Foreword THE COMMUNIST FIGHT FOR THE NEGRO CAUSE The two major capitalist parties, the Republican and Democratic, and their small brother, the Socialist Party, have an unwritten "gentleman's agreement" on the Negro question. According to this sacred "gentleman's agreement," which no capitalist politician has dared to violate in the present election campaign, there is no Negro question in the United States, there are no problems of social and political equality, no questions of discrimination against the Negro masses. During the whole course of the election campaign there has been only one political party which has had the courage to violate this "gentleman's agreement" to keep a deathly silence on the Negro question. The Workers (Communist) Party of America has come out in its election platform and in its whole election struggle as the fearless champion of the Negro masses. Com The southern states are stirred up by the political struggle of the communist speakers and organizers for the Negro masses. munist anti-lynching leaflets are being distributed everywhere. The candidates of the Communist Party are everywhere putting up a courageous fight for the full social and political equality of the Negro race. The meetings of the Communist Party have been broken up in Arizona, in Texas, in Delaware, and in other southern states, because the communist spokesmen dared to tackle the Negro question and were bold enough to call the Negro workers to their meetings. The Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, the forces of police and other organs of governmental terrorism are mobilized everywhere against the communists, because the Communist Party is the only party of the working class and of the oppressed Negro masses. One, if not the most outstanding, feature of the election campaign of 1928 is the fact that communist speakers, organizers, and candidates for President, Vice-President, and Governor are being jailed everywhere because of their uncompromising struggle for the Negroes. 40361 0-59-pt. 2- -9 To this brief foreword to the following essay on some of the basic Negro problems in America, we wish to add the principal demands for the oppressed Negro masses as embodied in the Platform of the Workers (Communist) Party of America: 1. Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination. Full racial, political, and social equality for the Negro race. 2. Abolition of all laws which result in segregation of Negroes. Abolition of all Jim Crow laws. The law shall forbid all discrimination against Negroes in selling or renting houses. 3. Abolition of all laws which disfranchise the Negroes. 4. Abolition of laws forbidding intermarriage of persons of differ ent races. 5. Abolition of all laws and public administration measures which prohibit, or in practice prevent, Negro children or youth from attending general public schools or universities. Full and equal admittance of Negroes to all railway station waiting rooms, restaurants, hotels, and theatres. 7. Federal law against lynching and the protection of the Negro masses in their right of self-defense. 8. Abolition of discriminatory practices in courts against Negroes. No discrimination in jury service. 9. Abolition of the convict lease system and of the chain-gang. 10. Abolition of all Jim Crow distinction in the army, navy, and civil service. 11. Immediate removal of all restrictions in all trade unions against the membership of Negro workers. 12. Equal opportunity for employment, wages, hours, and working conditions for Negro and white workers. Equal pay for equal work for Negro and white workers. J. P. American Negro Problems By JOHN PEPPER The Negro question in America must be treated in its relation to the liberation struggle of the proletariat against American imperialism. The struggle against white oppression of the Negro masses is a part of the proletarian revolution in America against capitalism. The American working class cannot free itself from capitalist exploitation without freeing the Negro race from white oppression. What Marx said about the United States is still true: "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." At the same time the Negro question in the United States of America must be treated in its relations to the huge Negro masses of farmers and workers oppressed and exploited by white imperialism in Africa and South America. The Negroes of the United States are the most advanced section of the Negro population of the world and can play a decisive role in helping and leading the liberation movement of the Negro colonies. Within the Negro population of the United States, the Negro working class is destined to be the vanguard of all liberation movements and may become the vanguard of the liberation movement of the Negro peasant masses on an international scale. A NEGRO PROLETARIAT APPEARS The industrialization of the agrarian south of the United States, the concentration of a new Negro working-class population in the big cities of the east and north, and the entrance of the Negroes into the basic industries on a mass scale, have been changing, in the last few years, the whole social composition of the Negro race in America. The appearance of a genuine Negro industrial proletariat creates an organizing force for the Negro race, furnishes a new working-class leadership to all Negro race movements, creates the possibility for the Negro workers under the leadership of the Com munist Party to assume the hegemony of the Negro liberation movement, strengthens immensely the fighting possibilities for the emancipation of the Negro race and increases the importance of the Negro question for the revolutionary struggle of the American proletariat. American imperialism oppresses in the most terrific way the nearly 11 million Negroes who constitute not less than one-tenth of the country's total population. White capitalist prejudice considers the Negro race a "lower race," the born servants of the lofty white masters. The racial caste system is a fundamental feature of the social, industrial and political organization of the United States. The Workers (Communist) Party of America, in its fight against imperialism, must recognize clearly the tremendous revolutionary possibilities of the liberation movement of the Negro people. Today the "solid south," the millions of Negro farmers of the "black belt," living under the most oppressive conditions, "half-feudal, half-slave" (Lenin) constitute one of the props of American imperialism. It is the basic duty of the Communist Party to develop all revolutionary possibilities of the Negro race, to transform the "solid south" and the "black belt" from "reserves of forces for the bourgeoisie into reserves of forces for the proletariat" (Stalin). The Communist Party must consider itself not only the Party of the working class generally, but also the champion of the Negroes as an oppressed race and especially the organizer of the Negro working-class elements. The Communist Party cannot be a real Bolshevik Party without being also the Party of the liberation of the Negro race from all white oppression. THE SOLID SOUTH-AN AMERICAN COLONY The Negro tenant farmers, share-croppers, and agricultural workers of the south are still, despite all the pompous phrases of "freeing the slaves," in the status of virtual slavery. They have not the slightest prospect of ever acquiring possession of the land on which they work. By means of a usurious credit system they are chained to the plantation owners as firmly as plantation slaves. Peonage and contract labor are the fate of the Negro cotton farmers. The bankers of the east and the south are increasingly becoming the landowners. The landowners, who are at the same time the merchants, having a monopoly of marketing the crops of the Negro tenant farmers, and of the government in the south, rule over the Negroes with a merciless dictatorship. The most backward half-feudal, half-slave methods of exploitation by the plantation owners, are merged in the south with the most modern forms of capitalist exploitation by the huge trusts and banks of financial capital. No other section of the American toiling masses feels the ruthless capitalist dictatorship of the much-vaunted American bourgeois democracy more than the oppressed Negro masses. The Negroes of the south are disfranchised politically. Sheer force prevents the Negroes from exercising their so-called political rights. Lynch law is the law over the Negroes. The terror of the Ku Klux Klan is the constitution for the Negroes. Most infamous segregation policies prevail everywhere against them. The white masters try to reduce the Negroes to illiteracy. The "black belt" of the south, with its starving and pauperized Negro farmers, and Negro agricultural working masses; with its Jim-Crowism, its semi-feudal status and its political system still bearing the earmarks of the period of slavery, constitutes virtually a colony within the body of the United States of America. The super-profits extracted from this Negro "colony" are one of the most important sources of the growth of American imperialism; the oppression of the Negro race is one of the most important bases of the government apparatus of American capitalism. The prejudices created in the minds of large sections of the white workers against the Negroes are the most dangerous obstacles to the unity of the American working class. CLASS DIFFERENTIATION OF THE NEGROES A sharp class differentiation has taken place in the Negro population in recent years. Formerly the Negro was in the main the cotton farmer in the south and the domestic help in the north. The peasantry (the Negro farm owners, the share-croppers, the Negro tenant farmers) and the agricultural workers are still the largest stratum of the Negro race. Out of eight million Negroes in the south, there are six million still on the land. In the big cities and industrial centres of the north there is concentrated to a growing degree a Negro working-class population. There are already one and one-half to two million Negroes in industry in the north. At the same time there is a rapid development of a Negro petit-bour |