William L. Patterson speaks to the cleavage widening within Black politics as the Communist Party’s growing alternative to traditional, liberal, lobbying organizations, attracted a new generation of young, confident militants.

‘The Path of Negro Reformism’ by William L. Patterson from The Daily Worker. Vol. 8 Nos. 290 & 291. December 3 & 4, 1931.

PART I.

THE terror of the bosses against the Negro masses is not only being continued but is increasing in extent and intensity. The ruling class wins at the murderous attacks upon Wilie Peterson while he is in the custody of its armed thugs in the Birmingham, Ala., jail. John Grey-Ford and Edward Jackson are murdered in the most vicious fashion by the police in Cleveland at an unemployed demonstration, and the bosses’ tools go unpunished. The terror against the Negro miners in Harlan, Ky., in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia goes on unabated. For company thugs, deputies and police, it is “open season” for “n***s.” New Ku Klux Klan organizations are everywhere being formed. No day passes without adding to the inhuman record of mob violence and lynching against them. The bloody hand of the cotton barons and the mill owners rests on the shoulder of Judge Lynch directing him and his murderous tools.

The mob inciting, lynch provoking capitalist class with its lying slanderous tales about Negro rapists, conceals the trail of blood and its directing hand wherever possible. But the failure to bring the murderers of Negro workers to book is in itself evidence of the presence of ruling class direction.

These bloody events against the Negro masses add but another chapter in the long murder record of America’s ruling class. Already this year the record notes the conviction of the innocent Scottsboro victims; the massacre of share croppers in Camp Hill, Ala., who sought only to organize the better to free themselves from their slave conditions; the massacre of the unemployed workers in Chicago and 33 lynch law victims. This legal and extra-legal boss terror is the weapon by which that class maintains its system of super-exploitation through semi-slavery and peonage over the Negro masses. This slave level of Negro life becomes the level towards which the bosses are driving the white workers. The bosses seek in the perpetuation of this system of robbery of the Negro masses with the aid of the misguided white workers to make of these white workers the instruments of their own misery and poverty. The acceptance by white workers of the bosses’ white chauvinist (white supremacy) policy makes them the main tool by which the whole working class is exploited. At a moment of crisis it becomes more than ever necessary for the bosses to divide the working class.

It is therefore not by accident that the wave of lynching and of mob violence now develops Increased intensity. It coincides with the developing militancy of the Negro and white workers and their growing tendencies toward unity of struggle against the unbearable burdens of the crisis. It is precisely at this moment that the intensity of the terror against the Negro masses becomes for American imperialism a most necessary course of procedure. The cementing of the unity of Negro and white workers at the moment when American capitalism is in its deepest throes of crisis makes it a question of extreme danger to the ruling class and its agents. It is precisely because of the effects of the crisis upon the workers as a whole that this unity now expresses itself in struggle.

On the one hand is reflected the growing working class consciousness that the strength of the bosses lies in the weakness of working class unity. On the other hand, the savage terror of the bosses is preceded by a campaign of lies and slander in the white capitalist press against the Negro masses, and a campaign of equally vicious calumny against the white workers in the reformist Negro press. The bosses are seeking to arouse every white chauvinistic tendency they have cultivated in the white workers. They hope thus to turn the rage of the white workers against the Negroes and distract their attention from the true source of their misery and suffering. The Negro bosses seek to arouse the “nationalist moods” of the Negro masses and direct them indiscriminately against all whites.

But the Negro and white workers are beginning to see through the haze of capitalist lies and slander. Life itself has made of the question of working class unity a historical question. It has become the greatest social demand of the working class. In the face of mass unemployment and slashing wage cuts, while millions are paid in dividends to parasites; in the face of mass starvation, amid warehouses filled with food; in the face of mass evictions of unemployed workers it becomes increasingly obvious to them that only the common struggle of Negro and white, native and foreign born workers can defeat the bosses program of terror and starvation. This unity of the working class gives added strength to the workers’ counter offensive against the bosses, and raised to higher political levels, will accelerate the development of that counter-offensive into a direct attack against the master class.

The unity of Negro and white workers is what the bosses and their agents fear most. It strikes a death blow at once at the myth of “white supremacy” and counteract the poison of “race loyalty.”

In Chicago the demonstrations of the Negro and white employed and unemployed workers against eviction struck a blow at the profits of the Negro bourgeoisie. The Negro landlords, professionals and boss politicians, leaders of the reformist National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, owners of property, bosses themselves within the Negro ghetto, called for the aid of the murderous police. It was they who called forth the blood bath of August 3.

The relatively weak position of the Negro bourgeoisie is made many times weaker by virtue of the crisis. Their’s is an extremely narrow field of exploitation–the Negro ghetto and the Negro masses. Since the burdens of the crisis fall first and heaviest upon the weakest sections of the working-class–the Negro workers–the market of the Negro bosses is hit foremost and hardest. They see as their only relief a closer union with American imperialism. They, too, demand the protection of the armed thugs of the robber class. The rising discontent of the Negro masses and the growing tendency toward unity with the white worker only fills the Negro bosses with greater panic.

To save their meagre profits they are openly capitulating before American imperialism. Even the fiction of struggle against social and political oppression is now scarcely maintained. The crisis has brought about an open alignment of Negro and white bosses at the top just and precisely as it affects unity of Negro and white workers at the bottom. Therefore the question of the struggle of the Negro masses for full social and political equality and for the right of self determination includes a most desperate struggle against Negro reformism.

PART II.

In the wave of terror against the Negro masses, the Negro reformists, particularly the bourgeois wing in the leadership of the NAACP has waged a bitter attack, not upon the bloody boss inciters to mob violence and lynching, but against the militant leadership that guides the liberation struggles of the Negro masses. The class nature of the Negro bosses’ nationalism is becoming ever clearer. Despite the long record of Negroes done to death in the bosses’ determination to hold the Negro masses enslaved, these treacherous Negro lackeys try now to place the blame for Scottsboro, Camp Hill, Chicago and the intensifying terror at the door of the Communist Party. It is not by accident that the press of the Ku Klux Klan (Jackson County Sentinel) commenting on the Charleston speech of William Pickens, field secretary of the NAACP, against the Communists, cannot disguise its satisfaction with his position. It says that the NAACP has no principle difference with the bloody Southern landlord and mill bosses. On the contrary, common interests inevitably forces them to openly display their unholy alliance. On the basis of this common force, Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, and Pickens have freedom of entrance into Kilby prison where the 9 innocent Scottsboro sit facing the electric chair while the children’s parents and their legally designated representatives are barred. The NAACP gets grants of money from the white millionaires and the slimy press of the bosses praises them for their “discrimination.”

Viewed in the light of a defense of their common interests, the treacherous role played by the leadership of the NAACP in Scottsboro, Camp Hill, Chicago and in the case of Willie Peterson is not difficult to understand. In the Peterson case, it even joined with the white bosses in creating a reward for the capture of the Negro worker when all evidence pointed to the commission of the crime by a white man.

The crisis and the upsurge of the liberation struggle of the Negro masses has exposed the role of the Negro bourgeois intellectuals. They seek to head the struggle of the Negro masses only to behead it. A revolutionary struggle means for the Negro and white workers a struggle against “Negro ghetto nationalism.” But the ghetto is the only source of profits for the Negro bourgeoisie. It is absurd to think that they can lead a struggle against their own interests. Their shameless double-dealing in support of Jim Crow YMCA’s, Jim Crow apartments, hotels, hospitals, etc., can leave no doubt as to their position.

Theirs is a shameless path but a logical one and historically determined to save their profits, there is no depth to which they will not sink. Already in 1929, in Frankfort-on-Main, at the 2nd Congress of the Anti-Imperialist League, Wm. Pickens had shown himself the tool of world imperialism. There he shamelessly announced that in his opinion (his master’s, as well) the withdrawal of armed forces of British imperialism from Africa would be disastrous to the native masses. The internationalism of Negro reformism and its value to world imperialism is clear. The African Negro reformists echo Mr. Pickens.

Now he sinks to lower levels. In order to better befool those elements who retain faith in the “struggles” of the NAACP in the interests of the Negro masses, he endorsed the defense of the 9 Scottsboro boys by the International Labor Defense. He moved then to the position that although the action of the ILD was good, the NAACP is the logical organization to lead such a defense. From there to a vicious slanderous attack upon the ILD was the next logical step he took. Is it any wonder that even the Ku Klux Klan class can recognize this “friend” of the Negro masses as one of its own.

His next step was to hold that the Communists are seeking the death of the Scottsboro boys in order to make of it a new Sacco and Vanzetti case. This “running dog” of the bloody landlords and the mill bosses has taken this step “gracefully.” Truly this servant is worthy of his master’s hire.

The Negro misleaders can no longer turn the tide of the emancipatory struggles of the Negro masses into reactionary channels by cries of “racial solidarity” and slander of the revolutionary leadership. The power of mass pressure was concretely demonstrated to them in, Chicago when Mayor Cermak, tool of the power interests, was forced to stop the issuance of eviction orders of unemployed workers. It was further demonstrated when the city manager of Cleveland after the massacre there granted many of the immediate demands of the united Negro and white, employed and unemployed workers.

The Negro masses are being set in motion. They are the main reserves of the American revolution. The preaching of preparation for mass economic and political struggles, of preparation and organization of strikes, of mass action by the unemployed is particularly important and urgent. The Negro masses must be drawn into the ranks of the Unemployed Councils, the revolutionary Trade Union, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and most important of all, into the ranks of the Communist Party.

We demand the right of self-determination for the Negro masses in the Black Belt where they constitute the majority of the population!

Down with the Jim Crow lynch policy of the bosses and their government!

Equal pay for equal work for Negro workers! These slogans must and can mobilize the Negro masses under the leadership of the Negro and white proletariat for the revolutionary overthrow of American capitalism.

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. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1931/v08-n290-NY-dec-03-1931-DW-LOC.pdf

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1931/v08-n291-NY-dec-04-1931-DW-LOC.pdf