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In this prologue, Harry Haywood talks about an eventful date in his life: July 28, 1919. On that day, he literally stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of his life. Exactly three months after mustering out of the U.S. army fighting in World War I, he found himself in the midst of one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S. history. For Haywood, it was certainly a most dramatic return to the realities of American democracy. He had a job as a waiter on the Michigan Central Railroad at the time. In July, he was working the Wolverine, the crack Michigan Central train between Chicago and New York. On July 27, the Wolverine left on a regular run to St. Thomas, Canada. Passing through Detroit, they heard news that a race riot had broken out in Chicago. The following day, Southside Chicago, the Black ghetto, was like a besieged city.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood talks about his childhood and his family, his first years in school, and the conditions in which he lived at the time. He was born in South Omaha, Nebraska, on February 4, 1898—the youngest of the three children of Harriet and Haywood Hall. The 1890s had been a decade of far-reaching structural change in the economic and political life of the United States. These were fateful years in which the pattern of twentieth-century subjugation of Blacks was set. A young U.S. imperialism was ready in 1898 to shoulder its share of the “white man’s burden” and take its “manifest destiny” beyond the Pacific Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. At the time when Haywood was born, the overwhelming majority of Black people still resided in the South. His parents were born slaves in 1860. His father was born on a plantation in Haywood County, Tennessee. Tennessee at the time was the home of the Ku Klux Klan.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood reflects on his work with the Sharecroppers Union to mobilize poor farmers in the deep, Black Belt South during the early 1930s. In the spring of 1933, Haywood Patterson of the Scottsboro Boys was declared guilty in relation to the alleged rape of two white girls in Alabama in 1931. His conviction sparked a a wave of indignation among Black communities across the country. Mass protest rallies, demonstrations of all sorts, and parades culminated in the Free the Scottsboro Boys March on Washington on May 7–9, 1933.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood reflects on his participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 as a volunteer for the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), which supported the Spanish people’s front government against General Francisco Franco’s forces. The civil war was sparked by Franco’s rebellion in mid-1936 and became a focal point of the worldwide struggle to halt fascism and prevent World War II. The generals’ rebellion against Spain’s front government was backed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who poured in troops, tanks, planes, and supplies in an attempt to topple the progressive Republican government. For Haywood, as a Communist and a member of the CPUSA, Spain was the next logical step. Blacks have always faced the most brutal, racist oppression in the United States, but fascism would mean a great heightening of the terror and oppression. Haywood felt it was wrong to say that the conditions of Blacks “could not be worse under fascism.” It was through this understanding that he felt the strongest solidarity with the Spanish people.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood reflects on his experience as part of the Merchant Marines that fought in World War II. Haywood enlisted as a seaman in the Merchant Marine at San Pedro, California, in June 1943. Just like millions around the world, he wanted to make some contribution to the fight against fascism. He knew the history of struggle of the National Maritime Union (NMU), the largest of all seamen’s unions, and had long been an admirer of the militant organization. The Merchant Marines left San Pedro on November 9, 1943, bound for the South Pacific and eventually Bombay, India. Approximately 5,000 troops were on board. When they docked in Bombay, Haywood visited the Communist Party of the United States headquarters. They then headed for Cape Town, where Haywood also made his way to the Communist Party headquarters. The Merchant Marines sailed for the Pacific war zone, with the Philippines as their destination.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood reflects on his time in the Soviet Union, where he was sent in 1926 by the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) to which he belonged to train as a revolutionary. At the time, Haywood and his fellow Blacks felt that applying for a passport would be subjected to close scrutiny. Therefore, when he learned that he would soon be studying in Moscow, he applied for one in the first names of his mother (Harriet) and father (Haywood). In order to avoid going through the port of New York, he left by way of Canada. He first took a train to Berlin before heading to Leningrad and finally to Moscow, where he registered as a student at the Universitet Trydyashchiysya Vostoka Imeni Stalina (the University of the Toilers of the East Named for Stalin; Russian acronym KUTVA). KUTVA’s student body, which represented more than seventy nationalities and ethnic groups, was founded by the Bolsheviks. In January 1927, Haywood was stunned by the news of his mother’s death.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood reflects on his role in the Blacks’ fight against white chauvinism in the United States. Haywood arrived in New York in early November 1930, four and a half years after studying as a revolutionary in the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of the United States to which he belonged was planning to launch a new organization, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR), to replace the now practically defunct American Negro Labor Congress. The LSNR was conceived as the nucleus of a united front movement around the party’s program for Black liberation. Haywood also talks about the case of the Scottsboro Boys, the nine African-American teenagers accused in Alabama of raping two white girls on a train in 1931, and the strike launched by the National Miners Union, an affiliate of the Trade Union Unity League.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood reflects on his trip to the Soviet Union in 1932 as one of the three delegates—Robert Minor and Henry Puro were the other two—of the Communist Party of the United States to the Twelfth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. The meeting was to be held in Moscow in early September. Its purpose was to analyze the current international situation and check the work of the Comintern sections, the affiliated parties. In Moscow, Haywood had a joyous reunion with his second wife Ina. He visited the Lenin School, where he reported on the Afro-American work in the party. He also met members of the Black and white film group who had come to the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Mezhrabpom (Soviet film industry).

In this chapter, Harry Haywood reflects on his role in the Communist Party of the United States’s campaign in Chicago against war and fascism during the 1930s. In late 1934, Haywood left New York for Chicago, where the Communist Party was beginning to grow. The following year, the Communist International held its Seventh Congress in Moscow. How to prevent fascism, and how to overthrow it where it already had come to power, were the questions facing the Congress. The Congress called upon the parties to build broad people’s fronts against war and fascism. Earlier that year, Italy openly proclaimed its goal of annexing Ethiopia, arousing deep anger among Blacks throughout the country. Anticipating the call of the Seventh Congress, Southside Communists seized the initiative to build a broad united front struggle against the growing threat of war and fascism. The party’s campaign in defense of Ethiopia helped lay the basis for the greatest Black united front movement of the period—the National Negro Congress, founded in Chicago in mid-February 1936.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood talks about his experience as a member of a Black regiment that fought in World War I. Because of his bitter encounter with racism in a school in Minneapolis, Haywood quit school and became a part of the small Black community with which he completely identified. Included in the Black community and among his new friends were a relatively large number of mulattoes, the progeny of mixed marriages between Scandinavian women and Black men. It was in Minneapolis that he also reached a heightened stage of racial awareness. When his family moved to Chicago, he became friends with several members of the Eighth Illinois, Black National Guard Regiment. Intrigued by their experiences, he joined the Eighth Regiment in the winter of 1917. He was nineteen at the time. The regiment gave Haywood a feeling of pride.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood talks about his experience as a member of the U.S. army’s Eighth Illinois, Black National Guard Regiment that fought in France during World War I. Haywood’s regiment sailed for France in early April 1918, on the old USS Washington, a passenger liner converted into a troop ship. Their three ships sailed out of Newport News without escort. They were naturally worried due to rumors of German submarines, but their anxiety disappeared when in mid-ocean they picked up two escort vessels, one of which was the battle cruiser Covington. When they reached the war zone, about three days out of Brest, France, a dozen destroyers took over, circling their ships all the way into port. It took Haywood’s regiment sixteen days in all to reach Brest, where they arrived on April 22. The regiment spent six months in the lines in all. They took part in the 59-day drive of General Mangin’s Tenth Army, which ended on the day of the Armistice.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood talks about his determination to see the elimination of racism and the achievement of complete equality for Blacks, as well as his personal commitment to the fight for a socialist United States. The bloody Chicago race riot that erupted on July 28, 1919 was a pivotal point in Haywood’s life. In the early 1920s, Chicago was an ideal place and time for the education of a Black radical. It would become the scene of some of the nation’s bloodiest battles in the struggle between labor and capital. Blacks, however, played little or no role in the turbulent early history of the Chicago labor movement. Haywood and his fellow Blacks searched for answers to the social problems of the day. Many found the answer in the Back to Africa program of the West Indian Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

In this chapter, Harry Haywood reflects on his experience as a member of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB)—a secret, all-Black, revolutionary organization to which some of the Black members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) belonged—and later as a member of the party itself. At the time Haywood joined the ABB, he knew little about the organization other than the fact that it was in some way associated with the Communist Party. It was founded in New York City in 1919 by a group of Black radicals under the leadership of Cyril P. Briggs. After about six months, Haywood left the ABB. He then joined the Young Workers (Communist) League (YCL), the youth division of the Communist Party, and became a member of the party itself in the spring of 1925. On the whole, Haywood was very optimistic during his early years in the party.

In this epilogue, Harry Haywood reflects on the Black revolt in the 1960s that began in the Deep South and quickly spread across the entire country. After Haywood and others who had defended the revolutionary position on Black liberation had been driven from the Communist Party of the United States, the Black revolt surged up from the Deep South. The stage for the Black revolt was set in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation. In a decade of mass movement, which saw demonstrations and uprisings in virtually every ghetto in America, Afro Americans put all existing programs for Black freedom to the test. The struggle was transformed from an internal, isolated one against an apparently “invincible” ruling class into a component part of a worldwide revolutionary struggle against imperialism. The revolt forced concessions from the ruling class: it broke down a great deal of legal and occupational Jim Crow, enlarged the Black middle class, and extended the franchise to Blacks in the South.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood talks about his role in the fight for the self-determination of all Blacks in the United States. Toward the end of 1927, N. Nasanov returned to the Soviet Union after a sojourn in the United States as the representative of the Young Communist International. Nasanov’s observations had convinced him that U.S. Blacks were essentially an oppressed nation whose struggle for equality would ultimately take an autonomous direction and that the content of the Black liberation movement was the completion of the agrarian and democratic revolution in the South. Therefore, it was the duty of the Communist Party of the United States to channel the movement in a revolutionary direction by raising and supporting the slogan of the right of self-determination for Afro-Americans in the Black Belt, the area of their greatest concentration. Haywood also believed that the path to freedom for Blacks led directly to socialism, uncluttered by any interim stage of self-determination or Black political power.