II
        The Communist Party early recognized that the intersections of race
and class in America made the injustices of the capitalist system
transparent, thus offering an ideal organizational lever. In 1928 the
Comintern instructed the American party to adopt as a central plank of
the party platform a call for an independent Black republic in the
American South.  This proposal may seem quixotic; but a recent
observer, Mark Solomon, sees it as representing a crucial commitment to
the right of Black Americans to choose their own future:
[T]he Communists had touched a fundamental issue: democracy as
independence, and independence as the right of choice.
African-Americans, to be free and equal, had to liberate themselves
from supplicant status; they had to be free to control the political
and social lives of their communities and to redefine the conception of
black-white cooperation on the basis of new power relationships among
equals. In that respect, the Communists were "advanced" in their
approach to the political content of racial equality. (Solomon 86).
        By the late 1920s, the Communist Party was winning significant numbers
of recruits both in Harlem and in the South.  In the South, says
Solomon, the Communist Party helped to create "a culture of opposition
and resistance that would eventually influence a larger liberal
community and help set the stage for the civil rights movement a
quarter-century later. The Communist movement in the South may have
been small and unreasonably inflexible, but its contributions to the
struggle for equality were significant and enduring" (128). By the
early 1930s and continuing on into the Angela Davis years, the
Communist Party also created an internal ethos that allowed Blacks and
Whites to work and to socialize together as equals, in ways that have
been rare in American history. In the shorter run, perhaps the
Communist Party s most significant achievement was its anti-lynching
campaign. Its commitment to this cause led the Party to step in
immediately when, in March 1931, nine Black teenagers were accused of
raping two white girls on a freight train passing through Alabama.  The
party led the struggle to save the Scottsboro boys first from a
conventional and then from a judicial lynching, and it was remarkably
successful in using this case to dramatize the way American racism
operated and to galvanize resistance to that racism (Goodman 25-31 and
passim).
        At the same time, the Party was itself by no means free of racism.
According to Robin D. G. Kelley, in the 1920s
national Communist leaders presumed the South to be an impenetrable
bastion of racist conservatism and derided the notion that Southern
blacks had their own radical tradition. Communist John Owens opposed
bringing Southern blacks into the Party because "the vast majority of
southern Negroes are not revolutionary, not even radical.  Given a
society of peace, prosperity and security, they are content to drift
through life." (14)
Kelley and Mark Naison both suggest that the achievements of the
Communist Party in the 1930s resulted primarily from the ability of
Black Communists to, in effect, co-opt the Party organization for their
own purposes. Solomon takes a more positive view of internal race
relations within the Party, but he too contends that only pressure from
the Comintern persuaded the national Party leadership to place racial
issues at the center of the Party platform. Even in the Scottsboro
case, the Party was accused, especially by the NAACP, of using the race
issue for its own purposes, and in retrospect there seems to be some
justice to this charge (Goodman esp. 32-38). The Communist Party s
record on racial issues is not, then, unblemished. Like other White
Americans, even those with progressive views on racial relations, the
average White Communist was not immune to reductive and stereotyped
images of African-Americans.  The Northern liberal might see the Black
man as a kindly, harmless, self-sacrificing Uncle Tom or a stumbling,
comically confused Stepin Fechit, the Black woman as a reservoir of
unlimited love; the frightened racist, North or South, might see the
Black woman as a temptress, the Black man as an insatiable sexual
predator; the Communist might see Blacks, men and women, as oppressed
Workers heroically struggling to through off their chains.  But the
perceptions of all three were in some measure stereotyped.
        In the pages of the New Masses from 1926 to 1931, we can see emerging
both the Communist dedication to racial justice and the stereotyped
images in terms of which this dedication was articulated. In the
December, 1926, issue of New Masses, the same issue that includes the
"Pound Joins the Revolution" letter, we find a piece by George S.
Schuyler titled "Some Southern Snapshots."   Here is the first
"snapshot":
SOUTHERN KENTUCKY
B_________, a hustling, thriving community in the tobacco country, is
conceded by both its black and white citizens to be one of the best
towns in the South.  Incidentally, this is a belief held by the
inhabitants of every Southern town.  Well, Johnny S________, a Negro
youth of sixteen was employed in a white barber shop as porter and
bootblack.  He is an affable chap and knows how to get on well with
white people.  He always has a smile for everyone and doesn't seem to
resent having his woolly head rubbed or his pants being kicked
occasionally.  He was a favorite in town until several months ago.
Then one day the rumor got abroad that he had made a date or tried to
make a date with a white girl over the telephone.  One of the white
barbers said he heard him.  The white girl in question denied that
Johnny had said anything out of the way to her; that she had only
telephoned about a pair of shoes she had left to be cleaned. However,
public opinion was aroused.  Johnny's past popularity was of no avail.
He was told to get out of town at once.  He got. (2:2 [December, 1926],
15)
There follow eleven additional "snap shots" of about the same length as
the one I have quoted.  Four of these, along with the one quoted, turn
on the fear of sexual relations between Black men and White women, or
the actual sexual exploitation of Black women by White men. Ten of the
twelve "snap shots" include violence or the threat of violence on the
part of Whites toward Blacks. In four episodes, African-Americans
resist White oppression, by actions that range from refusing to obey an
order from a White man, through fighting back with their fists, to
union organizing; but all these attempts at resistance fail. The only
sign of hope comes in a description of a town in Oklahoma where "for
ten miles in every direction everything is owned by Negroes." In this
town, "there is no jim-crowing," and Whites are treated the same as
African-Americans.
        All the themes that will dominate later Left-wing discourse about
American racial relations, and that will come to the fore in the
Scottsboro case, are already visible in Schuyler's "snap shots": the
entangled relationship between race and sex, the threat of lynching as
the primary white strategy for keeping African-Americans "in their
place," the hope that a common identity as "Worker" might allow Blacks
and Whites to come together in a common struggle.  The vision of the
paradise of racial equality in Oklahoma even forecasts the Communist
Party proposal to establish a Black republic across the Southern
states: in such a republic, Schuyler implies, Whites would have nothing
to fear.  And indeed the African-Americans in Schuyler's "snap shots"
are notably peaceful people.  All the firearms are in the hands of the
Whites, and the African-Americans show no inclination to change the
situation when told to get out of town, they get.
        But aside from the perceptivity (and the occasional sentimentality) of
Schuyler's portrait of Black/White relations in the South, I am also
struck by his "snap shot" method itself, which other New Masses writers
also used.   We have a technique here that seems to verge upon Pound's
"gists and piths": his conviction that the image, if accurately
presented, can sum up the totality of a cultural situation.  I do not
want to suggest that, for a journalist writing in 1926, Pound was the
only possible source of a paratactic style. Whitman had long since
pioneered the mode, and the vivid reportage of John Reed's Ten Days
That Shook the World may well have served Schuyler as a model.
Nevertheless, it seems clear that Pound and a writer like Schuyler
share a common faith in "the facts." Give people the concrete data of
perception, both writers assume, let them see for themselves, and they
will immediately grasp the truth.  Similar assumptions are at work in
the tough-guy street vignettes of Mike Gold himself, regularly featured
in New Masses, then collected in Jews Without Money (1930), and admired
by Pound; and in the "American Portraits" that John Dos Passos
contributed to the journal and later adapted for use in USA (5:8
[January, 1930], 3-5; 5:9 [February, 1930], 8-9; 6:5 [October, 1930],
6-7).  These stylistic affinities, I would propose, may help to explain
why in 1928 Gold was calling Pound "the leader of the most vital wing
of younger American writers."
        The interest of New Masses in the "Negro question" remained
intermittent during the 1920s.  The first issue (New Masses was a
monthly from 1926 to 1934, and then became a weekly) included a poem by
Claude McKay, and the sixth issue, in December 1926, included four
poems of Langston Hughes, along with the "Southern Snap Shots" piece
described above.  In February 1928, another poem by Hughes appeared.
And in the October issue of that year we find a stern address by
William C. Patterson, "Awake Negro Poets!" (4:5, 10). This essay
celebrates the "race-consciousness of Negro poets, and their
determination to be regarded as black men." Despite the male noun,
Patterson shows a broad knowledge of poetry by African-American women
as well as men, mentioning not only Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon
Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee P. Cullen, Sterling Brown, and Langston
Hughes, but also Gwendolyn Bennet, Angelina Grimke, Arna Bontemps, and
Helene Johnson. But in the end, Patterson condemns all these writers
for not being revolutionary enough: "There is little in recent Negro
poetry that would lead one to believe that the poets are conscious of
the existence of the Negro masses. There is no challenge in their
poetry, no revolt. They do not echo the lamentations of the downtrodden
masses. . . .  There is no race more desperate in this country than the
black race, and Negro poets play with pale emotion!" (10).
        Patterson's comments assume a distinction between a "Black
Bourgeoisie" cut off from its roots and a more authentic but still
largely inarticulate world of the "Black Masses"; and the attempt to
bridge this gap through a rhetoric of revolution will continue on in
New Masses throughout the next decade. As we move on into 1929, there
is evidence that the New Masses editors were becoming increasingly
interested in issues of race, perhaps in response to Comintern
directives. In the March issue we find a review of a book titled Negro
Problems in Cities (4:10, 26-7).  The June issue includes three scenes
from a chronicle play titled John Brown, Abolitionist, by Mike Gold
himself (5:1, 8-11).  In November comes Paul Peter s "Wharf Nigger (a
Scene from a Proletarian Play)" (5:6, 6-10).  A second installment of
this play follows in the April 1930 issue, under the new title "On the
Wharf" (5:11, 12-14). In December 1929, Scott Nearing contributes an
essay on "The Color Line in Art" (5:7, 11-12).  And the June 1930 issue
features s a short story by Langston Hughes, "Sister Johnson's Story"
(6:1, 6-8), followed in the next issue by another Hughes story, "Party
for White Folks" (6:2, 6).

Part II of the essay will be continued in posting III