From reader T

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Early years (1919–1928)

When the Communist Party USA was founded it had almost no black members. The Communist Party had drawn most of its members from the various foreign language federations formerly associated with the Socialist Party of America; those workers, many of whom were not fluent English-speakers, often had little contact with black Americans.

The Socialist Party had not, moreover, attracted that many African-American members during the years before the split. While its most prominent leaders, including Eugene V. Debs, were committed opponents of racial segregation, many in the Socialist Party were often lukewarm on the issue of racism, perceiving discrimination against black workers to be merely an extreme form of capitalist worker exploitation. In addition, the party’s allegiance with unions that discriminated against minority workers compromised its willingness to attack racism directly; it did not seek out African-American members, nor did it hold recruitment drives where they lived. Some African Americans disaffected by Socialist attitudes joined the Communist Party, others the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), whose political philosophy was essentially Marxist in nature.

The Communist Party at first echoed the economism of the Socialist Party. However, the party was also committed from the outset to bringing about world revolution, which put it in sympathy and concert with anti-colonial and "national liberation" movements around the globe. Its opinions of black worker struggle and on civil rights for blacks were therefore couched in broader terms of anti-colonialism; moreover, from its early years in the U.S. the party recruited African-American members; results were mixed, primarily due to the presence of rival groups such as the ABB.

The party thus had the greatest appeal in its early days to black workers with an internationalist bent, and from 1920 began to intensively recruit African Americans as members. The most prominent black Communist Party members at this time were largely immigrants from the West Indies who viewed a black worker struggle as being part of the broader campaigns against capitalism and imperialism.

At the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Claude McKay, a Jamaican poet, and Otto Huiswoud, born in Suriname, persuaded the Comintern to set up a multinational Negro Commission that sought to unite all movements of blacks fighting colonialism. Harry Haywood, [1] a communist drawn out of the ranks of the African Blood Brotherhood, a socialist group with a large number of Jamaican émigrés in its leadership, also played a leading role. McKay persuaded the founders of the Brotherhood to affiliate with the Communist Party in the early 1920s. The African Blood Brotherhood claimed to have almost 3,500 members; relatively few of them, however, joined the party.

The Comintern directed the American party in 1924 to redouble its efforts to organize African Americans. The party complied by creating the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) in 1925. That organization was also a failure: the black press denounced it and the labor movement, outside of a few party-controlled unions that themselves had few black members, ignored it.

The ANLC, for its part, isolated itself from other black organizations, attacking the NAACP and other organizations as middle-class accommodationists controlled by white philanthropists. The ANLC and the Party had a more complex relationship with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); while the party approved of Garvey's fostering of "race consciousness", it was strongly opposed to his support for a separate black nation. When the party made efforts to recruit members from the UNIA, Garvey expelled the party members and sympathizers in its ranks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Party_USA_and_African_Americans

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