Content area
Full Text
Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist
Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press,1978).
Haywood Hall was born in 1898 in South Omaha, Nebraska. His parents had been born slaves; and both his grandfather and his father, in successive generations, were forced by racial violence to move to another city for their family's safety. Haywood writes that the turning point in his life was experiencing the Chicago race riot in July, 1919 after returning from military service in France in a black army unit. Confronted once more with racism at home, he decided that he "had been fighting in the wrong war." From that time on he dedicated his life to fighting capitalism, which he viewed as the source of racism. His search for answers to social problems led him eventually to join the Communist Party in 1923.
Haywood Hall assumed the name Harry Haywood in 1926 when applying for a passport in order to go to the Soviet Union for political training. While there he made his single most important contribution to the Party as a member of the commission which...