The Red and the Black

The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic

David Featherstone, Christian Høgsbjerg, Satnam Virdee, John Solomos, Aaron Winter, David Featherstone, Christian Høgsbjerg

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526144324
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not just a world-historical event in its own right, but also struck powerful blows against racism and imperialism, and so inspired many black radicals internationally. This edited collection explores the implications of the creation of the Soviet Union and the Communist International for black and colonial liberation struggles across the African diaspora. It examines the critical intellectual influence of Marxism and Bolshevism on the current of revolutionary 'black internationalism' and analyses how 'Red October' was viewed within the contested articulations of different struggles against racism and colonialism. Challenging European-centred understandings of the Russian Revolution and the global left, The Red and the Black offers new insights on the relations between Communism, various lefts and anti-colonialisms across the Black Atlantic – including Garveyism and various other strands of Pan-Africanism. The volume makes a major and original intellectual contribution by making the relations between the Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic central to debates on questions relating to racism, resistance and social change.

I

Racism, resistance and revolution

1

Claude McKay’s Bolshevisation in London

Winston James

If there was no romance for me in London, there was plenty of radical knowledge.

Claude McKay, 1937

Claude McKay’s sojourn in London marks one of the pivotal moments in his political and intellectual evolution. Yet it remains one of the most obscure, underexplored and poorly understood. This, no doubt, is partly due to McKay’s own misleading statements and silences about his time in Britain. But the ignoring and ignorance of valuable archival resources by ostensible McKay scholars, and until recently the unavailability of other relevant sources of information have certainly also played their part. My intention here is, therefore, to apprehend more fully the dimensions of McKay’s London moment by drawing on these overlooked and new archival resources. In particular, I hope to illuminate the radical milieus in which McKay lived and operated, the social and political circles in which he moved, the friendships, networks and contacts he established, and to document and analyse the manner in which his ‘English innings’, as he called it, proved crucial in deepening his radicalisation, to the extent that he became a fully and publicly committed Bolshevik – a relatively rare phenomenon among black intellectuals at the time.¹

The road to London

McKay arrived in London in early December 1919 and returned to New York over a year later in January 1921. But his journey to Britain had certain distinct and important characteristics. First, unlike virtually all the other Caribbean intellectuals who made their way to Britain, McKay’s journey to London was indirect: he travelled not from Kingston, Jamaica, but from New York City and after an absence of more than seven years from his native Jamaica.² Second, he was not simply an intellectual migrating to Britain. He had in fact been a member of America’s black proletariat ever since he dropped out of college after just two years in 1914, earning his living in the US, as his close friend Max Eastman put it, ‘in every one of the ways that northern Negroes do, from “pot-wrestling” in a boarding-house kitchen to dining-car service on the New York and Philadelphia Express’.³ Moreover, McKay regarded and explicitly identified himself as ‘not only a Negro but also a worker’,⁴ and his American poetry reflected that world, as would his novels. Prior to going to Britain, then, McKay had experienced a double exposure setting him further apart from the other Caribbean intellectuals who went to England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: he had travelled indirectly after having lived not only as a black person in a virulently racist America, but also as a member of its black working class, one of its millions of ‘Negro’ menials.

Partly because of this prior American life, by the time he arrived in London, McKay was no ‘black Briton’ except in the most nominal sense of that term. And even that, he would later disavow: ‘I’ve never felt I was legitimately British, which I’m not after all.’⁵ He was from the British Caribbean but his self-identification had expanded well beyond such tight confines through experience, travel and conscious decision. He identified himself as a Pan-Africanist (one who recognised the common experience, condition and struggles of black people the world over) and a revolutionary socialist – a race man and a class man, not merely a West Indian.⁶ He had entered the US as a Fabian socialist and freethinker. But during the next seven years he had been further radicalised by the shocking brutality of racism in the US; the catastrophe of the First World War; and the hope engendered by the outbreak of revolution in Russia, revolutionary upheavals elsewhere in Europe and especially the Irish and Indian anti-colonial struggles. His British sojourn would significantly deepen and consolidate these allegiances.

McKay’s reflections on Britain and the British (especially the English) were overdetermined by his experience of racism, and they mark a historic departure. They break with the adulatory and often cloying celebration of Britain, characteristic of previous black writings – including William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells-Barnett – anticipating a sensibility that was to become more pronounced in black British writing and political practices half a century later. McKay’s distinguished Caribbean predecessors, such as Henry Sylvester Williams and Theophilus Scholes, were critical of Britain, but focused on imperial matters unfolding outside Britain itself. McKay was arguably the first Caribbean intellectual to provide a detailed description and analysis of what it meant to be black in Britain.⁷ He wrote with anger and bitterness, pre-empting sentiments expressed half a century later by writers such as George Lamming, reaching a crescendo in the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson and a later generation.⁸ McKay’s anti-British feelings remained with him and intensified the older he got.

The man who went to London

Best known for his pioneering role in the so-called ‘Harlem Renaissance’ of the 1920s, Claude McKay was born in Jamaica into an uncommonly prosperous peasant family in 1889. He was educated by his eldest brother, Uriah Theodore, who had been a prize student at Mico College (the Caribbean’s leading teacher training college). Seventeen years Claude’s senior, U. Theo (as he was known to all) became one of the island’s outstanding schoolmasters. Exceptionally widely read, worldly and cosmopolitan, and progressive in outlook, U. Theo trained Claude in the virtues of socialism, feminism and militant rationalism. After a brief stint in the constabulary, which radicalised him further, McKay immigrated to the United States in 1912 to study scientific agriculture at Tuskegee Institute.⁹ Hating the ‘semi-military, machinelike existence’ of Booker T. Washington’s school, he transferred to Kansas State College.¹⁰ But in 1914 he gave that up too, for New York. Before leaving Jamaica, he had earned a reputation as a poet and published two volumes of verse to critical acclaim at home and abroad. To make a living in New York, he laboured at the tasks described by Eastman, stealing time on the job to work at the craft of poetry. His first American poems appeared in 1917; by 1919 he had become famous (and notorious) throughout the US, mainly because of his militant sonnet, ‘If We Must Die’.¹¹

American racism shocked and appalled him. ‘I had heard of prejudice in America but never dreamed of it being so intensely bitter’, he wrote.¹² He was attracted by Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and wrote for its newspaper, Negro World, but never joined the organisation. However, while working in a Manhattan factory, McKay did join the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the most radical, internationalist and inclusive working-class organisation in the US. The IWW welcomed and embraced skilled and unskilled workers, men and women, and – going against the American grain – white, black, Asian and all others who wished to join, regardless of race and ethnicity.¹³

Before he left the US, two events had crucially affected McKay and contributed to his deepening radicalisation. The first was the mass carnage wrought by the First World War. This ‘great catastrophe’, as he called it, had proven the ‘real hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride and most of the things which one was taught to respect and reverence’. The war, he averred, epitomised the ‘blind brute forces of tigerish tribalism which remain at the core of civilized society’.¹⁴

But out of that catastrophe came the second event that inspired McKay. This was the Russian Revolution. ‘Holy’ Russia, as he dubbed Soviet Russia, had given McKay back his ‘golden hope’.¹⁵ Before the second anniversary of the revolution he was debating the subject with the black nationalist Garveyites. He vigorously promoted the relevance of Bolshevism to the struggles of black people the world over. ‘Every Negro’, he wrote in a letter to the Negro World,

who lays claim to leadership should make a study of Bolshevism and explain its meaning to the colored masses. It is the greatest and most scientific idea afloat in the world today that can be easily put into practice by the proletariat to better its material and spiritual life. Bolshevism … has made Russia safe for the Jew … It might make these United States safe for the Negro.¹⁶

McKay was not alone in advocating black liberation through Bolshevism. But he was one of the first black people to do so in the US, and he did so vigorously and openly, which drew the attention of the authorities.¹⁷

The pogroms and attempted pogroms against black people in the United States, the so-called ‘race riots’ of 1919, also had a profound impact on McKay. White mobs, led mainly by ex-servicemen, went on a rampage of unparalleled breadth and savagery. Almost thirty outbreaks with their blood and fire, death and destruction, convulsed urban America. These events of 1919 were dubbed the ‘Red Summer’ by James Weldon Johnson, black poet and executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).¹⁸ The Red Summer had a catalytic effect on McKay, helping to transform him into a revolutionary. It was his open, militant and courageous response to it that first brought McKay into the limelight. ‘If we must die’, he implored a besieged Afro-America,

– oh, let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

Oh, kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;

Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! …

L...