|
The Communist Party USA, ideologically committed to foster a Socialist revolution in the United States, played a significant role in defending the civil rights of African Americans during its most influential years of the 1930s and 1940s. In that period, the African-American population was still concentrated in the South, where it was largely disenfranchised, excluded from the political system, and oppressed under Jim Crow laws. By 1940, nearly 1.5 million blacks had migrated out of the South to northern and midwestern cities and become urbanized, but they were often met with discrimination, especially among working-class ethnic whites with whom they competed for jobs and housing. The labor struggle continued, and many unions discriminated against blacks. Additional migration of another 5 million blacks out of the South continued during and after World War II, with many going to West Coast cities, where the defense industry had expanded dramatically and offered jobs. ==Early years (1919–1928)== When the Communist Party USA was founded in the United States, it had almost no black members. The Communist Party had attracted most of its members from European immigrants and the various foreign language federations formerly associated with the Socialist Party of America; those workers, many of whom were not fluent English-speakers, often had little contact with black Americans or competed with them for jobs and housing. The Socialist Party had not attracted many African-American members during the years before the split when the Communist Party was founded. While its most prominent leaders, including Eugene V. Debs, were committed opponents of racial segregation, many in the Socialist Party were often lukewarm on the issue of racism. They considered discrimination against black workers to be an extreme form of capitalist worker exploitation. In addition, the party’s allegiance with unions that discriminated against minority workers compromised its willingness to attack racism directly; it did not seek out African-American members, nor did it hold recruitment drives where they lived. Some African Americans disaffected by Socialist attitudes joined the Communist Party; others went to the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), whose political philosophy was essentially Marxist in nature. The Communist Party at first repeated the economic position of the Socialist Party. Committed from the outset to bringing about world revolution, the party sympathized with anti-colonial and "national liberation" movements around the globe. Its view of the black worker struggle and on civil rights for blacks were based in the broader terms of anti-colonialism. From its early years in the U.S., the party recruited African-American members, with mixed results. Some African Americans preferred competing groups such as the ABB. In its early days, the party had the greatest appeal among black workers with an internationalist bent. From 1920 it began to intensively recruit African Americans as members. The most prominent black Communist Party members at this time were largely immigrants from the West Indies, who viewed a black worker struggle as being part of the broader campaigns against capitalism and imperialism. At the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Claude McKay, a Jamaican poet, and Otto Huiswoud, born in Suriname, persuaded the Comintern to set up a multinational Negro Commission that sought to unite all movements of blacks fighting colonialism. Harry Haywood, 〔Harvey Klehr, ''The Heyday of Americana Communism: The Depression Decade'' pp. 344–45〕 an American communist drawn out of the ranks of the African Blood Brotherhood, a socialist group with a large number of Jamaican émigrés in its leadership, also played a leading role. McKay persuaded the founders of the Brotherhood to affiliate with the Communist Party in the early 1920s. The African Blood Brotherhood claimed to have almost 3,500 members; relatively few of them, however, joined the party. The Comintern directed the American party in 1924 to redouble its efforts to organize African Americans. The party complied by creating the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) in 1925. That organization was also a failure: the black press denounced it and the labor movement generally ignored it, aside from a few party-controlled unions that had few black members. The ANLC, for its part, became isolated from other leading black organizations. It attacked the NAACP and related organizations as "middle-class accommodationists" controlled by white philanthropists. The ANLC and the Party had a more complex relationship with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); while the party approved of Garvey's fostering of "race consciousness", it was strongly opposed to his support for a separate black nation. When the party made efforts to recruit members from the UNIA, Garvey expelled the party members and sympathizers in its ranks 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Communist Party USA and African Americans」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|