FROM MY FORTHCOMING BOOK - HUGH MURRAY

What do Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mrs. Raymond Parks,, and Martin Luther King, Jr. all have in common? Yes, they were all blacks, or Negroes as the more common term used in the earlier era. And many would have had other common experiences, but one I want to stress here – they were all, at some point in their lives, in the orbit of the Communist Party of the USA. My point is that the CPUSA, though a small political party, had influence far beyond its numbers, which at its height, was only 100,000. McKay, a West Indian native who came to the US, in November 1922 traveled to Moscow to present “A Report on the Negro Question” to the 4th gathering of the Comintern (the Communist International). His bitter poem, “If we must die,” had stirred black reaction to continued oppression following victory in the Great War, the war to save the world for democracy. His novels explored race and he then became something of a black nationalist. Four years before his death in 948, Mc Kay was baptized and received into the Roman Catholic Church.

Langston Hughes also wrote some bitter poetry, like “Christ is a n*****,” and a play about the Scottsboro boys facing electrocution because of false accusations of rape in Alabama in the 1930s. Even earlier, in the 1920s Hughes partook in a sit-in in North Carolina. But by the late 1940s, he is denying any connections to the CP. Author Richard Wright, who had portrayed some individual communists heroes in his novels, turned against the party and its ideology, even contributing a chapter to the influential, strongly anti-communist collection, The God that Failed. Robeson had been an all-American football player for Rutgers University in the 19teens while excelling in academia, graduating cum laude. He then earned a law degree from Columbia U., while playing in early professional football leagues. Robeson found limitations in the legal field; he had a bass/baritone voice and sang professionally, performed in the theater more and more, and then in films, singing “Ol Man River” in the 1935 film version of Show Boat. He and his wife lived in Britain as he performed on the stage there, and in British films, where, ruling half of Africa, they wanted films with black stars – and Robeson became one. He met and befriended some film extras, African university students studying in the U.K. But he did not forget America. Robeson and a student, Johnstone Kenyatta, headed the British Scottsboro Defence Committee in Britain. (Somewhat later, Johnstone would later return to his homeland, become known as Jomo, and lead the Mau Mau rebellion against the British in Kenya.) Robeson himself became more political and decided it best if his son grew up without racism, so Paul sent his son to live with his grandmother in Moscow in the late 1930s. The father generally defended anti-colonialist policies, and supported Soviet approaches into the 1940s and during the Cold War.

Lorraine Hansberry used a line from a Hughes' poem as the title of her major play (and film), A Raisin in the Sun. She also wrote for Freedom, the Harlem newspaper founded by Robeson during the Cold War. She became a spokesperson for Southern civil rights activists, when she, other celebrities, and activist Jerome Smith met with Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy in the early 1960s. Bayard Rustin, from a Quaker family, opposed the war clouds brewing in the late 1930s. When Nazi Germany attacked Poland (usually given as the start of WWII), while most of the West and many Americans supported Britain and the other “democracies,” the CPUSA followed the notions of Moscow, refusing to support the imperialist, colonialist powers (Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, and America). To the pacifist, Ruston, this seemed reasonable, and he joined thethen  anti-war Young Communist League. In summer 1941 Hitler attacked the USSR, and suddenly communist policy changed – the “imperialist” powers had to be helped as allies in order to destroy Nazi fascism, the old popular front with liberal democracy was revived to defeat Hitler. The YCL now became all out for support of war, and Rustin ceased to be a part of it. He would continue to protest in various ways, and eventually organize the influential 1963 March on Washington.

Du Bois had supported the drums of the Great War, but soon discovered that Wilson's notion of democracy did not extend to black people. The new NAACP gave him a platform, and provided some national center to fight violent and overt racism. The organization's magazine, The Crisis, was edited by Du Bois, and he wrote much of the material as well. Still, the virulently black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Assn., founded by a very black Marcus Garvey, won a larger following than did the proper middle-class NAACP. Worse, Garvey made deals with the growing Ku Klux Klan, supported segregation, and even championed a return of Negroes to Africa. Du Bois was certainly not chagrined when the US deported Garvey. In the 1930s Du Bois was critical of the CP, especially in its defense of the Scottsboro boys. Du Bois had hoped to regain control of the defense from the CP, but the boys and their moms chose the communists instead of the NAACP. Du Bois traveled in Germany in the 1930s, and had kind words for the people of color of imperial Japan. But with WWII, he became more anti-imperialist, and certainly more skeptical of the Missouri Democrat, Harry Truman, who became President opon FDR's death in spring 1945. Truman, who had a Confederate heritage, was close to leading segregationists like South Carolina's Jimmy Burns, whom Truman appointed as Sed. of State.  But in 1948, hoping to win another term in office, Truman began to seek black votes, addressed the NAACP, the first President to do so. When Du Bois refused to support Truman and backed a previous FDR VP, Henry Wallace for President in 1948 against Truman, the NAACP fired Du Bois. With that, the NAACP in effect, became a Democratic party front-group.  Truman got further revenge when his Atty. General had Du Bois arrested as a foreign agent in 1950. Just before Du Bois chose to leave the US for the Gold Coast, now independent Ghana, he joined the CPUSA.  Ironically, Du Bois, who had opposed Garvey's Back to Africa campaign of the 1920s, became the most prominent American black to return to Africa in 1961.

Rosa Mc Cauley married Raymond Parks, a barber in Montgomery, Alabama in 1932. The Scottsboro rape cases had become international news, thanks to the International Labor Defense, a CP front organization. Alabama authorities had raided some CP attempts to organize share croppers into unions, and sheriffs and deputies and some of their posses had killed those who dared attend such subversive meetings. Raymond worked with the ILD to bring food and fresh clothing to the 9 jailed black boys. He also had meetings at his home. Rosa was sometimes look-out to warn if any strange cars were coming. With her husband, Rosa Parks also attended some CP meetings.

In 1948 the civil rights movement in the South WAS the Henry Wallace Progressive Party. The 1948 PP was endorsed by the CPUSA. That year, Virginia Durr ran for the US Senate from Virginia on the PP ticket. She and her husband were Alabama natives who had moved to the Washington area when Clifford was appointed to a federal agency in 1933, and they remained during the New Deal era. When FDR sought to gain support in the South (after many in Congress had rejected his court-packing bill), the New Deal sought to promote uplift to the South, the poorest part of the nation. As part of this effort, Eleanor Roosevelt was also involved in the creation of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, and Virginia Durr was on its civil rights committee. Of course, to many Southerners, integration was communism, or often called race-mixing or mongrelization. Harry Truman's Attorney General would place the SCHW on his list of subversive organizations, so it would be targeted for destruction. Durr did not the Virginia Senate seat she sought. She and Clifford then returned to Alabama, Montgomery. She required a seamstress to help, and then she helped the seamstress get a scholarship to Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a “progressive” school where one might learn about protest. So seamstress Rosa Parks went. The rest is history.

Martin Luther King, Jr. also attended Highlander. There was a famous photograph taken of him seated beside a member of the CPUSA. If you drove through the South in the 1950s or 60s, you might have seen the bill boards showing King at the "communist" training school. (They may have been the same bill boards that had earlier displayed IMPEACH EARL WARREN signs after the Supreme Court ruled against segregation of the public schools. King was a young minister, thrust into the fire of the Montgomery bus boycott, with all its dangers. If there were threats, there was also help, and one helper became one of King's chief advisors, Stanley Levison. According to the FBI, Levison was s secret member of the CPUSA, and handled some of its hidden funds. Levison was now fund-raising for King. More, he was advising on tactics, writing some of King's speeches, perhaps chapters of his books. Both Pres. John Kennedy and Atty . Gen. Robert Kennedy told (ordered) King to break with Levison. King lied, said he had split with his advisor, but King maintained his contact with the controversial, and quite influential Stanley Levison.

CAN THERE BE ANY DOUBT THAT THE CPUSA HAS HAD GREAT INFLUENCE ON AMERICA?

It was not only blacks who were swayed by the CP. For whites, I shall mention only one name of a person involved in the communist orbit. Some disagree.  However, his wife was a member of the CP; his mistress was also a member of the CP, and his brother was a member of the CP.  Was he in the orbit of the Communist Party?  The man I am referring to is J. Robert Oppenheimer.  With a wife, mistress, and brother all party members, did that color his thinking closer to red?  Moreover, according to an article in the September 2023 Commentary magazine, "Oppenheimer Was a Communist," by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, not only did J. Robert contribute healthy sums to communist front organizations in the 1930s, they contend that he himself was also a member.  Then, which is it; CP leaders told him to drop out of the organization, for he might have to pass an important security check?  Or he heard of the major scientific project, and on his own, decided to keep a distance from the CP?  He did pass the test, and was soon working in the Manhattan Project.  The rest is history, and a movie.