist Party as a successor organization to the now moribundAfrican Blood Brotherhood, the ANLC was founded by a convention of 500 men and women in Chicago late in October of that same year.[11] Delegates attending this founding congress included substantial numbers of representatives oftrade unions and sundry community organizations as well as unaffiliated working-class people rather than members of the so-called "Negro intelligentsia."[12] In the words of one historian, the bulk of these founding delegates were "the sorts of blacks the Communists felt theNAACP andUrban League forgot."[12]
The short-lived success of the founding convention of the ANLC was largely a product of Fort-Whiteman's initiative. Chosen as the head of the Provisional Organizing Committee of the ANLC, Fort-Whiteman had traveled across theSouth andNortheast speaking to countless black community groups attempting to persuade them to support in the new effort,[13] arguing that a new organization was essential in order to "present the cause of the Negro worker."[14] His successful organizing effort gained national notoriety for Fort-Whiteman, with the conservativeTime magazine deeming Fort-Whiteman to be "the reddest of the blacks."[15]
Fort-Whiteman moved to Russia in about 1927, joining the tiny African American community in Moscow. He lived with his wife Marina, a Jewish chemist, in a small apartment. He was a close friend of African American journalistHomer Smith Jr. In 1928, Fort-Whiteman was a delegate to the6th World Congress of the Communist International. In the Comintern debates of 1928, Fort-Whiteman supported the positions of Bukharin and American leaderJay Lovestone, arguing against the need for the existence of the ANLC.[16]
He was later hired by the English-languageMoscow News as a contributor and worked as a teacher at an English-language school in Moscow. He was a consulting screenwriter on the 1932 productionBlack and White.[17]
Early in 1937, amassive campaign of arrests and punishments of alleged spies, saboteurs, and disloyal individuals was initiated by theSoviet secret police targeting especially Communist Party members and economic leaders. Lovett Fort-Whiteman applied for permission to return home to the United States at this time – a request which was refused.[18] Three weeks later, Fort-Whiteman was denounced for having expressed "counterrevolutionary" sentiments and on July 1, 1937 was sentenced to five years internal exile. He was first sent toSemipalatinsk,Kazakhstan, where he worked for a time as a teacher.[17]
Lovett Fort-Whiteman was identified as aTrotskyist in internal CPUSA documents. A report from the mid-1930s on support for Trotsky within the party stated that "Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a Negro Comrade, showed himself for Trotsky."[19] In a 1938 letter toGosizdat, the CPUSA's Comintern representative Pat Toohey wrote, "Whiteman is a Trotskyist."[20]
The terror continued to escalate into 1938 and on May 8, 1938, Fort-Whiteman's sentence was reviewed under the stricterarticle 58, specifically 58-2 and 58-6, of the criminal code of theRussian SFSR (for armed insurrection and espionage) and his sentence was amended to five years of hard labor in the notoriousGulag system of work camps.[21] Fort-Whiteman was sent toKolyma inSiberia, a particularly inhospitable part of the Soviet Far East. In Kolyma, Fort-Whiteman was imprisoned in one of the camps of the Camp Department of the Southern Mining and Industrial Administration, part of theSevvostlag camp system run by theDalstroy State Trust in the region surroundingMagadan. The camp department and camps under its management were tasked with the extraction of gold and tin ore in freezing subarctic conditions.[17][22][19]
There the intentionally inadequate food supplied to the overworked camp inmates and savage winter weather sapped Fort-Whiteman's strength and the formerly robust man's health rapidly failed.[18] According to an acquaintance ofRobert Robinson, who saw Fort-Whiteman, he was severely beaten for failure to fulfill the work norms in the camp,[18] and was "a broken man, whose teeth had been knocked out".[17][19] On January 13, 1939, Lovett Fort-Whiteman died of illness related to malnutrition.[18] He was 49 years old. According to the death certificate filled out at the Southern Mining Administration's Gulag hospital in Ust-Taezhny,[19] Fort-Whiteman was most likely working at the Taezhnik mine.[22]
Although Fort-Whiteman's death certificate was printed on letterhead belonging to the Camp Department of the Southern Mining and Industrial Administration, the need to increase production of tin led to reorganizations of the Sevvostlag organization structure in October 1938 that preceded Lovett's death and led to its reorganization into the Southwest Mining and Industrial Administration with its center in Ust-Utinaya.[22] The Southwest Mining and Industrial Administration was responsible for the operation of a complex of camps, including Taezhnik in the village of Ust-Taezhny (Orotukan), where Lovett Fort-Whiteman died.[22]
{{cite magazine}}:Cite magazine requires|magazine= (help)