The small pamphlet with the black and white cover bore the title “The Negroes in a Soviet America.” On the cover was a young African American man, smiling broadly and happily as he undoubtedly envisioned a future vastly different from the one he was living.
The pamphlet was obviously about communism and its path to a seemingly brighter future for black people. It was published in 1935 by the Communist Party USA’s Workers Library Publishers in New York City. This was a time when the party was touting itself as the cure for the woes of African Americans living in a country that denied them basic rights.
I was curious because I knew that African American writer Richard Wright embraced communism around that time – but did not completely adopt its principles – and like so many others, was bedeviled by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The country as a whole was in a devastating storm called the Depression, and African Americans – its men in particular – were being lynched with cruel indifference. Communism may have been appealing to some, but not all blacks accepted it. Many had tired of their longstanding allegiance to a Republican Party that had produced few results, and had wandered to the Democratic side.
The pamphlet was authored by James W. Ford and James S. Allen, and sold for 5 cents. In the Foreword, they expressed what African Americans wanted but were forbidden to taste: “a decent and secure livelihood; the rights of human beings; an equal, honorable and respected status in all public and social life.
“Capitalism has not been able to provide these needs, and is less and less able to do so … There is only one real, effective way out for the masses. It is not an easy one. But no basic change in society is easy. This way leads to a Soviet America.”
Though small in stature at 7 ¼” x 5″, the pamphlet nonetheless carried a heavy message for people like the man on the cover. While the overall focus of a Soviet America was on the working-class, this particular work was a discourse on why African Americans should embrace communism and eschew capitalism. It laid out a history of mistreatment, citing the “Scottsboro Boys” case in Alabama; the disappearance of black farms; Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of training vs. brains; what it called the capitalist-leaning views of the NAACP, and W.E.B. DuBois, whose views were both extolled and denigrated.
The Communist Party began a campaign in the late 1920s to win the support of African Americans with the idea of self-determination, of creating their own Black Belt nation within the United States. Party members not only called for racial and job equality, and an end to lynchings, they also offered small benefits for stable living (such as getting electricity turned back on or forcing white social workers to provide relief food to blacks).
Soviet America would be a world free of “hindrances, barriers, discrimination,” it promised. The pamphlet was one of a series targeting youth, miners, longshoremen and professionals, outlining what a shared life would be like under communist rule.
Co-writer Ford was considered one of the country’s most well-known communists. He was the party’s nominee for vice president in 1932, garnering more than 100,000 votes. He ran a second time in 1936 (winning another 100,000 or more votes) and for a third time in 1940 (less than 50,000 votes). In 1938, he was the party’s candidate for the Senate seat out of New York. Neither Ford nor the party expected a win; they only wanted to spread their message of racial equality.
He was born in Alabama, served in World War I (where he was a radio engineer), graduated from Fisk University and worked at the Post Office when he could not get a job in radio in Chicago because he was black. An early adherent to the philosophy of Washington, he later found it lacking. He joined the postal workers union, as well as an organization of black workers founded by the Communist Party USA, which he later joined and became fully involved in. He was fired from the Post Office for some of his union and party work.
Moving to Harlem in the early 1930s, Ford became head of the party’s Harlem branch. He and other communists were prominent during hearings into discrimination against Harlem residents after they rioted in March 1935 over an incident involving a teenage boy in a department store. Ford died in 1957.
Co-writer Allen was born Sol Auerbach to Jewish parents who arrived in Philadelphia from Russia in 1906 when he was born. He was a staunch member of the party, a journalist and editor who helped keep the Scottsboro case alive by publicizing it in the communist newspaper The Southern Worker.
Allen joined the party in the late 1920s and began writing for its newspaper The Daily Worker and other publications, including a stint as editor of The Southern Worker along with his wife Isabella. He went to the Soviet Union for conferences, wrote books and pamphlets, and headed the party’s publishing company.
During the 1950s, Allen appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated what it considered communist and subversive activities by private citizens (including Hollywood artists and writers), organizations and others. He died in 1986.
The 1935 pamphlet has been reprinted – by the National Economic Council in 1945 and by American Opinion, an arm of the John Birch Society, in the 1960s in an attempt to discredit the civil rights movement as communist-inspired. The society was rabidly opposed to the movement and despised its leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom it often tried to tie to communism.
