[1] In 1926, he joined other African-American Communists and travelled to the Soviet Union to study the effect of Communism on racial issues found in the United States.

[6] He stated, in his autobiography Black Bolshevik, that "this work was the single most important book I had read in the entire three years of my political search and was decisive in leading me to the Communist Party.

His interest in military combat began when his friends recalled tales of their service in the Eighth Illinois, Black National Guard Regiment.

[4][5] In the Spanish Civil War, like many Americans there, he fought for the Popular Front with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades.

Harry Haywood began his revolutionary career by joining the African Blood Brotherhood in 1922, followed by the Young Communist League in 1923.

[5] He began to advocate for African-American concerns, arguing that they were captives in the United States and that "they must embrace nationalism in order to avoid the harmful effects of integration.

Haywood was General Secretary of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, but he was active in issues involving working-class Whites as well.

He also participated in the major factional struggles internal to the CPUSA against Jay Lovestone and Earl Browder, regularly siding with William Z.

Because African Americans in the South constituted such a nation, Haywood believed the correct response was a demand for self-determination, up to and including the right to separate from the United States.

He believed that relying on race and ignoring economic questions could only alienate African Americans and inhibit working-class unity.

It abandoned African Americans to plantations as tenant farmers and sharecroppers, faced with the Redeemer governments, the system of Jim Crow laws, and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups.

It is the historic task of the working-class movement, as it advances on the road to socialism, to solve the problem of land and freedom of the Black masses."

I made extensive use of population data; the 1940 census, the 1947 Plantation Count and other sources, in order to show that the present day conditions affirmed the essential correctness of the position we had formulated years before."

Long an admirer of Mao Zedong, Harry Haywood was one of the pioneers of the anti-revisionist movement born out of the growing Sino-Soviet split.

In 1957 he wrote "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question" (later published by Liberator Press) but was unsuccessful at changing the direction of the Party.

He wrote "On the Negro Question", which was distributed at the Seventeenth National Convention by and in the name of African Blood Brotherhood founder Cyril Briggs.

In Haywood's view, "White chauvinism" in the party, rather than an accurate analysis of the economic issues, had caused the change in position.

Progressive Era Repression and persecution Anti-war and civil rights movements Contemporary Haywood and his wife Gwendolyn Midlo Hall were among the founders of the Provisional Organizing Committee for a Communist Party (POC), formed in New York City in August 1958 by 83 mostly Black and Puerto Rican and White trade unionists, mainly coal miners from Williamsport, Pennsylvania and maritime workers.

Its membership included Theodore W. Allen, best known later for his "White skin privilege" theory and widely acclaimed historical writings.

According to Haywood, the POC rapidly degenerated into an isolated, dogmatic, ultraleft sect, completely removed from any political practice.

Nevertheless, the (POC) did release many highly trained organizers from the dead hand of the CPUSA as the civil rights and the black power movement began to hit the streets.

[9] Haywood then returned to Mexico for a short time and then to the United States permanently in 1970 invited by Vincent Harding, then Director of the Institute for the Black World in Atlanta, Georgia.

This work, circulated in mimeographed form from early 1964 throughout California and the Deep South, deeply influenced the armed self-defense movement against the Ku Klux Klan during 1964 and 1965 and projected a slogan widely picked up throughout the Deep South that we must pose our own challenge to order and stability to counter the challenge posed by "massive resistance" by Southern politicians and racist terrorists.

In his last published article, Haywood wrote that the New Communist movement spent too much time and energy seeking the "franchise" of governments and parties outside the United States without validating itself among the people of our own country.

Haywood's theoretical innovations have been influential in a range of scholarship including historical materialism,[10] geography,[11] Marxist education,[12] and social movement theory,[13] among others.

She returned with Haywood to the United States in 1964 working as a temporary legal secretary, started teaching in North Carolina in 1965, enrolled in graduate school in 1966, and earned her doctorate in 1970 at the University of Michigan.

Midlo Hall has taught Africans in the Atlantic World at Michigan State University, as adjunct professor of history.

In Richard Wright's autobiographical novel Black Boy (American Hunger), the character of Buddy Nealson is said to represent Haywood.