Highland Folk School

“It behooves each of us to learn more of Communist infiltration and the direction of Communist movements.  Only through information and knowledge can we combat this alien menace to Constitutional government.”[1]  The “alien menace” spoken of in this quote is the famous Highlander Folk School of Monteagle, Tennessee.  The Highlander Folk School was founded in 1932 as a center for labor movement education.  In 1953 the school adopted the civil rights movement, and over the next decade would host some of the most prominent civil rights leaders of the time including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.

As a center for “radical”  thought, the Highland School was investigated by the Georgia Commission on Education in 1957.  The commission published a broadside documenting the twenty-fifth annisersary celebration of the school, where the so-called investigator found that “they met at this workshop and discussed methods and tactics of precipitating racial strife and disturbance.”[2]  Adding to the fear of such communist activity was the fact that this was an inter-racial gathering.  The publishers of the broadside even included a picture of a young black man dancing with a white woman, an act sure to arouse anger within the white population.  This broadside, and further investigations of the school, invoked so much fear and anger throughout the South that in 1961 the State of Tennessee revoked the school’s license and shut its doors.  The school would eventually reopen and continues its work today.   
 
 [1]”Highlander Folk School: Communist Training School, Monteagle, Tenn.” Georgia Commission on Education, 1957. http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/highlander/efhf003.pdf

[2]ibid.

Keeping them on the fields

The Legislative Black Caucus of South Carolina is not calling for a worldwide class revolution, or even organizing a demonstration of thousands to demand bread. These lawmakers are, however, hitting white elites where it hurts by urging black football recruits to reconsider attending the University of South Carolina (USC). The caucus is responding to the university’s board of trustees, which is likely to lose its lone black member.

State Rep. David Weeks, the chairman of the caucus, told the AP, “We are asking young athletes to be aware … there are folks in this state who say it’s fine to play ball but not to be on the governing board.”

Race and Place

Trying to locate a museum exhibit or online resource that addressed the issues raised in the reading for this week proved difficult.  Unfortunately, it seems as if the story of African American interest in Communism during the 1920s and 30s has not had the broad appeal of the Civil Rights movement, Black radicalism, or the era of Jim Crow.  Seeing that the African American Communist experience was not being represented, I broadened my search.  What I found was a wonderful project called Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South: Charlottesville, VA.

The Race and Place website is a collaborative project between the Virginia Center for Digital History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African and Afro-American Studies.  The mission of the project is “to connect race with place by understanding what it was like to live, work, pray, learn, and play in the segregated South. We plan to develop manuscript collections and oral histories of African Americans in the segregation period, and construct the social, political, and economic history to understand race in the context of place.”[1]

Through maps, oral histories, photographs, political materials, and newspapers, this site provides a detailed look at the political and social life of the African American community of Charlottesville, Virginia in the era of Jim Crow.  One particularly informative section was a timeline comparing African American involvement in state vs. local politics.  The timeline shows that while African Americans continued to lose ground in the state political system, they remained active on the local level, fighting for voting rights and participation in the Republican Party.

Republican Party poster urging African Americans to come out and vote, 1901.

Another section providing useful information about the political activities of the African American community in Charlottesville is the newspapers section.  Here, one finds “selected, transcribed articles from two major African-American owned newspapers–the Charlottesville Reflector and the Richmond Planet.”[2]  A quick search turned up several articles that addressed the issue of Communism, and it seems as if this particular community did not concern itself with the movement.  One editorial from The Reflector in 1934 shows that even in this politically active town, the color of one’s skin led to disenfranchisement whether you were Republican, Democrat, or Communist.  The story related in the article is about the cancellation of Richard B. Moore’s, a nationally known Communist, lecture at the University of Virginia.  According the editor, the professor:

did not order the closing of all public buildings to the speaker because of what he may have said against Senator Carter Class or in favor of Karl Marx. No, because Communist speakers have been there before and have, in true Communist fashion, freely discussed all of the “untouchables”, from the existing dual wage scale in Virginia to jury pondering in Alabama, and they were made welcome.

Richard Moore is a Negro and consequently, he was barred for that reason.[3]

[1]Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South: Charlottesville, VA. http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/raceandplace/about_main.html

[2]ibid

[3]“What Would Jefferson Think?” The Reflector. May 26, 1934 http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/raceandplace/news_main.html

Seeing Red.

What is freedom when you cannot do anything? The theme that I recognized throughout this week’s readings was the intolerable claustrophobic environment that restricted any sort of political movement in the black community. The southern white population offered no end to the continuous harassment and restricted living conditions of African Americans, yet wondered in shock and often disbelief why African Americans rose up in various ways against them.

Communist Party poster from the early 20th century. Looks promising.

Many African Americans looked to Communism in the early twentieth century because it claimed to be a system of government that recognized no class or race as superior; the very definition of Communism is founded in the ideal that all people have the same national goal of equality in life and work. Black southerners such as Lovett Fort-Whiteman traveled to Moscow and were amazed at the equal treatment they received from their comrades.

The evil done in the name of Communism by party leaders has tainted (and perhaps even destroyed) the original goal of this system of government. I can understand why this system appealed to those African Americans (and whites as well) living in the 1920s and 1930s American South. In a world that abused their rights, forced them to work overtime for little pay, and showed them no respect, as in the case of Lovett Fort-Whiteman’s friend Oliver Golden, Communism was an answer. It promised to bring change to the lives of African Americans, many of whom were educated but found jobs “incommensurate with their educations.” [1]

Looking For a Way Out of Hard Times? Try Communism!

Of course people who are struggling financially want to find a solution to their problems.  Listen to this rosy picture that literary critic Edmund Wilson paints and see what you think:

“…unemployment has been wiped out, a gigantic reconstruction of industry to extend a … planned economy has been undertaken, and a cultural revolution of tremendous dimensions has been won on many fronts.  [They have] freed women from age-old social disabilities and discrimination, provided national and racial minorities with an opportunity to develop their own cultural life, broken down the barriers between city and country and adopted the most advanced system of social insurance in the world.” 

A few of those ideas sound like things we might like to see in our country today in the current economic climate, don’t they?  That was Soviet Russia under the Communist Party  in 1932, a time when America was in the midst of its Great Depression.

Writers such as Wilson, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright used both non-fiction and fiction to spread the word about what they saw as the answer to America’s problems during the 1930s.  Although slavery was legally a thing of the past, poor sharecroppers in the South were facing much the same social, economic, and political prejudices as their forebears.  In Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star” both portray the severity of Communism’s threat to white Americans.  While the lynch mobs that seem to always be a part of his writing (at least in Uncle Tom’s Children) are still present, it is fascinating to see the change in attitude of whites toward blacks when there are Reds involved.  

When trying to get information on party members or meeting locations, whites treat African Americans almost as equals, as if they are united in their fight against what they see as an extremely dangerous political group.  For instance, in “Fire and Cloud,” the mayor actually addresses Dan by name, rather than calling him “boy.”  However, when he and his friend are unable to obtain the information they want, as is the case with Sue and Johnny-Boy in “Bright and Morning Star,” African Americans return to their role as sub-human in the eyes of the white man.  While they still have no problem torturing and killing black men and women, their new enemy was the powerful Red, members and followers of the American Communist Party.