In the run-up to 1932’s election, the Crisis hosts Frank Crosswaith, running as a Socialist for Congress from New York, and Mabel Byrd, just returned from the Communist convention which nominated James W. Ford vice president, to make a pitch for their parties to Black voters.

‘Socialists and Communists Bid for the Negro Vote’ by Frank R. Crosswaith and Mabel Byrd from The Crisis. Vol. 39 No. 9. September, 1932.

1. The Negro Program of the Socialists by Frank R. Crosswaith, Candidate for Congressman, New York.

TO all who are not blinded by ignorance and bound by tradition, it is quite obvious that time and the overlapping financial interests of our economic masters have wiped out every excuse upon which any important difference between the Republican and Democratic parties could be predicated. These two parties never were more like the traditional “two peas in a pod” than at present. Not even with respect to the elementary civil rights of the Negro do they differ, to say nothing of the rights of the working class.

Under a Democratic administration Negro soldiers in war time were subjected to all manner of indignities and humiliations, at home and abroad. Under a Republican administration the widows and mothers of these soldiers share the same fate as their departed dead.

Whether it be the endorsement of a high tariff wall by the South whose agrarian interest once arrayed it against the tariff, or the attempt to elevate Judge Parker to the Supreme court bench and thus placate the anti-Negro, anti-labor sentiment of the Bourbon South; or whether it be the continued segregation of Negro civil service employees at Washington, or the brazen betrayal of the Negro by the Republican party, when in deference to the South it gladly lynched the Dyer anti-lynching bill, all the evidence points to the similarity of these two parties.

Both of them have entered into a dastardly conspiracy to keep the Negro helpless and hopeless, politically, socially, educationally and economically. Laws restricting suffrage in the Southern states and designed to deny to the Negro the most meager advantages of political democracy have been condoned by both parties. Through the use of “property qualifications”, so-called “educational tests”, “Grand Father Clauses” and other subterfuges, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia continue to tax the Negro masses who inhabit these states without giving the Negro a voice in government. Lynching, legal and illegal, continues to haunt the Negro wherever he goes, while the tide of race prejudice rises and overflows into every city and state in the nation.

In November 1929, the Senate Lobby Investigating Committee made public a letter written to Vice-president Curtis by Mr. James A. Arnold, manager of the Southern Tariff Association and a co-worker of Colonel Mann, leader of the lily-white Republican forces of the South, in which a plan “to blacken the Democratic party and whiten the Republican party”, was discussed. Negro Democrats were “to be elected in St. Louis, Chicago, New York and other Negro districts” and thus once more the Negro masses were to be hoodwinked. It is apparent that “the plan” has not wholly been abandoned.

How the Negro can escape his present evils and affect a change for the betterment of his life in America is a question which the limits of this article will not permit of an adequate answer. This much is certain however, that, if the political future of the Negro is to be any brighter and safer than his past and present, then the Negro must be made to know that politics is not merely “the science of Government” but that it is essentially a reflection of economic, and class interests. Negro politicians especially must drop their familiar role of decoy to lead the masses cf Negroes blindly into the slaughter-house of the two old parties, also the Negro politician must subordinate his own selfish desires for pelf and place to the interest of the Negro masses.

For the Negro to shift his political allegiance from Republicans to Democrats is no indication of intelligence nor of political progress, neither can he excuse his conduct on the grounds that there is “no other party”. The Socialist party is one of the recognized major parties in the nation; its record with respect to the rights of the Negro is beyond reproach. From its birth, the Socialist Party has consistently stood on the side of the Negro, not in any condescending manner or for selfish reasons, but because the Socialist Party, here and abroad represents the interest of all workers, just as the Republican and: Democratic parties represent the interests of the exploiters.

As a first step toward the eradication of the evils from which the Negro and all other workers now suffer, the Socialist Party offers the following remedies:

1. A Federal anti-lynching bill.

2. A Federal Anti-child Labor Law and Education Laws. These laws will tend to reduce the illiteracy now prevalent in the South and give to Negro children a better opportunity for education in those states.

3. Admission of Negroes to juries and equal voting rights for all citizens.

4. The reduction of Southern representation in Congress until all citizens there are permitted to vote.

5. Unemployment insurance for all workers victims of involuntary idleness,

6. Jobs for all: The Government could provide decent work and decent pay for all if it was run in the interest of the workers instead of for the exploiters as the Republicans and Democrats now run it.

To the extent that the Negro and all other workers support the program of the Socialist Party to that same extent will their future be bright and a nobler heritage left to their children.

2. The Black and Red Convention by Mabel Byrd

FOR the first time in the history of the United States, a Negro is a candidate for Vice-President. It happened May 28, 1932, at the Second National Nominating Convention of the Communist Party of the United States of America, held at the Coliseum in Chicago.

James W. Ford, a young Negro of 39 years, was born in Alabama. Born of working class parents, he went to work early and by dint of hard labor won his way through school. His college training at Fisk University was suddenly terminated by service in the g2nd division of the United States army in France. With the vivid remembrance of the lynching of his grandfather, much of his war experience was the defense of Negro soldiers from unjust accusations. He, as member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of America, is one of the outstanding communist leaders in America.

The nomination of a Negro as Vice President marks the beginning of the third epoch in the history of the Negro in the United States. There have been two epoch-making incidents previously in the history of the Negro in America. The first was his enslavement on American soil, with all the miseries and degradations that come with this type of a social and economic state of being. This period saw two important and significant means by which the slave tried to escape his bondage. Religious worship, as evidenced by the Negro spirituals, such as “Steal Away”, “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”, were unconscious means by which he sought to rid himself of the burdensome reality. More significant still, were the organized rebellions, such as the Nat Turner and the Denmark Vesey rebellions, which while unsuccessful, were indications of the restless, conscious mob of black workers, trying to emerge into the plain day freedom.

Emancipation, the second epoch-making incident, was regarded by the Negro masses as their salvation. “Free and with the hope of forty acres and a mule”, they sallied forth from their enchainment with a belief in their God, the North and the Republican Party, that has taken almost 60 years of growing disillusionment to die and to be replaced by a frank recognition of their realities. “Forty acres and a mule” never were part of the Negro’s equipment for the modern, economic struggle; wage-slavery, bound hand and foot by political disfranchisement and social ostracism,—this is the status of the Negro, despite the 14th and 15th amendments.

Especially since the end of the reconstruction period, when the Negroes were beginning to realize that the change in economic and social status was merely one of name and not of fact, the protest for equal rights before the law, for equal social and economic opportunities has assumed a variety of forms. They have tried education, but now they know, under the present system, that an educated Negro may also black shoes and be “George” to the traveling public.

Industrial education was at one time the salvation, but now Negroes may not be taught skilled trades in southern “public schools” for “they are bound to come into competition with white workers”, and so trade education for economic independence now gives way to academic education. The North takes its toll in limiting the economic freedom of the Negro worker in many ways, among which are the more subtle operations of trade unions of the American Federation of Labor variety. The Negro has tried and is yet trying politics.

Has this freed him from his modern slavery? The Negro worker vociferously says “No”. In Texas, his right of entry into the Democratic primaries is contested; generally throughout the South he is either intimidated at the polls, or his vote not counted, or his right to vote is denied on the basis of “The Grandfather’s Clause”, payment of poll tax; or his interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.

Each election year, the party of Lincoln sets out to gather in the harvest of Negro votes. “Something must be done about the disfranchisement of the Negro” is the slogan just before elections. “Lynching must be stopped.” But definite methods of stopping both these and other injustices are crushed by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Education, law, work,—which translated, means training, politics, wealth—these three have they tried, but the Negro arrives in 1932, yet on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, disenfranchised, and a social outcast.

The second Communist Nominating Convention marked the third epoch in the Negroes’ lives. James W. Ford, a Negro from Alabama, was nominated vice-president on the Communist ballot. The second plank of their platform calls for “equal rights for Negroes”. The Party demands “full and unconditional economic, political and social equalities” for the Negro masses. In this convention, fifteen per cent of the 1000 delegates were Negroes and at least one-fourth of the speeches were made by Negro workers—men, and women. Southern whites, farmers and industrial workers, northerners, westerners—all not only endorsed the party platform, but made plain to the convention that they had the full support of their local constituencies to endorse each and every plank. James W. Ford was not only a brother Communist, but they attested their approval of a Negro candidate through a unanimous nomination. The ovation that greeted the Negro’s nomination was the most spontaneous and prolonged of the occasion. This was the dramatic moment of the Second Communist Nominating Convention of the United States of America.

The significance of this convention must not be overlooked. For several years now, Negro leaders have been, in effect, threatening the Republican Party with pictures of the Negro masses turned “red”, There is need no longer for this “left-handed threat”.

Increasingly, Negro masses are deciding to speak and act for themselves, Within the last year or so, it is the Communist party that is the chosen medium through which they are asserting their demands. They spoke from the Convention platform of political, social and economic injustices. They scored the “three parties of capitalism”, Republican, Democrat, and Socialist. They saw ahead of them struggle, fight, hardship, but they visualized a Society in which equality will be an actuality. They decried “white chauvinism” but they suggested means for its eventual extinction. Theirs is a philosophy of hope and enthusiasm that has not been known since the days of emancipation.

One-third of the delegates came from both the rural and urban areas of the South; approximately four-fifths of the Negro delegates were unemployed. One-third had deserted American Federation of Labor organizations, while practically all of them were affiliated either with the Communist Party or some one of its sponsored organizations—such as the Unemployed Councils, the Trade Union Unity League, International Labor Defense, or the United Farmer’s League.

One-third of their number was a skilled artisans group; a merchant and a writer were among the delegates. But by far the largest number were unskilled workers—factory, farm and domestic. This was the personnel of the most articulate Negro group that I have ever seen assembled,

Whatever the chances for the election of W.Z. Foster and James W. Ford, for president and vice-president respectively, these truths seems to be increasingly self-evident: the Negro masses are now speaking for themselves, as evidenced on the convention floor. They are becoming increasingly aware of their status in the American Commonwealth ; through their conception of, and belief in, the philosophy and program of the Communist Party, they are awakening that attribute, for so long made dormant by the Negro’s social and political environment—self-respect. And this will, it seems, be possible now of achievement, for this freedom which is before them, is being gained through their own efforts. They have taken their first step in the repudiating of the old line parties which they hold have so consistently betrayed their trust in the past.

In the words of one of the most ardent delegates of the Convention, “the disinherited became the inheritors of the most important treasure in the world—that vivid, energizing force of self-respect.

The Crisis A Record of the Darker Races was founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910 as the magazine of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. By the end of the decade circulation had reached 100,000. The Crisis’s hosted writers such as William Stanley Braithwaite, Charles Chesnutt, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina W. Grimke, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Arthur Schomburg, Jean Toomer, and Walter White.

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