African American Communists

"Remind them that the sword still hangs upon the wall and the heart still beats within the man, and that that sword will be unsheathed again, if necessary, in defense of your rights. Given them to understand that you will not stand patiently by and see your hard earnings squandered by a luxuriating class of idlers. If the American manhood will arouse itself and speak to those fellows in plain language, not to be misunderstood, they can save themselves, their country and their children, from the fate of poverty which awaits them. Will you do it?"

"The trusts will not allow you to vote them out of power because they are the power, as is shown by the interview given above."

"What has ever been granted to the countless millions of workers of Earth without a fight? Czar Nicholas has discovered that he is not all Russia. Will he "let the voice of the people be heard"? Was it argument or force that changed Czar Nicholas's mind? Well, the Russia people have gotten thin edge of the wedge in; let them keep striking hard, they will split the throne after a while."

"Women are stripped to the skin in the presence of leering, white-skinned, black-hearted brutes and lashed into insensibility and strangled to death from the limbs of trees. A girl child of fifteen years was lynched recently by these brutal bullies. Where has justice fled? The eloquence of Wendell Phillips is silent now. John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave. But will his spirit lie there moldering, too? Brutes, inhuman monsters—you heartless brutes—you whom nature forms by molding you in it, deceive not yourselves by thinking that another John Brown will not arise."

"Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination."

"Never since the days of the Spartan Helots has history recorded such brutality as has been ever since the war and as is now being perpetrated upon the Negro in the South. How easy for us to go to Russia and drop a tear of sympathy over the persecuted Jew. But a step across Mason’s and Dixon’s line will bring us upon a scene of horrors before which those of Russia, bad as they are, pale into insignificance! No irresponsible, blood-thirsty mobs prowl over Russian territory, lashing and lynching its citizens."

"Lucy Parsons never stopped working for the revolution to end the oppressive capitalist system. It could come only through a well-organized workers' movement, she said, which would take over the factories, all the means of production. Repeatedly imprisoned for her work, she saw free speech as crucial…Lucy was a warrior woman of unlimited courage and commitment."

"Lucy Parsons was a study in contradictions, many of them of her own devising. She strove to project the image of the perfect Victorian wife and mother, even while writing columns encouraging workers to dynamite the homes of the rich. She feuded with fellow anarchist Emma Goldman over the idea of "free love," wearing her public persona of pious chastity like a mourning veil while taking on new lovers in private. Her identity as one of the best-known anarchists in America clashed with her later involvement in the Communist Party, and the harsh criticism she reserved for generations of younger anarchist activists. Her horrific treatment of her son, Albert, Jr., whom she had confined in a psychiatric institution after he expressed his desire to join the military, remains difficult to fathom."

"The nineteenth century allowed little room for women of color to find their voices-let alone share them with the masses-and the few who did manage to break their silence often became figures of mixed curiosity and revulsion. There are few greater examples of that than Lucy Parsons...Her enthralling demeanor, sophisticated oratory skills, and blistering anti-capitalist rhetoric also made her a star to live crowds, defying the nineteenth-century social convention against women addressing mixed crowds...Her impassioned entreaties on behalf of suffering laborers earned her both awe and scorn from the press, which would call her a "red-mouthed anarchist" in one line and then breathlessly wax on about her beauty and fashionable dresses in the next."

"(The IWW} was not only the inheritor of many of the traditions of the 1880's but personalities who were identified with the 1880's were present at the early conventions of the IWW. The names may not be known to you unless you are students of labor history but included were such figures as Eugene Debs, Daniel DeLeon and Mrs. Lucy Parsons"

"At this (IWW) convention I was thrilled to meet Mrs. Lucy Parsons, widow of Albert Parsons, who had been executed 20 years before in the yard of the Cook County Jail in the heart of Chicago. While he was hanged she was held a prisoner in the Clark Street Station House, not far from where we were then meeting... I remember Mrs. Parsons speaking warmly to the young people, warning us of the seriousness of the struggles ahead that could lead to jail and death before victory was won. For years she traveled from city to city, knocking on the doors of local unions and telling the story of the Chicago trial. Her husband had said: "Clear our names!" and she made this her lifelong mission."

"Politics is the art of making the people believe that they are in power, when in fact, they have none."

"Women-of all colors-are the fastest growing incarcerated group, two-thirds being mothers of dependent children. A growing population of lifers and people on death row. A death-penalty system tabulated strenuously to race. In the words of the death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, "the barest illusion of rehabilitation [is being] replaced by dehumanization by design" in the maximum-security, sensory-deprivation units of the penal system in the United States, and in prison policies overall."

"Once again, my family and I find ourselves being assaulted by the obscenity that is Mumia Abu-Jamal. On Sunday October 5th, my husband's killer will once again air his voice from what masquerades as a prison, and spew his thoughts and ideas at another college commencement. Mumia Abu-Jamal will be heard and honored as a victim and a hero by a pack of adolescent sycophants at Goddard College in Vermont. Despite the fact that 33 years ago, he loaded his gun with special high-velocity ammunition designed to kill in the most devastating fashion, then used that gun to rip my husband's freedom from him--today, Mumia Abu-Jamal will be lauded as a freedom fighter. Undoubtedly the administrators at Goddard who first accepted, then enthusiastically supported Abu-Jamal as their speaker will be moved by his "important message" when, if one distills that message to its basic meaning, it amounts to nothing more than the same worn out hatred for this country and everyone in law enforcement that Mumia Abu-Jamal has harbored his entire life. Many at Goddard College have said that this is a matter of Abu-Jamal's First Amendment right to speak and be heard. What a convenient way to dodge their responsibility to take a moral position on this situation. This is not a matter of First Amendment rights -- it's a matter of right and wrong. Across the country, people have been voicing their disgust with the wrong that the college is about to commit by allowing a convicted cop-killer to speak to them. Is this the message to be heard? How could they allow him to speak when Danny no longer has a voice? It is my opinion that all murderers should forfeit their right to free speech when they take the life of an innocent person. I have repeatedly seen college administrators deny conservative and religious speakers access to their campuses when even the tiniest minority feel their message is in some way offensive. What could be more offensive than having a person who violently took the life of another imparting his "unique perspective" on your students? Let's be honest. The instructors, administrators and graduates at Goddard College embrace having this killer as their commencement speaker not despite the fact that he brutally murdered a cop, but because he brutally murdered a cop. Otherwise, like so many other speakers that have been denied access to college campuses across the country, Goddard's administration would have lived up to their moral responsibility and pulled the plug on this travesty long ago. Shame on Goddard College and all associated with that school for choosing to honor an arrogant remorseless killer as their commencement speaker. Unfortunately, this is something that I am certain they will be proud of for the rest of their lives."

"The media, itself an arm of mega-corporate power, feeds the fear industry, so that people are primed like pumps to support wars on rumor, innuendo, legends, and lies."

"I spend my days preparing for life, not preparing for death... They haven't stopped me from doing what I want every day. I believe in life, I believe in freedom, so my mind is not consumed with death. It's with love, life and those things. In many ways, on many days, only my body is here, because I am thinking about what's happening around the world."

"The role of television is the illusion of company, noise. I call it the fifth wall and the second window: the window of illusion."

"Do you see law and order? There is nothing but disorder, and instead of law there is the illusion of security. It is an illusion because it is built on a long history of injustices: racism, criminality, and the genocide of millions. Many people say it is insane to resist the system, but actually, it is insane not to."

"At the risk of quoting Mephistopheles I repeat: Welcome to hell. A hell erected and maintained by human-governments, and blessed by black robed judges. A hell that allows you to see your loved ones, but not to touch them. A hell situated in America's boondocks, hundreds of miles away from most families. A white, rural hell, where most of the captives are black and urban. It is an American way of death."

"The state would rather give me an uzi than a microphone."

"The artist must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. The history of the capitalist era is characterized by the degradation of my people: despoiled of their lands, their true culture destroyed... denied equal protection of the law, and deprived their rightful place in the respect of their fellows."

"For the sake of our future collective history I ask that we never forget this one great forefather who, regardless of his glory, never forgot to claim our suffering as his own; that son of a slave who never bowed down to tyranny; That compassionate king who went all over the world singing our own best song in solidarity with the best hopes of people everywhere longing for justice and equality and peace."

"I am thrilled to think about the visionary, loving excellence of his life, symbolized by his painstaking fluency in twenty-five languages-a life and a fluency that ignorant, hateful, totally wrong men, here, in America, sought to cancel with one word! And that one word was "communist"!"

"I want to remember and to praise his compassion and his defiance and the ever enlarging scope of his moral concern. Today, as the United States insists upon punishing the Arab peoples of Iraq, I want to embrace the lucid, principled commitment of his amazing life. I want to respect and fathom his declaration of himself as African. I want to follow him to the workers of England, whose cause he so passionately espoused. I want to watch him rushing again and again to the side of the miners of Wales. I want to intervene and shield him from the atrocious insults he endured at restaurants, concert halls, hotels, and the actual and the political attempts to lynch him. I want to join his studies of Marx and track his on-site inspection of Soviet efforts at equality for minority peoples. I want to cheer him on as he founded, just one year after I was born, the Council on African Affairs, which, for almost twenty years, was the sole United States organization devoted to assistance of African liberation struggles. I want to enjoy his twenty minutes of standing ovation triumphs onstage as Othello, or as himself, singing Negro Spirituals and Russian and Spanish folksongs. I want to understand and copy his devotion to the eradication of racist everything and his rejection and exposure of economic inequities everywhere. I need to honor his resistance to the stupidity of Harry Truman's Cold War and Joe McCarthy's un-American witch-hunt. I want to cheer as he becomes an honorary member of the C.I.O. and the International Longshoremen's Union. I want to shout when W.E.B. DuBois presents him with the 1952 Stalin Peace Prize."

"Today I wish to pay tribute to an astonishing, powerful forefather of all of us, an exemplary Black man, an unparalleled role model who studied, and mastered, twenty-five languages, including Chinese and Arabic, as well as East and West coast African languages. A great human being, an exemplary Black man who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Rutgers University, a huge hero who twice made All-America in football, and who earned fifteen Varsity letters in six or seven other sports, besides. An exemplary Black man who sang like a God and comported himself like a king."

"Not very long ago I was invited by the satirical Krokodile to see the Soviet Union. In Tashkent I sat on a parkbench where I could drink in the breathtaking oriental beauty of the opera house. I was thinking of coming back the next day with my sketch pad when a little Uzbek girl came to me holding out a flower. Her oval face was so lovely, even with the tooth missing from in front. Of course I couldn't understand what she was saying but Yuri, my interpreter explained, "She asks if you are Paul Robeson?" Her mother appeared and suddenly it seemed there were hundreds of Uzbek children with their mothers, all carrying hastily picked flowers. I was terribly flustered but I managed to explain that I wasn't Paul Robeson but that he was my friend. And then one Uzbek mother, proud of her English said, "Here, he is our beloved Pauli.""

"We helped plow the fields, build the dams, write the poems and sing the music of America. Are not all Americans proud, of Doree Miller, of Frederick Douglass, of Paul Robeson, of Joe Louis, of Marian Anderson."

"And then there was Robeson and the heart-filling voice singing WHAT IS AMERICA TO ME."

"Paul Robeson was holding forth on the wizardry of old w:Josh Gibson, w:Satchel Paige and other black ballplayers jimcrowed out of what was euphemistically called the national pastime..."One day," said Paul, "our boys are going to bust right into the Yankee Stadium dugout and teach 'em the fine points of the game.""

"My first real job was as art editor of the People's Voice. Adam Powell, Charlie Buchanan and Ben Davis published that great sheet and one day Adam called me into his office. "Ollie," he said, "there's someone I want you to meet." A beaming giant of a man left his chair, thumped me on the back with a hand as powerful as John Henry's sledgehammer and boomed, "Feller, I just wanted you to know that those cartoons of yours are great."Of course it was Paul Robeson. I can't remember doing much more than gulping. What can one say to a mountain? But it was the beginning of a treasured friendship."

"Downtown they were still mournfully talking about the good, solid white folks who had walked into space from Wall Street's many windows. Uptown we were talking about Paul Robeson, who was singing songs which gripped some inner fibres in us that had been dozing. And he was saying things which widened black eyes and sharpened black ears, things which sounded elusively familiar."

"There is this... that must be admired about Du Bois, Robeson, Ben Davis and others. They are not taking it lying down. Ben Davis is in prison... Robeson has sacrificed... DuBois has fought without let up for over half a century and at 85 be is determined as ever. Some day when truth gets a hearing, America, regardless of colour, we will honour them."

"“Cross That Line” is an important poem to me because I loved Paul Robeson so much as a child. I loved his voice. We had a record of him singing. And I wouldn’t read his biography till I was an adult, and know about what he suffered as a so-called communist and how his passport was taken away from him and he was not allowed to leave the nation, though he had a huge fan club in Europe and elsewhere. So I thought this was so funny when he did this, and I now own a CD of this concert."

"Paul Robeson stood/on the northern border/of the USA/and sang into Canada/where a vast audience/sat on folding chairs/waiting to hear him./He sang into Canada./His voice left the USA/when his body was/not allowed to cross that line…"

"Robeson studied several African languages and planned to undertake a thorough study of West African folk song and folklore. As he wrote in a 1934 article in the London Spectator, his goal was to introduce the world to the beauty, power, and dignity of African and African-descended art. "I hope to be able to interpret this original and unpolluted [African] folk song to the Western world and I am convinced that there lies a wealth of uncharted musical material in that source which I hope, one day, will evoke the response in English and American audiences which my Negro spirituals have done." He even understood himself to be "African," both culturally and spiritually, and he saw in black cultural values the foundation for a new vision of a new society, one that could emancipate not only black people but the entire West...Whereas for Claudia Jones the structural position of black people-black women in particular-in the political economy placed them in the vanguard of the revolution, for Paul Robeson it was their culture that gave the black movement its special insight and character...Unfortunately, neither Du Bois nor Robeson nor anyone else with a continuing commitment to the Left had anything to say about Stalin's atrocities-the political assassinations, the gulags, the Soviet state's hidden war against political dissidents and Russian Jews. Although it is not clear who knew what before Khruschev unveiled these crimes to the world in 1956, the silence that followed these revelations is one of the great tragedies in the history of the Communist movement. The other great tragedy, for the black freedom movement in particular, was the silencing of radical leadership. Robeson, Du Bois, and Claudia Jones were among the many victims of statesponsored anticommunist witch hunts."

"my first childhood memory of the name Moses came from hearing Paul Robeson singing of him, in the unmistakable deep bass that was his voice alone: "Go down Moses/Way down in Egypt land/Tell ol' Pharaoh/To let my people go""

"I met Paul Robeson and Alpheus Hunton. Absolute giants. One could not help but be impressed. Minds were pried open by their keen insight, the manner in which they explained things. One had to join the struggle for the oppressed."

"Vast quantities of U.S. bombers, tanks and guns have been sent against Ho Chi Minh and his freedom-fighters; and now we are told that soon it will be 'advisable' to send America GI's into Indo-China in order that the tin, rubber and tungsten of Southeast Asia be kept by the "free world"-meaning white Imperialism."

"Yes, all Africa remembers that it was Litvinov who stood alone beside Haile Selassie in Geneva, when Mussolini's sons flew with the blessings of the Pope to drop bombs on Ethiopian women and children. Africa remembers that it was the Soviet Union which fought the attempts of the Smuts to annex Southwest Africa to the slave reservation of the Union of South Africa... if the peoples of the Congo refuse to mine the uranium for the atom bombs made in Jim Crow factories in the United States; if all these peoples demand an end to floggings, an end to the farce of 'trusteeship' in the former Italian colonies.... The Soviet Union is the friend of the African and the West Indian peoples."

"You are the non-patriots, and you are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves."

"Whatever has happened to Stalin, gentlemen, is a question for the Soviet Union.… You are responsible, and your forebears, for 60 million to 100 million black people dying in the slave ships and on the plantations, and don’t ask me about anybody, please."

"I am here because I am opposing the Neo-Fascist cause, which I see arising here in these committees."

"My father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?"

"In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington."

"You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too."

"The Korean war has always been an unpopular war among the American people. We remember the unforgivable trickery in the use of the United Nations to further the purposes of “American century” imperialists in that land—quite comparable to the taking of Texas from Mexico, the rape of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Hawaii...today the Negro people watch Africa and Asia and closely follow the liberation struggles of the rising peoples in these lands. We watch the United Nations and see the U.S.A. join with the western imperialist nations to stifle the liberation struggles. We cannot help but see that it is Vishinsky and the spokesman of the Eastern European Peoples Democracies who defend and vote for the interests of the African and Asian peoples. Yes, peace can and must be won, to save the world from the terrible destruction of World War III."

"But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people. Wallace was hailed by vast throngs when he resigned from Truman’s cabinet in protest against the war-mongering of the then Secretary of State James Byrnes, now the Negro-hating governor of South Carolina. We know how Truman betrayed the American people in their hopes for peace, how he betrayed the Negro people in their thirst for equal rights, how he tore up the Bill of Rights and subjected the whole American people to a reign of FBI-terrorization."

"The telling of these truths is an important part of our work in building a strong and broad peace movement in the United States...at home in the United States we found continued and increased persecution, first of leaders of the Communist Party, and then of all honest anti-fascists."

"In this framework we can make clear what co-existence means. It means living in peace and friendship with another kind of society—a fully integrated society where the people control their destinies, where poverty and illiteracy have been eliminated and where new kinds of human beings develop in the framework of a new level of social living."

"We must join with the tens of millions all over the world who see in peace our most sacred responsibility. Once we are joined together in the fight for peace we will have to talk to each other and tell the truth about each other. How else can peace be won? I have always insisted—and will insist, even more in the future on my right to tell the truth as I know it about the Soviet peoples: of their deep desires and hopes for peace, of their peaceful pursuits of reconstruction from the ravages of war, as in historic Stalingrad; and to tell of the heroic efforts of the friendly peoples in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, great, new China and North Korea—to explain, to answer the endless falsehoods of the warmongering press with clarity and courage."