32 Facts About Lovett Fort-Whiteman

Lovett Huey Fort-Whiteman was an American political activist and functionary for the Communist International.

The first African American to attend a Comintern training school in the Soviet Union in 1924, Fort-Whiteman was later named the first national organizer of the American Negro Labor Congress, a mass organization of the Communist Party USA.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was once called "the reddest of the blacks" by Time magazine.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was accused of being a Trotskyist and died of malnutrition while imprisoned in a gulag in the Soviet Union.

Lovett Huey Fort-Whiteman was born in Dallas, Texas on December 3,1889.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman's father, Moses Whiteman, was born into slavery in South Carolina and relocated to Texas at some time prior to 1887, where he worked as a janitor and a small scale cattle rancher.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman received a better education than was common for many African American children of the era in the Dallas public schools, attending one of the few high schools in the American South in that day open to black attendance.

Soon abandoning his dramatic ambitions, Lovett Fort-Whiteman next spent two or three years in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, where he worked as an accounting clerk for a rope manufacturer, gaining fluency in the Spanish language and studying the rudiments of French.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was deeply inspired by the Mexican Revolution which swept the Yucatan in the spring of 1915, advancing a reform program over the staunch opposition of wealthy landowners and the Catholic church.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman became a committed adherent to the idea of radical transformation of society through trade unions, syndicalism, as a member of an organization called Casa del Obrero Mundial.

In 1917, Lovett Fort-Whiteman left Yucatan as a sailor bound first for Havana, Cuba before proceeding to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman disembarked there and made his way to the city of Montreal, adopting the pseudonym "Harry W Fort" and discreetly reentering the United States under the guise of a railroad dining car waiter.

Back in New York City, Fort-Whiteman became well acquainted with leading black socialists A Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, publishers of the magazine The Messenger.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman enrolled for courses at the Rand School of Social Science, a socialist school operated by the Socialist Party of America, joining the party himself.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman even tried his hand as a writer, publishing two works of fiction in The Messenger provocatively dealing with interracial amorous relations.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman followed his friend into the Communist Labor Party of America shortly after the time of its formation in September 1919.

In October 1919, Lovett Fort-Whiteman was arrested in St Louis speaking to a small gathering attended by a small handful of party members infiltrated by an informer from military intelligence.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman ultimately remained in jail for months after his arrest but seems to have escaped a lengthy prison term.

From 1920 to 1922, the American communist movement eked out a covert, underground existence, with Lovett Fort-Whiteman presumably retaining party membership through the succession of mergers and splits which ensued.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman reemerged in the public eye in February 1923 as a member of the editorial staff of The Messenger, although his affiliation with the Workers Party of America, a legal communist organization established around the first day of 1922, seems to have remained an unpublicized fact.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman moved to Russia in about 1927, joining the tiny African American community in Moscow.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman lived with his wife Marina, a Jewish chemist, in a small apartment.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was a close friend of African American journalist Homer Smith Jr.

In 1928, Lovett Fort-Whiteman was a delegate to the 6th World Congress of the Communist International.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was later hired by the English-language Moscow News as a contributor and worked as a teacher at an English-language school in Moscow.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was a consulting screenwriter on the 1932 production Black and White.

Three weeks later, Lovett Fort-Whiteman was denounced for having expressed "counterrevolutionary" sentiments and on July 1,1937 was sentenced to five years internal exile.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was first sent to Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, where he worked for a time as a teacher.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was identified as a Trotskyist in internal CPUSA documents.

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was sent to Kolyma in Siberia, a particularly inhospitable part of the Soviet Far East.

In Kolyma, Lovett Fort-Whiteman was imprisoned in one of the camps of the Camp Department of the Southern Mining and Industrial Administration "Gulag", part of the Sevvostlag camp system run by the Dalstroy State Trust in the region surrounding Magadan.

On January 13,1939, Lovett Fort-Whiteman died of illness related to malnutrition.