The following is part three of a seven-part series reprinted and lightly edited from the communist newspaper Daily Worker in September-October, 1932, written by famous communist Mike Gold.
Workers here are referred to as Black instead of the original “Negro” to reflect our antiracist principles 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 sank 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 councils, tenant unions that led bold actions that weakened the power of profit 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.
In this article, the popularity of communist ideas and struggles among Black workers is described by Gold, emphasizing an important aspect of our line that Black workers play a key role in organizing for communist revolution. Another important political aspect highlighted by Gold’s piece is the role of churches in misleading Black workers, winning them away from communist ideas. . During this time, Black workers were won over to the idea that they had much more in common with fellow workers than with the bosses and their corrupt misleaders. A generation of Black workers gave militant leadership to the movement.
There was the funeral of an old Black woman. She had died of hunger; the doctor’s certificate called it “malnutrition.” The councils arranged a mass funeral; they rented a large lot for such services. The great procession marched through the streets, carrying hundreds of banners and slogans telling the story. Ah, from all the sidewalks and tenement windows, what groans, wails, sobs, what shrieks of pity and anger! This mourning was real; these workers knew what the funeral said: they knew they might be next to die of – “Malnutrition.”
All the revolutionary slogans that well-fed liberals sneer at as clichés, the South Side takes to its heart. They are life. “Fight Against Hunger” is a literal command; it has helped to many victories.
On the south side, the old slavish spirituals are being rewritten. The deep yearning that once turned to a mythical heaven for freedom, now fights for a real and wonderful future on this earth.
“That New Communist Spirit”
“Gimme That Old Time Religion, it’s good enough for me,” they used to sing at their prayer meetings. Now I heard them sing it fervently:
Gimme that new Communist spirit
Gimme that new Communist spirit
Gimme that new Communist spirit
That’s good enough for me.
“It was good for Comrade Lenin,
And it’s good enough for me.
“It’s against the labor fakers.
And it’s good enough for me.
“It has built the Soviet Union,
And it’s good enough for me,
“It’ll free the world of sorrow,
And it’s good enough for me …”
(and so on, dozens of verses)
Many such new songs and singers. At mass meetings, their religious past becomes transmuted into a Communist present. They follow every word of the speaker with real emotion; they encourage him, as at a prayer meeting with cries, “Yes, yes, comrade” and often there is an involuntary and heartfelt “Amen!”
The Chicago politicians are alarmed by this local revolution. Pork-jowled pimps and bootleggers sometimes come to the forums and begin their harangues with the salutation, “Comrades!” The workers laugh at them. They hooted and laughed down Big Bill Thompson, ex-gangster mayor of Chicago when he came to Washington Park and pulled this new “Comrade” gag.
It’s hard to fool them any more. They read, study, think. They have built up the best unemployment movement in America, a model to the white comrades, in the seat of their own minds and bodies. They have developed their own leaders.
Claude Lightfoot
Of the hundreds of leaders let me give one typical biography:
Claude Lightfoot, a brilliant youth of 21 developed as a speaker at a Washington Park forum. He was a Garveyite, an American patriot, and won a large following among the young Black workers.
Democratic and Republican politicians came to him and offered him hundred dollar a week jobs to campaign for them. But he was honest, the questions fired at him by Communist hecklers made him think.
The work of the unemployment councils interested him. The fact that white workers fought and shed their blood in defense of Black workers, gave Lightfoot a new vision of the race question.
He Is Arrested
He read, studied, argued, he wrestled with his own mind. During this transition period, he happened, by accident, to be arrested in one of the eviction fights.
He was beaten, stripped, thrown into a dark unheated small stone cell on bread and water.
He personally knew the capitalist politicians who were prosecuting him. In the very prison, they came to him, and offered him his release and a good job if he would surrender his new ideas. He told them to go to hell. He was given the maximum sentence in the Bridewell, that ancient hell of stone and hate.
When he came out he joined the Communist Party. He has been an active force ever since. Read the next issue for an episode out of his new life of struggle!