Woodbey, George Washington

WOODBEY, GEORGE WASHINGTON (1854 -1937). George Washington Woodbey, known as “The Great Negro Socialist Orator,” was born into slavery in Johnson County, Tennessee in 1854. He grew up to become a Baptist minister and, like most African Americans of his era, was loyal to the Republican party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Then, after careful study and listening to the speeches of Eugene V. Debs, Woodbey switched his allegiance to the Socialist Party.

Woodbey became an immediate force. He moved to California and began delivering speeches about socialism to packed rented halls and churches and even on street-corner soapboxes. “The general verdict is he has done more good for the cause than any of our most eloquent speakers who have preceded him,” the Los Angeles Socialist wrote in 1902.

Woodbey went on to serve as the sole Black delegate to the 1904 and 1908 Socialist Party conventions, contribute articles to the Christian Socialist magazine, and publish a well-received pamphlet, The Bible and Socialism (1904).

He paid a price for his advocacy. On multiple occasions, his public speeches were interrupted by police who arrested and often beat him. Armed vigilantes stalked him. Woodbey lost his pulpit in the Mt. Zion Baptist church in San Diego over his advocacy for socialism, even though he had been attracting large crowds to the services.

Yet Woodbey still insisted the sanctuary was a priority forum for the left. “Socialists cannot win without reaching the millions of working people who belong to various churches of the country,” he wrote in the Christian Socialist in 1915.

Woodbey was not shy about pushing for an aggressive form of socialism, often pointing out that Americans accepted public education, libraries, and infrastructure as the norm, and they could soon adjust to industry being publicly-owned, too. He rose at the 1908 Socialist Party convention to urge the party’s mayoral candidates who succeeded to quickly “socialize everything in sight.”

At that same convention, Woodbey resisted Socialist party leadership proposals to include anti-immigrant policies in its platform. “There are no foreigners, and cannot be, unless some person comes down from Mars, or Jupiter, or some place,” he said. “I stand on the declaration of Thomas Paine when he said, ‘The world is my country.’”

Woodbey was praised for his ability to explain socialism to audiences that were not familiar with the concept. Socialism simply meant the end of financial struggle, he said. “You will not have to worry about how you live any more than you need to worry now about whether you can walk on the street from this meeting.” And he insisted that workers of all races had more in common than they believed. “We poor whites and blacks have fought each other long enough, and while we have fought, the capitalists have been taking everything from both of us.”

Dorrien, Gary. The New Abolition: W.E.B. DuBois and the Black Social Gospel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

Foner, Philip S. “From Slavery to Socialism: George Washington Woodbey, Black Socialist Preacher,” in Socialism and Christianity in Early 20th Century America, ed. Jacob H. Dorn. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.