'The reddest of all blacks': the story of an African-American communist who died in the Gulag

Sean Guillory, American historian, research associate at the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh (USA) and host of the podcast about Russia, tells the story of Lovett Fort Whiteman, a US communist who was called “the reddest black of all black” by the USA but in Russia practically nothing is known about him, writes Meduza.

Photo by wikipedia.org

Fort Whiteman was one of the most active members of the US Communist Party and a delegate to the Comintern. In 1928, he finally moved to the Soviet Union, but fell out with his party comrades and in 1939, he died of exhaustion in Sevostostlag on Kolyma.

Lovett Fort Whiteman first came to the Soviet Union in 1924, and was one of the first black Americans in Soviet Russia. The other two were Claude McKay and Otto Haywood at the 4th Comintern Congress in Moscow in 1922. Interestingly, Fort Whiteman is hardly mentioned in the history of African American Communism in the United States. The only book in which his biography is set out in as much detail as possible is Glenda Gilmore's Challenging Dixie.

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He first came to the USSR in 1924 and spent the whole year in the country studying at the Communist University of Eastern Workers, an educational institution of the Comintern for its members from Asia, the Middle East, but mostly Chinese. I could not find in the archives traces of his stay at this university, although it is known that he wrote a couple of letters to the head of the Comintern, Grigori Zinoviev, complaining about how African Americans were portrayed in the Soviet media, on advertising posters, and so on — Fort Whiteman didn’t like that in the USSR they reproduce the same racist stereotypes that angered him in the United States.

Lovett Fort Whiteman was born in 1895 (according to other sources, in 1889) year, so by the time he arrived in the USSR he was already behind 30. Even before his conversion to Soviet communism, he had a rather curious biography. He was born in Dallas, Texas, in a family of former slaves: his father was from North Carolina, and his mother - from Louisiana. He graduated from Tuskigi University - one of the largest so-called "historically black" colleges in the United States. He also attended the University of Fisk, another “historically black”, and in general was very well educated, judging by his literate writing. In general, his fate is rather uncharacteristic for a young African-American of those times: despite his origin, he managed to get an excellent education, and not a technical, but a humanitarian. This was probably due to the fact that he was born in a big city, and not in a rural area.

The radical politics of Fort Whiteman got pretty early. For example, in 1919, he was arrested in St. Louis and interrogated at the FBI, where a rather thick folder was kept on him. It can be said that he was one of the first African American activists who actively participated in the socialist movement in the United States. At that time, he called himself a member of the Industrial Workers of the World movement. Around 1914 or 1915, he spent some time in Mexico, where he communicated with local anarchists. At the same time, he was also a member of the Socialist Party of America, and when a leftist split occurred in 1919, which resulted in the US Communist Party, Fort Whiteman went for the left faction. So he became one of the first black members of the US Communist Party.

So, for the first time in the USSR, he was in 1924, spent a year there, and, as far as I know, visited Central Asia. While still in the US, he took an ethnographic course at the University of Colombia, and was deeply interested in anthropological research. In 1924, he gave a speech at the V Congress of the Comintern in Moscow under the name of James Jackson - this was a common practice among foreign communists because many people entered the USSR illegally. There he, in fact, was the main delegate from the so-called “Negro Question”. Returning to the US in 1925, Fort Whiteman was tasked to form the American Negro Labor Congress, an organization that he and other African American radicals had been creating since the October Revolution in Russia.

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It is not known exactly how Fort Whiteman became a radical communist - historical archives do not give a definite answer to this question - but most likely it happened during the Mexican revolution, which took place a couple of years earlier than the October revolution in Russia. It is known that he wrote articles in various radical publications. There was, for example, the Messenger magazine (“The Messenger”), founded by black socialists, Chandler Owen and Philip Randolph - the latter later, in 1950, will become a prominent civil rights activist. There Fort Whiteman wrote notes about the theater and stories. In addition, he participated in the election campaigns of socialist candidates in New York and edited two magazines that were published by one of the most famous black socialists of the time, Hubert Harrison. In general, he was an active member of the African-American socialist circle formed in Harlem in the 20s of the 20th century.

The revolutionary events of the year 1917 in Russia captured the imagination of American radicals. Lovett Fort Whiteman, like many of his associates, came to the conclusion that the only way to make the same revolution in the United States is, firstly, to support Soviet Russia, and, secondly, to create a political organization in America, like the Bolshevik. According to some information, in the USSR he was invited by the Soviet representative to the USA Ludwig Martens. The FBI believed that he was sent to the United States to recruit African American and other radical activists. Later, the US Communist Party will actively promote the penetration of American socialists into the Soviet Union, help them with entry documents, and even advertise calls for everyone in the party newspaper The Daily Worker. The archives of the Communist Party of the United States contain thousands of letters from Americans asking them to be sent to the Soviet Union.

Although the United States immediately recognized the sovereignty of the Provisional Government in March 1917, the Bolshevik government, which came to power in October, the US authorities refused to recognize, despite all the efforts of Soviet diplomats. But informal contacts continued mainly through sales representatives. Soviet emissaries in the United States made contacts with immigrants — mainly political refugees from radical circles. And the main contacts were carried out through the organization called “Friends of Soviet Russia” (“Friends of Soviet Russia”). There was also a cultural exchange, but the main mutual interests of the United States and Soviet Russia lay in the field of business. The young Soviet state was interested in new technologies and investments, and American entrepreneurs in new markets.

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In addition, American radicals actively traveled from the United States to Russia in 1920-ies: first of all, of course, the writer and journalist John Reed, buried near the Kremlin wall, and his wife Louise Bryant. But in 1930, most Americans go to the USSR in search of work: the Great Depression is already underway in the USA, and an economic boom occurred in the early Stalin years in the USSR. In the early 30s, at least three thousand American specialists worked in the USSR. One of them, by the way, was another African American named Robert Robinson.

In general, for an African-American, especially one who received a good technical education, the Soviet Union offered not only a chance for employment, which he had not even dreamed of at home, but also the ideal of a just society without racism. In addition, African Americans in the USSR were accepted as celebrities.

After returning to the US in 1925, Fort Whiteman continued his active work as a member of the US Communist Party and dreamed of going back to the Soviet Union. He was so obsessed with the Soviets that in the reports of the FBI they wrote about him that he even dressed as a Bolshevik. There is his photograph of those times, which he was wearing in the then Bolshevik fashion: a leather jacket, high boots, a cap. In this form, he walked around southern Chicago. At the congress of the American Negro Labor Congress, he organized a concert of Russian music and a ballet troupe performance - which surprised the other delegates a lot. Obviously, he completely plunged into Russian culture and dreamed of returning to the Soviet Union.

Despite being watched by the FBI for a long time, Fort Whiteman didn’t meet any particular resistance, although the American press is extremely hostile towards it. In 1926, he traveled around the United States with speeches, and the responses in American newspapers in many respects repeated what we are writing about the “Russian conspiracy” around Donald Trump. They say the Soviet Union is recruiting African Americans to stage a revolution in the United States and overthrow the government. It is worth noting, of course, that the United States Communist Party could hardly have existed without Soviet help.

The problem with Fort Whiteman was that, for all his eloquence, he turned out to be a useless organizer. He was assigned the task of self-organization of African Americans in the southern states, but he did not cope with this. The fact is that most of the African-American radicals from his circle did not like him and did not understand why he had such a privileged position. This personal dislike for him seems to have led Fort Whiteman to his sad end.

In 1928, Fort Whiteman was appointed a delegate from the US Communist Party to the 6th Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. In addition, he received a scholarship from the Moscow State University at the Faculty of Ethnology, and in 1931, he got a job as a research assistant at the Timiryazev Biological Institute.

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In 1928, under pressure from several black communists from the United States, the Comintern adopted a resolution known as the Thesis on Black Belt Self-Determination — essentially a call for the formation of an autonomous African American republic in the southern states of the United States based on the model of the national republics of the USSR. The Communist Party of the United States at that time occupied a purely class position on a racial issue: they say, no race exists, all working people, regardless of skin color, belong to a single class. However, a few black delegates from the US Communist Party, who became real celebrities in the USSR, used their privileged position to put pressure on the party leadership through the Comintern.

However, this project was not understood, and Fort Whiteman was one of the delegates who rejected the proposal. As the opponents of the Black Belt Thesis wrote, black Americans first of all considered themselves Americans. The fact is that communism among African Americans in the United States was not at all popular: the black members of the Communist Party were on the strength of a couple hundred. But at this time the movement of Marcus Garvey, pan-African and nationalist in essence, was gaining strength.

By the time he returned to the USSR in 1928, the Fort Whiteman position in the Comintern had shaken considerably. He was removed from his leadership position in the Negro Labor Congress; he found himself in political isolation because of his intransigent position on self-determination. Plus, in the 1929 year, rumors had already spread that he was a Trotskyist - the chairman of the US Communist Party even had to write a letter to the executive committee of the Comintern that they had no basis. In 1932, a group of African-American actors led by Langston Hughes came to the USSR to make a film about racism in the US “Black and White”. Fort Whiteman became one of the screenwriters - but Langston Hughes immediately rejected his draft screenplay, stating that the Fort Whiteman script "has nothing to do with American realities." In addition, Fort Whiteman immediately disliked the entire film crew, so he was removed from the project.

In 30, Fort Whiteman taught English to Moscow schoolchildren, and in 1934-35, he wrote articles about Soviet science in the English-language newspaper Moscow News. He lived at that time in the center of Moscow in the 7 house on Ogarev Street - now it is Gazetny Lane. One African-American journalist who worked in Moscow at the time wrote that Fort Whiteman was married, but I could not find confirmation of this.

He lived in the USSR to him hard. Already in 1933, Fort Whiteman wrote a letter to the leadership of the US Communist Party with a request to return him to his homeland in America, he volunteered to teach Hegelian philosophy and science at the party school. These letters reached the addressees, but remained unanswered. Like many American communists in the Soviet Union, Fort Whiteman changed membership from the US Communist Party to the CPSU (B.) In 1931, but he was expelled from there for non-payment of membership dues.

Finally, in 1935, another black communist, William Patterson, wrote several denunciations on Fort Whiteman. Fort Whiteman, Patterson reported, is engaged in subversive work among black Americans in Moscow, and is also allegedly linked to the US embassy - a hint that Fort Whiteman is spying for the United States. Fort Whiteman left the USSR, but he failed: he did not have documents, because he entered the country illegally under an assumed name. He tried to get a new passport in the American embassy, ​​but because of some bureaucratic delays, he failed. He told his friends that he wanted to go to Ethiopia, then to flee to Turkey through the Caucasus, but this only attracted additional attention of the Soviet authorities.

Finally, in July 1937, Fort Whiteman was arrested, accused of counter-revolutionary activities and exiled to Kazakhstan. Almost nothing is known about what he did in the Semipalatinsk exile, but according to fragmentary information, Fort Whiteman was a boxing trainer there. In May 1938, he was arrested again and the sentence was tightened: five years in the camps. Fort Whiteman was sent to the stage at Sevvostlag on Kolyma, where a terrible frost, poor nutrition and overwork quickly undermined his mighty health. 13 January 1939, Lovett Fort Whiteman, died of starvation. He was 44 of the year.

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