Harry Haywood

Harry Haywood (* 6. February 1898 in South Omaha , Nebraska , † January 1985 ) was a member of KPUSA (CPUSA) and Marxist thought leaders in regard to the situation of African Americans . He was also the founder of the New Communist Movement .

Live and act

In 1915 the Haywood family moved to Chicago . He became politicized, especially through the race riots in Chicago in 1919 . Influenced by his brother Otto, who had been a member of the CPUSA since 1921, he joined the African Blood Brotherhood in 1922 . After he had also become a member of the CPUSA in 1925, he attended the Communist University for the Workers of the East . He later studied at the International Lenin School and remained a Comintern delegate until 1930 .

Haywood wrote a draft entitled Comintern Resolutions on the Negro Question , in which he saw the blacks in the southern United States as an oppressed people with the right to national self-determination .

From 1927 to 1938 Haywood was a member of the Central Committee of the CPUSA and from 1931 to 1938 of the Politburo . There he took up position in internal battles at the side of William Z. Foster against Jay Lovestone and Earl Browder .

He became general secretary of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, founded in 1930 .

After the de-Stalinization , which also took place in the CPUSA, he was expelled from the party as a “Stalinist” and “Maoist”. From 1956 until the end of his life he was married to civil rights activist Gwendolyn Midlo Hall .

In his view, white chauvinism led to de-Stalinization in the party, rather than economic analysis, which prevented the CPUSA from playing a decisive role in the civil rights movement from 1955–1968.

literature

• Harry Haywood: Black Bolshevik: autobiography of an Afro-American Communist . Liberator Press, Chicago 1978, ISBN 0-930720-53-9 . ( Autobiography )