Explain Carol Swain -- Part III: The Vanguard Party

Black Americans played a disproportionately
large role in the Communist Party USA and other
similar movements. Harry Haywood was an early
activist that tried to tie communist beliefs with racial
questions.

In Part I of this series I explained the failure of explicit Marxism among American black voters. In Part II the process of their gravitation toward being committed Democrats throughout the US was explored further. Here the focus will switch back to communism in the USA, among black Americans, and finally its relationship with the Democratic Party. The objective here is to answer the question of whether that party has begun to embrace certain principles of that tendency.

The Old Left and racial issues

For communist movements in the United States the early 20th century was an era of major potential, clashing with authorities, and then ostracism and disappointment. When compared to the repression against political dissidents in actual communist countries like the USSR, the movement in the United States existed in relative comfort, even the official pro-Soviet Communist Party USA.. It was never totally banned, although members suffered from harassment and intimidation from authorities. One of the key avenues where they were controlled was through blacklisting of CPUSA members, sympathizers, or similar groups in a number of industries. The subjects or victims of the Hollywood Blacklist were portrayed as courageous dissidents in films like The Front by Woody Allen. Recently acclaimed actor Brian Cranston portrayed one such blacklisted member in Trumbo.

Being a black communist meant having one's rights compromised on two fronts, political and racial.Such was the life of Harry Haywood, an early black communist who traveled to Soviet Russia and in 1948 penned a revolutionary book Negro Liberation calling for a separate nation for black people under a Marxist system. A follower of Stalin and Mao, Haywood was expelled from the CPUSA in the late '50s during the post-Stalin revisionist movement in the USSR. Among many in the party his stance on black self-determination in the South was too divisive, but would be a forerunner to the views of other black separatist groups with communist beliefs.

The Swinging '60s

Eldridge Cleaver and other
black nationalists did not fit into
larger far left movements. They
usually formed their own groups
like the Black Panthers, SNCC or
Organization US. 

Tom Hayden and other
SDS leaders believed in civil
rights but simply were not
positioned to directly recruit
blacks as they were not in
their immediate circle.

In 1962 a group of 58 American college students led by Tom Hayden issued the Port Huron Statement forming Students for a Democratic Society. This movement called for nuclear disarmament and reform within the Democratic Party, in particular calling for an end to the Dixiecrats' crippling influence on the party's civil rights agenda during the Kennedy-Johnson era. Yet instead of making their mark on the Democrats the SDS first became the face of anti-Vietnam War protests when US troops became involved in 1965. As student opposition to the war and the cultural climate surrounding it spread, SDS activists were critical in galvanizing protests. In 1968 major elements of the Days of Rage protests during the Chicago Democratic National Convention ended up splitting the SDS into several different factions including the Worker Student Alliance, Weather Underground, and Revolutionary Youth Movement. The last two were openly communist in their orientation, supporting the Chinese communist world movement as opposed to the Soviet Union's viewpoint. But what Hayden and the rest of these counterculture elements did was more important in the long run, because being far left no longer became exclusively identified with endorsing the stodgy Soviet worldview. It became rebellious and acquired its own mystique. It even became trendy. Far left activism meant sticking it to "the man" and counter-cultural elements such as beatnik writer and anarchist Allen Ginsburg or renowned child psychologist Benjamin Spock. Neither of these individuals were open Soviet sympathizers, but the both were strident supporters of the same broader movement as SDS.

But the SDS's primary audience was among the predominantly white college student crowd of the 1960s. In addition, university campuses had yet to be integrated in most of the South. In 1966 the Black Panther Party was founded, an exclusively black group that advocated Marxism-Leninism. Though started in Oakland, CA the Panthers rapidly attracted a national following included black former members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee like Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver. The Panthers were not the only black nationalist or separatist organization at the time, as Organization US (or Us) was active in southern California and was notable for leading the Afrocentric movement to renounce American culture and adopt Swahili names and even dress. The central figure of Organization US was Maulana Karenga (born Ronald Everett), and he would introduce the holiday of Kwanzaa and other Afrocentric ideas that were directly against established religions, in particular Christianity.

The Old Left never adjusted

The Communist Party USA ran
black candidates including VP choice
Jarvis Tyner in five straight elections

But the founding of these black or African identity movements further indicated that black Americans were not embracing radical ideology as a whole. The New Left did not choose electoral politics; many of its proponents took to either protest movements or even armed struggle (Bob Ayers and the Weathermen, Symbionese Liberation Army) in order to attract support. Aside from exceptional people like Donald DeFreeze, black radicals typically did not find their way to these movements, but black radical groups often collaborated with them.

From 1968 through 1984 the CPUSA ran presidential tickets that included either a black president (Charlene Mitchell '68) or running mate (Jarvis Tyner and Angela Davis twice each). In 1940 James Ford ran for the ticket as the first black American in the 20th century to run for president or vice president. None of them garnered much support, in fact their high water mark was in 1976 with slightly more than 56,000 votes in the first post-Watergate election. I couldn't find the state breakdown but to give you an idea of how inconsequential that tally was, in the same election third party candidates Eugene McCarthy (independent) and Roger MacBride (Libertarian) each reached more than 56,000 votes in California alone.

. . . So they just went establishment

It used to be that when the Age of Aquarius, the period when young people began to dress and act according to the "hippie" culture, ended those that shaved their beards and put on slacks and button-downs were termed as having "gone establishment". Well the CPUSA took until 1988 to do that, but that is exactly what it did and we will deal with that soon. 

Other far-left communist movements of the New Left simply fizzled out. The Weathermen evolved into a number of sub-groups and disbanded in the 1985, the Black Panthers in 1982. Let's take a look at how they have fared:

• Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers was able to avoid any prison time for the group's terror bombings and became a state employed instructor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. His wife Bernadine Dohrn, also a former fugitive, also became a law professor at Northwestern. Are these victims of a vindictive government.
• Black Panther founder Huey Newton suffered from drug addiction issues and was murdered in 1989 during a drug deal. His co-founder, Bobby Seale, has taught at Temple University, written a BBQ cook book, and continues to have connections to social activism in Oakland.
• Maulana Karenga despite having served a criminal conviction for false imprisonment and torture of a female follower in the early 1970s, has been awarded two PhDs and teaches at Cal State - Long Beach as head of its Department of Africana Studies. 
• Karenga's collaborator ex-National of Islam dissident Hakim Jamal was murdered in 1973 by four assailants allegedly at the behest of NOI. Black Panther alumnus H. Rap Brown (now Jamal Abdullah Al-Amin) was convicted in 2002 for the murder of a Georgia sheriff's deputy. Female Panther Assata Shakur has been a fugitive since escaping prison in 1979 where she had been serving time for the murder of a New Jersey police officer.
• New York area Black Panther Afeni Shakur would give birth to world-famous rap artist Tupac Shakur in 1971.
• Two ex-Panthers Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) and Barbara Lee (D-Cal.) hold seats in the US House of Representatives to this day. I've commented on Ms. Lee's protest of the Authorization for Use of Force on a different page. 

But the bottom line is that these radical groups dissolved entirely. The era of radical activist politics had worn on most of these people. The fact is that the New Left lifestyle was unsustainable during the 1970s. Perhaps college aged students were willing to entertain the ideas of radical groups like the SDsS, but among mainstream American families (the "silent majority" that helped elect and reelect Richard Nixon) they were horrifying. Many of them associated these groups, hippies, and aquarian lifestyles with the Charles Manson murders, Patty Hearst kidnapping, and other scary social problems that they could not digest.

And in truth, the conditions in the USA were not thoroughly distressed enough even at the lowest points of the Vietnam War and Watergate Scandal to cause a full insurrection. This is what caused the death by attrition of the New Left activism. In the late 1970s China abandoned Maoism; numerous follower groups worldwide remained loyal to it, but in the USA the greater problem was that no one was paying attention anymore. The New Left had calcified and was going the way of the stodgy pro-Moscow Old Left.

What became of them and what to expect?

Former CPUSA vice presidential candidate Angela Davis
has been praised for her work in the Black Panther Party
and Civil Rights movement. The truth is that she symbolizes
the underground normalization of communism within
American academia and now in the Democratic Party. 

Despite all of the complaints from communist or other far-left leaders of persecution by the FBI, CIA, and other US government agencies, they themselves apparently have no issue with taking jobs for the US government. Aside from Ayers, Dohrn, and Karenga who all were hired for academic positions, two-time CPUSA vice presidential candidate Angela Davis has worked as a professor at UCLA, San Francisco State University, and UC Santa Cruz. Despite her past offenses for firearms possession, and involvement in shootouts with the police, none of these institutions screened her out.

The story of Davis, Karenga and others is the final phase of the journey through the history of American communism, which will be dealt with next time. It has already been shown that the Democratic Party historically was not socialist; it was Keynesian, meaning it believed in government investment or influence in the general economy.The second thing that was shown in this series is that neither among Americans in general nor among black Americans have explicitly communist groups been an electoral success. The public simply hasn't accepted the theory. Finally here, it was shown that these communist groups trying to outflank the electoral system in the New Left have failed and need an accommodation.

So what's left to talk about? The most important part: The communist left, or groups of similar vein, found shelter in the world of academia, and then it found a new home in a new generation of the Democratic Party, one that was much more tolerant of it. Stay tuned!