Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

Negro is the goat of the STFU. " All thirteen Afrikan tenant
farmer union locals in Arkansas quit the STFU and
joined the rival CIO union as a group. These Afrikan
sharecroppers were trying to take advantage of Euro-
Amerikan labor factional in-fighting, playing those factions
off against each other attempting to find a situation
with the most resources and leverage for themselves.
In January 1939 thousands of dispossessed,
landless Afrikan sharecroppers in Southeastern Missouri
took to the highways in a major demonstration. To
dramatize their demand for bread and land, the sharecroppers
set up a "tent city" lining the roadsides of a national
highway. This protest, which lasted for months, caught
empire-wide attention and was an early fore-runner to the
1960s "freedom marches" and other such actions. It was a
very visible sign of the struggle of Afrikans to resist leaving
their lands, to resist imperialist dispossession. (26)
Practice showed that the Afrikan sharecropper
and tenant labor struggles not only had a class character
but were part of a larger national struggle. They were anticolonial
struggles having the goal of removing the bootheel
of settler occupation off of Afrikan life and land. In this
stirring the Afrikan masses - rural as well as urban,
sharecroppers as well as steelworkers - were creating new
forms of organization, trying mass struggles of varied
kinds, and taking steps toward revolution. Again, it is important
to recognize the meaning of the reality that
Afrikans were picking up the gun. And raising the need for
socialist liberation.
This gradually developing struggle was against
U.S. imperialism and had a revolutionary direction. In the
'Thirties Afrikan communism grew, taking root not only
in the refugee ghettos of the North but in the South as well.
Primarily this political activity took form within the Communist
Party U.S.A. (which the ABB had joined). While
we can recognize the CPUSA finally as a settleristic party
of revisionism, it is important to see that in the Deep South
at that time the CPUSA was predominantly an
underground organization of Afrikan revolutionaries. The
CPUSA was accepted not only because of its labor and
legal defense activities, but because in that period the
CPUSA was opening espousing independence for the oppressed
Afrikan Nation.
Hosea Hudson, an Afrikan steelworker who
played a major role in the CPUSA in Alabama in the
1930s, points out that the party of his personal experience
was in reality an Afrikan organization: "Up in the to^
years, in '33, '34, '35, the-party in ~ir~ingham and
Alabama was dominated by Negroes. At one time we had
estimated around Birmingham about six or seven hundred
members. And in the whole state of Alabama it was considered
about 1,000 members. We had only a few whites,
and I mean a few whites."
So that in the Afrikan Nation not just a small intellectual
vanguard, not just a handful, but a significant
number of Afrikans were illegally organizing for socialist
revolution and national liberation. Hudson makes it plain
that Afrikan communists then had very explicit ideas
about their eventually leading a freed and sovereign
Afrikan Nation in the South.
"Our struggle was around many outstanding
issues in our party program in the whole South: 1) Full
economic, political and social equality to the Negro people
and the right of self-determination of the Negro people in
the Black Belt ... When we got together, we discussed and
we read the Liberator. The Party put out this newspaper,
the I.ihrrator ... It was always carrying something about the
liberation of Black people, something about Africa,
something about the South, Scottsboro, etc., etc.
We'd compare, we'd talk abo'ut the right of selfdetermination.
We discussed the whole question of if we
established a government, what role we comrades would
play, the about the relationship of the white, of the poor
106 white, of the farmers, etc. in this area.