Report on the Negro Question:
Speech to the 4th Congress of the Comintern, Nov. 1922.
by Claude McKay
Published in International Press Correspondence, v. 3 (Jan. 5, 1923), pp. 16-17.
Comrade McKay: Comrades, I feel that I
would rather face a lynching stake in civilized
America than try to make a speech before the most
intellectual and critical audience in the world. I
belong to a race of creators but my public speaking
has been so bad that I have been told by my
own people that I should never try to make
speeches, but stick to writing, and laughing. However,
when I heard the Negro question was going
to be brought up on the floor
of the Congress, I felt it
would be an eternal shame if
I did not say something on
behalf of the members of my
race. Especially would I be a
disgrace to the American
Negroes because, since I
published a notorious poem
in 1919 [“If We Must Dieâ€],
I have been pushed forward
as one of the spokesmen of
Negro radicalism in America
to the detriment of my poetical
temperament. I feel
that my race is honored by this invitation to one
of its members to speak at this Fourth Congress of
the Third International. My race on this occasion
is honored, not because it is different from the
white race and the yellow race, but [because it] is
especially a race of toilers, hewers of wood and
drawers of water, that belongs to the most oppressed,
exploited, and suppressed section of the
working class of the world. The Third International
stands for the emancipation of all the workers of
the world, regardless of race or color, and this stand
of the Third International is not merely on paper
like the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution
of the United States of America. It is a real
thing.
The Negro race in the economic life of the
world today occupies a very peculiar position. In
every country where the Whites and Blacks must
work together the capitalists have set the one
against the other. It would seem at the present day
that the international bourgeoisie would use the
Negro race as their trump card in their fight against
the world revolution. Great Britain has her Negro
regiments in the colonies and she has demonstrated
what she can do with her Negro soldiers by the
use that she made of them during the late War.
The revolution in England is very far away be-
cause of the highly organized exploitation of the
subject peoples of the British Empire. In Europe,
we find that France had a Negro army of over
300,000 and that to carry out their policy of imperial
domination in Europe the French are going
to use their Negro minions.
In America we have the same situation. The
Northern bourgeoisie knows how well the Negro
soldiers fought for their own emancipation, although
illiterate and untrained, during the Civil
War. They also remember how well the Negro soldiers
fought in the Spanish-American War under
Theodore Roosevelt. They know that in the last
war over 400,000 Negroes who were mobilized
gave a very good account of themselves, and that,
besides fighting for the capitalists, they also put
up a very good fight for themselves on returning
to America when they fought the white mobs in
Chicago, St. Louis and Washington.
But more than the fact that the American
capitalists are using Negro soldiers in their fight
against the interests of labor is the fact that the
American capitalists are setting out to mobilize the
entire black race of America for the purpose of
fighting organized labor. The situation in America
today is terrible and fraught with grave dangers. It
is much uglier and more terrible than was the condition
of the peasants and Jews of Russia under
the Tsar. It is so ugly and terrible that very few
people in America are willing to face it. The reformist
bourgeoisie have been carrying on the
battle against discrimination and racial prejudice
in America. The Socialists and Communists have
fought very shy of it because there is a great element
of prejudice among the Socialists and Communists
of America. They are not willing to face
the Negro question. In associating with the comrades
of America I have found demonstrations of
prejudice on the various occasions when the White
and Black comrades had to get together: and this
is the greatest difficulty that the Communists of
America have got to overcome-the fact that they
first have got to emancipate themselves from the
ideas they entertain towards the Negroes before
they can be able to reach the Negroes with any
kind of radical propaganda. However, regarding
the Negroes themselves, I feel that as the subject
races of other nations have come to Moscow to
learn how to fight against their exploiters, the
Negroes will also come to Moscow. In 1918 when
the Third International published its Manifesto
and included the part referring to the exploited
colonies, there were several groups of Negro radicals
in America that sent this propaganda out
among their people. When in 1920 the American
government started to investigate and to suppress
radical propaganda among the Negroes, the small
radical groups in America retaliated by publishing
the fact that the Socialists stood for the emancipation
of the Negroes, and that reformist America
could do nothing for them. Then, I think, for the
first time in American history, the American Negroes
found that Karl Marx had been interested in
their emancipation and had fought valiantly for
it. I shall just read this extract that was taken from
Karl Marx’s writing at the time of the Civil War:
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave holders for
the first time in the annals of the world, dared to
inscribe “Slavery†on the banner of armed revolt, on
the very spot where hardly a century ago, the idea of
one great democratic republic had first sprung up,
whence the first declaration of the Rights of Man was
issued, and the first impulse given to the European
revolution of the eighteenth- century, when on that
spot the counter-revolution cynically proclaimed
property in man to be “the cornerstone of the new
edifice†— then the working class of Europe
understood at once that the slaveholders’ rebellion
was to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of
property against labor, and that (its) hopes of the
future, even its past conquests were at stake in that
tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic.
Karl Marx who drafted the above resolution
is generally known as the father of Scientific Socialism
and also of the epoch-making volume
popularly known as the socialist bible, Capital.
During the Civil War he was correspondent of the
New York Tribune. In the company of Richard
McKay: Speech to the 4th Congress of the Communist International 3
Published by 1000 Flowers Publishing, Corvallis, OR, 2005. • Free reproduction permitted.
http://www.marxists.org/subject/usa/eam/index.html
Transcribed by William Maxwell for the Modern American Poetry website.
PDF version published here by permission.
For further information on Claude McKay and his role, see Dr. Maxwell’s book,
New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
Cobden, Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist, and John
Bright, he toured England making speeches and
so roused up the sentiment of the workers of that
country against the Confederacy that Lord
Palmerston, [the] Prime Minister, who was about
to recognize the South, had to desist.
As Marx fought against chattel slavery in
1861, so are present-day socialists, his intellectual
descendants, fighting wage slavery.
If the Workers Party in America were really a
Workers Party that included Negroes it would, for
instance, in the South, have to be illegal, and I
would inform the American Comrades that there
is a branch of the Workers Party in the South, in
Richmond, Virginia, that is illegal — illegal because
it includes colored members. There we have
a very small group of white and colored comrades
working together, and the fact that they have laws
in Virginia and most of the Southern states discriminating
against whites and blacks assembling
together means that the Workers Party in the South
must be illegal. To get round these laws of Virginia,
the comrades have to meet separately, according
to color, and about once a month they
assemble behind closed doors.
This is just an indication of the work that
will have to be done in the South. The work among
the Negroes of the South will have to be carried
on by some legal propaganda organized in the
North, because we find at the present time in
America that the situation in the Southern States
(where nine million out of ten million of the Negro
population live), is that even the liberal bourgeoisie
and the petty bourgeoisie among the Negroes
cannot get their own papers of a reformist
propaganda type into the South on account of the
laws that there discriminate against them. The fact
is that it is really only in the Southern States that
there is any real suppression of opinion. No suppression
of opinion exists in the Northern states
in the way it exists in the S outh. In the Northern
states special laws are made for special occasionsas
those against Communists and Socialists during
the War — but in the South we find laws that
have existed for fifty years, under which the Negroes
cannot meet to talk about their grievances.
The white people who are interested in their cause
cannot go and speak to them. If we send white
comrades into the South they are generally ordered
out by the Southern oligarchy and if they do not
leave they are generally whipped, tarred and feathered;
and if we send black comrades into the South
they generally won’t be able to get out again —
they will be lynched and burned at the stake.
I hope that as a symbol that the Negroes of
the world will not be used by the international
bourgeoisie in the final conflicts against the World
Revolution, that as a challenge to the international
bourgeoisie, who have an understanding of the
Negro question, we shall soon see a few Negro
soldiers in the finest, bravest, and cleanest fighting
forces in the world — the Red Army and Navy
of Russia — fighting not only for their own emancipation,
but also for the emancipation of all the
working class of the whole world
