Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

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tutional leaders, eager for assimilation at any cost. Thus Baruch Vladeck, a leading
Socialist figure among the post-1905 immigrants, described a race-riot that
he personally witnessed in 1910 in Norfolk, Virginia (and precipitated by Black
prizefighter Jack Johnson's victory over Jim Jeffries, the "Great White Hope") as
akin to a Russian anti-Semitic pogrom. He was outraged by the refusal of
Norfolk's Jews to take a stand in defense of the local Black community. 9
Unfortunately, Vladeck's comrades within the Socialist Party, founded in 1901
after the disintegration of the SLP, had no consistent anti-racist policy. Here and
there individual socialists led a rare interracial labor struggle (as beloved left
humorist Oscar Ameringer did in New Orleans), publicized the horrors of lynching,
published anti-racist books for children, and (especially among Christian
Socialists) made special efforts to recruit African Americans or to work with
Chicanos in the Southwest. In practice, the socialist movement acted on a localistic
basis, often conceding ground to popular racist impulses and their codification
in AFL practices. Milwaukee leader Victor Berger thus brazenly described African
Americans as rapists. When questioned by its International Bureau about the
Party's position on lynching, party leaders responded that
nothing less than the abolition of the capitalist system and the substitution
of the Socialist system can provide conditions under which the hunger
maniacs, kleptomaniacs, sexual maniacs and all other offensive and nowlynchable
human degenerates will cease to be begotten or produced. 10
It was not surprising, then, that the Socialist Party failed to attract a Black following
until the volatile war years. In the few places outside New York where
African American socialists existed in numbers, mostly Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas, they generally met in segregated locals. Many Southern socialists courageously
denounced Ku Klux Klan activities and dreamed of an interracial movement
of the poor, but others boasted of maintaining a "white man's party." Torn
by the factional divisions of the 1890s, Jews remained at first only minor players
in this movement. 1 '
A thin trickle of African American socialist intellectuals, most of them
Christian socialists, pointed toward the need for a closer understanding of Black
and Jewish experiences. These men of the cloth, perhaps more than their white
comrades, recognized the unique forms of oppression African Americans and Jews
faced in the Western world. Socialism, they believed, was the means to overcome
ethnic difference and to remove racial and religious barriers standing in the way
of true freedom. "While in [a Socialist meeting}," wrote Black Socialist Reverend
George W Slater, "a prominent Jewish merchant came to me—a gentile and
Christian minister—and said: 'Comrade, isn't this great? Isn't it soul inspiring?
Don't you find a bond of true brotherhood here?' And I said, emphatically,
'Yes.'" 12 Though reaching few readers, this effort at dialogue was crucial, for the
speeches and writings of Black Christian Socialists like Slater, the Reverend