The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936. - Review - book review

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Alan Wald

Mark Solomon. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998. 441 pp. $20.00 paper.

From the early 1920s until the late 1950s, the U.S. Communist movement was a significant pole of attraction in African American political and cultural life. Yet students of the African American literary Left have had access mainly to the reasons why some Black cultural and intellectual figures were eventually dismayed by Communism, through admonitory novels such as Chester Himes's The Lonely Crusade (1947), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), and Richard Wright's The Outsider (1953), reinforced by Harold Cruse's brutal polemic The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967).

Only in the past fifteen years has a counter-trend gained momentum through the appearance of richly documented, independently critical, yet compelling explanations of just how and why the Communist movement wielded the attractive power that it did, despite all the obvious disadvantages, for Blacks as well as whites, of being regarded as a "communist." Books of the 1980s, such as those by Mark Naison and Robin D. G. Kelley, have now been augmented by the writings of Bill Mullen, James Smethurst, and William Maxwell to constitute a quantum leap forward in our ability to understand what was achieved by the symbiotic relationship of African American and Communist activists and cultural workers. However, in my view, the indispensable foundation for appreciating this entire body of new scholarship is Mark Solomon's stunning narrative of the absorption of revolutionary Black Nationalists and other Black radicals into the post-World War I Communist movement.

Solomon's highly nuanced and finely researched The Cry Was Unity treats the consequences of this co-mingling for the development of Communist ideology and activity from the early 1920s through the first year of the Popular Front. On the one hand, Solomon's book seeks to elaborate the "theory" of national oppression and the road to liberation worked out by U.S. Communists, Black and white, in their first decade and a half. On the other, his aim is equally to explore the practical activities against which the evolving theory was tested as this heroic, interracial organization rose up against white supremacism "with unprecedented passion as an indispensable requirement for achieving social progress."

In rich detail, Solomon's book covers the period of nearly two decades from the founding of Cyril Briggs's magazine The Crusader after World War I to the launching of the Party-led National Negro Congress in 1936. Thus he follows Communist policy through three phases: from the view of a "colorblind" class outlook, to the theory of nationality, to the broad-based "Negro-labor alliance." The overall structure of the book is divided into three components, recalling the traditional Hegelian triad. The initial five chapters review the efforts of the first Black Communists to formulate a policy, their interaction with a vision of the Communist International, and the development of a theory (the view of African Americans as a "a nation within a nation") and an organization (the American Negro Labor Congress) to realize this project.

Part II presents another six chapters, this time focused on the 1929-1933 era of the ultra-revolutionary "Third Period." Solomon convincingly demonstrates his rather disconcerting view that unrealistic visions, aspirations, and demands frequently motivated the most heroic projects. From this perspective he discusses Party practice in the Deep South, and struggles against eviction, hunger, and lynching.

In the third part, the book marches to a climax at the beginning of the Popular Front when, at last, in Solomon's judgment, the foundation of Black/Labor unity is established. This is achieved through the success of Peoples Front policy in Harlem and the creation of the National Negro Congress, a multiracial organization under Black leadership.

Solomon is sympathetic to the remarkable men and women whose stories he collectively narrates, but he has his own opinions. He is especially critical of the Communists' ultra-revolutionary "Third Period" (roughly 1929-1934) for its ideological rigidity. He believes that the political line was really about Stalin's fight to dominate the Soviet Party and the Communist International, one that would be "ultimately drenched in Soviet blood."

Nevertheless, Solomon insists that there existed an authentic commitment to anti-racism and national liberation. The Party's steadfast opposition in the 1930s to any form of racial segregation, at a time when it was tolerated by liberals and other progressives, was an outgrowth of its assessment of the Party's failure to make gains in the 1920s. Solomon says that the Party came to the conclusion that "racial segregation and the savaging of black identity represented both an institutional foundation for American capitalism and its weak point." Thus the toleration of any form of racism only bolstered capitalism and "wounded its most potent foes." The Party had to create an internal culture qualitatively different from other radical or liberal movements that "extended a hand to blacks while allowing in its own structure the very circumstances that engendered inequality."