African Americans and American Communism

Of the many radical and socialist political movements of the 20th century, the Communist Party (CP) USA, more than any other, placed black liberation at the top of its agenda. The Party won some critical victories for that cause and achieved a small but significant following among black workers and intellectuals, especially during the 1930s and 1940s. The first contact between blacks and communists was the result of a convergence of seminal events in the second decade of the 20th century. The Great War engendered irreparable splits in socialist parties over support or opposition to a war that opponents viewed as imperialist. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia followed by the formation of V. I. Lenin's Third Internationale (Comintern) spurred anticolonialist currents, as Lenin declared that struggles of non-European colonial and dependent peoples for self-determination was essential to the fortunes of working-class movements in developed states. Those events, in turn, stimulated movement toward the communist orbit by a segment of a new urban black intelligentsia drawn largely but not exclusively from West Indian immigrants already schooled in anticolonialism.