Ethnicity and Race Race, Class,

Ethnicity and Race

Race, Class, and Economics

The Harlem Renaissance today is famed as an age of artistic ferment, an age that gave birth to the career of Paul Robeson and the Cotton Club. It was also an age of political challenges to an American political and economic system that clearly was not 'working' as it should for the African-Americans and working class Americans. These Americans' lives failed to flourish during the Roaring 20s. Later, after the crash of the stock market and the subsequent Great Depression that hit the already precarious lives of Black Americas especially hard, Black citizens looked for different models of economic life, such as communism, to provide a new vision for the future. Blacks were buffeted by economic turmoil more than Whites, were denied the voice of conventional labor union activism, and Black women were often forced to shoulder a double burden as mothers and laborers in an era where women were poorly paid because they were technically not supposed to be working at all.

Early, on, advocates such as Cyril Brigg expressed the philosophy that Black nationalism must not be an ideology of territorial or race liberation alone, as advocated in the 'Back to Africa' movement of Marcus Garvey. Instead it must be an international working class movement of liberation founded upon Marxism and workers' rights -- after all, American Black oppression was founded upon the capitalist needs of the slave trade. The American legislative system had proved a failure in winning Blacks their rights, thus a new system was required, and like Marx's workers, Blacks had nothing to lose but their chains, even less to lose than White workers (hence the greater attraction of more moderate trade unionism for Whites).

The radical Marxism of advocates such as Briggs, as expressed in "What the African Brotherhood Stands for" was in direct contrast with the so-called talented tenth ideology of Langston Hughes, which advocated non-violent African-American mobility through the system of American education, and by claiming the American ideology of infinite class mobility and democratic justice as Black's own (246). Like Marx called upon the working classes of the nations to unite in international struggle, Briggs justified armed Black self-defense, although unlike some Black advocates, Brigg did not see Blacks as uniquely aggrieved, rather Briggs saw Black oppression as part of a larger struggle of international social justice, of all oppressed, marginalized, and impoverished workers denied the ability to better their lot in life through the current system. Thus Briggs felt that Marcus Garvey was misguided in his isolation of the Black cause that did not embrace the class-based nature of Black oppression.

This may sound strange to modern ears, as communism is now synonymous with tyranny. But before Stalin's crimes became widely known, Soviet Russia stood as an ideal for many Blacks, who identified with the 'lower' European classes in this older system of economic oppression. This alliance between European oppression of aliens and Blacks is seen in Claude McCay's essay "Soviet Russia and the Negro," where he speaks of finding kinship and fellow understanding from Russians lacking in the hearts of American White. "When the democratic bourgeoisie of the United States were execrating Czardom for the Jewish pogroms they were meting out to your people a treatment more savage and barbarous than the Jews ever experienced in the old Russia," says one Russian in sympathy during McCay's visit (246). Claude McCay was also impressed by the "this spirit of sympathetic appreciation and response prevailing in all circles in Moscow and Petrograd. I never guessed what was awaiting me in Russia," he marveled stating that he felt more at home in Russia than he did in America (246).

Given the pervasiveness of Jim Crow in America, it should perhaps come as little surprise that African-Americans found empowerment in the advocacy of a new, liberating ideology that proclaimed the equality of all workers, regardless of their race or economic status. "I found this party, the part of the working class, gave me rights equal with all others, regardless of race, class or educational standards," said Hosea Hudson, a self-taught former Black sharecropper who often felt discomfort with highly educated Northern Blacks and instead sought the unquestioned acceptance and class blindness of the American communist party (314). Hudson's account also draws attention to the fact that the non-communist labor unions were all "lily white," and rejected Black workers, though there might have been presumed class solidarity (316). "The two great obstacles to racial solidarity are the psychology of craft unionism and the psychology of race prejudice," note the authors Manning Marable and Leith Mullings in their overview of "Black Workers and the Great Depression" (296). For Hosea Hudson, communism alone satisfied his needs as an African-American and as a poor, Southern worker.