revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

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Angelo Herndon, a Negro Communist, had been convicted and sentenced
by the State of Georgia under a Civil War statue for inciting
a riot . The specific charge was that Herndon distributed
a book which urged the establishment of a Black Belt Republic
in the South . 22
Herndon's conviction was reversed by the United States Supreme Court . During
the 1930's and 1940's an estimated 10,000 blacks joined the CP making up
10 percent of its 100,000 membership at its peak . By linking its work with
the unemployed leagues in massive campaigns to protect evicted tenants and
victims of police brutality, the CP,
throughout 1934, expanded its popular
base . It began a major cultural program in the black community publishing
the Negro Liberator newspaper, combining artistic events with politics,
and encouraging young black writers to write for The New Masses , The Commun -
ist and The Daily Worker . 23
Black cadres of the
CP worked with almost every black organization
during this period . The CP was instrumental in helping a group of black
Alabama sharecroppers, threatened with eviction, to organize the Alabama
Sharecroppers Union .
The Alabama Sharecroppers Union organized 12,000 black
sharecroppers around a program calling for redistribution of the land, total
racial equality and extensive federal relief . The Union engaged in several
gun battles with local authorities, which was the beginnings of mass radical
armed struggles of the rural black poor against the ruling class . 24
But the
independent organizing of blacks by the CP threatened many
whites cadres inside the CP .
Black nationalist tendencies among black
22 1bid ., p . 137 .
23 1bid ., p . 13-14 .
24 Dale Rosen and Theodore Rosengarten, "Shoot-Out at Reeltown : The Narrative
of Jess Hull, Alabama Tenant Farmer ." Radical America , Vol . 6, No . 6,
Novembe December 1972 .