The Communist Party USA, ideologically committed to foster a socialist revolution in the United States, played a significant role in defending the civil rights of African Americans during its most influential years of the 1930s and 1940s.
In that period, the African-American population was still concentrated in the South, where it was largely disenfranchised, excluded from the political system, and oppressed under Jim Crow laws.
By 1940, nearly 1.5 million African Americans had migrated out of the South to northern and midwestern cities and become urbanized, but they were often met with discrimination, especially among working-class ethnic whites with whom they competed for jobs and housing.
Additional migration of another 5 million African Americans out of the South continued during and after World War II, with many going to West Coast cities, where the defense industry had expanded dramatically and offered jobs.
While its most prominent leaders, including Eugene V. Debs, were committed opponents of racial segregation, many in the Socialist Party were often lukewarm on the issue of racism.
In addition, the party's allegiance with unions that discriminated against minority workers compromised its willingness to attack racism directly; it did not seek out African-American members, nor did it hold recruitment drives where they lived.
The Fourth Comintern Congress passed a set of "Theses on the Negro Question", which guided the party's stance on race issues, contextualizing the African-American struggle for civil rights as part a broader wave of anti-colonial activity which was growing internationally, and stressing the need to link the black civil rights or liberation struggle to the fight against capitalism.
However, the theses were not received enthusiastically by the American party's leading faction, led by C. E. Ruthenberg, who wrote to the Comintern to argue that they were unhelpful in the United States.
The party leadership was deeply divided into rival factions, with each eager to show its fealty to the Comintern's understanding of conditions in the United States.
While the party continued to give lip service to the goal of national self-determination for blacks, particularly in its theoretical writings, it largely ignored that demand in its practical work.
The party focused its efforts, for the most part, on very concrete issues: organization of miners, steelworkers and tenant farmers, dealing with utility shutoffs, evictions, jobs, and unemployment benefits; trying to raise awareness of and prevent lynchings, and challenging the pervasive system of Jim Crow.
After leading a strike in 1934 that won higher prices for cotton pickers despite intense hostility from local authorities and businesses, its membership increased to nearly 8,000.
William L. Patterson, a black attorney who had left a successful practice to join the Communist Party, returned from training in the Soviet Union to run the ILD.
It won reversals of these convictions in Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935), on the ground that the exclusion of blacks from the jury pool had violated the defendants' constitutional rights.
For a period of time in the early and mid-1930s, the ILD was the most active defender of blacks' civil rights in the South; it was the most popular party organization among African Americans.
[citation needed] The League of Struggle for Negro Rights, founded in 1930 as the successor to the ANLC, was particularly active in organizing support for the Scottsboro defendants.
The party also made a concerted effort to weed out all forms of racism within its own membership, conducting a well-publicized trial of a Finnish member of a foreign-language federation in Harlem, who had acted insensitively toward blacks.
At the outset of the Third Period, the rigid communist orthodoxy dictated by the Comintern required the party to attack other, more moderate organizations which also opposed racial discrimination.
In 1935, the Comintern abandoned the militancy of the Third Period in favor of a Popular Front, which sought to unite socialist and non-socialist organizations of similar politics around the common cause of anti-fascism.
The party had also started edging toward support of the New Deal by moderating its attacks on the Roosevelt administration, which had promoted programs alleviating the most severe economic problems.
When black residents of Harlem rioted in 1935 after false reports that a youth arrested for shoplifting had been killed by the police, Communist Party activists joined with Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and NAACP leader Walter White to try to avert further violence.
A New York City school teacher and party member, Abel Meeropol, wrote the song "Strange Fruit" to dramatize the horrors of lynching in the South, which had reached a peak around the turn of the century.
Local authorities used this issue and the Party's support for "godless communism" and the Soviet Union to drive a wedge between the strike leadership and white workers.
The Transport Workers Union of America, which denounced segregation but took only halting efforts to oppose it during its early years, formed coalitions with Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the NAACP and the Negro National Congress in the early 1940s to eliminate occupational segregation and to require ambitious affirmative action goals in New York City public transit.
The TWU also fought against employment discrimination in public transit in Philadelphia in 1944, during which time the federal government ordered the private transit company to desegregate its workforce, provoking a wildcat strike of many of the union's newly organized members that was ended only when the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration sent troops to guard the system and arrested the strike's ringleaders.
Paul Robeson, a vocal defender of the Soviet Union, apparently never joined the party, but was loyal to at least a few of its members including Benjamin J. Davis Jr. who was jailed under The Smith Act.
The party also made a point of integrating its dances and other social events and continued to ostracize and expel members accused of "white chauvinism".
A. Philip Randolph resigned from the Negro National Congress in protest and black newspapers throughout the North condemned the party for its rapid volte face.
Patterson was convicted a year later of violating the Smith Act; in 1954 the Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. declared the CRC to be a subversive organization.
The party maintained some standing in the black community through its former allies, including Coleman Young of Detroit and Gus Newport in Berkeley, California, who were elected to office in the 1970s.