Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

206 // PAUL BUHLE AND ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
Communists' staunch opposition to "Zionism" of any kind—whether it be Jewish
or Black—comrades such as Cyril V. Briggs, ex-UNIA activist "Queen Mother"
Audley Moore, and others entering the Communist milieu would frequently measure
the acceptance of Black Nationalism against that of Jewish nationalism,
asserting even in moments of conflict that it was the Black-Jewish nexus which
mattered most.
Virtually compelled by Moscow to accept the "Negro Question" as vital to an
American revolution, American Communists had begun to work on the problem
from another direction, through their practical activity. Because of their large
immigrant membership, Communists rebuilt constituencies through appealing
to class issues within ethnic groups. The "National Question," although complex
and different in each case, uniformly saw nationalities as part of a world revolutionary
force placed anomolously within the bulwark of world capitalism. The
struggle against imperialism which Lenin highlighted abroad (and which played
such a great role in appealing to groups which had seen their cultures crushed by
empire) had a clear domestic application: capitalist America itself as a domestic
empire whose especially oppressed groups (Blacks) had every need of solidarity
with the proletariat at large and the communists in particular. By the Sixth World
Congress of the Communist International in 1928, this formulation took on its
most extreme form: African Americans residing in majority Black counties in the
South, the Comintern argued, have the right to self-determination. Black peasants
and proletarians not only have the right to rule their own territory but to
secede from capitalist America if necessary. 25
This view of race in America was revolutionary enough, as revolutionary as
that held by Abolitionists generations earlier. At another level of political discourse,
rank-and-file Jewish Communists faced the rigors and the promise of the
"Negro Question" in daily life. If most of the other major ethnic blocs of
Communist loyalists were insulated by geography (such as Finnish Americans in
the Midwest Mesabi Range), industry, language, or personal choice, often reluctantly
accepting aggressively anti-racist positions to assist Blacks as a strategy for
uniting the working class, the case was different among several key groups of
Jews. During the early 1930s, wherever the Party sought to organize large concentrations
of African Americans, Jews were almost always the "shock troops." In
Harlem, Jewish Communists fought evictions of Black residents, organized the
jobless, and were often at the forefront of anti-racist campaigns. Cultural, historical,
and above all personal experiences certainly help account for their prominent
role in Black struggles. But for a variety of reasons including their own young age
and the class and political conflicts within a badly divided Jewish community,
they rarely emphasized their own identity as Jews. As historian Mark Naison
points out, "Although many were products of the self-contained Jewish radical
subculture, the bulk of the Jews who volunteered for work in Harlem were
American born, English speaking, and enmeshed in a Communist version of an
assimilationist dream." 26 Indeed, although the Communist Party would later