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Communists, Negroes, and Integration The Communist Party has long been expert at the business of fishing in troubled waters—-the more troubled, the more to its liking. The Communist Party is at it again today; and, un- fortunately, the “Keep Off” signs have been taken down by order of the U. 8S. Supreme Court, in its deci- sions of June 17, 1957, affecting the Communist con- spiracy. If any issue in our society today may be properly characterized as troubled waters, it is unquestionably the issue raised by the Supreme Court’s desegregation order of May 17, 1954. And there is no hazard in _ * + 2 that these waters will be troubled for a long time to come. The situation is one which the Communists have welcomed eagerly. It offers them an almost unparall- eled opportunity to exploit, for their own ulterior and revolutionary purposes, the inevitable social turbulence resulting from the Supreme Court’s order for public schooi integration. Violent agitation is the meat on vbich Communism feeds. The Balt: Negro Liberation ine bait on the Communist hook is “Negro libera- tion.” a phrase which has been reiterated by Communist igudci, with such frequency over the years that it has hccome a cliche. It matters not that liberation at the hends of Communists is demonstrably a cruel euphem- ism for a slavery worse than that from which Lin- ccin’s Emancipation Proclamation freed the Negroes. The Communists stil! approach the Negro people of the United States with the promise of liberation danp- Uag from their hook. As long ago as 1928, the Communist Party of the United States published a pamphlet written by John Pepper, the representative of the Communist Interna- tional in the United States, in which Pepper said: “The Cammunists must participate in all national liberation movements of the Negroes which have a real mass character.” (American Negro Problems, p. 14; em- phasis in original) in 4 Chmmunist pamphlet entitled “The Read to Ne- » ration,” published in 1934, Harry Haywood "7 -S=-4 “Party leadership in the Negro liberation movemem.” (p. 62) In 1937, the Communist Party issued a pamphlet entiled “The Road to Liberation for the Negro Peo- ple.” by Abner W. Berry and others. Ten years later, in 1947, Negro Communist leader Benjamin J. Davis published his pamphlet entitled “The Path of Negro Liberation,” in which he wrote: Consequently the Negro people are moving in the direction of some form of statehood in the Black 6 Belt. This would mean an adjustment or rectification of ihe lines demarking 12 states through which runs the Black Belt area where the Negro people are in a majority. (p. 19, 20) In 1948, Negro Communist leader Harry Haywood published a book entitled Negro Liberation. That “Negro liberation” has priority on the Com- munist Party’s agenda today is confirmed by the fore- most Negro Communist leader in the United States. Writing in Political Affairs, the theoretical magazine of the Communist Party, U.S.A., which lays down the Party line, Benjamin J, Davis declares: The struggle for Negro rights—particularly in the deep South—is the single most crucial and decisive issue in the United States today . . . The massive significance of the national liberation struggles of the Negro and colonial people, here and abroad, envelops this work with additional importance. (p. 13) Negro Republic in the Black Belt The Communist slogan of “Negro Liberation” is simply a watered-down version of the Party's original slogan of “A Negro Republic in the Black Belt.” The propaganda which the Communist Party conducted on the basis of the latter slogan fell flat in its appeal to Negroes and only served to show how far the Kremlin's agents are removed from the realities of the American scene. In October, 1930, the Communist International adopted a resolution “on the Negro Question in the United States.” It was published in the United States by Workers Library Publishers, the publishing adjunct of the Communist Party, in 2 pamphlet entitled The Communist Position on the Negro Question. On the subject of an independent Negro republic in the Black Belt, the Comintern took the position that “as Jong as capitalism rules in the United States the Communists cannot come out against governmental separation of the Negro zone from the United States.” (p. 51) But, in the event of the establishment of a Soviet government in the whole United States, Com- munist Negroes would come out against “separation of the Negro Republic from federation with the United States,” while unconditionally giving “the Negro popu- lation of the Black Belt freedom of choice even on this question.” (p. 50-51) The Comintern’s resolution held that there was a “prospective sharpening of the national conflicts in the South, with the advance of the national revolutionary Negro movement,” and that in such a situation the Communist Party must “stand up with all strength and courage for the struggle to win independence and for the establishment of a Negro republic in the Black Belt.” (p. 51-52)