Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Abstract

On a cold February night, a young Black man with no coat or hat on made his way down Third Street in downtown Memphis.1 Levon Carlock had only recently moved to the city with his young bride, Eula May. Due to the Depression, their small farming community in Mississippi no longer offered adequate employment for a young couple wishing to start a family. His wife was fortunate to find employment at the Cordova Hotel but her schedule caused her to work late hours. Therefore, Levon made certain to meet his wife every night at the end of her shift and walk her to the small rooming house they lived in on 364 South Second Street.2 It was around 3:00 a.m. when Levon made his way to the hotel, passing a White sex worker on his way.3As Levon stood outside the hotel, in the distance he saw a police car pull up and the officer inside began talking to the sex worker Carlock passed on his way to the hotel. Levon paid little mind to them, even though the sex worker pointed in his direction—he assumed she was pointing at the hotel. She eventually got into the back of the cruiser. Assuming she was being arrested, Carlock was surprised when the police car turned away from the direction of the police station and came speeding toward the hotel. The cruiser stopped in front of him. The officer jumped out of the car and pinned Carlock against the alley wall adjacent to the hotel. Another police car pulled up to the hotel. Four officers instantly surrounded Carlock. The first officer to arrive shouted, “What in the hell are you doing this time of the morning?” Carlock meekly replied, “I'm looking for my wife.” The officers laughed in disbelief as they handcuffed Levon. The first officer on the scene then yelled at Carlock, “You are telling a goddamn lie. We tried to catch you last night, but you got away. We're going to fix you tonight.” Levon knew better than to resist, but politely requested, “Mr. Officer, if I have did anything please ride me to the police station.” The officers again laughed as the first officer menacingly chided, “we are going to give you a ride. It's going to be a damned long ride. The first one is going to be to the undertaker and the next ride will be to the goddamn cemetery.”4As the first officer finished with his remark, another officer had brought the sex worker, later identified as Ruby Morris, in front of Carlock. “Is this the one?” the officer asked. “Yes,” Ruby replied as she bowed her head. All four officers then began to beat a handcuffed Levon with their clubs, breaking his neck as they dragged him to the back of the alley. Levon started to cry out but one of the officers shouted through his swinging club, “you better not holler you son-of-a-bitch.” Levon begged the officers not to kill him. He soon lay prostrate and unconscious in the back of the alley. Four shots rang out in rapid succession, clearly fired from different guns. As the officers directed the light from their flashlights onto Carlock's body, one officer exclaimed, “Why, that son-of-a-bitch ain't dead yet.” The officer again pulled out his holstered pistol and put one additional bullet into the side of Carlock's head.5As the ambulance pulled away with Levon's dead body, a stream of blood was seen streaking down the sidewalk in front of the Cordova Hotel. The first officer put Ruby back into his cruiser, and both cop cars pulled away to the sound of laughter and catcalls.6 This was a familiar sight in the South during this period when White men erroneously believed it was their duty to protect the purity of White women and preserve a “racial hierarchy” based upon White superiority.7Memphis was significant during the interwar period when Marxist organizations, such as the Communist Party, began to emphasize racial issues as distinct from class oppression in the United States. Harry Haywood was an African American who served valiantly in World War I in the United States Army. When he returned to the country after the War, he was discouraged by the continued mistreatment of African Americans and joined the Communist Party in the hope of finding solutions to the atrocities visited upon Black Americans. By 1933, Haywood was a high-ranking member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) and a member of the Soviet Politburo. Haywood's protest of Levon Carlock's murder was a pivotal moment in Memphis race politics. During this period, Haywood and his fellow organizers connected directly and indirectly with local activists such as members of the Memphis Socialist Party (MSP) to fight racial discrimination within the city. Haywood's protest of the Carlock murder exposed the limits of the White superiority hierarchy within the city and increased avenues in which organizers could operate outside of the White power structure in the South. In 1933, the work carried out by Haywood and other antiracist activists/organizations developed a template for Black radical organizing that was used during the remainder of the interwar period throughout the South and the nation.8 Providing continued evidence that organizing around racial issues in the South could facilitate a mass movement, Haywood's protest of the Memphis police's cold-blooded murder of Levon Carlock encouraged interracial organizing on a grander scale than ever before seen in the South. During the Levon Carlock murder protest, activists and organizations did not allow race to divide them. Their movements intertwined, with the Black struggle for freedom as their glue.This study examines the convergence that formed a mass movement for the development of networks that were used throughout the South to fight Jim Crow repression well into the Civil Rights Era. The article is into three sections with a conclusion. The first section explores the CPUSA's interactions with racial issues in the United States to present Harry Haywood's contributions to the Party's platform, which propelled much of his Memphis activism in 1933. The second section focuses upon the racial climate in Memphis in the immediate years before Haywood's visit in 1933. In order to understand the outcome of Haywood's 1933 visit to Memphis it is important to see the brutal racial issues that abounded, even though the city was a glaring Southern exception due to the continued enfranchisement of Black Memphians. The third section details the Carlock murder protest and its important accomplishments. Although not immediately recognized by many, including Haywood and other Central Committee members, the protest forged new alliances, evolved cultural analyses of White superiority hierarchies in the South, and expanded networks of antiracist resistance throughout the South. Harry Haywood's long overlooked contribution to this structural development shows the importance of reclaiming the revolutionary figures of the Black freedom struggle who laid important groundwork for the civil rights movement in the post-World War II era, which continues to influence antiracist struggles today.In early January 1933, Nat Ross was certain that he needed an experienced Black organizer in the South. Early in 1932, Ross took over as district organizer of the largest CPUSA region in South with an extensive African American population, District 17. Since that time, he had become familiar with the many issues facing African Americans in the South. Although headquarters were located in Birmingham, Alabama, District 17 not only encompassed the state of Alabama but also Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee.9 Ross had seen a lot of the despair among African Americans in the South but he had not been able to break ground into large areas such as Memphis. After contemplating the size of his district, he was certain that “a separate district should be considered—with Memphis . . . as the Dist. Headquarters.”10 Ross had joined the Communist party in 1929 while working on his PhD at Columbia University.11 He had a theoretical mind and wanted a like-minded organizer in the South. In a January 1933 letter to the Central Committee of the CPUSA, he formally requested, “we would like to have Harry H.”12By 1933, Harry Haywood was considered to be the CPUSA's “foremost theoretician” due to the incredible changes in the racial paradigm brought about by the Great War.13 During World War I, several factors compounded to exacerbate Marxists’ inability to find answers to the racial inequality in America. Among these factors was the influx of African Americans to northern U.S. factory cities such as Chicago and New York from the farm communities of the South known as the Great Migration. From 1916 to 1919, over a half-million African Americans migrated from the South to the North in search of jobs in the steel and meat-packing industries that were in need of employees due to a large number of White workers heading off to the War.14 As World War I began to grind to an end in 1918, many White soldiers began to return home only to find their former jobs no longer available and an increased African American population. By 1919, several large northern U.S. cities including Chicago were engulfed in bloody race riots due to labor and housing issues.15 Moreover, African American serviceman returned home from the trenches of Europe to discover they were still considered second-class citizens even though they had risked their lives for their country.16 These problems intensified racial inequality in America to the point that many African Americans joined the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a group that endeavored to establish an independent nation in Africa for the return of all people of African descent.17 As these issues raged for African Americans, the Socialist Party (SP) continued to ignore fundamental aspects of racism, insisting that racial inequality would disappear when the working class won the class struggle in America.18 However, events had recently unfolded that caused major changes for both the SP and the way Marxists handled questions about race.The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought significant changes to how American Marxists viewed the plight of African Americans. When the Bolshevik Party led by V. I. Lenin took power in Russia in November of 1917 and established the USSR, it became the first Marxist country. The effect of the Russian Revolution was monumental to Marxists worldwide because they now had a legitimate proletarian country. One of the most important Marxist/socialist organizations of the period was the African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB). Formed in 1919 in Harlem by Cyril Briggs, the ABB prided itself on being a secretive group of militant race radicals. In function, though, they were a group of intellectuals and activists searching for solutions to racial inequality in America.19 The ABB and its leader Cyril Briggs, a Caribbean immigrant to the United States, initially supported Garvey's Back to Africa Movement, but after Lenin's address at the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern), the ABB became staunch supporters of communism.20 Throughout the history of the ABB, members recruited into their ranks were some of the most important figures of the burgeoning Black radical movement, including Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud. At the Fourth Congress of the Comintern held in Moscow in 1922, McKay and Huiswoud were the “Negro delegates” sent by the ABB to attend the Congress and addressed the plight of African Americans with Bolshevik leaders. The Fourth Congress formally established the Soviet Union's intent to assist African Americans and formed a “Negro Bureau” to ensure the new policies were carried out.21 Although the outcomes of the Fourth Congress failed to elevate the Black freedom struggle to the level of the class struggle to most White CP members, the new association between the ABB and the Soviet Union opened the door to finding new solutions to racial inequality in America and also encouraged many African Americans to study in the Soviet Union in order to devise these new solutions.Haywood took this challenge and went to the Soviet Union. Arriving in 1925, he thrived in the space afforded him to study the plight of African Americans.22 Due to Harry Haywood's promise as a theoretician, he was promoted to the elite Lenin School in 1927. First established in 1926 by the Comintern, the Lenin School was developed as an institution with three-year courses for intensive study of communist theory.23 It was a school of extreme prestige in the international communist movement. When Haywood was offered a spot, the CPUSA wasted no time finding the funds to bankroll his enrollment.24 He became the first African American student to attend the college and quickly began to study Lenin's writings about racial issues in America.25 In addition, he studied the work of Marx, especially his work regarding the American Civil War, and met many communists from around the world, including those in colonized countries. The most significant of these countries for Haywood was Ireland. To Haywood, the plight of the Irish in their struggles against the British had the most parallels to the struggles faced by African Americans. Haywood was not alone in this belief; Lenin had felt the same way and he often conflated the two groups and emphasized their importance to the International Communist Revolution.26 Therefore, Haywood worked closely with Irish communists to learn as much as possible about the Irish struggle. Haywood later noted in his autobiography, “I was shortly to find these observations applicable to the liberation movement of U.S. Blacks.”27 Soon, Haywood viewed African Americans in the “Black belt” as a nation deserving political autonomy.The Sixth Congress of the Communist International of the Soviet Union took place in 1928 and featured a section dedicated to the reexamination of the “Negro Question” in America. In 1926, the Comintern took a more active role in finding a solution to African American inequality that included a large conference in Brussels. Unfortunately, African Americans’ insistence that race was an important factor to fighting oppression in the United States continuously broke down around concerns from White Comintern members that racial struggles were merely part of the larger class struggle. However, the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928 presented a new challenge to the old notion of prioritizing the class struggle.28Haywood was a delegate at the twenty-third session of the Sixth Congress and he wasted no time in offering a draft thesis he had developed.29 Haywood and his fellow Lenin School comrades had turned their many discussions about self-determination for African Americans into a working resolution that attacked several issues concerning human rights for Blacks in the United States. Chief among them was the contention that fighting “Jim Crow” and developing antilynching campaigns, especially in the southern United States, could never build a mass movement. Instead, Haywood argued the problem was that racial issues in the southern United States were treated secondarily and relegated to a subordinate role in the class struggle.30 Therefore, if the African American freedom struggle was viewed as a national yearning for self-determination that demanded full social and political equality, one could see the importance of race in America to the class struggle. “Race,” according to Haywood's resolution, “is defined as a device of national oppression, a smokescreen thrown up by the class enemy, to hide the underlying economic and social conditions involved in Black oppression and to maintain the division of the working class.” In addition, Haywood argued, “the Black freedom struggle is a revolutionary movement in its own right, directed against the very foundations of U.S. imperialism.”31 These arguments formed the basis of Haywood's “Black Belt Nation Thesis,”32 which declared that the southern United States (with the largest African-American population) was an oppressed “nation within a nation” that deserved full social and political equality.33 However, this proposal caused considerable controversy within the CPUSA and proved difficult to enforce in the United States due to differing interpretations of the thesis.At first, the BBNT was controversial to both White and Black members. Black members of the CP believed that the BBNT “smacked of the Back to Africa Movement” and could never influence change within the United States.34 Haywood was able to allay some of their concerns, however, through an emphasis upon how the BBNT was not a separatist movement that intended to remove African Americans from the United States. Nor was it Black Nationalism, but more like a strategy directed toward economic, political, and social autonomy in order to encourage true equality—not just the ability to drink from the same water fountain as White citizens.35 The controversy among White members, however, was a tougher obstacle to overcome. Even the most progressive White CP members still retained a strong belief that Whites were the superior race, especially those CP members residing in the South. Large numbers of these members had lived their entire lives in an area that continued to treat African Americans as if they were second-class citizens (if not subhuman is some instances).36 These members had also seen intense violence directed toward African Americans within a social context that sanctioned such actions. Front pages of Southern newspapers were often littered with sickeningly specific lynching accounts that stated in bold letters details such as “Negro Tries to End Life by Swallowing Hot Coals as Flames Eat Flesh From Legs,” when reporting the lynching of an African American who was burned at the stake.37 Assumptions about African Americans’ subordinate position in society were deeply entrenched into the fabric of Southern culture. Therefore, White CP members (or White Southerners in general) found it difficult to consider African American issues as important as White issues. Often termed “white chauvinism,” these biases, at the very least, manifested into practices in which White CP members stated they were dedicated to racial equality but were actually doing very little to help African Americans. To Haywood, White chauvinism was the major issue blocking the implementation of the BBNT in the United States, especially in the South.38In hopes of eradicating “white chauvinism” within the CPUSA, Haywood was appointed to the Central Committee of the CPUSA. Haywood returned to the United States in November of 1930 after being in the Soviet Union for nearly five years.39 During his time in Russia, many important things had transpired for the CPUSA and the United States, including the Great Depression and the passing of the BBNT by the Comintern. In the United States, especially in the South, many White CPUSA members were reluctant to organize with African Americans and enforced segregation within their local ranks or at the very least dismissed racial issues as secondary “Negro work” that was to be carried out by Black party members only. Because the party had difficulties implementing the BBNT among American communists, Haywood was appointed to CPUSA's Central Committee as the head of the newly formed “Negro Administration,” a group dedicated to showing the CPUSA's commitment to the BBNT. Therefore, Haywood began to purge the CPUSA of members who refused to support the new Soviet line; over 100 members were dismissed from the party during Haywood's first year on the Central Committee.40 The most prominent of these dismissals came after the trial of CPUSA member August Yokinen in Harlem. Yokinen not only refused to aid a fellow African American communist, but also assisted the mob that attacked the Black member.41 Throughout the early 1930s, CPUSA leadership supported Haywood and he quickly recruited many people of color who sought a solution to African American inequality. At this point, Haywood directed his energies toward organizing African Americans throughout the country.42 However, the most important work for Haywood still lay ahead.In March 1931 nine African American youths were accused of raping two White women on a train bound for Memphis. The arrest and subsequent trials of the young men, dubbed the “Scottsboro Boys,” brought a renewed need for the CPUSA and its African American organizer, Harry Haywood, to establish the new Soviet line in the South. Coming just weeks after the Yokinen trial, CPUSA leadership viewed the case as an opportunity to both fight White chauvinism within their ranks and to showcase the brutal racism inherent in Southern law.43 Shortly after the young men were arrested, they were quickly brought to trial in Scottsboro, Alabama. They were sentenced to death even though the lawyers for the young men proved that the two women were sex workers who had decided to say they were raped to avoid being arrested for prostitution. The CPUSA intervened when they discovered the women were lying and sent their team of lawyers, the International Labor Defense (ILD), to defend the young men.44 The ILD was the legal arm of the CPUSA but also worked closely with the AGITPROP (agitation and propaganda) wing of the Party to bring international and national attention to cases the ILD litigated. William Patterson, former roommate of Haywood at the Lenin School, was now secretary of the ILD. He requested increased reporting of the legal proceedings. The CPUSA reports of the trial were not only in the United States but also broadcast throughout the world. At one point, Clarence Darrow, arguably the most prominent defense attorney in America at the time, considered defending the young men. This brought considerable national and international attention to the case.45 Finally, in November 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Scottsboro Boys’ convictions on the grounds of ineffectual council and granted all nine young men a new trial.46 By late 1932 Haywood had yet to venture to the South, and he now believed it was the perfect time to take advantage of this momentum and seek out other potential Scottsboro-like injustices in the southern United States.Haywood arrived in Birmingham, Alabama, in early 1933. Since the Scottsboro case began, Haywood watched from afar as a mass movement formed around the racism that the trial and subsequent protest had brought to the surface. After continued correspondences with district organizer Nat Ross, and due to Haywood's belief that “the South was the center of gravity” for continued implementation of the BBNT's core tenets, Haywood moved his operations there.47 His primary concern in the South was finding incidents of systemic abuse that contained a racial component. At first, he spent several weeks with the primarily Black communist Sharecroppers Union headquartered in Birmingham. His meetings with African American organizers such as Hosea Hudson and Al Murphy were extremely important to the Alabama communist movement.48 Haywood's next stop was Atlanta, in order to meet with Benjamin Davis, lawyer for Angelo Herndon. In addition to Scottsboro, Herndon's case garnered national attention for the CPUSA. Herndon, an African American, was arrested in July 1932 for organizing Black workers and sentenced to several years in prison under an archaic law. When Haywood met with Benjamin Davis they worked together for several weeks to appeal Herndon's sentence.49 Herndon was eventually released in 1934, and his case constituted one more reason why African Americans turned to the CPUSA for assistance in the early 1930s.50By 1933, Haywood was convinced that organizing around race in the American South was the necessary next step for the Black freedom struggle. The early work of the Sharecroppers Union proved that labor unionizing was important for African Americans and needed to target labor areas with increased Black employment rates such as agriculture. Likewise, Herndon's case presented the need for Black labor organizing but also was a strong example of the need for outside assistance in order to resist the entrenched system of White supremacy in the South. However, the Scottsboro case showcased the grandest potential in organizing solely around racial issues. It was clear that the rape accusations had nothing to do with class struggle because the young men were accused of something based solely upon the color of their skin. In addition, the case elicited attention from both White and Black people who decried the poor treatment of the young men. To Haywood, Scottsboro presented a perfect opportunity to showcase how race (or racism) could be used to form a mass movement without any connections to class struggle.51 Although it could be argued that the Comintern was more concerned with supplanting capitalism with communism in America, the international attention of the Scottsboro trial brought global notoriety to the Comintern and its developing reputation as an organization that assisted the oppressed, regardless of color. Early on in the proceedings, Scottsboro presented how assisting Black Southerners stripped of their basic civil liberties was both beneficial and possible, not only to the Comintern but also to the Black freedom struggle.52 Thus, the Scottsboro trial started to turn White opinions against the brutal racism of the Southern legal system—something that had not occurred on a large scale in the United States in the twentieth century.53 With this in mind, Haywood's next stop in the South was Memphis and it was arguably his most important.When Haywood made it to Memphis, he found himself the catalyst at two important moments in time. With the BBNT, he diligently worked out the issue of the importance of class within Marxist circles. As Cedric Robinson notes, “Marxism is a Western construction . . . emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated . . . through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures.”54 Marxist theory developed as a critique of capitalism in Europe during a period when there were only class issues on the continent and little to no consideration of race or slavery. Even though Europeans were commonly involved with chattel slavery in their colonies, they never considered the colonies part of Europe.55 Therefore, race must be looked at from a global perspective to see the differences and not merely reduced into the White mainstream Marxist view that everything was a class struggle.56 Through this expanded view, Black Marxist theorists of the twentieth century, like Haywood, were able to articulate how world capitalism “was made possible by the ideologies of racism,”—especially in areas such as the southern United States.57 Moreover, Black Marxists were important to the radicalization of Marxism during the interwar period because they brought an “African” perspective to a White European ideology in order to challenge the “Western” structured racial hierarchy. In particular, African Americans such as Haywood started the radical process of expanding Marxist parameters to include race and using this transitional period to challenge the system of White supremacy in the South that ran throughout the legal system with Jim Crow laws and extralegal social factors such as the acceptance of lynching by the majority of White citizens of the southern United States. Understanding the anti-Black racism imbedded into the Southern system and inspired by his ability to expand Marxist parameters to include race, Haywood's next stop was Memphis—an anomaly in the South due to the Church family and other Black Memphians’ ability to resist and maintain some of their civil liberties since Reconstruction.58 However, the city was no less imbued in a system that maintained White superiority at all costs.Haywood arrived in Memphis in late February 1933 and quickly began organizing for African American Civil Liberties. District 17 director Nat Ross was reluctant to let Haywood, an important member of the Central Committee, go alone into a city as dangerous as Memphis. He insisted two White organizers, Boris Israel and another man known only as Forshay, go with Haywood. Haywood was expert at maneuvering in the South and was confident about his ability because, even though he spoke Russian fluently, he could still turn on what he referred to as his “‘field-nigger’ drawl” when speaking to anyone he did not know.59 Haywood's time in Memphis coincided with the many issues that were coming to a head. He and CPUSA members wasted no time in finding issues to potentially garner national and international attention for both the Party and the atrocities visited upon African Americans in the region. As well, the Depression had caused increased unemployment in the area for many Black and White tenant farmers.60 This brought an influx of unemployed African American workers from the surrounding Delta region into Memphis. According to historian Nan Woodruff, over 90 percent of the Black hardwood and cotton employs laid off in the Delta region (which included not only areas in West Tennessee but also Arkansas and Mississippi) made their way into Memphis as the Great Depression accelerated during the early 1930s.61 In 1933, the CPUSA's commitment to help these individuals motivated their campaigns in Memphis.CPUSA members quickly found an incident in Memphis that exemplified Blacks’ life in the South; the murder of Levon Carlock. On the morning of 25 February 1933, Memphis police officers shot Carlock after he reportedly attempted to evade arrest for the sexual assault of a White sex worker.62 This, of course, was the police report of what happened. Haywood sent Israel to find eyewitnesses and to talk to Carlock's widow, Eula May. Eula May's story was quite different than the one the Memphis Police Department reported. According to Eula May, Levon was only in the area t