Haywood, Harry

HAYWOOD, HARRY (1898–1985). Of all the African American figures in the history of American Communism, none was more important in ultimate impact than Harry Haywood. Born to a sharecropping family that fled the South at the turn of the century, Haywood came to Chicago as a young man following World War I. He joined the Communist Party in 1925 and in 1926 sojourned to Moscow, where he was strongly influenced by the first generation of anticolonial revolutionaries (among them M. N. Roy of India, Tan Malaka of Indonesia, and Ho Chi Minh). During his years of study in the Soviet Union his peasant background merged with this anticolonial tradition to crystallize his major theoretical contribution to American radicalism—the theory of self-determination in the “black belt” of the American South for the Afro-American people.

Haywood initiated the debate on self-determination within the Party during the 1930s and vigorously fought for this position until his expulsion in 1959. Accused of “Left sectarianism,” Haywood continued to be one of the most astute observers of the civil rights and black power movements from an independent standpoint during the later 1950s and 1960s. His work on the insurrectionary potential of the black masses bore fruit in the “long, hot summers” of 1965–1968; his work on the revolutionary implications of black nationalism with the emergence of Malcolm X, the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. He was no less prescient in cautiously warning about the co-optation and subversion of an independent black mass movement. During the last years of his life, he was instrumental in nurturing a new generation of Afro-American radicals, exposing them to the intricacies of his own experience in Party politics, while exposing them to the dangers of the integrationist dogma of liberal and radical alike. His major works include Negro Liberation (1948) and his autobiography, Black Bolshevik (1978), in addition to numerous articles, pamphlets, and political tracts. Ernest Allen of the University of Massachusetts is preparing a collection of his lesser-known writings for eventual publication.

Baraka, Amiri [LeRoi Jones]. “Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist, by Harry Haywood.” In Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974–1979. New York: William Morrow, 1984.

Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978; distributed by Lake View Press.

Haywood, Harry. For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question. Chicago: Liberator Press, 1975. (This was written and circulated in 1957.)

Haywood, Harry. Negro Liberation (1948). Chicago: Liberator Press, 1976.

Harry Haywood Internet Library. Marxists Internet Library. https://www.marxists.org/archive/haywood/index.htm

Harry Haywood Papers, 1928-1985. Bentley Historical Library. University of Michigan. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/bhlead/umich-bhl-851384?view=text

Harry Haywood Papers, 1948-1981. Archives & Manuscripts. New York Public Library. http://archives.nypl.org/scm/21034