"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"...

For Hosea Hudson, communism alone satisfied his needs as an African-American and as a poor, Southern worker.
Class conflict between Black and White workers was still rife, however, as jobs grew scarcer during the depression. Black workers, desperate for a job and non-unionized, took work at a lower pay, outraging union activists and fanning race prejudice, without suggesting the obvious solution of welcoming Blacks into the union and providing an incentive for Blacks to join. African-American women worked in heroic numbers during the depression, out of necessity, whenever work was available. Elaine Ellis wrote of the women she saw cotton-picking under the blazing sun: "it is the women...on whom the burden is the heaviest," as they were forced to shoulder the twin burdens of feeding their families, worrying about their economic security, and raising and giving birth to many children. (326). However, Ellis' account fails to note that the Black women also shouldered the burdens of societal racism that White women did not suffer under, and unintentionally highlights the paradox of any ideology solely based in gender, class, or race -- one totalizing perspective seems to inevitably make the other aspects of the worker disappear, while Black, working class, and female workers had needs that had to be addressed that acknowledged every aspect of their identity.

Works Cited

Marable, Manning & Leith Mullings. Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance.

Reform, and Renewal: an African-American Anthology. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.