Harry Haywood

Comment by “Wastline”, 11 October 2007

Harry Haywood was a member of the CPUSA. He developed and pioneered the line and analysis that Black people in america constitute an oppressed nation. This line was eventually adopted, under pressure from the Comintern and Stalin personally, as the CPUSA's position. It is no accident that when the american Communist Party was most popular amongst the Black masses in america, they held to and promoted this line.

Haywood was a great comrade and fighter in the struggle against white nationalism in america. I strongly recommend his great books “Negro Liberation” and “Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist”. I have no doubt that Melvin/Waistline is the person to ask for more details.

Comment by Waistline

When the history of the Communists Movement in America and the American Communists Movement is written, say 100 years out, Harry Haywood is going to emerge as a seminal figure in world communism Communism because he lived the proof of the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution the principled policy of the CPSU(B), the impact of the Cominterm and the brilliance of Lenin and what became called Marxism and the National-Colonial Question. Harry Haywood's life, like no other individual in America, spans all the critical junctures of communism in America and internationally for virtually the entire 20th century.

It is my most personal tragedy and regret that I was never able to meet Harry although scores of my comrades had such an opportunity.

Here is what wikipedia says of Harry Haywood:

Harry Haywood (February 6, 1898—January 1985) was born in South Omaha, Nebraska to former slaves, Harriet and Haywood Hall. He was the youngest of three children. Named after his father at birth, Haywood Hall, “Harry Haywood” is a pseudonym adopted in 1925. Radicalized by the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, he was a leading African American member of both the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He is best known for his significant theoretical contributions to the Marxist national question and as a founder of the Maoist New Communist Movement. In Richard Wright's autobiographical novel Black Boy (American Hunger), the character of Buddy Nealson represents Haywood.

Harry was trained by real Bolsheviks and willingly became part of the political orbit of Lenin and Stalin within the Third Communist International. I absolutely agree with the comrade's description of Harry.

Harry's history-altering book was “Negro Liberation” and its theoretical aspects formed the basis of my generation of communist approach to African American Liberation and Social Revolution in America. Harry'ls book “Black Bolshevik” is worth reading and owning. Harry was part of a small group of folks in the CPUSA whose names would also include Claudia Jones, James Allen and Pettis Perry.

Harry matured in a period of our history when the question of the Black Belt of the American South presented itself as the Negro Question. Thus, Negro Liberation is a historical document—a dagger, aimed at the heart of the bourgeoisie within American communism, specifically the writings of Dr. James Jackson, a most bourgeois intellectual within the CPUSA and representative of a militant sector of the Negro Bourgeoisie.

From another perspective, I guess one could say, that Harry's Negro Liberation stood in direct polarity and antagonism with the writings of CLR James, the black Trinidad intellectual of American Trotskyism. It is to the credit of many of the member of the “New Communists Movement” of the 1970's, that the life of Harry Haywood was not lost to history.