The following piece was originally published in the June 14, 2017 edition of CHALLENGE (volume 49 no. 12). Ruling-class historians have segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many anti-racist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations. Many Black fighters were also dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.

In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide anti-racist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being red-baited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between anti-racism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain. 

This series aims to reunite the history of communism with anti-racism. Part I explored how the fight to free Scottsboro Boys was ignited by the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party. See Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression to find out more. 

The following piece excerpts from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the essay, “The Civil Rights Movement” by researcher Davarian L. Baldwin at Trinity College.   

The Civil Rights Movement was a decades-long mass uprising of Black and white workers and students against the most open forms of racism in the U.S. Its impetus was the growing international communist movement fresh off the defeat of fascism in Europe and quickly growing in China, Africa and around the world, combined with the growing resistance to racism by the Black workers in the U.S. 

The U.S. ruling class tried to shut down the mass anti-racist fightback by using anti-communism to divide and terrorize the movement. In the period right after World War II, the Soviet Union was admired by workers around the world, including in the U.S., for defeating the Nazi war machine. The workers-led society in the Soviet Union stood in stark contrast to the legal segregation workers faced in the U.S.

Communist movement was dawn of The Civil Rights Movement
While the racist Jim Crow laws in the South were are well known, segregation cut across the country. Black workers who moved to northern cities to look for jobs faced racism in looking for homes and on the job as well. 

Between 1940 and 1960 the Great Migration brought over six million African Americans to industrial centers in the urban North and West, where migrants were met with new forms of racial containment. They were often restricted to domestic and retail service work. Those who found industrial employment were kept out of labor unions.

The communist movement had been heavily involved in the fight against racism in the South since around 1930 and had built up a mass movement that included Black and white workers and students. The struggle to defend the Scottsboro Boys, nine young Black men wrongly accused of raping two white women, galvanized the anti-racist movement (see CHALLENGE, 5/31). This communist-led struggle brought thousand of Black and white workers into organizations that fought racism and trained many of the leaders of the civil rights movement. 

If you look at all the…auxiliary organizations[of the Communist Party in Alabama], the International Labor Defense, which focused on civil rights issues, they had up to 2,000. The Sharecroppers Union had up to 12,000. You had the International Workers Order. You had the League of Young Southerners. You had the Southern Negro Youth Congress. [In total], it touched the lives easily of 20,000 people.

There were many people who were trained in the Communist Party who went on to become Civil Rights activists [including] Rosa Parks…some of her first political activities were around the Scottsboro case…She never joined the party, but as a young woman, she and her husband, in fact, attended some of the meetings…the infrastructure that was laid forward that becomes the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, was laid in many ways, not entirely, by the Communist Party (Robin Kelly on WNYC Radio 2/16/2010).

WW II and After: Communist Fighters Under Attack 
The movement against racism that grew in the 1930s didn’t stop during World War II.

The United States entered the wartime world as the self-professed face of democracy, but African Americans began to make links between Nazi racism, European imperialism, and American [racism].
Veteran activist and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) A. Philip Randolph threatened to lead a 100,000-person March on Washington Movement (MOWM) in November 1941 if wartime production was not desegregated…

Between 1942 and 1945 industrial centers, military camps, and port cities, including Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles, exploded with race riots. Ongoing…attempts to constrain black life erupted in violent riots in more than forty cities (Baldwin).

After the war, the U.S. bosses came under increasing pressure as the Soviet Union and the international communist movement exposed the hypocrisy of U.S. capitalism, describing itself as a pillar of “democracy” while denying even the most basic freedom to Black citizens.

Black workers led the charge against racism
Black communists played a leading role in exposing U.S. racism to the world and came under attack as well. Paul Robeson was a communist actor, singer, athlete and political activist. He was a man of international renown and used it to build the movement for workers’ power and the fight against racism. Robeson and other communists came under extreme attack by the U.S. bosses who were terrified of the multi-racial fight against racism

In 1947 W. E. B. Du Bois placed the grievances of African Americans before the newly formed United Nations in his famous “Appeal to the World” address…singer and activist Paul Robeson signed a U.S.S.R. petition to the United Nations, “We Charge Genocide,” documenting a series of human rights abuses against African Americans. Communist activist Claudia Jones organized in Harlem for jobs, housing, and humane immigration policies. Both Robeson’s and Du Bois’s passports were revoked until 1958 while the Trinidadian [Claudia] Jones was deported to Britain. In the Cold War context, black struggles for freedom were largely denounced as un-American (Baldwin).

The bosses’ anti-communist McCarthyism campaign was an attempt to strangle the communist movement in the U.S. and stop the fight against racism. It terrified many people. Leading fighters were driven underground, out of the country and some were put in jail. For a while, there were few public demonstrations against racism in the South or North as anyone, Black or white, who stood up against Jim Crow, housing or school segregation was labeled a communist and subject to being harassed or attacked by the FBI.

But the working class continued to fight and the struggle against racism eventually focused on the Jim Crow laws that segregated all forms of life in the South. The U.S. bosses were particularly vulnerable to the fight against Jim Crow laws. The German Nazis had used the laws as a model for setting up their fascist system “[Hitler in Main Kampf] describes the United States as ‘the one state’ that had made headway toward what he regarded as a healthy and utterly necessary racist regime” (NY Times 5/22). Black soldiers returning from the war were increasingly unwilling to tolerate fascism at home after fighting it in Europe.

Many Black workers began to resist legal segregation and Alabama civil rights leaders decided it was time to take mass action against the laws. 

In 1955, Rosa Parks was asked to make a stand that would spark the campaign. When she refused to get out of her seat setting off the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Black working class of Montgomery, experienced by the communist-led fight to defend the Scottsboro Boys and the many other battles against racism, was prepared to fight and that they did.