My Story of the Communist Party USA in Detroit Pat Fry December 2, 2020 I grew up in a white, working-class neighborhood in northwest Detroit. The city was my father’s birthplace and several generations before him. My mother was born in the small rural town of Ventura in north central Iowa. She left for Detroit at the age of 18 to find work in the auto plants during WWII. That’s where she met my father. They had 5 children; I was the first born. My parents were not of the left. They were Democrats and proud of it. Republicans were for the rich folks, they always told me. This was my first grounding in class politics. I was raised as a devout Catholic and a prime candidate for the convent. What diverted me from that course was the now defunct Social Security program that provided survivor benefits to children pursuing higher education. My father died when I was 13. The SS money enabled me to attend college. The single most important event that shaped my early social consciousness took place in March, 1965. I was completing senior year at my neighborhood Catholic high school and had been keenly following the events unfolding in the civil rights movement of the South. News broke that a white woman who lived a few blocks from me had been murdered by the KKK during the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. She was Viola Liuzzo. I was in awe of Liuzzo’s heroism; her racist murder shook me. My shock and anger, however, was not the response of the political establishment, the media or the Catholic church where she had been a parishioner. Vicious racist stories circulated as to her motives. How dare a white woman leave her children to take up with Blacks? That was a common refrain. Lies, that we later learned had been orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, condemned Liuzzo. The horrific reaction to her death, and the outpouring of racist verbal, violent attacks on her family, unmasked for me the hypocrisy of many who preached religion. I soon became an activist on the campus of Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, 30 miles west of Detroit. The civil rights struggle became my struggle as we demanded “open admissions,” picketed barbershops that barred Black people, and documented landlords who refused to rent to Black students. I helped form the campus human rights committee, and through it called for an investigation by the Michigan Human Rights Commission of campus systemic racism. The anti-war movement and the women’s movement became equally dynamic, and I was a student leader of both, barely graduating in 1970 amidst the protests against the invasion of Cambodia, a campus student strike, and the slayings at Kent and Jackson State universities. I returned to Detroit in the summer of 1970 and entered the political world of the “New Left.” The Detroit Organizing Committee (DOC) introduced me to the political theory of Marx and Lenin. Significantly, we all were white. We saw our role as providing support to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers who were waging militant action against discrimination at Detroit auto plants and within the UAW. We worked to disband the infamous Detroit police STRESS unit, a terror squad in Detroit’s black neighborhoods. But the DOC never considered organizing a multi-racial collective, and it soon died. I then joined several study collectives. At one time, I was a participant of three study circles simultaneously made up of various activists. We were black student leaders of the radical South End newspaper at Wayne State University, Chicano activists from Southwest Detroit and the United 2 Farmworkers Union grape boycott, Palestinian activists from the South End of Dearborn, community activists protesting university expansion and gentrification. Among us were the former national chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Phil Hutchings, and a leader of the Republic of New Africa, Gloria House (Aneb Kgositsile). We organized Detroit contingents of the Venceremos Brigade to Cuba and worked to build the US-China Friendship Association. One of the study circles was led by Grace and Jimmy Boggs. The “new communist movement” took shape at this time. Detroit had become a mecca for the Maoist- influenced organizations of the Revolutionary Union that became the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the October League that became the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist. Their stated goal was to build a “party of a new type,” one that rejected what they viewed as the “revisionism” of the Communist Party USA and the Soviet Union while embracing the political line of the Chinese Communist Party. Many of us who had studied and worked together formed the Detroit Marxist Leninist Organization (DMLO) in the mid 1970s. We saw the need for a socialist organization but rejected the Maoist left. We did not consider joining the Communist Party, convinced that it had betrayed Marxism-Leninism. There were similar collectives around the country that soon came together to form the Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center. In a position paper, we said the CPUSA had “only slight influence and was the dominant opportunist force in the trade unions,” which “does not even give lip service to socialism, let alone revolution.” (OCIC chair Clay Newlin, May 1978). The OCIC devoted all of its energy to debating the fine points of political line. It saw itself as a new theoretical center for “party building” but completely divorced from practical work of the mass movement. It collapsed under the weight of a phony, destructive, internal campaign against white chauvinism that focused on what people thought rather than what they did. By 1981, DMLO and the OCIC had become a political cult and died. I was emotionally wrecked by the DMLO/OCIC experience. It was difficult to find my bearings as I was greatly influenced by the anti-CPUSA critiques. My views began to change influenced by movement veterans who were formerly members of the CP. One was Chris Alston, an African American who was one of the first Party members organizing the UAW at the Ford Motor Company. In the 1930s, Chris organized tobacco workers in Virginia. In his later years, when we met Chris, he was heading a youth community center on Detroit’s eastside. As young activists we met often with Chris who became a mentor, sharing his experiences and perspectives. He helped us debate and get clear on a position in opposition to the Chinese Communist Party’s support for the reactionary nationalist forces of UNITA in Angola. The issue had become a dividing line among activists of the “new communist movement.” Another veteran activist who influenced me greatly beginning in the early 1970s was Saul Wellman. Saul had been a leader of the Communist Party in Detroit in the early period, a Party organizer in the auto plants, and a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought Franco fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Saul had left the CP in the late 1950s over political differences but remained close to some of his comrades in the Party such as Gil Green. Always a stalwart who drew young activists around him, he joined what became the Detroit chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. In the early 1980s, Saul organized a number of us in a study circle reading Carl Marzani’s 1981 book, “The Promise of Eurocommunism.” Years later, I was interviewed for a documentary film about Saul, “Professional 3 Revolutionary: The Life of Saul Wellman” (2004) In it, I said that Saul had always instilled in me the importance of organization, one that “could see the forest and the trees.” The ideological straight jacket of the “new communist movement” was difficult to shake loose even after breaking from its organizational orbit. Perhaps of singular importance in dispelling its myths was the movement for nuclear disarmament. Anti-Soviet thinking was an obstacle, as the “new communist movement” viewed “Soviet social imperialism” as an equal or greater threat to the world than U.S. imperialism. This was the period when Leonid Brezhnev, President of the U.S.S.R., was unilaterally discontinuing deployment of medium-range missiles in the European theatre, pressing for talks with U.S. President Ronald Reagan to reduce strategic arms, and offering an immediate freeze on strategic weapons development. As the world teetered on the brink of nuclear catastrophe, Reagan was planning to escalate the nuclear arms race with his “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative. It was Al Fishman and other Communist Party members active in the peace movement in Detroit that were indispensable in my re-education. Al was passionate about peace and worked tirelessly with SANE/FREEZE and later with Peace Action when it was launched. Up until then, I could not see the Soviet Union’s drive for negotiated nuclear arms reductions as anything other than a ploy. The U.S. Peace Council’s educational programs providing detailed information about the arms race were indispensable. I learned from the many selfless activists like Michelle Stone Art who headed the Detroit chapter, and Mark Solomon and Rob Prince of the national organization. The Communist Party was an important mobilizer of the historic June 12, 1982 peace march in New York City that drew a million people. The march and rally coincided with the United Nations Second Special Session on Disarmament. I was among the many who travelled in busloads from Detroit. Unfortunately, the “Soviet social imperialism” political line dovetailed with the line of a small band of right-wingers who held signs that read, “Peace is a Soviet Weapon of Conquest” (NYT, 6/13/1982). Following the collapse of the organizations of the “new communist movement” in the early 1980s, few went on to join other socialist organizations or parties. A few joined the Communist Labor Party, a sectarian party organization that had a substantial number of Black cadre in Detroit. Some others were active in the NAM/DSOC predecessor that led to the formation of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization with an anti-communist international line and sorely lacking in building a multi-racial membership. With few exceptions, my fellow activists of the “new communist movement” ended their organizational tenure in “party building.” Why me and not most others? I have been asked. In my opinion, the distorted politics of the “new communist movement” derailed many fine activists from ever considering party organization again. For myself, I chose not to give up on the imperative for party organization and multi-racial unity. Another fellow activist who also moved on from the new left was my good friend and comrade, Geoffrey Jacques. Geoff had left DMLO a few years earlier to join the CP, becoming the Detroit correspondent for the Daily World newspaper. He invited me to a small gathering at the home of Carl and Helen Winter for a discussion of what was shaping up to be a coordinated FBI attack on Detroit’s first African American mayor, Coleman Young. Elected in 1973, Young was one of several Black mayors voted into office in a wave not seen since Reconstruction. A broad anti-racist movement had worked to elect Young and defeat John Nichols, the Detroit police chief who oversaw the police terror unit, STRESS (Stop the 4 Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets). STRESS was disbanded as Young’s first act as mayor when taking office in 1974. Ten years later, Young was in his third term of office, winning by large margins. He would win two more reelections spanning 20 years in all. The political establishment in the surrounding predominantly white suburbs hated Young’s outspokenness on racism and his staunch defense of Detroit. Determined to undermine his administration, the Detroit media filled it pages with stories of Young’s alleged corruption on city contracts. None of it was true. It was later revealed to be part of an FBI dirty tricks campaign to bring down Young and other Black mayors in the country. Still in the fog of the DMLO/OCIC debacle, discussion that day at the Winter home helped to clear it away. It was a discussion of racism rooted in real life, working-class politics. Leading it was Carl Winter, one of the 12 Smith Act leaders of the Communist Party who was convicted in 1948 and served five years in prison. Carl talked about the stakes for the multi-racial working class in defending Mayor Young against a government campaign to bring him down. While the “new communist” left was focused on “Third World Marxism,” the CP in Michigan was mobilizing against an attack on Detroit’s African- American working-class mayor. I filled out a membership card joining the Communist Party that day. Coleman Young was pure Detroit. Raised on the city’s east side “Black Bottom,” he was a Tuskegee Airman who was not permitted to fly missions in the anti-fascist war in retaliation for his efforts to desegregate the all-white officer clubs at military bases. After the war, Young became a leader of the National Negro Congress and famously ran the anti-communist McCarthy hearings out of Detroit with his refusal to answer red-baiting questions, saying “I ain’t no stool pidgeon.” In his autobiography, Young recounted what life was like in Detroit’s “Black Bottom” in the 1930s. Maben’s barbershop was the center of neighborhood political discussion and debate, and his mentor was the Rev. Charles Hill of Hartford Avenue Baptist Church who along with Young was a leader of the National Negro Congress. “From the barbershop I got the attitude,” wrote Young, “from Rev. Hill I got the leadership. I knew the party line backwards and forwards from Maben’s.” I soon came to learn what Coleman Young had described. Over the next few years I met many of the labor and African American leaders who had provided the backbone to the early industrial union organizing and civil rights movements, as well as the struggle for peace. By the following year, 1984, I had been working for past 14 years as a clerical worker at Detroit’s Wayne County Community College, and an elected officer of its UAW local union. For my vacation in July, I travelled to Nicaragua with religious and student activists protesting the U.S. contra war. I had been active in Latin American solidarity movements since my 2-month Venceremos Brigade trip to Cuba in 1972, and was an avid reader of the Daily World coverage of Nicaragua and Cuba by correspondent Sandy Pollack, who later died in a 1985 plane crash en route from Cuba to Nicaragua. I was inspired by the heroism of the people I had met in Nicaragua defending their country against a brutal U.S. intervention. When I returned, I decided to quit my secretarial job to devout full-time to movement activism. The Daily World newspaper’s Detroit bureau was in need of a correspondent after Geoffrey moved to New York City where he continued to write for the paper. In January 1985, I interviewed for the position, and my on-the-job training as a working-class journalist began. 5 As Detroit correspondent I followed in the pathbreaking footsteps of Billy Allan, the Daily Worker (later named Daily World) correspondent for decades. I had not known him during his Detroit days as he had moved to California where he continued to write for the paper. Billy was the consummate working-class journalist, activist and organizer. He was one of six Michigan leaders of the Communist Party arrested in 1952 and charged under the Smith Act, along with Helen Winter, who was then the organizational secretary of the Party and wife of Carl Winter. Billy taught me how to cover a UAW convention. We co-authored daily coverage of the 1986 Anaheim convention. The issues we wrote about were priority campaigns in the unfolding fight-back movement in the midst of a pandemic of plant closings and job losses. Convention resolutions called for a federal jobs program, a government-run family farm program and conversion of military production to fund programs to fight poverty and unemployment, government ownership of oil and energy production, and legislation to halt plant closings. These were the issues that Party members were building mass campaigns around in Detroit and elsewhere, a program of its “industrial concentration policy.” From the early 1930s, the Party had developed a policy to focus its activity on the “most decisive industries – mine, steel, textile, marine and auto. (Roger Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Union, p. 81.) Auto plant closings in the mid-1980s had became a crisis of gloom and despair for the thousands of autoworkers left unemployed. I covered labor-community pickets and rallies in front of General Motors headquarters and elsewhere. GM, Ford and Chrysler were abandoning the African-American centers of Detroit, Flint and Pontiac in pursuit of maximum profits in low-wage regions of the South and off-shore. Jesse Jackson and Rep. John Conyers were among the African American leaders who marched with rank- and-file autoworkers. At a press conference at GM headquarters, the company announced that 22 auto plants in Detroit would close due to “excess capacity.” No mention was made about GM’s previously announced plans to build new plants In Mexico. As a member of the press, I rose to ask why GM was closing plants in the U.S. while building new plants in Mexico if “excess capacity” was the reason. GM had to admit that they were simply relocating. This became the headline story in the mainstream media the next day. The plant closings became a civil rights issue. The People’s Daily World as it had been renamed in 1985, assigned me to write a feature story, Death of an Auto Town. I interviewed auto workers at several plant gates throughout Michigan about federal legislation that had been introduced to extend unemployment benefits, and provide a 90-day advance notice of a plant closing. Hearings were held in several parts of the country and it became a priority campaign of the Party. As Detroit City Council president Mary Ann Mahaffey told me in an interview in 1988, “Even though (the legislation) won’t be good enough, it at least calls attention to the problem.” In building support for the plant closing bill, Communist Party trade union and community activists went all out to build the “Save Our Jobs” conference in Chicago in 1988. It was attended by a significant number of trade unionists, community and religious leaders and elected officials. On the east side of Detroit, saving the Chrysler Jefferson Assembly plant was a major concentrated effort for the Michigan Party. Chrysler had announced that it would close the aging plant but refused to consider building a new plant in its place. The predominantly African-American community had already 6 been severely impacted by the closing of the historic Dodge Main plant in 1980. My role was to cover the campaign in the pages of the PDW with stories of Chrysler’s profit-driven plant closings and their impact on communities. I wrote about the efforts of UAW Local 7 representing the Jefferson Assembly workers, the pressure brought by Mayor Young, and a labor-community-religious coalition to save the plant that the Party was instrumental in building. Central to the campaign was Lee Cain, African American long-time rank-and-file leader of Dodge Main’s Local 3 and now Jefferson Assembly’s Local 7, and an open member of the Party. Cain told us the history of his efforts at building the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) at Local 3 which was an important vehicle for UAW support of the civil rights movement in the South. It was an example of how the labor-African-American alliance was built. Our eastside community Party club distributed the PDW at plant gates, stores and door-to-door in neighborhoods. We organized community forums in churches near the plant. National CP co-chair Henry Winston spoke at one such gathering. In the end, the multi-faceted pressure campaign forced Chrysler to announce plans to build a new auto plant across the road from the old one. As the PDW reporter I was on the front lines of many struggles, as activist and reporter. I walked the UAW-led picket line at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in support of locked-out members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), and rode with UAW members in the “Motown to Coaltown” car caravan to Camp Solidarity in support of the United Mine Workers of America strike against Pittston Coal in Virginia. I covered many union and civil rights organization conventions, among them, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the NAACP, the Urban League, AFL-CIO legislative conferences, the founding convention of the Canadian Auto Workers union. In covering the plight of family farmers, I attended farm-labor conferences, and interviewed in a special feature Neal Rogers, a dairy farmer in Eaton Rapids, Michigan, who was the founder of the Farm Unity Coalition of Michigan family farmers struggling against agribusiness. I covered the rank-and-file New Directions upsurge within the UAW and its leader Jerry Tucker, as well as top leaders of the UAW. In a feature interview with UAW Vice President Marc Stepp, who headed the union’s Chrysler department, he discussed the impact of plant closings. He talked about the missed opportunity in 1979 when Chrysler was filing for bankruptcy and used the threat of job loss to extract major concessions from the union. The UAW, said Stepp, urged the government to acquire equity interest in the company in return for loan guarantees and tax credits, a step in the direction of public ownership. The government and Chrysler both refused. It always impressed me that that the many leading figures of Detroit that I interviewed for the PDW were so welcoming: Dr. Charles Wright, founder of Detroit’s African-American museum; Rep. George Crockett, the first Black lawyer at an integrated law firm who defended top leaders of the Communist Party in the Smith Act trials of 1948; Circuit Court Judge Claudia Morcom, who led the legal front against segregation in Mississippi in the violent struggles of the 1960s, and the first Black woman lawyer at an integrated law firm; City Council President Erma Henderson, considered the 20 th century’s most powerful woman in Detroit, whose history included chairing the Detroit chapter of the Labor Youth League, successor to the Young Communist League in the 1940s; and City Council President Mary Ann Mahaffey, who was elected following Henderson’s retirement. 7 I covered hearings organized at the Detroit City Council in support of the Hayes-Conyers Jobs or Income Now legislation, and another hearing led by Rep. Crockett on the status of women with testimony by the Detroit delegation to the Nairobi Women’s Conference. In 1989, I attended a gathering in the Detroit office of Rep. Conyers where he announced HR 40, the first bill introduced in Congress calling for a commission to study the case for reparations for African-Americans. The international dimension of the work of the Communist Party was unmatched on the left. In 1991, the PDW sponsored a national tour with Chris Hani, the head of the armed wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Later that year, Hani became the chair of the South African Communist Party, succeeding Joe Slovo. Detroit was a highlight of the Hani tour. Mayor Young rolled out the red carpet and treated Hani as a head of state, providing a driver and limousine with full security detail. Under the auspices of the PDW, a welcoming committee was formed that included leading anti- apartheid, community, peace and religious organizations. We held a reception and program in downtown Detroit at the Peace Museum, attended by a number of luminaries including Rep. Conyers. A well-attended program followed, featuring African-American cultural performances and a talk by Hani about the unbanning of the ANC the year before and prospects for South Africa’s first democratic election. The following day, I was one of four in a delegation that accompanied Hani to a private meeting with Mayor Young at the Manoogian Mansion, the official mayoral residence on the Detroit River. The meeting had been requested by Hani to ask Mayor Young’s help in transforming the racist South African police force in the post-apartheid future. Coleman Young’s experience in disbanding the racist STRESS police unit, and fully integrating the police force in racial and gender composition, would be a model for the new democratic government that would be coming to power in South Africa. The preceding year in 1991, Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years. Mayor Young and Rep. Conyers issued a call to the people of Detroit to march three days later on what was proclaimed Nelson Mandela Day. A few months later, Mandela toured the U.S. and Detroit greeted him with a hero’s welcome. One of the stops was to the Dearborn Ford Rouge Assembly plant where he spoke to 300 UAW members. I was honored to be among the press corps that stood in front of Mandela as he told the gathered autoworkers, “I am your flesh and blood. I am your comrade.” Later that day I would be in the press box at Tiger Stadium covering Mandela’s address before 50,000 people. The visit to Detroit of Tawfiq Zayyad and Felicia Langer was another unforgettable experience. The PDW sponsored a national tour of Zayyad, the Palestinian mayor of Nazareth, and Langer, the famed human rights lawyer who defended Palestinian political prisoners. Both were leading members of the Israeli Communist Party. Detroit and neighboring Dearborn was home to the largest Palestinian diaspora outside of Palestine. I had long been active with the struggle of Palestinians working with Detroit’s Palestine Aid Society and attending programs of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Now representing the PDW, I organized a 45-member Host Committee for a public program attended by 400 people in June 1988. My story about the event is worth sharing: Zayyad and Langer received greetings from the Detroit City Council in a testimonial resolution (presented by City Council President Maryann Mahaffey), and from Reps. George Crockett and John Conyers. The program began with a reading of “The Impossible,” a poem Zayyad wrote 30 years ago. It was first read in English by Harold Shapiro, chair of the Detroit Police Commission, and then in Arabic by Hasan Newash of the Palestine Aid Society. The event was chaired by Michele Stone Artt, chair of the 8 Michigan U.S. Peace Council (and daughter of Helen and Carl Winter). The unity message of the event was representative of the Host Committee which included the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Iraqi Democratic Union, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of Iran, New Jewish Agenda, SANE/Freeze and the Greater Detroit American Soviet Friendship Society. The year before, in 1987, I was part of a 3-person production team that presented a multi-media concert “Detroit Tribute to Paul Robeson and His Work for Peace.” Co-sponsored by the Museum of African- American History and the U.S. Peace Council, the project was principally the genius of composer, pianist and peace activist Bill Meyer. Detroit had been Robeson’s favorite city as the trade unions and the African-American community organized large events where he performed and spoke, bringing home the message of world peace. Detroit was a refuge from the racism, anti-communism and government persecution he endured his whole life. Our tribute to Robeson featured a video presentation of interviews with leading Detroit figures who related their personal experiences with Robeson, including the Mayor Young, Rev. Charles Adams of the Hartford Baptist Church and then head of the Detroit branch of the NAACP, Rep. George Crockett, former City Council President Erma Henderson, and Chris Alston and Dave Moore, who were early organizers of the Detroit Unemployed Council of the 1930s and the UAW union organizing drive at Ford. One cannot recount the story of Paul Robeson in Detroit without highlighting his role in winning the UAW union drive at the Ford Motor Company in 1941. Ford systematically assigned the worst jobs at the Ford plant to Black workers. A key union demand was an end to racial discrimination in job assignment, and a grievance procedure that would protect Black workers and all workers from retaliation. Ford had waged a vicious race baiting campaign against the union, pitting black against white. Forging unity with specific demands that address the concerns of black workers was keenly understood by the UAW organizing committee, many of whom were members of, or influenced by the Communist Party. By 1938, some 200 Communist Party members worked in the Ford Rouge plant, a small but dedicated core, publishing a shop paper, the Ford Dearborn Worker. (Roger Keeran, the Communist Party and the Auto Workers Union, p. 17). These were the workers who were the backbone of the union drive on the shop floor, getting union cards signed and collecting dues despite fears of being fired at the hands of a ruthless Ford security regime. On May 19, 1941, two days before the union vote, the UAW organized a rally at Cadillac Square Park in downtown Detroit. Paul Robeson headlined the event and addressed thousands for the final pre- election campaign. According to an account by Dr. Charles Wright writing in a program honoring Robeson at the Detroit Museum of African American History: “The crowd was brought to full attention with Robeson’s singing of ‘Joe Hill’ and ‘Ballad for Americans.’ He then exhorted the Black workers to reject Henry Ford’s paternalism and stand up and be counted as men by voting for the UAW-CIO. After the rally, he went to the Lincoln plant in Highland Park and the Rouge plant to shake hands and carry the message to those workers who could not attend the rally. “When the final vote was counted, UAW had more than 70% of the votes and the non-vote count was only 4%, the lowest in National Labor Relations Board History. The victory was decisive and the UAW has 9 maintained bargaining rights for the auto workers since that time.” (Paul Robeson in Detroit by Charles H. Wright, MD.) The fight for unity also meant bringing foreign-born workers at the Ford plant to the side of the union. A great number were Polish, and Ford used the language barrier to pit workers against each other and the union. Stan Nowak, who later became a Michigan state senator, was asked to join the Ford organizing committee. Using his Polish language radio program and using his influence with the Polish language newspapers and social clubs, Stan’s work was key to building the unity of the Ford workers. I listened to Stan’s recounting of such stories over the course of my time in Detroit in the Party. They are recounted in his biography, “Two Who Were There,” written by Stan’s wife and fellow activist, Margaret Collingwood Nowak. I also came to know other veterans of the UAW Ford campaign, among them, Dave Moore, Chris Alston, Paul Boatin and Frank Sykes. The four were at the core of the Ford organizing campaign in the 1930s and early 40s. I met up with them at the site of a bloody assault on unemployed workers that took place March 7, 1932 outside the Ford Rouge plant. They recalled for the readers of the PDW, what happened that day, known in history as the Ford Hunger March Massacre. They had organized 1,200 unemployed workers to march on the Ford Rouge plant, located just outside of Detroit. Their demands included jobs, a 7-hour day, medical care, an end to discrimination against Black workers, and the right to organize a union. Ford security agents and Dearborn police opened fire on the marchers and killed four that day, among them Joe York, who was the 19-year old District Organizer of the Young Communist League. Three months later, a fifth marcher died from wounds: Curtis Williams, who was Black and denied burial beside his comrades at the segregated Woodmere Cemetery. These are highlights of the many stories I wrote for the PDW from 1985-1991. The decisions on what stories I covered, how I covered them, and the leaders I interviewed were made through a collective process that connected the paper to the Party in an integral way. The industrial concentration policy in labor was the guiding line of the party through its various organs. I made occasional trips to New York City to meet with national PDW staff and for meetings of the Party’s National Committee of which I was a member. I participated in a 3-week Party school as part of my training where we studied strategy, such as building the left-center coalition, the centrality of the struggle against racism, the inter-connection of class, race and gender, campaigns for peace and disarmament. I would consult with the Labor Department of the Party and attend meetings of Party cadre in auto and steel. In the day to day work In Detroit, I worked closely with Sam Webb, the district organizer of the Party in Michigan who had worked in the trade unions in Maine before working full time for the Party. Sam organized weekly Monday morning meetings of key Party leaders in Detroit to orient my PDW coverage for the week. Besides Sam, Peggy Frankie, Lasker Smith and Carl Winter provided guidance in our discussions. Our thinking was filtered up to PDW national editors who provided input and recommendations on a weekly basis. Other meetings I attended and learned from were Party fractions at national conferences of, for example, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and fraternal organizations such as the Communist Party of Canada which held a meeting of Party cadre at the founding convention of the Canadian Autoworkers Union. 10 The Detroit personalities that I interviewed were key figures in the building of Detroit as a leading African American, working-class urban center. Their contributions built the industrial trade unions, and advanced the struggle for African American equality. They were not necessarily members of the Communist Party but they worked with the Party in pursuit of common goals. I took their willingness to be featured in one-on-one interviews as an expression of appreciation for the Communist Party’s role in those struggles. The Communist Party’s influence and connectedness to the struggles of workers and African Americans has been unmatched in the history of the left. It was the reason for the anti-communist crusade of J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy in the post-war years that succeeded in decimating Party membership. The constant surveillance, intimidation, job loss, social shunning, imprisonment of leading members took its toll. As noted by Edward Pintzak in his book about Michigan Communists during the Cold War: “In 1949, the Michigan District of the Communist Party had 79 Party clubs – shop, industrial, and community. By the early 1990s there were fewer than a dozen.” (Reds: Racial Justice and Civil Liberties, 1997) The Party struggled to overcome the debilitating impact of the government drive to destroy it throughout the time I was a member in the 1980s. The members of the dozen or so Party clubs in the 1980s were dedicated, seasoned and selfless. Yet, our campaigns, events and paper distributions at plant gates and neighborhoods yielded very few new members. When the Soviet Union collapsed, a bitter internal struggle within the Party culminated in a disastrous national convention in December 1991. The breaking point issue was the attempted coup against Soviet President and Communist Party General Secretary Mikael Gorbachev. Whatever shortcomings Gorbachev had, he was trying to democratize the country with policies to decentralize the economy (Perestroika), and to open up decision making (Glasnost). The Gus Hall-led leadership supported the aborted coup attempt, breaking open a rebellion within the ranks of the U.S. Communist Party. A third of the membership resigned in the months following, myself included. It was a time of intense emotional and political turmoil for all of us in the Party in Michigan. After leaving, I went on to help found the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. We hoped to be a unifying force for a new socialist organization. That has not yet materialized. I continue to believe that a communist party of the working class, capable of uniting key social forces of the country is essential if we are to impact the political and ideological challenges of today. Whatever organizational shape this takes, it surely must draw on the historic practice of the Communist Party USA in fighting for a substantive democracy and a socialist future. end