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Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist
by Harry Haywood
This is one of the most important books ever written in the struggle for socialism. It should be required reading in every Communist group, Party, organization, etc. If Goodreads had a 6 star option, I'd give it 6 stars. Actually, ☆ <- there's the 6th star. I'm not sure what edition is registered here on GR that says this book is 776 pages; my copy is the original 1978 version and the book itself is only 644 pages, with 56 pages of notes, rounding out at exactly 700 pages. But I digress.
This book is so absolutely incredible, historical, and a cornerstone of Marxist text. I was overwhelmed at times reading it because of the sheer meticulous detail Harry Haywood tells stories in. Here is a Black man, the son of formerly enslaved people, who went on to fight for Communism for over 60 years and in doing so, witnessed some of the greatest moments in the struggle. One of the most humbling parts is when Haywood recounts meeting veterans of the 1871 Paris Commune, in 1930. He met Stalin, he met Dolores Ibárruri, he was personally acquainted with Paul Robeson, and he knew Langston Hughes. And he wasn't there as some fly on the wall; he was in the struggle with them. He tells of meeting Ibárruri during the Spanish Civil War in which he fought on the front lines of at almost 40 years old, in 1937. He tells of his struggles with sell-out William Z. Foster and chronicles the downfall of CPUSA through revisionist bastards like Earl Browder and James Jackson. He tells of helping organize over 10,000 Black sharecroppers and farmers in Alabama in the 1930s, helping defend the Scottsboro boys, and of being a constant target of state surveillance in a time where the FBI overtly targeted both Black people, and Communists, although today it still overtly targets the latter, and covertly targets the former.
Haywood recounts with such vivid detail his life in the struggle that he does something that is very difficult to do in autobiographies: he puts you there with him as the reader. When he talks of vacationing in Crimea, witnessing the downfall of the ultimate betrayer, Leon Trotsky, being at a CPUSA convention with thousands of other Communists -- his descriptions are so in-depth that you feel yourself sitting next to him, or sitting in front of him as he speaks.
As the lead theoretical mind behind the Black Belt Thesis [building on Lenin's National Question], there is no better book to understanding this Thesis than in this one, in Haywood's own words. He draws on the first 30 years of his own life, the lives of other Black workers, and his time in the struggle in the early 1920s, to come up with a thesis so strong that it not only complemented Lenin's own National Question, but was approved unanimously by the CPSU in the Comintern. Here is a man who not only lived this rich, revolutionary history, but also made it.
It is a long, long read, as I said. But it is so worth it. I can't recommend this enough.
This book is so absolutely incredible, historical, and a cornerstone of Marxist text. I was overwhelmed at times reading it because of the sheer meticulous detail Harry Haywood tells stories in. Here is a Black man, the son of formerly enslaved people, who went on to fight for Communism for over 60 years and in doing so, witnessed some of the greatest moments in the struggle. One of the most humbling parts is when Haywood recounts meeting veterans of the 1871 Paris Commune, in 1930. He met Stalin, he met Dolores Ibárruri, he was personally acquainted with Paul Robeson, and he knew Langston Hughes. And he wasn't there as some fly on the wall; he was in the struggle with them. He tells of meeting Ibárruri during the Spanish Civil War in which he fought on the front lines of at almost 40 years old, in 1937. He tells of his struggles with sell-out William Z. Foster and chronicles the downfall of CPUSA through revisionist bastards like Earl Browder and James Jackson. He tells of helping organize over 10,000 Black sharecroppers and farmers in Alabama in the 1930s, helping defend the Scottsboro boys, and of being a constant target of state surveillance in a time where the FBI overtly targeted both Black people, and Communists, although today it still overtly targets the latter, and covertly targets the former.
Haywood recounts with such vivid detail his life in the struggle that he does something that is very difficult to do in autobiographies: he puts you there with him as the reader. When he talks of vacationing in Crimea, witnessing the downfall of the ultimate betrayer, Leon Trotsky, being at a CPUSA convention with thousands of other Communists -- his descriptions are so in-depth that you feel yourself sitting next to him, or sitting in front of him as he speaks.
As the lead theoretical mind behind the Black Belt Thesis [building on Lenin's National Question], there is no better book to understanding this Thesis than in this one, in Haywood's own words. He draws on the first 30 years of his own life, the lives of other Black workers, and his time in the struggle in the early 1920s, to come up with a thesis so strong that it not only complemented Lenin's own National Question, but was approved unanimously by the CPSU in the Comintern. Here is a man who not only lived this rich, revolutionary history, but also made it.
It is a long, long read, as I said. But it is so worth it. I can't recommend this enough.