Harry Haywood was an American political activist who was a leading figure in both the Communist Party of the United States and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
36 Facts About Harry Haywood
2.
Harry Haywood's goal was to connect the political philosophy of the Communist Party with the issues of race.
3.
Harry Haywood's work included creating a group to help the Scottsboro boys case.
4.
Harry Haywood contributed major theory to Marxist thinking on the national question of African Americans in the United States.
5.
Harry Haywood was a founder of the Maoist New Communist movement.
6.
Harry Haywood was influenced by theories he read of in Vladimir Lenin's State and Revolution as a teen.
7.
Harry Haywood held the position of Regimental Commissar in the XV International Brigade during the Battle of Brunete.
8.
Harry Haywood began his revolutionary career by joining the African Blood Brotherhood in 1922, followed by the Young Communist League in 1923.
9.
Harry Haywood was General Secretary of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, but he was active in issues involving working-class Whites as well.
10.
When eleven Communist leaders were tried under the Smith Act in 1949, Harry Haywood was assigned the task of research for the defense.
11.
Harry Haywood participated in the major factional struggles internal to the CPUSA against Jay Lovestone and Earl Browder, regularly siding with William Z Foster.
12.
Harry Haywood worked to draft the "Comintern Resolutions on the Negro Question" of 1928 and 1930, which stated that African Americans in the Southern part of the United States made up an oppressed nation, with the right to self-determination up to and including secession.
13.
Harry Haywood would continue to fight for this position throughout his life.
14.
Harry Haywood believed that a distinct African-American nation had developed that satisfied the criteria laid out by Stalin in his Marxism and the National Question: a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture.
15.
Harry Haywood believed that only with genuine political power, which from a Marxist point of view included control of the productive forces, such as land, could African Americans obtain genuine equality.
16.
Harry Haywood believed that relying on race and ignoring economic questions could only alienate African Americans and inhibit working-class unity.
17.
Harry Haywood argued that the root of the oppression of Blacks was the unsolved agrarian question in the South.
18.
Harry Haywood believed that the unfinished bourgeois democratic revolution of Reconstruction had been betrayed in the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877.
19.
Long an admirer of Mao Zedong, Harry Haywood was one of the pioneers of the anti-revisionist movement born out of the growing Sino-Soviet split.
20.
Harry Haywood was driven out of the CPUSA in the late 1950s along with many others who took firm anti-revisionist or pro-Stalin positions.
21.
Harry Haywood wrote "On the Negro Question", which was distributed at the Seventeenth National Convention by and in the name of African Blood Brotherhood founder Cyril Briggs.
22.
Harry Haywood argued that the change prevented the CPUSA from giving appropriate leadership as the Civil Rights Movement developed.
23.
Harry Haywood believed the Party was left behind actions of Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
24.
In 1964, Harry Haywood worked in Harlem with Jesse Gray, leader of the Harlem Rent Strike and Tenants' Union later elected to the New York State Legislature from Harlem.
25.
Harry Haywood worked with Malcolm X in 1964 until his assassination in 1965, and with James Haughton and Josh Lawrence in Harlem Fight-Back, then in Oakland, California, in 1966, then in Detroit, Michigan, with the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
26.
Harry Haywood then returned to Mexico for a short time and then to the United States permanently in 1970 invited by Vincent Harding, then Director of the Institute for the Black World in Atlanta, Georgia.
27.
In 1964, Harry Haywood began to become involved with the New Communist Movement, the goal of which was to found a new vanguard Communist Party on an anti-revisionist basis, believing the CPUSA to have deviated irrevocably from Marxism-Leninism.
28.
Harry Haywood published his autobiography Black Bolshevik although some of his important writings and political life during the 1960s were edited out.
29.
In 1920, Harry Haywood married a woman named Hazel, but they separated the same year.
30.
In 1956, Harry Haywood married Gwendolyn Midlo, a Jewish activist from New Orleans, Louisiana.
31.
Harry Haywood has been active in civil rights throughout her life.
32.
Harry Haywood has become a prominent historian of slavery in the United States and Latin America, and of the African diaspora.
33.
Harry Haywood did not follow him into the New Communist Movement, and they mostly lived apart after late 1964.
34.
Harry Haywood returned with Haywood to the United States in 1964 working as a temporary legal secretary, started teaching in North Carolina in 1965, enrolled in graduate school in 1966, and earned her doctorate in 1970 at the University of Michigan.
35.
Harry Haywood died in January 1985, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.
36.
The Harry Haywood papers are housed at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York City.