An important document in our history, the Comintern’s first devoted resolution on Black liberation from the Fourth World Congress held in 1922. There a commission chaired by Otto Huiswoud, with fellow U.S. participant Claude McKay and others, drafted the resolution below.

‘Resolution on the Negro Question’ from Resolutions & Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922.

DURING and after the war there developed among colonial and semi-colonial peoples a movement of revolt, which is still making successful progress against the power of world capital. The penetration and intensive colonisation of regions inhabited by black races is becoming the last great problem on the solution of which the further development of capitalism itself depends. French capitalism clearly recognises that the power of French post-war imperialism will be able to maintain itself only through the creation of a French-African Empire, linked up by a Trans-Sahara Railway, whilst America’s financial magnates (who are exploiting 12,000,000 negroes at home) are now entering upon a peaceful penetration of Africa. How Britain, for her part, dreads the menace to her position in Africa is shown oy the extreme measures taken to crush the Rand Strike. Just as in the Pacific the danger of another world war has become acute owing to the competition of imperialist powers there, so Africa looms ominously as the object of their rival ambitions. Moreover, the war, the Russian revolution, and the great movements of revolt against imperialism on the part of the Asiatic and Mussulman nationalities have roused the consciousness of millions of the negro race, whom capitalism has oppressed and degraded beyond all others for hundreds of years, not only in Africa, but perhaps even more in ‘America.

(2) The history of the negro in America fits him for an important role in the liberation struggle of the entire African race. Three hundred years ago the American negro was torn from his native African soil, brought in slave ships under the most cruel and indescribable conditions, and sold into slavery. For two hundred and fifty years he toiled a chattel slave under the lash of the American overseer. His labour cleared the forests, built the roads, raised the cotton, laid the railroad tracks, and supported the Southern aristocracy. His reward was poverty, illiteracy, degradation and misery. The negro was no docile slave; his history is rich in rebellion, insurrection, underground methods of securing liberty; but his struggles were barbarously crushed. He was tortured into submission, and the bourgeois press and religion justified his slavery. When chattel slavery became an obstacle to the full and free developments of America on the basis of capitalism, when chattel-slavery clashed with wage-slavery, chattel-slavery had to go. The Civil War, which was not a war to free the negro, but a war to maintain the industrial capitalist supremacy of the North, left the negro the choice of peonage in the South or wage-slavery in the North. The sinews, blood and tears of the “freed” negro helped to build American capitalism, and when, having become a world power, America was inevitably dragged into the world war, the American negro was declared the equal of the white man to kill, and to be killed for “democracy.” Four hundred thousand coloured workers were drafted into the American Army, and segregated into “Jim Crow” regiments. Fresh from the terrible sacrifices of war, the returned negro soldier was met with race persecutions, lynchings, murders, disfranchisement, discrimination and segregation. He fought back, but for asserting his manhood he paid dearly. Persecution of the negro became more widespread and intense than before the war, until he had “learned to keep his place.” The past-war industrialisation of the negro in the North and the spirit of revolt engendered by post-war persecutions and brutalities, caused a spirit, which, though suppressed, flames into action when a Tulsa or other inhuman outrage cries aloud for protest, and places the American negro, especially of the North, in the vanguard of the African struggle against oppression.

(3) It is with intense pride that the Communist International sees the exploited negro workers resist the attacks of the exploiter, for the enemy of his race and the enemy of the white workers is one and the same—Capitalism and Imperialism. The international struggle of the negro race is a struggle against Capitalism and Imperialism. It is on the basis of this struggle that the world negro movement must be organised. In America, as the centre of negro culture and the crystallisation of negro protest; in Africa, the reservoir of human labour for the further development of capitalism; in Central America (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Colombia, Nicaragua and other “independent” republics), where American imperialism dominates in Porto Rico, Haiti, Santo Domingo and other islands washed by the waters of the Caribbean, where the brutal treatment of our black fellow-men by the American occupation has aroused the protest of the conscious negro and the revolutionary white workers everywhere; in South Africa and the Congo, where the growing industrialisation of the negro population has resulted in various forms of uprisings; in East Africa, where the recent penetration of world capital is stirring the native populations into an active opposition to imperialism, in all these centres the negro movement must be organised.

(4) It is the task of the Communist International to point out to the negro people that they are not the only people suffering from oppression of capitalism and imperialism; that the workers and peasants of Europe and Asia and of the America are also the victims of imperialism; that the struggle against imperialism is not the struggle of any one people, but of all the peoples of the world; that in India and China, in Persia and Turkey, in Egypt and Morocco, the oppressed coloured colonial peoples are struggling heroically against their imperialist exploiters; that these people are rising against the same evils that the negroes are rising—racial oppression and discrimination, and intensified industrial exploitation—that these people strive for political, industrial and social liberation and equality.

The Communist International, which represents the revolutionary workers and peasants of the whole world in the struggle to break the power of imperialism, is not simply the organisation of the enslaved white workers of Europe and America, but equally the organisation of the oppressed coloured peoples of the world, and feels it to be its duty to encourage and support the international organisation of the negro people in their struggle against the common enemy.

(5) The negro problem has become a vital question of the world revolution, and the Third International, which has already recognised what valuable aid can be rendered to the Proletarian Revolution by coloured Asiatic peoples in semicapitalist countries likewise regards the co-operation of our oppressed black fellow-men as essential to the Proletarian Revolution and the destruction of capitalist power. The Fourth Congress accordingly declares it to be a special duty of Communists to apply the “Theses on Colonial Questions” to the negro problem.

(6) I. The Fourth Congress recognises the necessity of supporting every form of negro movement which tends to undermine or weaken capitalism or imperialism or to impede its further penetration.

2. The Communist International will fight for race equality of the negro with the white people, as well as for equal wages and political and social rights.

3. The Communist International will use every instrument within its control to compel the trade unions to admit negro workers to membership or, where the nominal right to join exists, to agitate for a special campaign to draw them into the unions. Failing in this, it will organise the negroes into unions of their own and specially apply the United Front tactic to compel admission to the unions of the white men.

4. The Communist International will take immediate steps to hold a general Negro Conference or Congress in Moscow.

Resolutions & Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow, Nov. 7 to Dec. 3, 1922.

PDF of full book: https://archive.org/download/resolutionsthese00commiala/resolutionsthese00commiala.pdf