CP.EDU, COP BUSTS, FLINT DISASTER

As soon as I got off the Greyhound I contacted the party on the phone who was to make arrangements for my CP class in Detroit. I was to bunk at the home of a young Black CPer who would also be in the class,  Our meetings were to be in a classroom and meeting space leased by the Detroit Party. We were an interracial mix of both young women and men, mostly from the Detroit area. There were four of us out-of-towners:, a young Jewish man from St. Louis had a car, another chap from Grand Rapids, and a young woman named Dorothy whose home town I can’t recall. This is the group I mostly hung out with as our St. Louis chap would often pick us up with his car and deliver us to our lodgings in the evenings. I’ll call him Blues for identity since he was from St. Louis. The Grand Rapids student I’ll dub as Rap. Breakfasts the whole class would share at a Polish-run co-op restaurant in Hamtramck—at least for the first few days. Suppers I’d share with my out-of-town cohort at various working class restaurants.

Our instructors were CP veterans. I can’t recall many of their names or even what subjects they all taught, except for bits and pieces. Our texts were Marxist or Marxist-Leninist classics with a Stalinist emphasis. One of our regular instructors was a working class old-timer from New York, who spoke the tough language of the Gotham streets. He wore a cheap suit and tie and had big ears which stuck out prominently on both sides, so I’ll call him Comrade Ears. He was obviously an old Party hack whose real name I’ve forgotten. Another regular teacher was a fortyish Party regular from Chicago, Molly Lieber (later Molly Lieber-West), who was approachably friendly and popular with us all. She had been in the CP since her days in the by-now defunct Young Communist League.

Esther Cooper Jackson and James E. Jackson, Jr.

Other instructors were one-day only visitors of some prominence. The only one of these I recall was Esther Cooper Jackson, a Black woman and well-known civil-rights activist and writer, married to James E. Jackson, a CP organizer at the Ford Motor Company plant in Dearborn, working with Black auto workers. He was also a CP National Committee member under indictment in the Smith Act.  I don’t remember him leading any of our classes.

I don’t remember much about the subject matter discussed. Main thing I recall about Lieber’s talks was that the aging national chair of the CP, William Z. Foster, had once told her that he kept reading from the Marxist classic works on a daily basis to stay on top of the ideology. Molly was not a pedantic sort and was down-to-earth in her lecturing, always with a smile on her face.  Decades later I heard she was a printer by trade and a leader in the internal politics of the Chicago Typographical Union. She’s more than likely deceased by now.

Esther Jackson’s assignment was to talk to us about the virtues of the Soviet Union based on one of her visits. The USSR of course was the ideological lodestar of the Communist movement which laid down the political line for its member parties. Apostasy or deviation could produce lethal and disastrous results. In the Soviet motherland and the “peoples’ democracies” in Eastern Europe, death was no stranger to leaders who were accused of erroneous thinking and accusations  by Moscow.  The only exception was Yugoslavia where Tito split  from the Kremlin’s grip and ruled with its own brand of totalitarianism. But we “brainwashees” heard nothing negative about Mother Russia and its allies from Ms Jackson.

To our speaker, the USSR was a heaven on eartrh, a universal “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”  She saw its people  as happy, productive  and secure. Not everyone could be a Communist Party member there. It was a great honor to be selected as part of this noblest of affiliations. Jackson’s dreamy gushiness was probably sincere although deep inside it aroused some seeds of skepticism in me despite my deepening indoctrination. It goes without saying that Ms Jackson was not shown anything but the most idyllic picture of life in the USSR.  She was not taken on tours of the infamous Soviet slave labor camps, nor learned anything of the mass starvation and death of millions in the Ukraine during Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture in Russia’s  great breadbasket in the early 1930s. She was not alone in these spoon-fed illusions. British Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb in their grand tour of the country praised the Soviet Constitution as the most democratic in the world but were totally oblivious to its brutal underside. To the contrary, fellow Briton Bertrand Russell was turned off by the dictatorial character of Bolshevik Russia after meeting and talking with Lenin in the early 1920s.  James E, Jackson died in 2007 at 92, but Wikipedia indicates that his widow Esther is still alive in NYC at 97. Both are honored in the Black community for their great contribution to civil rights.

BUSTED BY THE DETROIT RED SQUAD

One evening after several days of classes, Blues, Rap, Dorothy and I after dinner decided to drive around to look for a movie house where to spend the rest of the evening. Shortly after leaving the restaurant we heard a police siren and were pulled over and ticketed for a “broken tail light” which was a bogus rap. The cops turned their flashlights on us and began questioning us further as to who we were and what we were up to. Then they noticed some of our CP study materials in the car. That’s when the lasagna hit the fan! Another cop car pulled up, and sandwiched between the two of them, we drove off to a nearby police station. We were all separated and taken to different rooms to be individually grilled.  The officer who took me as his quarry was exceptionally hostile and belligerent. All during this time I could hear a whip cracking in another room with moans of pain to match. Sounded like intimidation to freak me out. I ventured little beyond showing him my driver’s license for ID. At one point he drew out his pistol from his holster, pointed the handle toward me and bellowed: “Here, go shoot yourself now because that’s how you’re going to end up anyway!”  I was scared but made no such crazy move as to go for the gun as I would have been dead meat right then and there. He also noticed my WWII veteran’s pin on my jacket lapel we used to call “ruptured ducks.”  “I see all you commie bastards are wearing those pins nowadays, but you Russia lovers don’t fool anybody!” We were probably no longer than a half-hour in the station when we were all released. They had no legal reason to hold us. But they sure as hell did their most to intimidate us.

Our driver Blues had been given a phone number to call if we had any problems during our evenings. Blues quickly found a phone booth and called the number to tell what had happened to us. We were told to come to a certain address ASAP to tell the entire story of our detention. By this time the evening was wearing on. There were two black male comrades and one female all perhaps ten or so years older than we were. After hearing us out, the three analyzed the situation for us neophytes. They said the Red Squad types were crude and verbally threatening and their job was to scare the hell out of us. They generally had a thuggish bullying approach.  On the other hand FBI operatives were smooth and even friendly for openers and they were quite civil in their approach to cajole information from us and therefore more dangerous than the heavy-handed city harness bulls. The best  approach was maximum non-cooperation on any questions they posed.

Although I don’t recall the names of the two men in the apartment the woman turned out to be famous in CP circles. She was Claudia Jones, a native of Trinidad, born in 1915 to a poor family. She was 9 when she emigrated to New York with her parents, Exceptionally bright, Claudia was unable to attend college with her father’s precarious economic straits. So she contracted TB through her marginal jobs which plagued her for the rest of her life. She joined the YCL in 1936 with her activist concern for the Scottsboro Boys frame-up. An excellent writer, Jones soon became editor of  a publication called Negro Affairs and became a staffer on the Daily Worker. She led the CP Women’s Commission and was elected to the Party’s National Committee.  All this caught the attention of the Feds. and Jones was deported to the UK in 1955 where she immediately played a prominent part in fighting for the rights of Blacks in her new home country. In 1956 she became editor of the West Indian Gazette and the Afro-Asian Caribbean News.

Wikipedia reported a race riot in heavily populated Caribbean immigrant Notting Hill in 1958 to which Jones quickly responded.   She founded the annual Caribbean Carnival in Nottingham the following year which became a massive popular street festival which has drawn hundreds of thousands  of mostly Afro-Caribbean  and Britons of color to its annual celebrations ever since. Finally on Christmas Eve of 1964, Jones died of a massive heart attack in her London flat at the early age of 49. She was a most impressive woman who is widely honored for her great work in the black freedom movement throughout the world. I don’t know how she was affected by the political cataclysms of the 1956 Khrushchev revelations and the Hungarian Revolution which brought mass resignations from CPs around the world. In 1999 I visited the splendid Karl  Marx monument at Highgate Cemetery in Greater London, and just around the corner on another path was a much more modest headstone for Claudia Jones.  Unfortunately, I had run out of camera film by then as I would have wanted a picture of the grave of this most fascinating woman I had only met that one time in Detroit.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

  UNWELCOME BREAKFAST INTRUDERS

Upon arriving for breakfast the next morning at the co-op eatery in Hamtramck, we found that place inundated with plain clothes cops, eating breakfast. It was obvious that the Detroit Red Squad knew about our classes either through street observations or informers which had also brought about our bust the evening before. We finished our meals and class organizers circulated among us and quietly told us to leave and report to another address across town to resume  our class sessions. Our new location was in the meeting rooms of a pro-CP Jewish fraternal organization in which we met undisturbed for the rest of our classes. Anyway, off we went to spread the word among the working class. The one thing I got most of from this experience and subsequently is that the police are no friends of any anti-capitalist movements, CP or otherwise. I’ve experienced police violence in strike situations, learned about the murderous Operation Cointelpro  during the Vietnam war, protests around  capitalist political party conventions like in Chicago, 1968, the trashing of the Occupy movement, and the current continued police killings  of young black men  right now in our time. They are gunslingers for the capitalist class in an economic system past its peak.

1960s POSTSCRIPT TO DETROIT RED SQUAD BUST

Late in the 1960s while I was living in San Francisco, I received a strange call from the Detroit Police Department. The official who called apologized for the 1949 Red Squad bust and wanted to know my San Francisco street address so they could send me a copy of the dossier they had on me, which was under court order to be released to persons who had been caught up in the Red Squad dragnet in the Communist hunt years.   The slim dossier I received contained trivia of no great import and nothing unlawful.   The report I received was quite insignificant, I’m sure, compared to the dossier of Coleman Young who became the five-term mayor of Detroit starting in 1974 to 1994. As a young man he had been a close fellow traveler of the CP (some say a secret member), including being a housemate of James and Esther Jackson at one time. Prior to being elected Detroit’s first Black mayor he had served as a Michigan State Senator. He had been a sharp-tongued defiant witness at a House Un-American Activities Committee  hearing and was prominent in labor and progressive politics with huge popular support  within Detroit’s Black community. His mayoralty was a mixed bag as he was charged with being too cozy with big business interests though he enjoyed UAW support in  his campaigns.

ON TO FLINT

My next stop was Flint where I was to seek work in the auto industry and become a Party activist. Initially, I stayed at the home of CP organizer Jack White and his family which didn’t turn out to be such a smart move.  He had a Finnish-American wife, probably the progeny of a Red Finn family in Upper Michigan with whom he had a precocious ten-year-old as well as infant daughter. I soon met some of the Flint CP local community as I began my rounds of the auto factory plant gates for work.   Before I could even get very far in this quest, a pair of young black comrades who were brothers asked me to join them in a leafleting expedition at a Flint high school—another dumb move.

So early the next morning we started passing out leaflets protesting the indictment of the top 11 national Party leaders under the Smith Act, charged with advocating the violent overthrow of the US government through force and violence (Untrue!).  It was just before start of classes so dozens of students were hanging around the front of their school building.  A bunch of the kids, all white and mostly male, surged toward us with hostility after sizing up what we were doing, especially because of two of us being Afro American with me the sole Caucasian. They started shoving us around when a city police car pulled up down the street and called the leaders of the mob over to talk to them. As soon as that huddle broke up, the cops came over and arrested us and took us to the Flint police headquarters.

After a hostile round of questioning each of us in separate rooms with no results, we were released as we had done nothing illegal, with leafleting being within our Constitutional rights. So after a huddle my companions said we should return to the school to continue our leafleting during the lunch hour. I was a bit leery but figured these were local activists and knew what they were doing. But by then the word had spread throughout the student body that a bunch of Communists were leafleting the school. The white student mob was out front waiting for us when we arrived in front of the school. So was the cop car. Again they consulted with the student leaders, and then drove off ignoring the three of us. They had apparently told the hostile mob to beat the hell out of us as they surged toward us again. There were no black students among them. Flint had been a strong labor town ever since the sit-down strikes of 1936, so it’s certain that quite a few of these UAW families still had  kids enrolled as students at the high school. The CP still had considerable support with UAW workers and I doubt whether any of their kids were part of the attacking mob.

We covered up best we could in our retreat as they pummeled us. Since it was wintertime the heavy overcoat I was wearing provided some protection from the blows although I lost my hat. Soon one of the brothers broke loose ran around the corner and got into his car. He careened through the mob that scattered, picked us up and we drove off brakes screeching with our attackers cursing and throwing any projectiles they could find that hit the back of our getaway car. Our comrade’s quick thinking and action saved us from a fate I can’t imagine. We lost no blood on the street though blows were rained on us.

We contacted Jack White as quickly as we could who didn’t directly criticize us for our short-sighted bravado in our fiasco of the leafleting venture. That evening there was a Flint city council meeting which we attended along with the CP periphery that could be mustered together on quick notice. An elderly left wing auto worker well known in the community made our case before the council and the audience, condemning the police-induced mob violence by the charged up  students.  He argued that the  civic  and Constitutional rights of us leafleters were severely violated as we had tried to peaceably inform the students about the Smith Act indictments against the leading members of a political party which had democratically run candidates for public office, however unpopular with many.  I understand there were a couple of council members sympathetic to our case. I faintly recall the Council president  was a UAW official who was part of the anti-communist Reuther Caucus of the union. Outside of possibly referring the matter to committee for further investigation nothing else happened that night. The press covered the Council meeting and the incident was broadcast widely through the media and made front page coverage in the Flint daily newspapers the next day which included publicizing our three names involved with handbilling. which for all practical purposes made my name mud for any meaningful work in the city.

Jack White took me to stay temporarily with another CP auto worker family as the Flint cop patrol calls cruised his house for several nights afterward. He was justifiably concerned for his wife and young family. As soon as I could I rented a housekeeping room elsewhere in Flint to continue my dead- of-winter job hunt.  I had withdrawn several hundred dollars from my Workers Credit Union savings account in Fitchburg during my December holidays at home in anticipation of buying a car in Michigan for the job hunt and for commuting once I found work. I spotted a classified ad for a used car in the Flint newspaper. So I bought a 1941 Chevrolet Club Coupe from an auto worker who  had put it up for sale. It was in excellent condition and provided reliable transportation for me for several years.

But for job hunting this proved of little avail. In attempts to get work in the auto industry I drew a blank, being told there was no work. I suspect the newspaper exposure from the high school fracas put me on the General Motors blacklist in Flint.  The only job I was offered was that of a cab driver. Of course, this was a loner job which wouldn’t do any good as would getting hired in a large workplace  where  I could begin my trade union and political mission  among the workers. Party organizer White bluntly told me that my employment possibilities in Flint were now zilch. He suggested I return to Lorain where I would have a better chance to get rehired in an area that had a functioning CP branch. So I tossed all my clothes and books into my new little Chevy and  barreled down the highway toward the south shore of Lake Erie.

End of Installment 11