The Red Ball of Demolition: Communists vs Capitalist Housing, Part 1: 'The beginning of the revolt'

The following 7-part series is reprinted and lightly edited from the Communist Newspaper Daily Worker in September-October, 1932, by famous communist writer Mike Gold.

Workers here are referred to as Black instead of the original “Negro” to reflect our antiracist priniciples as well as the linguistic shifts that occurred over decades of antiracist class struggle.

Communists have a long history of fighting against racist attacks on our class. One such fight was against landlords and evictions. In the early 1930s, amid Jim Crow segregation, a great depression with record unemployment levels that sunk the working class—particularly Black workers living in the urban industrial core—into deeper poverty and despair, the Communist Party in the U.S. (CPUSA) was fighting for revolution inside U.S. borders. This period was a golden age of class-conscious fightback when communist ideas were popular and gripped the imaginations of the working class.Under the leadership of the CPUSA, workers organized militant housing, unemployment councils, tenant unions that led bold actions that weakened the power of gluttonous landlords.

Today our class is in a different period marked by increasing volatility. We are choked by record-high inflation, rent hikes, food price gouging compounded by stagnant wages, high unemployment, and an eviction crisis worsened by a still-raging global pandemic. Though the CPUSA is a shell of its former self, decaying into a toothless, reformist party, their history is just as valuable as they were in 1932. This series highlights this antiracist revolutionary fightback and contains kernels of working-class wisdom.

This unemployment is a famine, a Mississippi flood, a major disaster to the human race. More than 50 percent of the Black workers in the city are unemployed. But the Black and white capitalists of Chicago, like their fraternity the world over, have been concerned only with preserving dividends.

A year ago, they were throwing thousands of Black workers out into the naked streets to die. But then a revolt began. Unemployed Councils sprang up, under communist guidance, which fought the evictions. As fast as a poor worker’s furniture was thrown into the street, the councils carried it back. The police used clubs, blackjacks and jail sentences, but the revolt could not be stopped.

The landlords grew desperate. Oscar DePriest, the Black congressman, is also one of the chief landlords on the south side. He retained as lawyers certain other Judas-liberals from the National Association of Advancement for Colored People.

Then he called a secret conference. That night the profit-hoarders and racketeers decided on nothing short of murder.

There was to be an eviction on Dearborn Street the next day. A 72-year old Black working woman was to be kicked out like a dog to die. But the Council arrived to stop the crime.

While they placed back the furniture, the police appeared. This time they did not merely club, maim, gouge and crack skulls. With not the slightest warning, they shot their rifles again and again into the crowd. They killed three Black workers, one of them a communist, and wounded many others.

It was a murder plot. I found proof of this a year later when I came to Dearborn Street.

The brown ruined wooden shacks have not been painted or repaired for decades. They are allowed to rot away. It is the landlord-economy in America to buy up putrid slums that should be burned, and rent them to Black workers. When the homes finally collapse they are torn down. Meanwhile they pay high dividends and cost nothing to maintain.

On Dearborn Street the garbage is heaped everywhere, foul as a landlord’s heart. The city has not removed garbage for months; it is bankrupt. Garbage, flies, stink, leaky roofs, broken windows and doors, moldy wet shacks swarming with vermin; all the houses in crazy tatters and out of plumb.

This is Dearborn Street, which has sent so many landlord’s wives to Paris, their sons to Harvard or Fisk. And women agonize in childbirth, and strongmen rot of hunger and despair, and babies’ bones shrivel because there is no milk.

The Landlords’ Warning
We went into one of those miserable tenements, and knocked at a door. An old woman answered, a soft-voiced gentle person with a motherly face. She apologizes for her appearance: her gray hair was knotted in paper; she was dressed in a wrapper and apron.

“I’ve been clearing,” she said, “and look a fright, but do come in and rest yourself.” Her home, despite the cracked plaster and grimy walls where lathes stuck out like a pauper’s ribs, was as neat as two hands could make it. It was touching to see her beautiful natural courtesy. It moved one to find her home so painfully clean. Would a landlord’s wife have retained her human dignity in such surroundings?

She was Ms. Martha Ormshes, wife of a stockyard’s worker. She did not want to talk at first; the Black [workers] have learned not to trust white [workers]. But then, convinced that we came from the workers’ press, she told us an amazing fact.

Her windows look out over the spot where the eviction-murders took place. The night before, her landlord had phoned her a warning not to look out of those windows the next day; there would be shooting.

But we did look out until the shots began coming too thick,” she said, “and my husband and I had to throw ourselves on the floor. It was murder; the police warned nobody, just started to shoot. Such a lot of black smoke around; my my, they just kept on shooting and shooting! And those poor people had nothing to fight back with, just a few stones. It wasn’t right. Everyone on this street is still wild about it.

Others on Dearborn Street had much the same story to tell, of whispers, telephone warnings, and the like. It was a plot. The landlords evidently decided to create an atmosphere of fear, to demonstrate to all that they controlled the police. But the plot failed.

Three Black workers were killed, but during the next weeks five thousand others joined the Unemployed Councils; 500 filled out applications to the Communist Party; hundreds of others became members of the International Labor Defense. Many of these Black workers are now in the leadership of these organizations.

Some of them have since drifted away. The Party in America has not yet worked out some simple, consistent plan that would hold such masses. Yet the South Side was a forest fire of indignation. Nothing else but the eviction-murders was talked about in barbershops, restaurants and churches. Groups of Black workers, after much hunting and questioning, would discover the address of party headquarters and march there in grim, determined squads to join up.

A Great Mass Funeral
There was a mass funeral for Abe Gray, John Oneal, and Thomas Paige, the three victims of the blood stained landlord system. More than 100,000 workers, Black and white, marched through the South Side street, a great solemn army of proletarian vengeance, waving red banners. That day has never been forgotten. It marked the beginning of the revolt.

Hundreds of evictions since then have been foiled by the Unemployment Councils. They take place almost every day. As Brown Squire, one of the leaders, told me, “when the first stick of furniture gets thrown out, a crowd gathers like magic. Somebody unknown telephones at once to the nearest council; everyone knows us. We first send a few delegates to investigate, to see whether the tenant wants us to move him back. If he does, we go there and carry on.”