The Struggle for the Leninist Position on the Negro Question in the United States

by Harry Haywood

This article by Harry Haywood, originally printed in the September 1933 issue of the The Communist, is from A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, edited by Herbert Aptheker. According to the editor, the original article “is published below, in part, with the essential argumentation intact.” I am making this article available on the Internet for the first time. For more on this history of the African American National Question, see Freedom Road Socialist Organization’s Unity Statement on National Oppression, National Liberation and Socialist Revolution and The Third International and the struggle for a correct line on the African American National Question.

The present program of our Party on the Negro question was first formulated at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, in 1928. On the basis of the most exhaustive consideration of all the peculiarities, historical development, economic, living and cultural conditions of the Negro people in the United States as well as the experience of the Party in its work among Negroes, that Congress definitely established the problem of the Negroes as that of an oppressed nation among whom there existed all the requisites for a national revolutionary movement against American imperialism.

Harry Haywood, legendary African American communist leader

This estimation was a concrete application of the Marxist-Leninist conception of the national question to the conditions of the Negroes and was predicated upon the following premises: first, the concentration of large masses of Negroes in the agricultural regions of the Black Belt, where they constitute a majority of the population; secondly, the existence of powerful relics of the former chattel slave system in the exploitation of the Negro toilers – the plantation system based on sharecropping, landlord supervision of crops, debt slavery, etc.; thirdly, the development, on the basis of these slave remnants, of a political superstructure of inequality expressed in all forms of social proscription and segregation; denial of civil rights, right to franchise, to hold public offices, to sit on juries, as well as in the laws and customs of the South. This vicious system is supported by all forms of arbitrary violence, the most vicious being the peculiar American institution of lynching. All of this finds its theoretical justification in the imperialist ruling class theory of the “natural” inferiority of the Negro people.

Arizona School Board Fires Head of Mexican-American Studies

by Paul Teitelbaum

The Tucson Unified School Board, in a 3-2 vote, ousted the director of the Mexican-American Studies Program on April 10.

Program Director Sean Arce co-founded the MAS Program in 1999 and developed it into one of the most successful programs in the district. In 2004, the Mexican-American Studies Department was combined with the Pan-Asian, African-American and Native-American Studies Departments to create the new Ethnic Studies Department. This made the Tucson district the only K-12 public school district in the U.S. with an Ethnic Studies Department.

During the two-and-a-half-hour public comment period prior to the vote, people defended Arce and the program and lambasted the racist cowards on the board. Not one comment was made against the program. Community activist Isabel Garcia expressed the anger and outrage of the people when she told the board, ”I believe you prefer our children in prison than graduating from these high schools.”