Having decided to mount their world rule on black American backs, it is interesting to note how the reds went about the important business of capturing the American Negro.

  For a blueprint, they took an ancient and long-discarded folk piece. The analogy of the “white mare.” It got to be said during the Reconstruction that the highest ambition of every Negro man was to have a white woman. While one of their faces was spouting about how deeply they resented, and would die defending us from, white slanders the other face was patronizing us insultingly with a revival of these old notions. As a supreme inducement to join up, prospective party members were grinningly offered white mates.

  Facts are facts, and it cannot be denied that some of us were influenced. This explains why so many of the Negroes high in party councils have white wives, or husbands, as the case may be. But it also explains one reason for so few party members. When you look at the thousands who could have and did not, it tells you something. The vaunted foundation for sweeping the whole Negro body into the party was laid on sandy land. The structure went shackly even before the winds began to blow.

  All the way along, there has been entirely too much dependence placed on sex. Very few of us felt the need of help in a case like that. It offended the thoughtful among us because it amounts to a tacit belief that we are a people totally under the sway of sexual pleasures, a sure and certain way to get us.

  The “white mare” apparatus failed to pay off. Yes, it is true that mules will unhesitatingly follow a white mare anywhere and at any time. But it is known there’s danger in arriving at conclusions by analogy. It is possible, and even probable, that we might not be mules. But the reds evidently thought so. That is why Harlem swarmed with party-sent white women during the pressure drive of the Thirties. Even white girls of high school age were up there under party orders and doing their level best to “persuade” Negro prospects, and then bring them on through “religion.”

  But it is still to be observed that Negro membership is slack and scanty. There is constant turnover in membership from backsliding. What happened to the misled little girls is another story. Perhaps there is some connection between this “pig-meat” crusade and the later dismissal of numerous teachers from the New York City school system.

  By such whoopdedoo was the Lincoln Brigade recruited to go to Spain in a vain attempt to place the Russian Bear at Gibraltar.8 But believe it or not, even we can learn a lesson. The disillusionment lingers on.

  Another Bear trap was the one polished over by Winston in a recent red convention. That is, that the party must infiltrate into Negro protest organizations, and generally seize upon Negro causes, and otherwise come to be looked upon as our saviors, champions and friends.

  This is a very old soup-bone to be warming over. God knows that we have had the experience of communist help, and it sure has been a lesson to us. The notorious Scottsboro Case is a horrible example of how they “help things out.”9 The case was wormed out of the hands of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who had taken steps for a quick and quiet settlement. The party wanted nothing of the kind, and they got it. The party stirred up years of world-wide publicity for themselves as the defenders of darker peoples. The boys got life-time in jail and other unhappy bonuses. There have been other and less-heard-of cases where they “helped us out.” Like the joke about the corn salve. The toe is gone, but the corn is still there. We have come to be real shy of party help, so Henry Winston, speaking for Moscow, can save his breath.

  And their shaking of the North Koreans and the Chinese communists in our faces is less than intelligent. There never has been any bond between us and the Chinese. So once more and again, the commies show off their estimate of our intelligence. When numerous Negro homes are mourning the death of their sons, husbands and brothers, and boiling over with rage at the knowledge of butchery and inhuman torture of their loved ones at the hands of these same yellow skins, to now be exhorted to treasure them and take sides with them is too much to expect of us, even though we are supposed not to be able to remember nor feel resentment at a thing like that.10 The sense that God gave a billy goat would have prevented this insult.

  In a recent issue of the Pittsburgh Courier, a GI in Korea publishes an earnest letter to American Negroes, warning us against the falsity of communist propaganda. In the letter, he strove to make us realize how horrible the commies are in fact. He goes on to wonder how any American Negro can think of joining the party, or even stoop to read the Daily Worker.

  In addition to jumping into causes as our defenders, another device to supplement that is to set up false enemies of the Negro and then make a great to-do about knocking them over. It is always interesting to note that these “enemy” individuals whom the party discovers to be our enemies, have always been less than enthusiastic about communism. In every case, they are and were bedded in Americanism. So we cannot dodge the suspicion that these “enemies” stand in the way of the change in form of government here. They must be done away with as popular public figures if the revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is to come to pass. Our dark hands must be used to pull them down and out of the way of the coming revolution. These “white chauvinists” must go! All done for Negro benefit, you understand.

  Another important “defense of the Negro peoples” is by literature and art. The Negro press and protest organizations were not near enough. Besides, they were not telling the thing right. Becoming disgusted and all put out about this condition, the party got the bright idea of their “literary defense” hoping thereby to make a clean sweep of us into the party ranks. And it did not matter, whether despite our mulishness, we saw the light, and joined up in any great numbers or not. The material was what they wanted for anti-American propaganda abroad. So they were going to do it for our benefit, whether we liked it or not.

  They acknowledged that the Negro press and protest organizations soap-boxed a gracious plenty about racial grievances fancied or real, but there was no real meat to the thing. No hopelessness, no despair, no suggestion of scrapping the Constitution, no mention of revolution. Just lawing and jawing for a better adjustment into the framework as is. And mingled in was offensive material concerning fine cars, big houses, wealth and education among Negroes here. It indicated a “black bourgeoisie, black chauvinists” no different from the white capitalists, and utterly detestable. Lying counter-revolutionists and all that. The party decided to ignore them and create its own Negro literature.

  Established Negro writers were approached to produce the kind of fiction that the party could use and approve of. The formula was, you can’t win, Negro, you can’t win! Expanded, the poor, dear colored character starts off to be something in the world, but he or she gets trapped by our form of government, and down he goes into the lowest depths like buttonless britches. Pity the poor, black brute! Rotted away morally and in every direction, but not his fault at all. It lies at the door of the people of these “United Stinks.” In other words, the formula of “The American Tragedy.” The Negro characters could not get too low and revolting. The lower and more despicable the better. The sop to the Negro public was, poor thing, what could he do under this American way of life? Negroes here are doomed from birth!

  The reward to the compl[ia]nt author was pre-arranged critical support, plus sales boosting and handling. For those who drew back from representing a whole race thus falsely, vile slander and abuse.

  It was brushed off as chauvinism that it was not just a matter of race pride, but utterly against fact. Like everybody else in the nation, a Negro can take his choice. The thousands on thousands of very successful Negroes in numerous fields could be offered in proof, so it was and is obvious that you can win.

  But the party had orders that this evidence of Negro success under the American system must be suppressed. The outside world must see us as a low, degraded mass, and impossible to be otherwise under constitutional government. Poor things! They will take us by our hands and lead us away from all this, and back to the Middle Ages with them. From where we stand, that is just like Mrs. Astor battling to free herself from her enslaving Cadillac to win her way into a Russian droshky.11

  Now with their intense efforts for at least a full generation, why have the commies gained such a comparatively few Negro adherents?

  The party’s first and foremost failure was under-rating our intelligence and self-esteem. I have no way of knowing whether they just scraped up any old-fogy notions that they found lying around, or whether they were briefed up by the earlier Negro sycophants that they got hold of. Certainly, the high-sitting black comrades do not object to the insulting program. The rest of what the party has to offer us as a way of life is as morbid and ugly as the devil’s doll-baby, when we are on the hunt, like everybody else, for something pretty; tasty-like, to make our side-meat taste more like ham.

  I reiterate, it is amazing how commies can hang on to a mere notion in the face of facts. They try to change the whole world, but refuse to let anything change them. They simply will not see us as Americans, nourished on the same ideals as other Americans, and so headed in the same direction. So why would we want to swap freedom for bondage? Why wouldn’t we like this freedom-feeling as well as the next one?

  I will not contend that we Negroes are more religious than other Americans, but certainly we are more ceremonial. Negroes own more church property per capita than any other group in the United States. There has to be a reason for that. We must like it. So how expect us to turn godless in a lump? Like a lot of other Americans, many of us do not attend church regularly, but we have no thought nor intention of doing away with God. We like Our Maker, and feel better to think He is somewhere around on the premises.

  The anti-white program was another mistake. We do not hate white people as the commies are determined to believe. As fellow-citizens, it is our privilege to give each other skull-draggings on occasion, but laying all jokes aside, we certainly have no wish and desire to kill off the pink-toed rascals. Even if they were not useful as they are, we’d keep ’em for pets. Where is the kick in being an American if you don’t call everybody out of their names now and then from the President on down? Just as natural as the Fourth of July. Are these commies so blind through the eyes that they have not seen us always in there fighting just as hard as anybody else in a common cause? From the revolution on down.

  Go against our own country because the Chinese are yellowish in color, indeed! We would fight them just as hard, just as fiercely, if they were lam and damn black. They are not Americans. It has been proved too many times and by different countries, that nationality is stronger than race.

  The party got misput on the road again when it fell for that old “leader” foolishness. They have proceeded from the premise that all they needed to do was to capture, or buy in, a few well known Negro names to have the whole tribe of A’nt Hagar’s children come tumbling in behind them like a passel of sheep. There is no such of a person among us. Not since Booker T. Washington has there been any “Moses of his race.”12 Like the rest of Americans, we use our privilege of acting contrary and doing our own picking and choosing.

  Instead of running like a fool at a funeral after the commie captives, however popular and prominent they might have been before they were taken in the raid, once they are shackled and begin to spout the trite jargon, somehow they seem to repel, rather than to attract. They give off a funny kind of smell. We stand off and look at them, remembering the flash and shine they had in their former existence, then shrink away from the morbid spectacle of their commie state. We shake our heads and mumble, “What happened, what could have happened to make so-and-so like that? They’ve come to be significant!”

  It could be that feeling of strangeness is the inside key to the failure of the party to attract Negroes in any numbers. It feels ghosty, and too much like marrying a zombie. Death on the breath, and something feeling corpse-like to the hand.

  Now take it to pieces, and everything is old and mouldy. What they call new and progressive is nothing but momucked-up dialectics. Just like children talking hog-Latin. What it is about is at least a thousand years old. The social devices of the Middle Ages, when the serf was bound to his master, which they have just found out about.

  Their touted “significant, socially-conscious” literature is a steal from the old morality plays. Authors and other artists must cater to the Kremlin as they used to do to the Medicis.13 Their labor arguments pre-date the machine age. The worker must own his tools in this highly mechanized age indeed! If that is kosher, then the very next time I go on the air, I’m carrying off the [microphone]. They are still waging a war against “the masters,” somebody who has been dead and gone too long to talk about. All in all, the commies carry on exactly like they have been in a trance like the Sleeping Beauty since the days of Genghis Khan.14 Awakened by the smell of blood from World War I, they sprang to life like the sons of the dragon’s teeth, to continue their bloody march across the face of the world.

  So this Russian philosophy does not take with us. We are not that morbid by nature. You need a huge inferiority complex to be a commie, something for hate to feed on. The reservoir of party thought is too much like the Dead Sea. You can and will get gassed to death just trying to fly over it. We are too American to fit in. Our idea of top dog is one who can muscle it out from the shoulder. Russia claims a great victory from World War II, when in fact, it was something like Max Schmeling lying flat on the canvas yelling “Owoooo”—then demanding the championship of the world.15

  The majority of American Negroes indignantly refuse the role that the party has assigned to us. That is, to go around the world like Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois and a few others, and be the “horrible example,” the pitiful object, the face on the bawl-room floor.16 On top of that, we are loyal Americans. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin’s definition of a Tory, to us an American commie is a person with his so-called head in Moscow, his trashy body over here, and whose neck ought to be stretched.

  Or better still, somebody ought to take and re-bury the dead. By behavior and flavor, they are zombies. Something oozes out like a viscous seepage from a morgue. It is poisoning the air of the world.

  So Henry Winston and the whole party in convention assembled, may call upon us like the priests of Baal, but I predict that few will answer.17 Not even for Chinese hides will we come, not being in the luggage business. Years ago, they had us at the mourner’s bench. If they failed to bring us through religion then, they certainly will not make it now. Their latest cry can well up from nothing but desperation. The last stroke of exhausted nature.

  From the very beginning, in dealing with us, the party has been led astray by the illusion of color. It has been tested and proven that we feel closer to the American white man than to any foreign Negro. The differences between us and foreigners are deep and fundamental.

  We are Americans, and so, a wing-footed people. We are confirmed in our springing impulses by the spirit that hovers this continent. The party is a Society of the Dead, soulless zombies, but even the living-dead have no place among the living people. They, and their way of life, died on the plains of Asia centuries ago. May they now return to their graves and remain there in decent death.

  A Negro Voter Sizes Up Taft

  “Mister Republican,” otherwise known as Robert A. Taft, of Ohio, has an over-average chance to be chosen Elephant Boy of 1952.1 At a characteristic Taft gait, the senator has been moving up the field since 1936, until now he is in position to make his bid for the collar of roses.

  To gain the Presidency of the United States, Candidate Taft must win a considerable percentage of the Negro vote. The question before the house is: Can Taft call the backsliding Negro vote back to the Republican fold? I believe he can. Negroes in Ohio are already enthusiastic about him, and politically conscious Negroes all over the nation are talking about him and sizing him up.

  It was not ever thus, even in Ohio, nor yet in his native city of Cincinnati. I was in Cincinnati for three months during the time his first campaign for the Senate nomination was making up.

  “What are the Republicans running that Taft for?” was the prevalent query among Negroes. “He might be all right, but he’s so standoffish that we don’t know too much about him. Why in the world didn’t they put up Charles P.? Now that’s our Taft, the swellest white man in Ohio or anywhere else, as far as that goes. Charles P. could get every one of our votes.”2

  It has been said that the only sure way to keep from agreeing with Robert A. Taft is not to let him get to you with his reasoning and that big brief case stuffed with facts. Once he gets to pulling facts out of that case and reasoning with you, you’re sunk.

  The majority of Negroes decided to keep Taft out of reasoning range. They were going to pay him no attention whatsoever. But they did not count on his wife, Martha Bowers Taft.3 She is said to have crashed a meeting staged by a group of Negro women in Columbus, Ohio, and asked to be allowed to say a few words. Out of politeness, they told her that she might speak briefly, but her subject had to be Abraham Lincoln.4

  Now, the charm and wit of Mrs. Robert A. Taft are famous. She got in there and began to talk, the next thing you know, she was making speeches to colored groups all over Ohio. Her husband got in his licks and won the nomination by a majority of 75,000, and went on to win his Senate seat by 170,000.

  Taft has strong Negro backing in Ohio now. They no longer mention him politely as “Mister Robert A.” He is “Senator Bob” now, and they take great pride in him. They admit now that his quiet manner fooled them.

  “That Taft is a fighting piece of plunder!” The speaker might have been looking with admiration at a jet plane or an A-bomb. “A tough piece of leather, and well put together. A regular catawampus on the Senate floor. He’s something!”