News and Letters Black World Column June 1998

Chicago's Black radical legacy

by Lou Turner

The Black Radical Congress (BRC) convenes in Chicago, June 19-21. The date chosen was in recognition of the Juneteenth holiday, commemorating the late June 19th date that Black slaves in Texas got the news that slavery had een formally abolished six months earlier.

Chicago may seem an accidental choice for such a gathering, that is, until its Black radical legacy is brought to light.

In one sense, Black radicalism in Chicago may be said to have begun in 1876 when Lucy Parsons, the Black, Latino and Native American anarchist joined the First Workingmen's International headed by Karl Marx, along with her husband Albert Parsons, who in 1886 became one of Chicago's Haymarket martyrs. Lucy Parsons was also an organizer of the May 1, 1886 general strike that demanded the eight-hour day and which became the first workers' manifestation of May Day. Before Ida B. Wells, Lucy Parsons was a militant campaigner against the wholesale lynching Blacks and the oppression of women at work and in the home.

Another significant, but long hidden, strand of Chicago's Black radical legacy-significant also because 1998 marks its hundredth anniversary-appeared in the form of Black anti-imperialism. While the leadership of the labor and the Populist movements, as well as the liberal press and academic world were either conspicuously silent about, or otherwise capitulated to, U.S. capitalism's plunge into imperialism with the 1898 Spanish-American War, the Black press and activist-intellectuals of the day maintained a consistent, principled opposition.

The Black working class in Chicago in this period, nevertheless, remained small. However, by the time the Great Migration swelled the Black industrial army in Chicago's plants, mills and shop floors, in the 1920s, not only had a critical mass in workers' power been reached but a new social consciousness had become manifest. At this point the first of two challenges to Black radicalism arose.

The "Red Summer" of 1919, with its bloody race riots and Black rebellions of self-defense, announced the appearance of a "New (radical) Negro" on America's historic stage. Even before 1919, a new Black radicalism was indisputably in the air. On the one hand, it became the vital impetus to the breathtaking growth of the Garvey movement. On the other hand, it and the 1917 Russian Revolution led to the organizational formation of Black Marxists into groups like the African Blood Brotherhood and around socialist journals like A. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Owens's MESSENGER.

Chicago, in 1925, saw the six year aftermath of the "Red Summer" of revolt culminate in the most proletarian expression of Black radicalism to date with the founding of the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC). Organized principally by the darkling figure of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, one of the Black radical tradition's first Marxists, and the editor of the ANLC's revolutionary organ, THE NEGRO CHAMPION, the Congress represented an historic step in Black radicalism.

As the Black radical economist Abram Harris wrote of the founding of the ANLC, in W.E.B. DuBois's CRISIS (April 1926): "Lovett Fort Whiteman [is] the Negro who more than any other person responsible for the Congress convening.... [I]t is evident that no assemblage like the Labor Congress, where Negroes gathered in primary interest of their economic fortunes as wage- earners, could have come to pass merely because Soviet Russia or some of its missionaries bade it meet. Not Soviet gold but social facts furnish the explanation for the convention's radicalism and its departure from the racial assumptions and logic of the older Negro social institutions."

By the time the sun had set on the ANLC and Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the organization had moved from Chicago to New York (in 1928), and Fort-Whiteman, who emigrated to Russia in 1930, had perished in Stalin's purge of the Bolshevik leadership later in the decade.

The birth of ANLC did not come easily. Between 1919 and 1925, what transpired to bring such developments as Black revolt and the new national consciousness that found its organizational expression in the Garvey movement to the radical culmination represented by the ANLC was the kind of radical critique that Lenin and the militant Jamaican poet Claude McKay leveled at American Communists for their failure to "face the Negro Question."

If the challenge to respond to a new stage of spontaneous mass revolt, organization, and consciousness is the first test of Black radicalism, whether it is the "Red Summer" of 1919 or the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, the second challenge came in the decade of the Great Depression. At this juncture, Chicago stepped forward as the center of Black radicalism in the form of the "Chicago renaissance." This little recognized, yet more radical, proletarian based, successor to New York's "Harlem renaissance" emerged out of the social and economic depression besetting the Black working class.

This second challenge was met by Black intellectuals, activists, writers and artists in Chicago during the Depression and World War II in so radical and creative a manner that it produced a new moment in Black cultural and political expression. Although Richard Wright, more than any other figure, is identified with this new stage of Black social realism, other significant contributions were made in the social sciences by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton with publication of BLACK METROPOLIS, as well as a host of writers and artists.

Black intellectuals, writers and artists of the "Chicago renaissance" were radicalized by their efforts to respond to the crisis in the Black condition. Black radicals of the "Chicago renaissance," as Margaret Walker recently recalled at a conference recognizing the multifaceted renaissance, held in Chicago's South Side Woodson Regional Library, were part of the historical movement of organized labor's creation of the C.I.O. A half century later, when the Black working class was nearly decimated in the Reagan decade by capitalist restructuring and deindustrialization, Black conservatism, not radicalism, emerged as the ideological response.

The Black Radical Congress, meeting in Chicago this June, has before it not only the challenge to respond to the social and economic crisis of the Black working class, especially in light of the ideological obfuscation of Black conservatism. The BRC has also to meet the challenge presented by the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, which like the "Red Summer" of the 1919 became so pivotal a challenge to an earlier Congress of Black radicals, six years after the revolt. That 1925 Chicago Congress met the challenge, until the inner contradictions of Stalinism destroyed it. What lies ahead for the Black Radical Congress?


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