The following is the final installation of our seven-part series of articles 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. For this last edition, we take another look at Brown Squire, an energetic Black comrade, who was as dedicated to fighting the bosses as he was to educating his red diaper children.
The Path to liberation is through communist politics
Brown Squire and his seven kids were living on charity relief; he had not been able to work in years. What courage, what heroic faith! The room filled up with people as we talked. One by one they drifted in, saying “Hello, comrades,” even the children.
“Yes,” said Brown Squire, in his deep, rich baritone, “We Blacks have gone through many disappointments in America. But more and more of us will find the road to Communism. It is our only way out. Only through the Communist revolution will the Black ever find freedom here, exactly as the Jews, Tartars, Mongols and other races found it in the Soviet Union.
“We have trusted many leaders, and they have let us down. But Comrade Lenin will never let us down. The Communist International can never let us down. The Scottsboro case and the nomination of James Ford as Vice-President proves that the American Communist Party has not let us down.
“The white Communists need us, as we need them. We are a fourth of the American working class, and how can the white workers free themselves if they do not free us, also? For, when the land is nationalized, when the factories belong to the workers, when all wealth is socially owned, who will want to exclude us? Who will be able to?
“This is the cause I have enlisted in for life. I am a good soldier, comrades, and I know what I am fighting for. If I must die, it will not be as a coward running away from the lynchers, but as a man fighting for the freedom of my race and my class.”
That’s right, Brown,” said the others, “that’s right, comrade.” They clapped their hands, and the children shouted, and tears stood in the eyes of Brown Squire’s young wife. She is less than thirty, the mother of seven kids whom she cooks and washes for, and a Communist Party member, busy with meetings.
“Do you know,” said Brown Squire joyfully, “that everyone on this street is a Communist or Communist sympathizer? Go into any home and they know about the Soviet Union. We have educated them. No, sir, I could not live now unless everything about me is red. Even my kids are red.”
“Pioneers Are We”
He lined up his seven kids and from the lean, serious 11-year-old girl, who led them, to the baby in his arms, Brown’s children sang the Pioneer songs.
One-two-three
Pioneers are we
Fighting for the working class
Against the bourgeoisie –
They sang in their high, treble voices, then they yelled some of the lively Pioneer chants: “Stand ‘em on their heads, stand ‘em on their feet, Pioneers, Pioneers, can’t be beat!” then a dozen others of the lively tune of red kids the world over, finally the “International.”
Outside in the street at least twenty other kids had gathered, attracted by the singing. They joined lustily in the chorus, lifting their fists in the Red Front salute. I have heard our great anthem sung on the streets of Paris, Berlin, Moscow and New York, but never did it seem so moving as in this home of a jobless Chicago worker.
“Hundreds of kids here want to join the Pioneers, but we have no books, literature, instructions. A comrade has taught these kids – he’s a war vet, and has a way with kids. Too bad, though, we can’t get the right books.”
An Eviction
Then a very subdued, heavy-eyed man in old pants and with a bald head, entered the room. Two boys were with him.Brown Squire leaped up and shook his hand.
“What’s wrong, Comrade Williams, are they evicting you again?”
“Yes, Brown.”
Brown Squire, who had been chatting, laughed easily and turned into a red commander before our eyes. “Round up some of the boys and let’s go.” Men left the room hastily and visited some of the neighborhood homes. Five minutes later thirty soldiers of the class struggle were lined up in the street, and read to fight evictions. Brown Squire led them, they sang the International as they marched, and the sidewalks cheered and applauded.
Brown Squire told me a story that revealed like lightning this world of new history.
There was a Communist demonstration and some republican politician ran in his truck with all his signs in an effort to utilize the demonstration to advertise his candidacy. The workers forced the truck from the scene, at the same time tearing some of the signs down. When the truck returned, another scuffle took place. During it, one of the Black workers who had sent this truck raced out and shot a white comrade named Madden. Three months later, when I met him, Madden’s arm was still paralyzed.
The Black comrades rushed out, found the thug, and gave him the beating of his life. The cops arrived and saved him, arresting, of course, not this willful republican murderer, but Brown Squire and another worker.
That night in the cell this comrade said to Squire:
“Squire, you and I together fought with guns in the race riots. We hated the whites. Do you realize what we two did today? We beat up a Black capitalist in defense of a white worker.”
“Yes,” said the other, “we have come a long way, and I know it has been the only way.”