Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist

Description

Black Bolshevik is the autobiography of Harry Haywood. A child of slaves, Harry Haywood became a pioneer theorist of Black Power and a leader of the communist movement in the thirties. Black Bolshevik is a dramatic and personal narrative of fifty years of the Black struggle and the American left, including first-hand accounts of the Chicago race riot of 1919, the defense of the Scotsboro Boys, organizing sharecroppers in the South, and the Spanish Civil War. Author of the classic ‘Negro Liberation,’ member of the Communist Party’s Politburo and head of its Negro department in the thirties, Haywood was expelled as a dissident in the fifties. Amiri Baraka called this a ‘powerful political journal… The sweep of history and event contained in this book will fascinate any serious reader.’

On July 28, 1919, I literally stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of my life. Exactly three months after mustering out of the Army, I found myself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S. history.”
Like thousands of other Black veterans in 1919, young Harry Haywood realized that, although the “war to end all wars” was over, the battle on the home front was still raging.