The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement -- Party Historians are Party Men First

 

Very difficult to miss in reading the passage below is the current spate of political correctness and re-interpretation of American history to fit an ideological agenda.  This agenda demands that the past be explained by court historians to justify the present, and that it points toward the desired collectivist future.   Bernhard Thuersam

The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement -- Party Historians are Party Men First

“While the [Communist] Party [USA] was instrumental in building both Negro and interracial organizations in carrying out its united front program among black Americans, it did not neglect an important corollary activity, the reinterpretation of Negro history.  Communists had always sought to depict the development of the American Negro in terms of a revolutionary tradition.  

[Black vice-presidential candidate of the CPUSA in 1932, James W.] Ford purported himself to be something of a historian, and in a series of pamphlets and articles emphasized the radical heritage of American Negroes.  International Publishers, which handled most of the Party’s publications, issued a series of biographies of Negroes and whites who had been prominent in the anti-slavery movement . .

 

While the re-interpretation of Negro history had been carried out by earlier historians under the influence of the scholarly Carter G. Woodson . . . it remained for the Communists to produce and circulate widely the more popular versions and turn them to account in their propaganda work.  The Party historians sought to give the Negro in America a radical past as a preface to a radical present.

Constantly emphasized by writers were the instances of concerted action by Negroes and poorer whites against the dominant economic class.  [Black author Herbert Aptheker [wrote:] “The poor whites fled from its [the Confederacy’s] armies and waged war upon it. The slaves conspired or rebelled, or broke its tools, or refused to do its work, or fled its fields and mines and factories.  Many fought shoulder to shoulder with the poor Southern whites against a common enemy, and a multitude joined the army from the North and brought it information and guidance and labor and desperate courage.”

Woodson and [WEB] DuBois were among the first to challenge the traditional interpretation of the role of the Negro in the Reconstruction period. The Communist historians drew heavily upon these investigations and supplemented them with new data and concepts. They vigorously attacked the “bourgeois historians” for the falsification of the militant Negro political programs during the immediate post-Civil War period.  Ford, for example, declared:

“The reactionaries try to cover up the truth of this period and to conceal the revolutionary actions of the masses, particularly the white Southern masses. A whole literature has been built up on such revolutionary distortions and misinterpretations of the Reconstruction period. The “carpet-bagger” bogeyman has been used to frighten little children and the whole population of Southern whites.  The influence of the reactionary myth of “Carpet-Bagger Reconstruction” is not only confined to the South; this fallacy has been built up in the North also.  It is one of the crimes of bourgeois historical scholarship that it has buried the profoundly significant revolutionary struggles of the Negro and white masses in the South . . .” 

Aptheker’s . . . writings as a whole can be regarded as a sustained effort to “correct” the distortions perpetrated by the “bourgeois” historical school. 

[It] is important to note that the Communist interpretation of Negro history [as cited] . . . had a rather clear-cut set of purposes.  In the case of the Stalinist writers certain motives stand out clearly [and] there was a recognized need to build up the Negro’s belief in his own militant tradition . . . [and] there was a need to portray an identity of interests and joint action between Negroes and poor whites against a common oppressor in the past. 

Third, it was important to depict Northern industrialists and Southern plantation owners as the common enemies of Negro and white toilers, thus externalizing the evil against which the workers must struggle.  The Party, like its mother organization in the USSR, demanded that the past explain and justify the present, and that it point to the future – a future in which great things were seen for the Party.

If the role of great Negro figures was distorted; if small men were clothed in the garments of the mighty; if undifferentiated protest was imbued with heavy ideological overtones; if the accomplishments of moderate leaders were reduced to insignificance; if facts and scholarship suffered in the process, this could not evoke major concern. The Party historian was a Party man first and a historian second.” 

(The Negro and the Communist Party, Wilson Record, Atheneum, 1971 (original 1951), pp. 172-176)