In response to a spate of racist murders and police terrorism at the end of 1928, the Communist Party leadership released this leaflet supporting self-defense and pledging Communist assistance. Also addressed to white workers demanding they support Black equality and defense. Interestingly, it includes the ‘full equality’ program, which very shortly would be succeeded with and orientation to self-determination.

‘To All Oppressed Negroes! To All Negro, White Workers!’ by the Communist (Workers) Party from The Daily Worker. Vol. 5 No. 319. January 10, 1929.

The closing of the year 1928 was celebrated in Mississippi with the lynching of two Negro workers. Charley Shepard, a Negro prisoner who ran away from the frightful brutalities at the state penitentiary at Parchman, was hunted with bloodhounds for three days by 1,000 men. Finally surrendered by his brother, with whom he had taken refuge, upon the understanding that he would be given a trial and a chance to defend himself against the accusation of killing a prison guard the day he escaped, he was immediately turned over to a blood-thirsty mob of Mississippi’s “leading citizens.”

Long before his capture, these leading citizens planned his murder, and as soon as news spread that he had been found, three counties began vomiting up their potential murderers, and the roads to Parchman were soon packed with automobiles speeding to the prearranged murder festival. Shepard was soaked in gasoline and burned at the stake while a mob of 2,000 howled and cheered as his tortured body became a flaming mass.

A few days before, another Negro worker, Emanuel McCullum, was lynched by a mob of business men in Hattiesburg, Miss. McCullum’s crime lay in the fact that he dared to protest against being overcharged by a white merchant. This shopkeeper got together with his cronies in the local Chamber of Commerce, and McCullum was taken out into the woods one night and strangled with a half-inch rope. He had dared to protest against one phase of the robbery of the working class by the capitalist class.

In McCullum’s case, a coroner’s jury returned the verdict of “death at the hands of parties unknown.” A confession was forced from Sheriff Gray that McCullum had told him of threats against his life. The sheriff “did not have time to protect workers,” and especially Negro workers, so he advised McCullum to leave his job and quit town.

In the case of the murder of Shepard, the attitude of the capitalist class is even more cynical. Gov. Bilbo, executive representative of capitalism in the state of Mississippi, brutally declares he has “neither the time nor the money to investigate 2,000 people.”

These two brutal lynchings are part of a nation-wide wave of terrorism against the Negro masses and must be met by the united action of white and black workers. In the state of New Jersey during the same week that the Mississippi lynchings occurred, a Negro worker was hunted by bloodhounds and beaten almost to death upon his capture. In New York City, on the Brooklyn and Manhattan subways, two attacks on Negro workers by U.S. sailors occurred. A few weeks previous, a 16-year-old Negro youth, Frank Whithurst, was riddled with machine gun by 200 Chicago police after defending himself bravely from their attack.

These lynchings and other acts of terrorism are a part of the savage repression and brutal exploitation of the Negro masses under capitalism. They reveal the hypocrisy of the exploiters who speak of “democracy” and “justice,” but who really only reward their Negro slaves with the lynch rope, the stake, jimcrowism, peonage and other brutal forms of oppression.

Lynching is purposely maintained by the capitalist rulers of America as a necessary part of the vicious system of oppression and exploitation which keeps the Negro masses as a slave class at the bottom of capitalist society, degraded and driven in the most merciless fashion, to produce profits for their inhuman exploiters. It is the naked engine of terror by which the exploiters seek to prevent the Negro masses from organizing for their own protection and making common cause with the exploited white workers.

The brutal and atrocious treatment of the Negro masses, of which lynching, cold-blooded and horrible, is an expression, is a characteristic of United States imperialism which suppresses with bayonet and gun the peoples of Haiti, Latin America and the Philippines and crushes with murderous cruelty every attempt of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples to free themselves from the oppression and exploitation of their imperialist masters.

Only a revolutionary workers’ and farmers’ government can abolish lynching and overthrow the whole vicious system of discrimination and exploitation. It was the revolutionary Communist Party which abolished lynching and pogroms in Russia. It will be the revolutionary Workers (Communist) Party of America that will abolish lynching in America in the same way.

The Workers (Communist) Party stands forth as champion of the oppressed Negro masses. Only the Workers Party supports the Negro masses in their struggle against the system of lynching and race oppression. Only this Party unites black and white workers in militant struggle against the system of imperialist oppression, of which lynching is an outgrowth. Only this Party champions the Negro masses in their right of self-defense and only this Party fights with them against capitalist mob violence and terrorism.

The Communist Party considers it as its historic duty to unite all workers regardless of their color, against the common enemy, against the master class. The Negro race must understand that capitalism means racial oppression, and Communism means full racial equality: political, economic, social.

The following are the demands of the Workers (Communist) Party for which it fights with all its vigor and determination. It calls upon the workers and poor farmers, black and white, to organize their might to put these demands into effect:

1. Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination. Full racial, political and social equality for the Negro race.

2. Abolition of all laws which result in segregation of Negroes. Abolition of all Jim Crow laws. The law shall forbid all discrimination against Negroes in selling or renting houses.

3. Abolition of all laws which disfranchise the Negroes.

4. Abolition of laws forbidding intermarriage of persons of different races.

5. Abolition of all laws and public administrative measures which profit, or in practice prevent, Negro children or youth from attending general public schools or universities.

6. Full and equal admittance of Negroes to all railway station waiting rooms, restaurants, hotels and theatres.

7. Federal law against lynching and the protection of the Negro masses in their right of self-defense.

8. Abolition of discriminatory practices in courts against Negroes. No discrimination in jury service.

9. Abolition of the convict lease system and of the chain gang.

10. Abolition of all Jim Crow distinctions in the army, navy and civil service.

11. Immediate removal of all restrictions in all trade unions against the membership of Negro workers.

12. Equal opportunity for employment, wages, hours and working conditions for Negro and white workers. Equal pay for equal work for Negro and white workers.

The Workers (Communist) Party calls upon the Negro and white workers to organize and fight against the lynching system, to join and support the only Party that can and does fight against lynching, oppression and exploitation.

Unite against the lynchers and exploiters, organize for the abolition of the system of lynching. Join the Workers (Communist) Party.

Negro and white workers, organize mass meetings to protest against these brutal lynchings and mob violence.

Negro and white workers, organize protest demonstrations against these dastardly crimes maintained by the capitalist class. Workers, rally your union or other labor organizations behind the fight against lynching and exploitation.

Negro and white workers, unite and organize inter-racial defense organizations to defend the lives of the workers against capitalist terrorism.

CENTRAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, WORKERS (COMMUNIST) PARTY.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1929/1929-ny/v05-n319-NY-jan-10-1929-DW-LOC.pdf