Blacks and the Left (BHM 5)

Frederick Douglass (c. Feb. 1817 or 1818 – Feb. 20, 1895; incidentally, Douglass chose Feb. 14th to celebrate his birthday) believed that exercise of our “natural” yet distinctively human “faculties and powers” [examples of the latter include ‘wisdom, virtue, and all great moral qualities’] are the basis of “man’s right to liberty” and our “humaneness,” and this in turn “expresses not only our humanity but also produces self-respect, or what Douglass … calls ‘natural dignity.’ This is why he asserts that our ‘natural powers are the foundations’ of our rights: we have rights because we have a human worth, or dignity,’ that we feel deserves informal acknowledgment and formal protection. Douglass’s second idea [‘braided together’ with that just sketched above] is … that our consciousness of our powers and rights depends, in some measure, on others conveying to us, through acts of respectful acknowledgement, that they, too, are conscious of and recognize our powers and rights. [….] Thus, while our rights derive from our innate powers, and to that degree are inherent in our very humanity, they also rest in the hands of others,* who may or may not allow us to become conscious of our powers, achieve our dignity, and exercise our rights.” — Nick Bromell, The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass (Duke University Press, 2021): 41-45

* In the end, Douglass can be seen as affirming what Michael Rosen has identified as four strands of thought commonly associated with the concept of dignity, namely, (i) rank or status, (ii) intrinsic value, (iii) “measured and self-possessed behavior,” and (iv) respectful treatment. Nos. (i), (ii), and (iv) at least (and perhaps arguably (iii)) have since found philosophical grounding or affirmation in international human rights instruments and constitutional law. Insofar as the notion of dignity pertains to the rule of democratic law, in the words of Allen Buchanan, it “can be understood to include two aspects. First, there is the idea that certain conditions of living are beneath the dignity of the sort of being that humans are. [….] Let us call this first aspect of dignity the well-being threshold aspect. The second aspect of dignity is the interpersonal comparative aspect, the idea that treating people with dignity also requires a public affirmation of the basic equal status of all and, again, that if they are not treated in this way they suffer an injury or wrong. [….] The well-being threshold aspect of dignity concerns whether one is doing well enough for a being of the sort one is; it makes no reference to how one is treated vis-à-vis others. The interpersonal comparative aspect has to do with whether one is being treated as an inferior relative to other people.” Please see Thomas E. Hill, “In Defense of Human Dignity: Comments on Kant and Rosen,” in Christopher McCrudden, ed. Understanding Human Dignity (for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2013): 313-325.

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“Black radical liberalism is not intended to be a particularistic and exclusionary political ideology for blacks, but rather one that fully adheres to the standard of liberal ideals—if more often betrayed than realized—of universalism and egalitarianism. It seeks to correct the (anti-universalist, anti-egalitarian) distortions in mainstream white liberalism, whether de jure or de facto, introduced by the complicity of that iteration of liberalism with white supremacy, both nationally and globally. [….] What I am arguing for is a synthesizing, reconstructed black liberalism that draws upon the most valuable insights of the black nationalist and black Marxist traditions* and incorporates them into a dramatically transformed liberalism.” — Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017): 201-202

* At this point we might remind ourselves that the Left, whatever its critique of Liberalism as a political philosophy and political praxis, cannot afford to ignore, let alone do away with (as Marx appreciated), what is perhaps its fundamental historical project: the “insistence on human dignity.”

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“… [T]he Black Popular Front—the ‘Other Blacklist’ of my title [i.e., Mary Ellen Washington’s The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (2014)]—has almost always been marginalized in black literary and cultural studies. Though nearly every major black writer of the 1940s and 1950s was in some way influenced by the Communist Party or other leftist organizations, and although the Left was by all accounts the most racially integrated movement of that period, the terms ‘U.S. radicalism,’ ‘left wing,’ ‘Old Left,’ ‘New Left,’ and ‘communism’ came to signify white history and black absence.

Blacks came to the Communist Party [CP] through various channels: through labor unions, labor organizations, and grassroots antiracist work; through the WPA [Works Progress Administration] or anticolonial work like the campaign against South African apartheid; through community and cultural groups like the South Side Community Arts Center in Chicago, and through the peace movement. As the witch hunts of the McCarthy Senate investigations and HUAC [The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly dubbed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)] geared up, every kind of legitimate dissent, including teachers who tried to institute Black History Week in schools and unions that did antiracist work, was targeted as ‘subversive.’ [….]

No one could have convinced me as a twelve-year-old Catholic schoolgirl or even as a twenty-something graduate student in the early 1960s that communism meant black people any good. But if I had listened carefully to the adults, I might have overheard them talking of unions, Paul Robeson, and civil rights. [….] ‘The CP was the only major American political party that formally opposed racial discrimination; it devoted considerable resources to an array of anti-discrimination campaigns; and it created a rare space for Black leadership in a multicultural institution’ (Martha Biondi). The CP signaled its commitment to black liberation as early as 1928, at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, when, with the encouragement of black activists, the CP made a statement in support of black rights to full equality. With its slogan of ‘self-determination in the Black Belt’ focused on black equality struggles in the U.S. South, the Party embraced both black nationalism and fought against white supremacy, a dual project rooted in the belief that ‘antiracism should be an explicit component of the anticapitalist struggle.’ [….]

Given the political history of the Communist Party as far back as the 1920s, it is clear why the CP attracted blacks, especially during the Depression. In industrialized cities, where blacks were at the bottom of industry’s discriminatory structures and were trying to organize themselves as workers, the militant efforts of communists to unionize workers, stop evictions, protest police violence, integrate unions, and give positions of authority to blacks in the unions must have seemed like beacons of light. The CP gained black support and black confidence in the rural South because of its work organizing the Sharecroppers Union and in the northern industrialized cities because of its organizing of the local CP Unemployed Councils, which fought for welfare relief and against evictions. Starting in the 1920s, the CP coordinated with, joined, or supported a range of black organizations: the American Negro Labor Congress (1925), the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (which replaced the all-black ANLC in the 1930), the National Negro Congress (1935-1947), the Council on African Affairs, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and the Civil Rights Congress (1940-1955). [….]

The Left played such an important part of the black struggle during the 1940s that scholars refer to that period as the Black or Negro Popular Front to indicate that for blacks the classic period of the Popular Front (1935-1939) extended well into the next decade and beyond. [….] With the impetus of World War II and the black militancy it encouraged, the Left gained a much-needed boost in the fight against racism. The war provided a nice set of ideological slogans—represented best by the Pittsburgh Courier’s ‘Double V’ campaign (victory against fascism abroad and victory against racism at home) and the ‘Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’ campaigns. But it was the CP and the black labor Left that supplied the armor for those slogans. Leftist labor leaders—like Ferdinand Smith of the National Maritime Union; Ewart Guinier of the United Public Workers Union; leaders of the Communist-led United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America; the Left-led National Negro Congress; and the leaders of the National Negro Labor Council, Coleman Young (mayor of Detroit from 1974 to 1993) and Nicholas Hood (who would serve as a Detroit councilman for twenty-eight years)—led the struggle for black jobs in war production and in unions and made fair employment practices central to their political agendas. Beyond the war, African American civil rights activists tried to internationalize black struggle with petitions to the United Nations: the NAACP’s 1947 An Appeal to the World and the Civil Rights Congress’s 1951 petition, We Charge Genocide, both of which offered a powerful critique of America’s institutionalized racism. These were left in the dustbin: the U.S. State Department refused to allow these petitions to be presented to the world body.” — Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (Columbia University Press, 2014): 4-7

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This is our fifth post in recognition and honor of Black History Month. In this installment, Black History Month encompasses organizations, movements, and people both inside and outside the U.S. Our next post will address Blacks and the U.S. criminal justice system.