Race-Baiting is a gun aimed recklessly at the heart and soul of America gathering traction as a result of Obama and Media Inc. v Zimmerman.
The question has to be asked: why such an outburst of anger over the verdict? Objectively there was no evidence of racial profiling or intention to kill. Why is such a large proportion of the black community and totalitarian liberals still raging over the verdict? Part of the answer is the soft underbelly of American politics--the racial divide in this country when blacks were slaves- -
before Caucasians, approximately 180,000 African Americans and a Republican president fought a Civil War to end it. Yet, gross injustices remained:
lynching, the poll tax, segregation and unfair employment practices.
But there are deeper roots to the anger we see - -foreign roots that can be traced directly back to Moscow. This is a necessary part of the explanation. In
Capitalism in Agriculture (1899) Lenin described the American South as "segregated, hidebound, a stifling atmosphere, a sort of prison for 'emancipated' Negroes..." While Lenin (d 1924) was preaching to the impressionable left in the West, he quietly began the system of concentration camps based on slave labor, terrorism, founded the All Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat the Counterrevolution, Speculation and Sabotage (Cheka) and directed mass murders that resulted in the deaths of 40,000,000 Russian citizens and 100,000,000 lives worldwide. Lenin did not live to see the Civil Rights marches of the sixties, with whites and blacks marching shoulder to shoulder that resulted in historic legislative changes. We had had our own revolutions first to abolish slavery and then to peaceably seek changes in voting laws, school segregation and employment practices- - revolutions that did not forfeit freedom of speech or press.
There is a dark history beneath the agitprop of the Zimmerman trial and as West has courageously pointed out in
American Betrayal, The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character, until we expose this history we cannot correct it. From its beginning in 1919 the communist movement in America
2 tried to recruit blacks to Lenin's battlefield. Shortly after the formation of the Comintern in 1919 the director of the U.S. branch,
Ludwig C.A.K. Martens, met with a black American named Lovett Fort-Whiteman, to launch the American Communist movement's strategy to enlist blacks. Fort-Whiteman was the first American-born black communist and a founding member of CPUSA, someone
Time Magazine called the "Reddest of the Blacks." Otto Huiswoud was a charter member of the U.S. Party in 1919.
Another radical socialist, Cyril Briggs, claimed "If to fight for one's rights is to be bolshevists then we are Bolshevists!" He championed "race pride" and a separate part of the U.S. for black self-government.
3 He also founded the African Blood Brotherhood and the
Crusader in 1918 which declared there was no justice in capitalist America and that it was futile to deny that the white working class was racist. (Solomon,
The Cry Was Unity, 1998) The theme of the
Crusader, partly financed by the Comintern, was the greatness of Bolshevik power. Briggs questioned how long would it be before Negroes joined with the "radical forces of the world that are working for the overthrow of capitalism and the dawn of a new day, a new heaven on earth, shepherding many into the Party. Rose Pastor Stokes, speaking in 1921 lobbied for a Communist-black alliance to destroy capitalism "root and branch," telling an audience in Harlem: "Go East and you will find the red armies of Russia marching shoulder to shoulder with black men." When the Negro recognizes his enemy, "he will be the most embittered, consistent and tireless opponent of capitalism...." (
Communist, Oct.1921) These early black communists were joined by: James W. Ford, Paul Robeson, Haywood, and DuBois, including Frank Marshall Davis,
card-carrying member 47544 and mentor to Barack Obama.
Eugene Lyons, UPI's correspondent sent to Stalin's heaven on earth, who opened his eyes to a living hell, said blacks were special targets and were to play a privileged role in the Party. In testimony to Congress on "
The American Negro in the Communist Party," Tappes saw the endgame: "I do not believe and I know they are not sincere in their efforts. They have grabbed the Negro issue as a matter through which they can attain the help and support of 15 million Negro people in this country in furthering the policies of the Soviet Union...." But the propaganda was successful, resulting in blacks joining the Communist Party convinced that they would fight for their rights; incorrectly concluding that since communists were on their side, anti-communists were racists; and finally since, according to the Party, capitalism was built on slave labor it had to be abolished.
The irony is that Marx was a racist.
In a July 1862 letter to Engels, in reference to his socialist political competitor, Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx wrote, ". . . it is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother had not interbred with a n####r. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product. The obtrusiveness of the fellow is also n####r-like."
4 Though portrayed publicly as a friend of the negro, he had "contempt for the entire negro race."
5 Another irony - -tragedy really- -was that Marx believed in slavery: "
As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.... Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry." Did the radicals read Marx and Lenin?
The third irony of blacks marching toward Lenin's Utopia is that
before they joined the Party, Lenin had published the decree: "On Red Terror;" and beginning in 1917 violence was unleashed resulting in the massacre of thousands of citizens; there was a shortage of bread and food (surplus food had to be handed over to the Dictatorship on pain of execution). Moreover, their leader had established slave labor camps; shut down all non-Bolshevik papers; forbade Bolshevik papers to publish defamatory articles about the Cheka; and decreed that the "enemies of the people" be executed. "Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity....you must make an example of these people.
Hang (I mean publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers."(Courteois,
The Black Book of Communism, 1999). They were hung publicly as seen in
The Soviet Story. Did the black pioneers know this? Did they understand the totalitarian mindset? The fourth irony was that blacks lived in an open society where they could protest and were allowed to express themselves politically. Those in Utopia could not- - as Fort-Whiteman was to discover. They lived in a country, not perfect, but where society hears, considers and reforms grievances.
Nevertheless American black communists believed the Party's line that freedom from injustices for them lay in revolution and a
Soviet America. Early recruits brought up the Negro question and in 1919 John Reed wrote to Zinoviev,
6 inaugurating the Comintern's leap into these issues and continuing in a discussion on the topic at the Fourth Comintern Congress in 1922.
7 But to improve the image of the Comintern as emancipator of blacks a permanent Negro Commission was formed in 1922 which provided a subsidy of $300,000 to propagandize American blacks. By 1923 Huiswoud became the first black member of the Party's Central Executive Committee.
After a "Negro Proposal" demanding political and social equality was rejected by labor, the Comintern used its own organization, the American Negro Labor Congress, founded in 1925 by Lovett Fort-Whiteman, to push the issue. Fort-Whiteman was associated with James W Ford who also served on the Negro Commission. In 1925 the Comintern selected 12 blacks to go to the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow, or KUTV, established in 1921 to train revolutionaries from colonial and dependent nations. Those who made the journey included Fort Whiteman, Nowell, Ford and Haywood. While they were in school learning about the beauties of Bolshevism and the fundamentals of oppression and revolution, between 1921 and 1922, 5 million Russians died of hunger; and between 1929 and 1933 Stalin created forced collectivization and began the liquidation of kulaks as a class. Two million peasants were deported, 6 million died of famine, and hundreds of thousands died as a result of deportation.
A book published in 1947 described the conditions of the boats taking Stalin's prisoners to Magadan, in northern Siberia. It painted a picture of conditions as horrible as the infamous slave ships between Africa and the New World. ". . . Special measures were taken to suppress disobedience or mutiny. Strong iron grilles cut the hold into several completely isolated sections. Armed guards walked constantly along narrow passages between the grilles. At carefully selected spots there were nests of machine guns which could cover every corner of the hold."
8
With the entrance of this small cadre of American blacks into Party influence, a tragic incident occurred in 1931 in Alabama, known as the Scottsboro Case. Nine boys were unjustly accused of raping two white women. Immediately the International Labor Defense (ILD) a section of International Red Aid headquartered in Moscow, sprang into action. Organized for the defense of Communist lawbreakers. ILD was a legal arm of the communist party totally controlled by Moscow that thrived by taking an injustice and exploiting it for the Party. Fort-Whiteman explained: the Negro was "revolutionary in a racial sense and it devolves upon the
American Communist Party to manipulate this racial revolutionary sentiment to the advantage of the class struggle." (
The Cry Was Unity, 48, emphasis added) Scottsboro was the perfect such case, creating national and international headlines. As a result, Scottsboro created sympathy in the black community toward communists. People marched, including the mothers of the Scottsboro boys, and the Communist Party, after much wrangling, controlled the defense.
9 The Scottsboro boys were tried and found guilty but the Supreme Court reversed the convictions. A benevolent appearing Stalin directing the ILD in Scottsboro was the same Stalin directing the traffic of the slave ships.
The case of Scottsboro is instructive as Manning Johnson, a former member of the Party who served on the National Committee,
testified at the House Un-American Activities citing the insincerity of the Communists in the case as one of the reasons. "We were constantly told by James W. Ford and others that we were not interested in saving the lives of the "damn" Scottsboro boys; that we were interested in using the Scottsboro case to penetrate Negro churches and civic organizations which we could not reach except for a cause of that kind, and in the course of the development of this campaign to raise the slogans of the Communist Party, and during our contacts with these large masses of Negroes to seek out the best elements among them and recruit them into the party."
During Stalin's lifetime we now know that more than 20 million Soviets, more than one out of eight men, women, and children, were executed by firing squads or sent to the Gulag. Roosevelt was President during this reign of terror. Voted into office by 71% of blacks, he opposed an anti-lynching bill. Since the Soviet archives were opened we also know that Lovett Fort-Whiteman, one of the Party's faithful followers, died in one of Stalin's prison camps
10 after being denounced by a black comrade for supporting Trotsky. These are some of the roots beneath the race-baiting of the Zimmerman trial. Case in point:
Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Maoist Communist party, organized and led protests in Oakland claiming: "We are all Trayvon Martin," and lobbying for racial unrest. The Trayvon Martin shooting was not a Scottsboro but leftists such as Avakian will continue to try to use it for that purpose.
And that is why it is not going away.
Endnotes:
1 Davis attended Amherst and graduated from Harvard Law School. He became radicalized through his role as defense attorney in the 1933 trial of Herndon, a black Communist charged with violating a Georgia law against "attempting to incite insurrection." Impressed with Herndon and his colleagues, he joined the Communist Party.
2 The first Communist organization formed in this country was the "Communist Party," founded by a Russian-speaking element at a convention held at Smolny Institute in Chicago in 1919. Another Communist group of native-born Americans met at the I.W.W. Hall in Chicago.
3 In 1935 the New York Communist Party published "
The Negroes in a Soviet America," by James W. Ford and James S. Allen which urged blacks to rise up and form a Soviet State in the South by applying for admission to the Comintern. It contained a firm pledge that a revolt would be supported by all American communists and liberals. It said that the Soviet Government would give the blacks more benefits than they would give to the whites, and "any act of discrimination or prejudice against the Negro would become a crime under the revolutionary law."
4 Marx referred to his son-in-law who was of French-Cuban origin and part Jewish, part Carib Indian, part French and part black as "the little Negro" or the "Gorilla," and said his daughter had solved the "color question by marrying a n####r." (Weyl,
Karl Marx: Racist, 1979, 73-4.)
5 Ibid.
6 Zinoviev an old Bolshevik, was executed during Stalin's "show trials."
7 In a slip, McKay, also present at the Congress, said with "sadness and candor, that bourgeois reformers had fought harder for the rights of blacks than Socialists and Communist had done." (
The Cry Was Unity, 1998, 41)
8 David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky,
Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, 1947.
9 The Comintern files contain a letter from Earl Browder, general secretary of CPUSA about Scottsboro. "Dear Comrades: The first Scottsboro verdict is expected in the middle of the week...and the verdict is bound to stir up a tremendous reverberation throughout the United States..no matter whether the decision is favorable or unfavorable there will be thousands of workers, of Negroes..who can be reached and drawn into a great mass meeting...." (quoted in Kengor
The Communist, 2012, 44)
10 The life of Fort-Whiteman was a tragedy. "By 1938 anyone in the Soviet Union identified as a Trotskyist by a ranking official of the Comintern was either dead or in the Gulag. Fort-Whiteman was in the Gulag." In 1996, records about Fort-Whiteman surfaced in the archives of the security service of Kazakhstan The documents show that on 1 July 1937 a "special session" of the NKVD held in Moscow which sentenced him to five years of internal exile for "anti-Soviet agitation." It sent Fort-Whiteman to Kazakhstan where he found work teaching.
But as the Great Terror continued Soviet authorities increased many of the punishments. On 8 May 1938 an NKVD board changed Fort-Whiteman's punishment to five years' hard labor and he was transferred to the prison labor camp near Magadan, in Siberia. He did not survive long, as the camps around Magadan were among the most lethal in the Gulag system. He died in 1939 at the Sevostlag labor camp at the age of forty-four. (
Soviet World of American Communism, by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Kyrill M. Anderson, 1998, 218-227.)
