Winston, Henry

WINSTON, HENRY (1911–1986). A leading African American Communist, Henry M. Winston pioneered the US anti-imperialist movement in aid to African nations struggling for independence and for decades played a central role in the organizational life of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). The son of a sawmill laborer and steelworker relocated from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to Kansas City, Missouri, Winston was compelled by family economics to leave high school. His political activities began at age nineteen, in Kansas City, where he led the city’s Unemployed Council. Over the next few years, he helped organize similar councils in a number of African American communities, including Harlem and Cleveland.

After joining the Young Communist League (YCL) and the CPUSA, he rose quickly through the ranks of both, due to his outstanding organizational skills. By 1936, he became the YCL’s national organizational secretary and a member of the CPUSA’s central committee. He was also active in the Scottsboro case and in support of Republican Spain. During World War II, Winston helped enlist thousands of Communists into the armed forces. His own European tour of duty ended with an honorable discharge, despite government discrimination against Communists. Afterward, he was elected national organization secretary of the CPUSA, then faced the emergence of the Cold War.Sentenced in 1947 to jail for five years under the Smith Act, Winston exhausted his appeals and, by decision of the Party, along with three other leaders went “underground.” After five years, it was decided that Winston should surrender. He was sentenced to three additional years in the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

During his prison term, Winston developed a brain tumor that prison officials refused to treat until too late to save his sight. An international campaign for his freedom, including among its supporters Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, A. Philip Randolph, and Reinhold Niebuhr, brought a 1961 commutation of his sentence by the new Kennedy administration. (Fidel Castro had offered to exchange him for a Bay of Pigs prisoner.)

In 1966 Winston was voted Party chairman, in which capacity he played an instrumental role in defending Angela Davis from government persecution, and in rallying Communist opposition to the Vietnam War. As an international figure, Winston became friends with many African leaders, including Amilcar Cabral and Kwame Nkrumah. In his major works, Strategy for a Black Agenda (1973) and Class, Race, and Black Liberation (1977), Winston polemicized against theories of race separation, back-to-Africa movements, and black capitalism. He also directed the CPUSA’s adoption of a ban on male supremacy. At age sixty-five, Winston received the Order of the October Revolution from the Soviet Union. He died in Moscow, and his ashes were placed in a vault at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago, with those of other famous American socialists, communists, and labor radicals.

Jackson, Maurice. “He Kept His Eyes on the Prize.” People’s Daily World, 19 February 1987.

Pecinovsky, Tony. “Henry Winston: Sight, Vision and Black Liberation,” from Pecinovsky, Let Them Tremble: Biographical Interventions Marking 100 Years of the Communist Party, USA. New York: International Publishers, 2020.