The following is part six 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.
Visiting comrade Squire in his home
Another ex-soldier and South Side communist is that remarkable person, Brown Squire. I shall never forget the afternoon I spent in his home.
It’s a bit tricky for whites to visit the south side. The police roam these streets ceaselessly in their squad cars. They pick up all whites who don’t look like landlords, installment agents or other exploiters. Then a visit to the police station, a few hours of questions, clubs, fists, etc. It has happened often.
One of these squad cars filled with beefy brutes rounded the corner just as we ducked into Brown Squire’s home.
Manly and attractive, one of those calm, smiling giants, it was good to see Comrade Squire. He was dressed in a khaki shirt, one of his seven kids on his powerful arm. Behind him, on a battered dresser stood a bust of Lenin. In the bookcase one saw Daily Workers, pamphlets, books.
All this in a typical Chicago slum, in a ruined shanty facing out on a backyard piled with a hill of the most amazing garbage. Signs of the new age: Lenin in the steel mills, Lenin in the stockyards, Lenin hovering over workers’ children playing on a garbage dump in Chicago.
Brown Squire fought in France for two years and eight months. He was a good soldier, a born leader, and rose from the ranks to return as a second lieutenant.
Yes, I was a good instrument for the capitalists,” he smiled, “a first-class soldier. You can still blindfold me, throw all the parts of a machine gun on the floor, and I will reassemble it by touch.
Lieutenant Squire came back from the war in 1919, believing he’d won his freedom. A month later, the race riots broke out.
“I’m a communist now”
I can understand them, now that I’m a Communist. They were part of the capitalist strategy, by which they tried to separate the white and [Black] soldiers and workers. But then I was bitter. I fought in the riots; some of us captured guns from the lynchers and barricaded this street. No lyncher could enter it; many tried, but failed.
Then he shared, with most of his race in America, the years of the Garvey mirage. When he came out of that, he didn’t know where to turn. One day he saw a parade with banners against lynching. He was still bitter, couldn’t believe that whites would fight for such a cause. So he began to study this thing, “to see whether the Communists really meant it.” After two years he decided that they meant it, and joined the party.
I was one of the first [Black workers] in the party then. We were isolated, the cops singled us out. I can remember my first arrest. They almost tore off one ear, and shut my left eye. They stomped on my bare feet with their boots, and almost broke my bones. They burned my body with cigar butts. Yes, they like to kill me. They wanted me to say I’d go to no more Communist meetings. But I would not say it. It was pretty bad, comrades. I lay in bed for a week afterward, coughing up blood.
"But it made a solid red out of me."
That was on March 6, 1929. Since then Squire has been arrested at least a hundred times for his speeches and other activities. He is a leader in the fight against evictions, and in the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League. This day of our visit was typical of all his busy days. He had just come from a meeting of vets. The bonus marchers needed food and tobacco, and he had been collecting nickels and dimes.
This afternoon he was collecting signatures for the Communist election campaign. He had already signed up eight blocks in his house-to-house canvass. At 5 o’clock he was due to speak in Ellis Park, at a demonstration against the Republican Presidential convention, at which the [Black] delegates were jim-crowed. In the evening he was booked to speak in a [Black] church on communism.