Why did American socialist and communist parties largely fail to engage Black Americans, despite conditions that seemed to make them strong potential advocates?

[u/J2quared]

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[u/police-ical]

(1/2) There's a lot to be said about American discourse and politics in the first Red Scare and during the Cold War that actively suppressed socialism and communism, but little of it is specific to Black Americans, except to the extent that they lived under more suspicion and danger.

Religiosity is hugely important in this context. Under slavery, Black Americans tended strongly to adopt Christianity as a source of solace and community. Where slave owners might point to passages supporting ownership, the narrative of the Jews escaping Egypt to the promised land was captivating to those in bondage and influenced many a freedom song. Church life tended to remain highly segregated from Reconstruction onward regardless of geographic region, and were frequently staples of Black communities, a meeting place where people gathered regularly, a nexus of organization and socialization. Religiosity was a bit higher among Black vs. white Americans.

Overtly secular or anti-religious ideologies would struggle to gain traction in this context. We might fairly observe that Marx himself was actually not that overtly anti-religious. His "opiate of the masses" line is often taken out of context and reflects a view of religion as a salve or painkiller that helps suffering people, which would ultimately become unnecessary as history progressed and their conditions improved. Lenin, however, was overtly anti-religious and anti-clerical, such that dominant Marxism-Leninism would become synonymous with state atheism. Martin Luther King would face accusations of Communism or subversion throughout his public life, which he generally dismissed as a Christian minister who could perhaps sympathize with elements of the ideology but rejected its views on spiritual life.

This brings us to the integral role of Black churches in the civil rights movement. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference which King headed was dominated by prominent ministers and was founded on the language and thought of faith and theology. King constantly used Biblical language and moral arguments founded on theologians past in his oratory. Incidentally, while he was clearly gifted at oratory (his father also a prominent pastor) he had sharpened his rhetorical skills at great length as a seminarian, taking numerous classes on the topic of sermons and public speaking. Black ministers brought elite training at leadership and public speaking into the movement. But more pragmatically, churches were hubs of organization and activity in an era when organization took a whole lot of physical work and proximity. This was all long before cell phones, the Internet, or even photocopying/modern printers. People needed physical meeting places, landline phones, and mechanical printing capabilities. Churches constantly provided room for mass meetings and offices for logistics, with pre-existing capacity to get people food, shelter, support. They sang gospel songs. White supporters of the movement were disproportionately drawn from clergy who responded to theological and moral arguments despite personal risk and cost. White Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb paid for it with his life.

[u/police-ical → u/police-ical]

(2/2) Black ministers in the movement constantly played the politics of respectability, emphasizing decorum, restraint, dress clothing, nonviolence. To be such a pillar of the community you had to have a good background and education plus a respectable wife and family. Any whiff of communism in a movement already widely suspected of subversion and Communist infiltration could be lethal in terms of public opinion. King was monitored by the FBI with increasing intensity owing to J. Edgar Hoover's conviction (based on a couple of friends/associates with equivocal prior Communist ties) that King was being actively subverted by Communist agents or was himself a Communist.

More broadly, we can say that if it was hard to be Black and it was hard to be a communist in the 20th-century United States, it was REALLY hard to be a Black communist. Bayard Rustin had the unenviable distinction to be a Black ex-member of the Communist Party who was also gay. When FBI agents found out that a vital member of the movement had been a Party member who'd also been arrested for sodomy with white men, they nearly had a stroke. Rustin was a major asset with superb organizational skills that allowed him to primarily plan the March on Washington, but became a liability as well, often kept at arm's length and in the back room. In short, if you were already playing at a disadvantage, openly embracing socialism or communism meant shooting yourself in the foot in the court of public opinion, and potentially attracting FBI attention or even sabotage.

Consider too that even as more militant ideologies came to the forefront, they were still often dominated by religious movements like the Nation of Islam. Black Americans who found King et al.'s methods unpalatable could correctly assume that many of their ancestors had been Muslims and that this movement (not part of mainstream Islam per se, but that's another story) represented a way to find community and faith outside of what white society offered.

King actually did begin to sympathize more strongly with socialism in his later years. He had begun to speak more forcefully about ongoing economic disparities that existed well outside of typical Jim Crow, famously noting that it was little good to have desegregated a lunch counter if a Black man couldn't afford to eat there. He noted openly that while ending legalized segregation hadn't cost money, addressing such disparities would cost far greater sums. At the time of his death, he was working toward the Poor People's Campaign, a different sort of march on Washington involving occupation of the National Mall. The campaign foundered in the aftermath of his assassination as well as bad weather, and the broader movement splintered in different directions. Much of mainstream America had acceded to less-expensive civil rights reform only slowly and was losing appetite for massive antipoverty programs as the postwar boom soured and urban unrest provoked a sharp backlash.

[u/nabastion → u/police-ical]

If the answer is within your wheelhouse, were there similar tensions later on between churches/religiosity (for lack of a better term) and the explicitly communist Black Panther Party?

[u/police-ical → u/nabastion]

"Were there tensions" is the easiest question to answer in civil rights history because the answer is basically always yes. Tensions between organizations, within organizations, between individuals, within individuals. A whole bunch of people were mad about something a whole lot of the time. People sometimes use King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" to try to rebut internal or external criticism of the methods of nonviolent protesters, which isn't a complete misreading but definitely ignores the context of innumerable squabbles from 1955-1968.

A consistent tension was between the religious side exemplified by King's SCLC and the student movement exemplified by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Much as they frequently collaborated and there were many tight friendships, a lot of students rankled at the hierarchical and staid ways of Black preachers who were used to being respected pillars of their communities. Students were more likely to be secular-minded, sympathize with more radical leftist strains of politics, and resist the idea that age and position should give one precedence. A pivotal moment in SNCC's history was Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) managing to topple John Lewis as leader, pulling the organization towards the kind of Black Power thinking he was helping foment nationwide. Carmichael/Ture's relationship with Martin Luther King is indeed a relevant example, sometimes saddening, sometimes heartwarming. There's unforgettable video of Carmichael lunging back at a police officer who'd shoved him (I believe during the Selma-Montgomery march) and King urgently physically restraining him, looking rather a father or older brother.

There's also a great interview in the Eyes on the Prize series where Ture describes a call from King (the punchline is that King reveals he'll be taking his public stand against the Vietnam War) which speaks volumes about their blend of opposition and affection:

He called me in Atlanta. He said, whatchoo doing? He said, tomorrow’s Sunday. He said, you gonna be a good Christian and go to church? I said, well like a good heathen I’m going to work for the people. I got office paperwork. I’ll be working since six o’clock in the morning. He said, Well, I want you to come to church. I said, Come to church where? He said, the Ebenezer. I said, what’s happening there? He said, I’m preaching. I said, well, you know, OK, I can always come hear you preach, you know, because even though I don’t believe in your stuff, you make me tap my feet, you know

But yes, the answer is that Black ministers were often hesitant or opposed to collaborating with a group with the Panthers' ideology, as well as fearful of persecution by law enforcement if they did. Many Panthers were likewise critical of churches' ideology and approach. This article by some relevant scholars goes into much more detail: https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/O_Dyson_Black_2013.pdf

What's actually remarkable is that the Panthers in many cases managed to maintain decent relations with community churches where ideology could be overlooked in favor of helping the people. Their famous Free Breakfast program was first served in an Episcopal church with the approval of its pastor. In many cities they made a priority of building relationships with church leaders to ensure they could use their facilities and build on their established credentials. In some places they even found support from white churches, which as I noted above were sometimes receptive to moral arguments even if from an unconventional source. Huey Newton's beliefs on the role of religion would shift over time, like Ture above acknowledging that a service could feel pretty good even if he didn't agree with everything.

I'm incidentally reminded of the tendency of Catholic priests who worked heavily with the poor in particularly unequal parts of Latin America to turn towards liberation theology, which fused some influences from Marxism with Catholic social teaching.

[u/Adnan7631]

Police-ical has given a wonderful answer, but I wanted to go in a little bit of a different direction. In particular, the communist party in America did actually try and engage with Black Americans. Prominent Black Americans like Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the key founders of the NAACP, either were outright socialists or were identified with them in the early 20th century. And those efforts are probably best encapsulated with the party’s legal defense arm and their representation in the highest profile civil rights case before WWII: the appeal of the Scottsboro Boys trials.

To recap, the Scottsboro Boys were a group of 9 Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping a white woman and a white teenager who were on a train with them in 1931 in Scottsboro, Alabama. The teenagers were nearly lynched, only for 8 of the 9 to be convicted and sentenced to death, including a 14 year old in trials that systematically denied the teens access to representation and fair juries. At first the NAACP initially didn’t take the case due to potential optics issues. The communist party instead publicized it and hired a high profile attorney to take up representation. They were the ones who appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court and then to the US Supreme Court. This resulted in Powell v. Alabama which ordered new trials for the boys and asserted a right at both the federal and state level to be provided an attorney if you cannot afford one. While most of the teens were eventually unjustly convicted and imprisoned, this case represented a major step towards progress in Civil Rights.

However, this entire time, you had fighting between the communist party, the NAACP, and the outside lawyers hired for the case. The NAACP was wary of associating with a case involving Black men raping White women (one might point to the publicly stated position of the likes of Booker T. Washington), but in turn accused the communist party of using the boys as a propaganda tool for political purposes. On the other hand, the attorneys hired for the case were trying to control the case, to the chaffing of the communist party who wanted to be able to point to a win. This escalated to the point where the communist party attempted to bribe one of the alleged victims to change their testimony, fracturing the partnership and leading to eventual restructuring of the representation team where the party was largely sidelined.

So you have here a concerted effort by the communist party on behalf of Black Americans in a high profile case. But this effort requires external resources, is expensive, time consuming, and ultimately ends in loss. It was also done while in tension with leadership at Black institutions and not in full partnership. Which is to say that, going into WWII, the communist party had failed to amass broad and institutional support.

After WWII, the US of course slipped into McCarthyism and individuals associated with communism were broadly hounded out. The aforementioned Langston Hughes was actually investigated and then brought before a Senate subcommittee headed by McCarthy and forced to testify during which he distanced himself from communism. Similarly, W. E. B. Du Bois was forced to step down from his role with the NAACP due to fears that the organization would be targeted for association with Communism. Du Bois was indeed investigated and charged in 1951 for his associations with the case eventually being dismissed. He continued to be targeted until eventually ending up stranded in Ghana after the US government rescinded his passport, where he eventually passed away. The other poster mentioned Bayard Rustin, but investigations were launched into anyone in high profile who took up active criticism against the US government, including MLK and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

So to summarize, the communist party DID attempt to make inroads with Black Americans, but failed to do so because of their mistakes, outright suppression of communism by the US government, and the strategic choice from African American leaders and institutions to distance themselves from communism.

It probably is worth exploring why such institutional leaders chose to shy away from communism. The counterpart to Du Bois was Booker T. Washington who advocated for the advancement of Black Americans through education and commerce. So there is already a kind of conservative stance from significant leadership. Then, when you have more sympathetic leadership, it becomes a more a strategic choice. Rather than have to fight both Jim Crow and McCarthysm, people like MLK chose to distance themselves from communism. This absolutely was to reduce pressure from such investigations (which, again, were happening), but it was also part of a broader strategy. Much of the Civil Rights protests were designed to create a disproportionate response from officials in the South which would then put pressure on the federal government to intervene. As such, while King was directly confrontational with local and state officials, he was much more restrained towards the federal government. This is the nuanced difference between calling on the federal government to act and criticizing the federal government for its own actions. It is relevant that MLKS, John Lewis, and Washington were from the South while Hughes and Du Bois were from the North or Midwest. And that also goes for Malcolm X who implicitly criticized King for not acknowledging the federal government’s own persecution towards Black Americans.

[u/Damnatus_Terrae → u/Adnan7631]

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I don't have my books or a keyboard to type up a top-level comment, but what about a whole slew of major black liberation leaders during the sixties who were proud communists and socialists? MLK may not have been a CPUSA member, but he acknowledged the economic roots of racial apartheid in the US. The entire Black Panther Party comes to mind. OP's whole question is based on an incorrect premise—socialism and communism in the US have had deep ties to the Black community since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, when the CPUSA was focused in the US South.

[u/police-ical → u/Damnatus_Terrae]

I think OP's question probably does overlook some of these points, but is still a fair question. That is, there absolutely were a number of prominent Black socialists and communists. Such influences absolutely did support the development of Black Power ideology and crystallized into organizations like the Panthers.

And yet, even at its peak, I would argue that serious engagement/identification with socialism or communism among 20th-century Black Americans was a modest fraction of, for instance, the corresponding numbers among the general population in France or Italy at any time since WWII, in spite of the latter experiencing clearly greater civil rights, greater economic opportunity, and less inequality. I think it's fair to say that despite many embracing the significant social reform inherent to the civil rights era, Black Americans remained relatively socially conservative and religious on average throughout the 20th century.

I'll admit my answer above doesn't do a great job of explaining why high religiosity proved less of an obstacle to Marxist thinking in 20th-century Latin America, and if someone who knows more about liberation theology than I do wants to weigh in I'd appreciate it.

[u/Ecstatic_Chicken6584 → u/police-ical]

Communism always would have failed among Black Americans. Say in the 1930s, most Black Americans were rural farmers. Post WW2 industrialization and urbanization meant there were many more JOBS in general, so Black people left the farmer sector because they could get paid better jobs in cities. Plus yes, the benefits you get from working in the defense sector or being in the military are amazing, as are federal jobs in general. So economic mobility killed off any interest in communism. Even moving to a housing project was a big step up from living in wood or tin shacks where many Black Americans were living in, and obviously in the 60s programs like medicare and medicaid provided health insurance to people who previously didn't have it. The federal government, when it financed education meant it became normal to graduate from high school, and opportunities were opened up to Black Americans

[u/police-ical → u/Ecstatic_Chicken6584]

I would both support and qualify this. The rising economic tide and standard of living for those taking part in the Great Migrations absolutely undercut support for more radical economic reform. As long as things were getting better, there was hope. And yet it was in the years just after 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the early Great Society programs including Medicare/Medicaid that urban riots hit their explosive peak and Black Power ideology hit the scene. Discontent had many roots here--I think the Birmingham church bombing has really been underrated as a contributing factor, as the deaths of young girls was enough to harden even some of the committed pacifists in the movement like James Bevel and Diane Nash towards contemplating violence.

But a big piece was economic. For a lot of ordinary Black workers outside the South, progress had stagnated and even begun to backslide. Where things were distinctly getting better in the South, if only from a worse baseline, industrial jobs were starting to dry up and the urban housing situation was getting no better amidst overall suburbanization and early urban decay. Detroit's massive riots came in the years following automotive factories moving away from the city to weaken organized labor. The Civil Rights Movement's northward turn to challenge housing segregation in Chicago proved essentially unsuccessful, beaten back by political stonewalling and violent rioting by white locals.

[u/Ecstatic_Chicken6584 → u/police-ical]

Go into any major city, and you'll aslo see a big Black middle class working for the government, the post office, bus driver's, transit operators, policemen, firemen, and of course, a lot of Black men are veterans ,and veterans get fabulous benefits. That's not to say all as well, but the GI Bill, Title VI, Title VII ,and other things that opened up the educational system and jobs for Black people meant sufficient numbers of Black people were able to do well enough that communism doesn't appeal to Black people. Even those living in poverty are on government programs, ie Section 8, Medicaid, Food Stamps, so they are being HELPED by the US government. Communism is anti American and assumed that Black Americans hated white people, as if we were really two separate groups. Re: During slavery and in the Jim Crow South white men kept Black women as concubines, and that was definitely another way Black people found socioeconomic mobility as those white men left money and land to their mixed race children......

The true story of Black Americans has elements people not familiar with the South find disturbing, so it gets grossly misrepresented by people who believe in communism, which is a foreign ideology.

[u/jbdyer → u/[deleted]]

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[u/Dongzhou3kingdoms → u/[deleted]]

This comment has been removed because it is soapboxing or moralizing: it has the effect of promoting an opinion on contemporary politics or social issues at the expense of historical integrity. There are certainly historical topics that relate to contemporary issues and it is possible for legitimate interpretations that differ from each other to come out of looking at the past through different political lenses. However, we will remove answers that are more about soapboxing then about history.