Haywood, Harry

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Haywood, Harry

February 4, 1898
January, 1985

Communist activist and theoretician Harry Haywood was born in South Omaha, Nebraska, the youngest child of former slaves. In 1913 his family moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in the same year, at the age of fifteen, Haywood dropped out of school and worked at a string of menial jobs, including bootblack, barbershop porter, bellhop, and busboy. In 1914 he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a waiter on the Michigan Central Railroad. During World War I he fought in France with the 370th Infantry. After the war Haywood settled in Chicago, and in 1923 he was recruited into the African Blood Brotherhood, a secret black nationalist organization, and then into the Young Workers League, both associated with the Communist Party (CPUSA). Two years later he became a full-time party organizer and soon came to be a leading proponent of black nationalism and self-determination within the party, seeking to reconcile Marxism-Leninism with what the party called the national-colonial question.

Haywood traveled with a delegation of young black cadres to the Soviet Union in 1926 and studied there until 1930, when he returned to the U.S. While in the Soviet Union, Haywood was strongly influenced by the first generation of anticolonial revolutionaries who were his fellow students, including M. N. Roy of India, Tan Malaka of Indonesia, and the future Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. In 1928 Haywood authored a resolution on what the party called the Negro question, which was presented to the Comintern's Sixth World Congress. Haywood argued for the "national minority status" of the African-American people. He advocated a "national revolutionary" movement for self-determination and an autonomous republic to be established in the "black belt" of the American South. By 1930 Haywood's formulation had become the official position of the party in its attempt to organize African Americans.

In 1931 Haywood was chosen to head the Communist Party's Negro Department. He helped lead the party's campaign to defend the Scottsboro Boys, eight black teenagers convicted and sentenced to death for allegedly raping two white women in Alabama. In 1934 Haywood was appointed to the politburo of the CPUSA and became national secretary of the party's civil rights organization, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. In 1937 he fought in the Spanish Civil War with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a volunteer force organized by the CPUSA to aid the Spanish Republic against the insurrection by Francisco Franco's fascist armies. In 1938 he was removed from the politburo for alleged mistakes in Spain, but Haywood suspected that this removal was due to his uncompromising support of black nationalism, which was losing favor in the party leadership. During World War II, Haywood served as a seaman in the Merchant Marine and worked as an organizer for the communist-led National Maritime Union from 1943 until the war ended.

The Communist Party's support of national self-determination in the black belt was officially dropped in 1944 but had been muted since the adoption of the popular front strategy in 1935. Despite this shift in party policy, Haywood continued to vigorously promote his theory that the black population in the United States represented a colonized people who should organize as a nation before being integrated into American society. He argued that self-determination and territorial autonomy were the only mechanisms that would guarantee the security of African Americans. His position finally caused him to be expelled from the party in 1959.

Harry Haywood

"The Black Freedom struggle is a revolutionary movement in its own right, directed against the very foundations of U. S. imperialism, with its own dynamic pace and momentum, resulting from the unfinished democratic and land revolutions of the South. It places the Black liberation movement and the class struggle of U. S. workers in their proper relationship as two aspects of the fight against the common enemy—U. S. capitalism. It elevates the Black movement to a position of equality in the battle."

black bolshevik: autobiography of an afro-american communist (chicago: liberator press, 1978), p. 234.

Haywood lived in Mexico City from 1959 to 1963 and thereafter returned to Chicago. In the 1960s Haywood supported various black nationalist movements, such as the Nation of Islam under the leadership of Malcolm X, the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Throughout his later years, Haywood remained critical of the integrationist politics of "petit-bourgeois" civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. In the 1970s Haywood was a leading figure in a small Maoist organization, the Communist party (Marxist-Leninist), which called for self-determination for African Americans in the Deep South. Haywood attempted to apply Mao Zedong's theories of peasant revolution to African Americans, influencing a number of younger black nationalists, including Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure). His public activities declined in his final years, and he died in Chicago in 1985.