James W. Ford: First Black American On a Presidential Ticket
James W. Ford (1893-1957) was born in Pratt City, Alabama on December 22, 1893, the son of Lymon Forsch, the son later Anglicizing the name. He was educated at the Fisk University (as was WEB DuBois) where he excelled at athletics and became active in campus politics. He served in the American military in France during World War One, returning to a federal job in the Chicago Post Office. It was here he became radicalized after joining the Postal Workers Union, and then joined the American Communist Party (CPUSA).
Ford rose quickly through Party ranks as the Soviets placed great emphasis on recruiting blacks to their ranks to exploit racial division in this country, and as a means to destroy capitalism and what they saw as American imperialism abroad. In 1926, Ford joined the communist-front American Negro Congress (ANC) and in a meteoric rise after visiting the Soviet Union in August, 1928 to represent the American Communist Party at the 6th World Congress of the Comintern (Communist International), and being elected to the Comintern’s Negro Commission, he was selected to head the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers in 1929. He also served as editor of the latter’s propaganda journal, The Negro Worker.
In 1930, Ford returned to the US and was appointed to lead the Negro Department of the Trade Union Unity League; and assumed the role as vice president of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. These communist-dominated labor and agitation fronts would form the basis for the so-called civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, using mass public disruption tactics to force appeasement and then government recognition and protection.
To attract the black vote to the CPUSA, Ford was selected as the vice presidential candidate on William Z. Foster’s presidential ticket in 1932 and became the first African American to be nominated for this office. In 1936 and 1940, Ford ran alongside CPUSA presidential candidate Earl Browder. The Party’s reasoning was that “The placing of a black man near the top of the CPUSA ticket was symbolic of the Party’s self-declared commitment to racial equality.” When asked about the chances for the Party’s black candidates, Ford replied “The Communist Party is not stupid; we know that better than 4 million Negroes in this country…[could vote the CPUSA ticket].” While polling a large number of votes, Franklin Roosevelt’s move to the extreme left of politics and appointment of communist labor organizers like Sidney Hillman blunted the impact of the CPUSA, and drew the social and much of the communist vote to the Democratic party after 1935. By 1940, little distinguished the Democrat platform from the CPUSA’s list of demands.
After the 1932 election, Ford was sent by the Party to Harlem as a section organizer where he ousted black communists Cyril Briggs and Richard Moore who were promoting a “race-conscious revolutionary nationalism” similar to Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism. He would reestablish and consolidate CPUSA Central Committee authority in Harlem, and became instrumental in forming the National Negro Congress in 1936 as another front to organize black communists and bring votes to the Party. As an indication of his stature in the Party, the CPUSA sent Ford to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1935 as a delegate to the 7th World Congress of the Comintern.
In early January 1936 Ford travelled to North Carolina where he spoke at mass church meetings in Greensboro, Durham and Charlotte, explaining that the CPUSA opposed Mussolini in his seizure of Ethiopia, and urging that church members support the Party. Many black churches enthusiastically received Ford and allowed the Party “to make dozens of speeches before their congregations.” Ford pressed the Party message that claimed America was heading toward fascism if it continued to allow big capitalists to dominate the nation. “Fascism is capitalism without democracy, he declared, “Communism is democracy without capitalism.”
In October Ford toured the nation in support of CPUSA candidates and encouraged blacks to vote the CPUSA ticket. On October 25th he was in Durham where local black communist organizers claimed the mayor had planned to ban Ford from speaking---not true, but the propaganda value was used to heighten interest in Ford’s tour. That afternoon he was interviewed on a half-hour radio program, and in the evening spoke to about 500 supporters, 80 percent black.
Ford and North Carolina CPUSA leaders approved of Soviet Ambassador A.A. Troyansky speaking on the University of North Carolina (UNC) campus then, and contacted Leon Trotsky to speak at UNC on “Lenin and the Revolutionary Struggle.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull would not grant a visa for Trotsky. Ford caused a major incident when he dined with UNC professor E.E. Ericson as the latter had been identified as a past supporter of Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party, and leftist UNC President Frank Porter Graham was known to harbor communist sympathies and faculty members. While in North Carolina, Ford would have met Burlington CPUSA organizer Don West who formed the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a communist labor training camp. Highlander would later be a agiprop training ground for Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.
The CPUSA sent Ford to Spain in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War as a show of solidarity with the American leftists serving with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and as encouragement for American blacks to volunteer as Republican (Communist) soldiers fighting against Franco.
The North Carolina Peace Committee (NCPC), the State organ of the communist-led American Peace Movement, held a rally on the UNC campus in May, 1940, encouraged by UNC President Graham. The Charlotte Observer editorialized that the NCPC and CPUSA were traitors and hid their real goal, the overthrow of the American republican form of government, under the veil of pacifism and free speech.
Also, Ford spoke along with New York black communist Benjamin J. Davis on the campus of historically-black Shaw University in Raleigh, where they advised non-intervention in Europe now that the Soviets had allied with Hitler, and “reiterated communist demands that State and federal governments do more to help all Americans suffering from the Depression.” Party leaders like Ford insisted that “the workers of North Carolina receive relief benefits because they produce so much wealth for the State and the industrial powers than control it, demanded a State pension for the elderly, abolish fees for public school books, adequate school buses, free hot lunches, a State health care plan for all, and equalizing white and black schools.”
Ford’s running mate Earl Browder dissolved the CPUSA in 1944 and replaced it with the “Communist Political Association,” Ford being chosen as vice president of this new organization. In May, 1945, Moscow expressed its displeasure at Browder’s and Ford’s independent action by demoting them both---expelling Browder---Ford would be replaced as “America’s Leading Black Communist” by Benjamin J. Davis of New York. Probably for reasons of attracting black communist votes to the Democratic party in 1948, Ford was not prosecuted by the US Justice Department for his role in the leadership of the CPUSA. Ford died in relative obscurity in 1957.
Sources:
Communists in Harlem During the Depression, Mark Naison, University of Illinois Press, 1983
The Cry Was Unity, Communists and African Americans, University of Mississippi Press, 1998
The History of the North Carolina Communist Party, Gregory S. Taylor, USC Press, 2009
Wikipedia online
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