Reds vs. Evictions: Part 5 - MacDonald’s path of many struggles lead him to be a communist

The following is part five 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. The series was titled, “Negro Reds of Chicago.”

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, its history provides valuable lessons for us today.

This series highlights this antiracist revolutionary fightback and contains kernels of working-class wisdom.

In past issues “Reds vs. Evictions” covered the story of Claude Lightfoot, a communist activist and author who, like so many communists before and after him, was brutalized by the klan in blue for fighting against racism. In this issue’s edition we look at how another Black worker was ultimately able to see through the bosses’ nationalist and religious dead ends, realizing his true path was in joining the Communist Party, and being embedded in working class fightback.

No liberation in religion
Leonidas MacDonald was a Mohammedan only a few years ago. He joined that sect, which finds a fertile field for proselytes among the Chicago Black workers, after he had become disillusioned with the Garvey movement and the Christian religion. There are several Arabian and American gentlemen in Chicago who have made quite a racket out of this Mohammed. But MacDonald took it seriously; once he fasted 40 days.

“It appealed to me on race grounds,” he said. “I had seen so much of the brutality and hypocrisy of white Christians. Mohammed was colored, and I thought maybe it was more fitting for us to follow him. Anyway, I can’t tell what I expected, but one day I started to read the Koran. It was the same old bible bunk – Adam and Eve and the rest of it. I quit about a month after I had finished studying the Koran.”

He was ever searching for a way out for his suffering Black race. Tall, lean, humorous, always neat but out at the elbows and knees, MacDonald is one of those born intellectuals who come out of the working class. Some betray it, sell out to the capitalists, others are loyal to their class and lead the fight for freedom.

Son of the working class
Born in Jackson, Tenn., in 1897, MacDonald’s father was a railroad brakeman earning $38 a month, “swell money, big money”, and there were eight children. The parents were ambitious to give all their brood a first-class education. But Leonidas went to school for only two years. Then the inevitable proletarian tragedy. The father was killed; the child was left with a large family.

He was six feet tall at the age of fifteen, and tried to join the army, but was rejected because he was Black.

He drifted north, working in all the southern states, then came to Chicago in 1916 and held a swell foreman’s job. The war came and he volunteered. He served in the 39th Infantry, a Black regiment attached to the 10th French Army. He went through the battles of Soissons, Metz, the Argonne, and was wounded and invalided home.

He was mustered out in July, 1919, year of the race riots in Chicago. These made a deep impression on him: killed some of his orthodox faith in Christ, and roused his race consciousness.

Seeking answers
MacDonald had been working for years as a butcher in the Chicago stockyards when Marcus Garvey came to town. The man swept him off his feet; he was ready for this message, and soon became an active speaker and organizer at night, rising to the position of Colonel in Garvey’s fantastic empire.

Whatever the crimes and mistakes of this misleader Garvey, I learned a lot about organization from him,” says MacDonald, “I could see, too, that all this talk of returning to Africa was a false solution. Liberia was a slave-holding colony controlled by the United States government. The rest of Africa was owned by other white imperialists. We were as enslaved in Chicago as we could hope to be there; we would have to fight for our freedom in the place we lived.

It was then that MacDonald joined the Mohammedans. When that failed to satisfy his clear, hungry mind, he felt lost, bewildered. In his bewilderment he took to the soapbox and every night, after his day’s work, he talked to the south side crowds. He was thinking aloud, trying to find his way.

One night some heckler shouted at him, “You talk like one of those damn reds.”

“Do I?” Mac answered in amazement, “Do I? If  so, I am going to study the matter, and see whether I am red.”

This taunt opened his eyes to the work of the Unemployed Councils. Now he first began to see the mass funerals, the demonstrations of the Reds. He began to discover Lenin and Marx. It all beat on him like a cloudburst – the new world, the new world was being born again in another proletarian mind.

Quoted Mac: “If the white man suffers, the Black man always is made to suffer twice as hard.” That is proving true in this depression.

“But where did Oscar De Priest the Black landlord fit in? He wasn’t suffering, he was causing Black workers to suffer. Class interests were stronger than race.”

Home at Last
MacDonald flung himself into the Unemployed Council work – a fine speaker and able organizer. He spoke at the hunger march at the stockyards. Four cops surrounded him. He was arrested often, he studied and grew. In August 1931, he joined the Communist Party.

My doubts were stilled; now I knew where I belonged. I came to my home, where I shall live and die. Yes, comrade, I found the Party at last. But it was through much struggle, many struggles and illusions. This is the crooked path that life takes.