Correspondence: Journalism, Anticommunism, and Marxism in 1950s Detroit

Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is A Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 169.Google Scholar

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008), 412.Google Scholar

Alan M. Wald, Writing From the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994), 120–121.Google Scholar

In Left of the Color Line (2003), for example, Smethurst and Mullen note that Freedom’s popularity shows “that a vibrant, public and significant African American left subculture... would be driven underground, but not destroyed, at the height of the McCarthy era.” Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst, eds. Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 3–5.Google Scholar

Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).Google Scholar

Of all sources discussing Correspondence, Kent Worcester’s C. L. R. James: A Political Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996)Google Scholar

Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (New York: Verso, 1988), 119–122Google Scholar

Grace Lee Boggs, Livingfor Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)Google Scholar

See Cornelius Castoriadis, “James and the Fate of Marxism,” in C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies, ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 285.Google Scholar

Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution, (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998), 16Google Scholar

The product of this experiment with amanuensis can be found in articles in the Socialist Worker’s Party’s The Militant and James’ 1941 pamphlet, “With the Sharecroppers,” in which James transcribed the words of sharecroppers and their families integral to the dramatic strike staged on the Saint Louis Highway. Worcester, C.L.R. James: A Political Biography, 57. C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question,” ed. Scott McLemee (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1996), 63–90Google Scholar

In 1954, the SWP experienced another internal split based on Bert Cochran’s followers’ conviction that the party needed to dramatically adjust its policies in response to McCarthyism, and take what some saw as a conciliatory, defeatist stance in the face of repression of leftists. See Paul Le Blanc, Trotskyism in America, the First Fifty Years (New York: Fourth International Tendency, 1987).Google Scholar

Donald Pease’s introduction to the republication of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways in its entirety provides a detailed overview of James’s complicated legal status during this period, and offers a powerful rebuttal to Buhle’s criticisms on the grounds that James was perturbed by his segregation with Communists, which “constituted an act of political categorization with disastrous implications for James’s deportation hearings.” Pease also illustrates that by “linking his experience with the I.N.S. authorities on Ellis Island to his reading of an exemplary national classic, James fashioned a writing practice that was in one of its aspects an interpretive exercise and in another a juridical appeal.” Introduction to C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hanover: University Press of New England 2001), XXI.Google Scholar

Throughout that period, those who would become the nucleus of Correspondence advocated for James’s release and raised money to publish 2,000 copies of Mariners, and distributed free copies to members of Congress, literary critics, and friends. Meanwhile, activist intellectuals such as George Padmore attempted to intervene on James’ behalf. Saul Blackman to George Padmore, August 20, 1952, Wright Collection, JWJ MSS 3, box 113, folder 1521. See also Aldon Nielsen, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 159.Google Scholar

The exemption of other Communist governments in North Korea and China might reflect a Eurocentrism on behalf of Correspondence theoreticians, particularly James. Judy Kutulas, The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and Anti-Stalinism 1930–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 222–223.Google Scholar

James, Mariners, 144. In letters from Ellis Island printed in the Daily Worker, CPUSA activist-theoretician and fellow Trinidadian Claudia Jones similarly warned that the conditions of her multinational fellow prisoners, and the I.N.S.’s refusal to take proper care of her heart condition, replicated fascism. Like James, Claudia Jones required medical care during her illness-ridden detentions at Ellis Island, where she was held sporadically between 1948 and 1954 before her final deportation to London in 1955. In “A Letter from Ellis Island,” published in The Worker, Jones argues that she and other McCarran Act victims were “incarcerated in concentration camps.” However, James’s long-standing antipathy toward the CPUSA prevented him from appreciating his shared fate with other such victims of McCarthyism and led him to disavow the evidence of his own experience as beneficiary of the Communists’ efforts on Ellis Island. Jones, “Letter from Ellis Island,” The Worker, Section 2, 7; Marika Sherwood, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), 22–27.Google Scholar

Other leftist newspapers and journals also felt that their publishing of dissident views constituted a form of political action, an argument that was particularly persuasive in light of the scrutiny the FBI. directed at the papers, and the recriminations experienced by, for instance, V. J. Jerome who was imprisoned under the Smith Act largely based on his arguments in the CPUSA-produced pamphlet “Grasp the Weapon of Culture.” For information about Jerome, see Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 302.Google Scholar

Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998)Google Scholar