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A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle: The Life of Harry Haywood. Edited by Gwendolyn Midió Hall. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Pp. xxvi, 325. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-81667906-5; cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-8166-7905-8.)
We Shall Be Free! Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices. By Walter T. Howard. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Pp. [xii], 208. $54.50, ISBN 978-1-4399-0859-4.)
These two books add to the growing literature on the intersection of communism and black liberation in the twentieth century. Walter T. Howard's We Shall Be Free! Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices has seven chapters, each consisting of documents by a noted black communistnamely, B. D. Amis, Harry Haywood, James W. Ford, Benjamin J. Davis Jr., Louise Thompson Patterson, William L. Patterson, and Claudia Jones. Howard writes short introductions to each of the seven chapters and contributes a six-page chronology. His work is that of an editor. Curiously, however, the word editor appears on neither the book's cover nor its title page. It is as if We Shall Be Free! is an authored text, which it clearly is not.
Some of the documents in Howard's collection have long been in the public domain. Others, however, are relatively new, including some from archives that opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Chronologically, the documents range from the 1920s to the 1960s. Thematically, they are illustrative of some of the key struggles...