Yergan, Max

YERGAN, MAX (1892–1975). Born of a literate Black seamstress in Raleigh, North Carolina, Max Yergan attended Saint Ambrose and the academy and university divisions of Shaw Institute, Raleigh’s premier Negro college. In 1911, Yergan discovered social service in the campus Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), echoing elements of Social Gospel Protestantism.

From 1915 to 1917 Yergan served British forces as YMCA chaplain in Bangalore, India. Transferring to East Africa, he ministered to imperial “Coloured” troops and supply carriers, an experience that deeply affected his global thinking. His position as director (1921–1936) of a “Bantu” (African) section of South Africa’s Student Christian Association radicalized him, and by 1934 militant trade unionists, nationalists, and antifascists had won him over to revolution. In a double role, he daily led the Student Christian Association, nightly teaching African cadres socialism. (A protégé, Govan Mbeki, called him “utterly convincing.”)

Emboldened by a 1936 Soviet tour, Yergan reemerged a changed man, that summer resigning his YMCA position on political grounds. Stateside, he contacted Communist Party members James Ford, Ben Davis, and Abner Berry, placing himself at the Party’s disposal. A pioneering black educator, Yergan taught Negro history at the City College of New York from 1937 to 1941. A noted Harlem celebrity, he assisted Washington-based National Negro Congress (NNC) secretary John Davis and also cofounded the International Committee on African Affairs with Paul Robeson in an effort to influence US African policy.

As a progressive Popular Front publicist, journalist, lecturer, publisher, and impresario, Yergan—influential rather than disciplined—tied the “Negro questions” of South Africa and the Jim Crow South to Axis incursions into Ethiopia, Spain, and China. By 1939, contacts with NNC members Ford and John Davis landed Yergan a spot on its national executive. In 1940, in a controversial coup, Yergan was elected to succeed NNC president A. Philip Randolph, whose anti-Sovietism had angered the trend’s orthodox left-wingers. Both backers and detractors considered Yergan a Communist Party stalwart.

NNC leader from 1940 to 1947 and executive director of a reconstituted Council on African Affairs from 1940 to 1948, Yergan—who had been a 1924 Harmon Foundation awardee and a 1933 recipient of the Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—succumbed to postwar government harassment. By 1948 he had turned, capitulating to Truman-McCarthy Era anticommunism. Until his death in April 1975, Yergan was a hired “ex-Communist expert” informant and pro-apartheid lobbyist.

Anthony, David H. Max Yergan: Race Man, Internationalist, Cold Warrior. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Duberman, Martin. Paul Robeson: A Biography. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.

Naison, Mark D. Communists in Harlem during the Depression. New York: Grove Press, 1984.

Yergan, Max. Gold and Poverty in South Africa: A Study of Economic Organization and Standards of Living. New York and The Hague: International Industrial Relations Institute, with the cooperation of the International Committee on African Affairs, 1938.

Yergan, Max. “An Answer to Japanese Propaganda among Negroes.” China Today 5, no. 8 (May 1939).

Yergan, Max. Democracy and the Negro People Today. New York: National Negro Congress, 1940.