Harry Haywood

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Harry Haywood
Haywood in 1948
Born	Haywood Hall (1898-02-04)February 4, 1898 South Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.
Died	January 4, 1985(1985-01-04) (aged 86)
Resting place	Arlington, Virginia, U.S.
Occupation	Political figure
Spouse	Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
Children	3
Military career
Allegiance	Spanish Republic  United States
Service/branch	International Brigades United States Army
Unit	370th Infantry Regiment (United States) The "Abraham Lincoln" XV International Brigade
Battles/wars	World War I Spanish Civil War World War II

Harry Haywood (February 4, 1898 – January 4, 1985) was an American political activist who was a leading figure in both the

Harry Haywood was born Haywood Hall, Jr., on February 4, 1898, in South Omaha, Nebraska, to former slaves Harriet and Haywood Hall, from Missouri and West Tennessee, respectively.[2] They had migrated to Omaha because of jobs with the railroads and meatpacking industry, as did numerous other southern blacks. South Omaha also attracted White immigrants, and ethnic Irish had established an early neighborhood there. Haywood was the youngest of three sons.^[3]

In 1913 after their father was attacked by whites, the Hall family moved to

During his four-and-half-year stay in the

He believed that a distinct African-American nation had developed that satisfied the criteria laid out by Stalin in his Marxism and the National Question: a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture. 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. Their "national territory" was historically the South, and they deserved full equality everywhere else in the United States. Haywood believed that only with genuine political power, which from a Marxist point of view included control of the productive forces, such as land, could African Americans obtain genuine equality. Their gaining of equality was a prerequisite for broader working class unity.

Most of those in the CPUSA who disagreed with Haywood considered the question of African-American oppression a matter of

Following the Great Migration of millions of blacks to the North and Midwest, accompanied by their urbanization, critics attempted to use statistics to counter the Black Belt theory and show there no longer was a black nation centered in the South. In his 1957 article, "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question", Haywood responded that the question of an oppressed nation in the South was not one of "nose counting."

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Harry Haywood's 1948 book, Negro Liberation, was the first major study of the African-American national question written by an African-American Marxist. He argued that the root of the oppression of Blacks was the unsolved agrarian question in the

The CPUSA's decision to change its position on the African-American national question was a central factor in Haywood's expulsion. Though the CPUSA had not been as active in the South since the dissolution of the Sharecroppers Union, in 1959 the CPUSA officially dropped its demand for self-determination for African Americans there. (The demand had been dropped earlier when Browder liquidated the party in 1944.) The CPUSA instead held that as American capitalism developed, so too would Black-White unity.

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. In 1959, Haywood, although no longer a functioning party member, attempted to intervene one last time. He wrote "On the Negro Question", which was distributed at the Seventeenth National Convention by and in the name of

In Haywood's view, "White

Political Activities 1950s–1980s

Haywood and his wife

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.

Marriage and family

In 1920, Haywood married a woman named Hazel, but they separated the same year.^[3]

While he was in Los Angeles in the late 1930s or 1940, he married Belle Lewis, whom he had known for years. They divorced in 1955.^[3]

In 1956, Haywood married Gwendolyn Midlo, a Jewish activist from New Orleans, Louisiana. She has been active in civil rights throughout her life. She also has become a prominent historian of slavery in the United States and Latin America, and of the African diaspora. She made her academic career at Rutgers University. They had three children, whom Midlo Hall mostly provided for alone. They are Dr. Haywood Hall (b. 1956), Dr. Rebecca Hall (b. 1963), and a third child from a previous marriage, Leonid A. Yuspeh (b. 1951.)

Haywood and Midlo Hall remained married until his death in 1985. Between 1953 and 1964, they collaborated on numerous articles, including some published in Soulbook Magazine, founded in Berkeley, California, in 1964.^[14] She did not follow him into the New Communist Movement, and they mostly lived apart after late 1964. Shortly before Haywood's expulsion from the Communist Party, he moved with his family to Mexico City, Mexico.^[3] During these years, Midlo Hall earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in history at Mexico City College. 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. From there, she went to work as an assistant professor at Rutgers University, where she made her academic career and advanced to full professor. Midlo Hall has taught Africans in the Atlantic World at Michigan State University, as Adjunct Professor of History.

Death and legacy

Haywood died in January 1985, and was buried in

See also

• Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)
• Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1937–50)
• The Communist Party USA and African-Americans
• Civil rights movement (1896–1954)
• Timeline of Racial Tension in Omaha, Nebraska
• Black nationalism
• Black separatism

Footnotes

Other sources consulted

• Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che. New York: Verso, 2006.
• William Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party of the United States. New York: International Publishers, 1952.
• Lance Hill,Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
• Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer & Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
• William Eric Perkins, "Harry Haywood (1898-1985)," in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, Dan Georgakas, Eds. Encyclopedia of the American Left. New York: Garland, 1990.
• Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Works

• The Communist Position on the Negro Question. With Earl Browder and Clarence Hathaway. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1931.
• Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression. With Milton Howard. New York: International Publishers, 1932.
• The Road to Negro Liberation: Report to the Eighth Convention of the Communist Party of the USA. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1934.
• The South Comes North in Detroit's Own Scottsboro Case. New York: League of Struggle for Negro Rights, n.d. [1930s].
• Negro Liberation. New York: International Publishers, 1948. —Reissued by Liberator Press, Chicago, 1976.
• Haywood, Harry. "Selected Works". University of Massachusetts. Retrieved December 7, 2020. Articles from Soulbook, 1965–1967.
• Harry Haywood, For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question. Chicago: Liberator Press, 1975.
• Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Liberator Press, Chicago: 1978.

Further reading

• Dawson, Michael C. Black Visions. The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies. University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 2001.
• Foster, William Z. History of the Communist Party of the United States. International Publishers, New York: 1952.
• Foster, William Z. The Negro People in American History. International Publishers, New York: 1954.
• Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Defying Dixie. The Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919–1950. W.W. Norton & Company, New York 2008.
• Howard, Walter T. Black Communists Speak on Scottsboro. A Documentary History. Temple University Press, Philadelphia: 2008.
• Howard, Walter T. We Shall Be Free!: Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.
• Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill: 1990.
• Kelley, Robin D. G. and Betsy Esch, "Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution", in Afro-Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans. Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, Eds. Duke University Press, Durham: 2008; pp. 97–155.
• Solomon, Mark.The Cry Was Unity. Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936. University of Mississippi Press, Jackson: 1998.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Harry Haywood.

• Harry Haywood Internet Archive
• Documents from School on Afro-American National Question. Important texts from New Communist Movement groups based on theories put forward by Haywood.
• The Third International and the Struggle for a Correct Line on the African American National Question Archived June 18, 2006, at the
  Workers Party of Belgium
• Harry Haywood Papers Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.