Blacks In and Out of the Left

by Michael C. Dawson

Overview

The radical black left that played a crucial role in twentieth-century struggles for equality and justice has largely disappeared. Michael Dawson investigates the causes and consequences of the decline of black radicalism as a force in American politics and argues that the conventional left has failed to take race sufficiently seriously as a historical force in reshaping American institutions, politics, and civil society.

African Americans have been in the vanguard of progressive social movements throughout American history, but they have been written out of many histories of social liberalism. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the Black Power movement, Dawson examines successive failures of socialists and Marxists to enlist sympathetic blacks, and white leftists’ refusal to fight for the cause of racial equality. Angered by the often outright hostility of the Socialist Party and similar social democratic organizations, black leftists separated themselves from these groups and either turned to the hard left or stayed independent. A generation later, the same phenomenon helped fueled the Black Power movement’s turn toward a variety of black nationalist, Maoist, and other radical political groups.

The 2008 election of Barack Obama notwithstanding, many African Americans still believe they will not realize the fruits of American prosperity any time soon. This pervasive discontent, Dawson suggests, must be mobilized within the black community into active opposition to the social and economic status quo. Black politics needs to find its way back to its radical roots as a vital component of new American progressive movements.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674057685
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	06/18/2013
Series:	The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures , #13
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	13.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Michael C. Dawson is John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 2: Power to the People?

Immediately after Martin Luther King’s assassination Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley claimed King was a communist. How could any elected official, especially one who was a mayor of a city with a very large black population, make such a claim during an extraordinary dangerous time? One hundred American cities were burning as a result of the mass black uprising that resulted from the assassination. Such an inflammatory statement could be made because from 1920–1970 millions of white Americans found it easy to believe that the only way that one could advocate for black equality was if that person was a communist. This charge was for many especially believable if unlike King the one advocating for black equality was white. Early in the century blacks began paying attention to charges of the alleged linkage between communism and advocacy on behalf of justice for blacks. The result of this attention led to not only many alliances with left forces, but many black activists adopting various forms of left radicalism. These activists viewed black radicalism as a tool to be used in service of black liberation. The simple truth was that particularly during the first half of the 20th century a substantial propotion of whites openly advocating for black equality were communists and their allies. And many of these communists, black and white, were heroes who suffered greatly for their deep commitment to racial equality.

The main force winning substantial if incomplete equality for blacks in America, however, was the black mass struggle for freedom. The black freedom struggle faced horrific levels of violence from the state and white civil society, in the South and the North, in what can only be called a century long war to maintain the racial order and white supremacy—the system of black oppression popularly known as Jim Crow. In this war, white allies were sorely lacking in the South and the North. The white working class all too often chose its racial “interests” as opposed to its class “interests.” Even working white women often chose race over class or gender. (Biondi, 2003; Gilmore, 2008; Solomon, 1997). More precisely, disadvantaged whites, men and women, saw their class, racial and gender interests as being for all practical purposes as identical given their submersion in an ideology of white supremacy that portrayed disadvantaged blacks as the worst threat to both their status privilege and their material interests. Worse, those fighting for racial justice in the South and the North had to fight an unholy alliance of the organizations of corporate America, white civil society and the state. Even in the face of this concerted opposition, black radical activism grew in black communities during two distinct eras. During both eras black radicals challenged white supremacy and searched for allies in the quest for black liberation. This chapter asks what lessons can be learned from analyzing the two 20th century peaks of black radical organizing.

In the last chapter, I first argued that the study of black radicalism was important from both scholarly and normative perspectives. Second, I argued the general history of progressive and labor movements, including specifically the history of Marxism in the U.S., and the history of what is called the New Left has been whitewashed. The result of this whitewashing not only leads to misapprehension of the nature, scope, and activities of the left in virtually any period of the 20th century, but also makes it extremely difficult to draw scholarly or political lessons from that history. Third, I argued that the white left has been complicit in the white-washing of radical history in the U.S. Fourth, I argued that a third path for radical black politics to follow developed before the massive battles between black leftists, liberals, nationalists, and later in the century black feminists came to dominate black radical politics. This third path which would come to dominate much of the Black Power era black radical organizing was marked by the formation of black organizations that claimed to fuse work for black liberation with what they saw as some form of socialist organizing. This stood in contrast to dominant organizational form of the period from 1920–1955 when black leftists were mostly found within multi-racial left organizations—primarily the Communist Party of the United States.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

1 Foundational Myths: Recovering and Reconciling Narratives of Resistance 1

2 Power to the People? 41

3 Who and What Killed the Left 126

4 Modern Myths: Constructing Visions of the Future 175

References 213

Notes 221

Acknowledgments 229

Index 233

Editorial Reviews

04/01/2013
In this version of his 2009 DuBois Lecture at Harvard, University of Chicago political scientist Dawson (Not in Our Lifetimes) addresses the divisions between the organized American left and black activists, among other issues. The author locates the “two most intense periods of twentieth-century black radicalism” as from 1920 to 1955, when the Communist Party dominated black leftist organizing, and 1965 to 1975, the era of black power and radicalism. Dawson reveals the significance of radical activists such as Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones, Hubert Harrison, and Cyril Briggs, along with organizations such as African Blood Brothers, Liberty League, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, who have largely been forgotten in mainstream accounts. The related scholarship of Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, and Beverly Gage is assessed with sharp negative scrutiny. Though Dawson’s account offers a fresh perspective and provocatively aims “to counter the continuing deadly move to the right in this country,” the book lacks flavor and makes for dull reading. (June)

Publishers Weekly

[An] important new book… Dawson’s frontal challenge to liberal and social democratic pontificates and his passionate defense of the black revolutionary tradition is a great gift to all students, especially black youth who have been robbed of their own history. Dawson brings to life the complexity of building a black and multi-racial left and highlights the profound achievements of black leaders and organizations that were purged from popular history. He emphasizes several important leaders who are too-little known today: Hubert Harrison, Cyril Briggs, Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, and Fannie Lou Hamer. By reminding us that black revolutionary action has a long and influential tradition that extends well beyond the ’60s, Dawson challenges the white intellectuals who saw the unification of minority groups as a threat to their own interests… Dawson’s historical analysis provides a model for reinvigorating the revolutionary organizations of today.

Boston Review - Eric Mann

Dawson is at his finest in exposing how many historians of the U.S. left have erased the black presence within American radicalism. Parallel to this ‘whitewashing,’ and perhaps a more nefarious form of political amnesia, has been the effort by some white scholars to blame the current fragmentation of the organized left on the profusion of racial, gender-based, and sexual ‘identity politics.’… Blacks In and Out of the Left is an act of socially committed scholarship that deserves the widest possible reading public among students of African-American social movements, black political thought, public policy, labor and working-class history, and U.S. radicalism.

Dissent - Clarence Lang

Dawson offers a fresh interpretation of the largely unknown and often misrepresented history of black radicalism in an effort to chart a progressive path forward that will effectively challenge racial injustice, economic inequality, and imperialism. This provocative and enlightening book creatively fuses analytical history with political theory to diagnose what has ailed the American Left for decades. But it is not a pessimistic book. Rather, in the spirit of hope and possibility, it calls for utopian yet pragmatic political thinking that regards independent black political organizing not as a balkanizing force or distraction from the ‘universal’ fight for a democratic society, but as an indispensable element of any viable Left-wing politics.

Tommie Shelby