In the shadows of the literary lights, economic desperation was growing among Harlem’s Black residents. Whites owned more than 80 percent of Harlem businesses. But following the Wall Street crash in October 1929, fewer and fewer white people came to Harlem in search of a good time. When Hurston returned to Harlem that year, she confronted enormous poverty and Harlem friends “all tired and worn out—looking like death eating crackers.” But when she visited her white benefactor, Charlotte Osgood Mason, there was no evidence of the Great Depression in her penthouse. She ate caviar and capon.
1929–1934
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Robin D. G. Kelley
The Fascist racketeers were no fools. They understood the psychology of their starving victims. Their appeal to them was irresistible. It went something like this: “Run the niggers back to the country where they came from—Africa! They steal the jobs away from us white men because they lower wages. Our motto is therefore: America for Americans!”
Anyone living in Donald Trump’s America will find these words eerily familiar; the author’s name, not so much. When Angelo Herndon penned this passage over eight decades ago, the twenty-four-year-old with a sixth-grade education was one of the most famous Black men in America. He had spent almost three years in a Georgia jail cell, about five years in Southern coal mines, and at least two years as a Communist organizer in the Deep South.
Herndon’s conviction under Georgia’s insurrection statute and his subsequent defense made the handsome young radical a cause célèbre. His story upends typical Great Depression images of despondent men and women in breadlines and soup kitchens, waiting for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to save the day.
Instead, the story of thousands of Angelo Herndons is a story of Black antifascism.
As American finance capital eagerly floated loans to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and Fortune, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New Republic ran admiring spreads on Italian Fascism, Black radicals called out and resisted homegrown fascism in the form of lynch law, the suppression of workers’ organizations and virtually all forms of dissent, and the denial of civil and democratic rights to Black citizens. As this was the state of affairs in much of the United States long before Mussolini’s rise, Black radicals not only anticipated fascism, they resisted before it was considered a crisis. As Herndon aptly put it, his case was “a symbol of the clash between Democracy and Fascism.”
Born Eugene Angelo Braxton on May 6, 1913 or 1914, he and his seven siblings grew up poor mainly in Alabama, though by his own account he was born in Wyoming, Ohio. His parents, Paul Braxton and Harriet Herndon, both hailed from the Black Belt town of Union Church, just southeast of Montgomery, in Bullock County, Alabama. Angelo was barely five years old when their father succumbed to “miners’ pneumonia” and his death sent Harriet and her children back to Union Church, where she sharecropped to make ends meet. In 1926 Angelo (thirteen) and Leo (fifteen) worked in the coalfields of Lexington, Kentucky, before moving in with their aunt Sallie Herndon in Birmingham, Alabama.
In 1930 Angelo was working for the Tennessee Coal and Iron company in Birmingham when the fledgling Communist Party began organizing there. He was primed for its message of militant class struggle and racial justice, having once dreamed of organizing “some kind of a secret society that was to arm itself with guns and ammunition and retaliate against the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion.” On May 22, he attended his first Communist-led mass meeting and listened to party leaders denounce racism, segregation, and lynching, and demand that Black people have the right to equality and national self-determination—that is, the right of the subjugated Black majority in the South to secede from the United States and form a truly democratic government if they so desired. This position, adopted by the Communist International in 1928, promoted not separatism but rather the rights of a subjugated nation to choose. Consequently, the policy led the party to greater support for civil rights and racial justice. Impressed with the Communists for fighting for all workers and for advocating openly for “Negro rights,” teenaged Angelo joined the party that night.
Using his birth name, Eugene Braxton, he immediately threw himself into the work, organizing coal miners, the unemployed, and sharecroppers, and spending many a night in an Alabama jail cell. The political situation heated up in March 1931, when nine young Black men were pulled from a freight train near Paint Rock, Alabama, and falsely accused of raping two white women. Following a hasty trial, all the defendants except the youngest were sentenced to death. The Communist-led International Labor Defense (ILD) built an international campaign to defend the “Scottsboro Boys,” eventually leading to their release.
Meanwhile, in the fall of 1931, the party dispatched Herndon to Atlanta. The reputedly liberal city had become a hotbed of fascism. Between March and May 1930, Atlanta police arrested six Communist leaders—Morris H. Powers, Joseph Carr, Mary Dalton, and Ann Burlak, all white—and African Americans Herbert Newton and Henry Storey. The state charged the Atlanta Six, as they came to be known, under a nineteenth-century statute that made it potentially a capital crime for anyone to incite insurrection or distribute insurrectionary literature.
Liberals across the country objected to this arcane law largely on the grounds that it violated free speech. Most white Atlantans, however, were less concerned with the party’s incendiary literature than with its interracialism. That white women and Black men had attended an antilynching meeting together was an egregious violation of Southern conduct and the primary reason for their arrests.
Unemployment fueled the party’s growth in Atlanta, which in turn fueled the fascist movement. During the summer of 1930, about 150 Atlanta business leaders, American Legionnaires, and key figures in law enforcement founded the American Fascisti Association and Order of Black Shirts. Their goals were to “foster the principles of white supremacy” and make the city (and its jobs) white. The Black Shirts held a march on August 22, 1930, carrying placards that read “Niggers, back to the cotton fields—city jobs are for white folks.”
Since the Black Shirts were of the better class, the anti-insurrection statute did not apply to them, though they earned the ire of merchants and housewives who feared losing access to cheap Black labor, and of unemployed white men who got black shirts but no jobs. By 1932, the city began denying Black Shirts parade permits and charters, though racial terror and discrimination continued unabated.
As the Atlanta Six appealed their case, Angelo Herndon became the next victim caught in the web of Georgia’s insurrection statute. On June 30, 1932, he led a march of over one thousand Black and white workers to city hall that forced the city to add $6,000 to local relief aid. Twelve days later Herndon was arrested while picking up his mail, and police searched his room without a warrant. They discovered a small cache of leaflets, pamphlets, Communist newspapers, and books by George Padmore and Bishop William Montgomery Brown.