Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Allies of a Different Sort \\ 205
a deeper understanding of class struggle than most of their fellow workers, but
"they, too, have been the historic victims of persecution, injustice and wrong.
They have a history that is replete with unspeakable outrages in well-nigh every
alleged civilized country... .Hence, the Jews have a deep and abiding feeling of
love and human sympathy for the downtrodden and oppressed of all races. Their
ears are not deaf to the bitter cries that come up from 15,000,000 of their Black
brothers, who, since the systematic trade in them passed with the Civil War, have
become, in the alleged land of the free and home of the brave, the mid-sills of the
industrial world and the flotsam and jetsam of society." 21
The world war brought government suppression of the IWW and of the
Socialist press at a moment when Black migration northward might have brought
a major radical coalescence with interracial movements toward a labor party and
even toward a general strike (both of which took place at local levels). The disastrous
split in the Socialist Party following Lenin's call for a Third International
cut short the burgeoning of a socialist movement around A. Philip Randolph,
whose campaign for State Comptroller under the Socialist ticket garnered an
unprecedented 202,361 votes statewide, only 1,000 less than Eugene Debs polled
in New York, the Socialists presidential candidate that year. The overwhelming
support shown by Harlem's electorate, almost certainly buoyed by Jewish
Harlemites, symbolized what could have been. 22
The Communist Era
The rise of Black Nationalism seems meanwhile to have bypassed the white Left
almost entirely, joined only at its early decline or demise by the urgent search for
alliances. Of Marcus Garvey's key lieutenants, Hubert Harrison and W.A.
Domingo were Socialist Party members. Cyril V. Briggs, a friend of Domingo's
and an early admirer of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA), founded the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a secret, underground
organization of radical Black nationalists led largely by West Indian immigrants.
As the editor of the ABB's official organ, The Crusader, Briggs urged support for
Socialist candidates, attacked Woodrow Wilson for not applying the concept of
self-determination to Africa, and during the "Red Summer" of 1919, demanded
"government of the Negro, by the Negro and for the Negro." Eventually, the
ABB fell victim to its own internal logic as an advocate of class struggle: by the
early 1920s it faded into a merger with the young Workers (Communist) Party. 23
While the ABB embraced the wider left-wing world, Garvey moved to the
right, firing Domingo from the editorship of the Negro World and expelling ABB
and Workers Party members from the UNIA in 1921. His rhetoric became much
more narrowly racial; he even expressed distrust of light-skinned Blacks and
sought a secret agreement with the Ku Klux Klan. Yet, like earlier generations of
Black nationalists, Garvey drew his vision of liberation from Jewish history and
began calling his own back-to-Africa movement "Black Zionism"—a term the
Communists used derisively in their 1925 Party platform. 24 Despite the