Berry, Abner Winston

BERRY, ABNER WINSTON (1902–1987). An African American revolutionary born in Texas, Berry grew up in New Orleans, Saint Louis, and Chicago, where he followed his father into work at the Armour packing plant. After the sixth grade, Berry educated himself primarily with the Haldeman-Julius “Little Blue Books” available on the streets of Chicago.

In 1929, while a reporter for a Black weekly in Houston, Berry joined the Communist Party, impressed by what he read in exchange copies of the Daily Worker. In 1931 Berry moved to Kansas City. There he adeptly united Blacks and whites into a militant Unemployed Council. He was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1934.

In late 1934, Berry moved to New York City, where he became the Communist Party’s section organizer for Upper Harlem until 1940. An effective “behind the scenes” facilitator and coalition builder, he forged the alliance between Harlem’s Italian community and Black nationalist Garveyites to protest Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia.

Berry was drafted into the US Army in 1942 while a reporter for the Daily Worker. After he returned from the war in Europe, he resumed work at the Daily Worker, reporting on the Black freedom movement and the South, including the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Called the “layman’s theoretician” by his colleagues, Berry wrote a regular column in the Daily Worker and was editor of the weekly Harlem Worker.

Berry resigned from the Communist Party in 1957. From 1960 to 1968 he worked as the United Nations correspondent for Antara, the Indonesian news service. From 1969 to 1973, he ran Afro World Associates news service at the United Nations supplying many articles to Muhammad Speaks concerning the Third World.

Influenced by Malcolm X and the Black liberation movement of the 1960s, Berry taught Marxism to young activists in the Black Left. He joined the African Peoples Party and took the name Baba Sufu. He was an organizer and speaker at the 1974 African Liberation Day in Washington, D.C.

Though wheelchair-bound owing to a 1977 stroke, Berry moved to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1981 to work in the “black belt” South. There he helped found the Black Workers for Justice (BWFJ).

He was a plaintiff in the 1983 voting rights suit in Rocky Mount that overturned the at-large method of city council elections. Berry guided the BWFJ in establishing the Workers School in 1985, the monthly newspaper Justice Speaks, and the cultural ensemble Fruit of Labor. The BWFJ opened the Abner Berry Freedom Library and Workers Center in Rocky Mount in 1986.

Charney, George. A Long Journey. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968.

Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem during the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

Audio: Abner Berry (Oral History of the American Left). Communist Party Oral Histories. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. New York University. https://wp.nyu.edu/tamimentcpusa/abner-berry/