Kléber
9th May 2010, 02:32
Lovett Fort-Whiteman (1894-1939) was born in Texas and attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. A militant revolutionist, he was an organizer with the IWW, the Harlem Socialist Party, and eventually the Third International. Fort-Whiteman was a founding leader of the Communist Party USA and the American Negro Labor Congress, and Time magazine called him "the Reddest of the Blacks (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,728642,00.html)." He was marginalized within the CPUSA because of his opposition to the zigzags of Comintern policy, and sent away to Moscow. When the purges picked up, he was accused of Trotskyism (as well as, according to some accounts, black nationalism) and sentenced to five years' hard labor. Beaten and overworked in the Kolyma mines, Comrade Lovett Fort-Whiteman died of exhaustion before he had completed one year of his sentence. He was one of a dozen Americans and an unknown number of international Communist revolutionaries who met their end at the hands of the NKVD from 1936-1941 as the Soviet bureaucracy purged the international workers' movement to facilitate the betrayals of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the dissolution of the Comintern.
A summary of Fort-Whiteman's leadership of the ANLC is available here (http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/american-negro-labor-congress-tf/). A more thorough biographical account can be found in Glenda Gilmore in Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950.
The following is an excerpt from The Soviet World of American Communism, by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Kyrill M. Anderson, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998, pages 218-227. Relevant Soviet documents and all footnotes have been included at the bottom of the post. My apologies for not knowing how to display these in vBulletin with the proper conventions.
One of the early black activists in the American Communist movement and in 1924 the first African-American to attend a Comintern training school in Moscow, Fort-Whiteman became the first national organizer of the American Negro Labor Congress, the party agency to organize black Americans. A fellow Communist at the founding convention of the congress recalled the extraordinary impression he made:
Fort-Whiteman was truly a fantastic figure. A brown-skinned man of medium height, Fort-Whiteman's high cheekbones gave him somewhat of an Oriental look. He had affected a Russian style of dress, sporting a robochka (a man's long belted shirt) which came almost to his knees, ornamental belt, high boots and a fur hat. Here was a veritable Black Cossack who could be seen sauntering along the streets of Southside Chicago. Fort-Whiteman was a graduate of Tuskegee and, as I understood, had had some training as an actor. He had been a drama critic for The Messenger and for The Crusader (45).
During the years 1928-1930 the Comintern called on the CPUSA to support the right of African-Americans to self-determination in the Black Belt, the area of the American South that had a majority black population. Fort-Whiteman did not jump at the command, and he lost his leadership post (46). The new black leaders did not enjoy having a defeated rival around, so to get him out of the way-and as consolation in view of his past service-the Comintern gave him work in Moscow.
Fort-Whiteman made the move with enthusiasm, telling an acquaintance, Homer Smith, that he was "coming home to Moscow." He married a Russian and, a friend noted, "adopted the practice of many Russian Communists of shaving his head, and with his sallow brown complexion and his finely-chiseled nose set into a V-shaped face he resembled a Buddhist monk." Smith, a young black American journalist who was in Moscow at the time, remembered that Fort-Whiteman "attempted to make himself into the ideological mentor of other black Americans living in Moscow" and invited groups of blacks to meet in his apartment to discuss Marxist theory. Smith also noted that Fort-Whiteman
was often sent on speaking tours to Russian industrial and farming centers. On these tours he pleaded fervently for formal and material support for the Scottsboro Boys and Angelo Herndon, the Atlanta youth who had been sentenced to a Georgia chain gang for leading a thousand Negro and white families in a relief march on the capital in Atlanta. He expounded loud and long on lynchings, Jim Crow and oppression of his people in America and condemned with fiery emotions the enslavement of black people in the African colonies of European imperialist nations (47).
But in 1933, after three years in Moscow, Fort-Whiteman decided that he would like to return to the United States (of which he was still a citizen) and applied for permission to do so from the CPUSA (48). His request was not granted. Fort-Whiteman never returned, and three years after he made his application, he disappeared. Neither Soviet authorities nor the CPUSA ever explained what became of him. In his 1964 memoir Smith writes that in 1936 he called at Fort-Whiteman's apartment, where Fort-Whiteman's wife said that her husband wasn't home and asked him never to come back. Smith comments, "I had been living in Russia long enough to understand the implications" of these words, adding: "Bits of information reaching me from different sources afterwards indicated that he had died in a concentration camp about two years after his disappearance. I, of course, had no means of confirming this information, but I do know that he was never seen again" (49).
In his 1988 memoir, Black on Red: A Black American's Forty- Four Years inside the Soviet Union, Robert Robinson, an emigre to the Soviet Union in 1930 who had remained until 1974, was able to help explain what had caused Fort-Whiteman's downfall. Robinson had known Fort-Whiteman casually, and he claimed that in 1936 Fort-Whiteman
offered some criticism of a book by Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks, during a discussion at the Foreign Club. A black lawyer from the upper echelon of the Community [Communist] Party USA was in the audience, and he stated during the evening that Whiteman's criticism of the book was counter-revolutionary. About three weeks later, Whiteman was summoned to NKVD headquarters and told that he was a counter-revolutionary and was to be banished from Moscow. He was ordered to be in a certain town on a specific date, and immediately on arrival to report to the local police. None of us ever heard from Whiteman. However, in 1959, I heard news of Whiteman's fate. A Russian who had been banished to the same town as Whiteman was rehabilitated by Khrushchev and allowed to return to his family in Moscow. This man told a friend of mine that Whiteman was assigned to his group of laborers, and was severely beaten many times when he failed to meet the norm. He died of starvation, or malnutrition, a broken man, whose teeth had been knocked out (50).
Smith's memoir was written nearly thirty years and Robinson's more than fifty years after the events in question, and both were based in part on second- or thirdhand information. Like many accounts written by American leftists disillusioned with the Soviet system, these books have been ignored by most scholars. Although the position of African-Americans in the CPUSA has been a major focus of late twentieth-century historians, most have avoided speculating about the disappearance and probable death of one of the CPUSA's leading black figures of the 1920s. With the opening of Soviet-era archives, however, we now know what happened to Lovett Fort-Whiteman (51).
In 1935 Fort-Whiteman was the subject of a Comintern committee meeting concerning a number of matters related to the American party. The minutes of this meeting, document 64, show that three CPUSA leaders were present: Earl Browder, "Sherman" (the alias for the CPUSA representative to the Comintern; at this time, William Schneiderman), and Sam Darcy, who had recently arrived in Moscow and was slated to replace Schneiderman. Also in attendance were I. Mingulin, a senior Comintern official of the Anglo-American Secretariat, and "Gerhardt"-Gerhart Eisler, who had just returned from the United States after serving as the Comintern representative to the CPUSA.
The minutes record the following resolution: "In view of reported efforts of Lovett Whiteman to mislead some of the Negro comrades, decided that Comrades Paterson and Ford take the initiative in holding a meeting with all the Negro comrades to discuss the question before they leave" (52). The minutes do not say what Fort-Whiteman had done that had displeased the Comintern and the CPUSA. William L. Patterson and James Ford, the two comrades mentioned, were high-ranking black CPUSA leaders. Patterson was a lawyer, and he is one of the few people then in Moscow who might fit Robinson's description of the "black lawyer from the upper echelon" of the American party who publicly denounced Fort-Whiteman a few weeks before his arrest (53).
Fort-Whiteman is also mentioned in an undated CPUSA report concerning support for Trotskyism within the party, which bluntly declares: "Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a Negro Comrade, showed himself for Trotsky" (54). And in document 94 (see chapter 4) Pat Toohey, the American representative to the Comintern, replies to an inquiry about Fort-Whiteman with the statement: "Whiteman is a Trotskyist." By 1938 anyone in the Soviet Union identified as a Trotskyist by a ranking official of the Comintern was either dead or in the Gulag.
Fort-Whiteman, in fact, was in the Gulag, and he was soon to die. In 1996, records about Fort-Whiteman compiled by the NKVD, the Soviet political police, in the late 1930s surfaced in the archive of the internal security service of the newly independent nation of Kazakhstan (55). The documents show that on 1 July 1937 a "special session" of the NKVD held in Moscow sentenced Fort-Whiteman to five years of internal exile for "anti-Soviet agitation" (56).
The NKVD sent Fort-Whiteman to the city of Semipalatinsk in Soviet Kazakhstan. There he found work teaching at local schools. As the Great Terror continued, however, Soviet authorities administratively increased (that is, without a hearing) many of the punishments they had earlier imposed. On 8 May 1938 an NKVD board changed Fort-Whiteman's punishment to five years' hard labor (beginning from that date). From Kazakhstan, he was sent to the Sevostlag prison labor camp near Magadan, in northeastern Siberia.
The prison labor camps around Magadan, especially the Kolyma goldfields, were among the most lethal in the Gulag system. Document 65 shows that Fort-Whiteman did not last long there. This document is Fort-Whiteman's official NKVD death certificate, stating that he died on 13 January 1939 at the Sevostlag labor camp at the age of forty-four. For identification purposes the report included fingerprints taken from his corpse.
Footnotes to pp. 218-227:
45. Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978), 143-44.
46. See Harvey Klehr and William Tompson, "Self-Determination in the Black Belt: Origins of a Comintern Policy," Labor History 30, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 354-66.
47. Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1964), 78, 81. Smith is mentioned in document 64.
48. Lovett [Fort-]Whiteman to CPUSA, 21 September 1933, RTsKhIDNI 515-1-3102.
49. Smith, Black Man in Red Russia, 83.
50. Robert Robinson, with Jonathan Slevin, Black on Red: A Black American's Forty-Four Years inside the Soviet Union (Washington: Acropolis Books, 1988), 361.
51. There is no mention of Fort-Whiteman's fate nor any commentary on his disappearance from the American scene in Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Philip Foner and James Allen, eds., American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1919-1929 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); or Philip Foner and Herbert Shapiro, eds., American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary
History, 1930-1934 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). Earl
Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919-1990 (EastLansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 54, reports rumors that Fort-Whiteman had become disillusioned and had lived in poverty in the Soviet Union until his death sometime before World War II. Gerald Home, "The Red and the Black: The Communist Party and African-Americans in Historical Perspective," in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed. Michael Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, and George Snedeker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 199-237, never mentions Fort-Whiteman at all.
52. A large delegation of Americans was in Moscow at that time for the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, which was just ending.
53. The minutes instructing Patterson to act against Fort-Whiteman date from August 1935, however, while both Smith and Robinson put the arrest in 1936, so he may not have been the man. In his career in the CPUSA, Patterson served as a party organizer in Chicago and New York, an official of International Labor Defense, director of the party's Scottsboro Boys campaign, director of the Civil Rights Congress, and a member of the Political Bureau.
54. "Discussion Meetings on the Question . . . ," RTsKhlDNI 515-1-4109. From internal references, it appears that this undated document was written in the mid-1930s.
55. Alan Cullison, Associated Press correspondent in Moscow, located these documents, and the authors thank him for his willingness to share his research.
56. Special sessions of the NKVD were not trials in the Western sense. Rather, they were a method of imposing criminal penalties by administrative action. During the Great Terror, NKVD boards would meet in secret, following arrests and secret interrogations, to determine guilt and impose penalties on those accused of ideological crimes. "Anti-Soviet agitation" was a favorite charge. It derived from section 10 of article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code of 1926, which declared that it was a crime punishable by imprisonment (with no upper limit on the term) to engage in "propaganda or agitation, containing an appeal for the overthrow, subverting, or weakening of the Soviet power. . . and, equally, the dissemination or preparation or possession of literary materials of similar content."
Excerpt from "Minutes of Sub-committee CPUSA Meeting on Organisational Questions," 25 August 1935, RTsKhIDNI 495-14-1. Original in English. There are a number of illegible scribbles in both English and Russian.
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
MINUTES OF SUB-COMMITTEE CPUSA MEETING ON ORGANISATIONAL
QUESTIONS - Aug. 25, 1935.
Present: Comrades Browder, Mingulin, Gerhardt, Darcy, Sherman.
QUESTIONS
I. Disposition of Negro comrades.
a) Homer Smith.
b) Johnson (Ross). Not a Party member; question of our helping him to establish his American citizenship.
c) Jones.
d) International Negro Committee.
e) Return of Ford.
Ford - Ercoly
II. Party personel.
DECISIONS
I. Disposition of Negro comrades.
a) Homer Smith: To refer the entire case to Corn. Chernin, with a recommendation that he be established as a sympathising correspondent in Moscow, to issue press services to all countries having Negro newspapers. Homer Smith is not a Party member.
b) Johnson (Ross): To get further facts and to make decision only after facts are established.
c) In view of reported efforts of Lovett Whiteman to mislead some of the Negro comrades, decided that Comrades Paterson(1) and Ford take the initiative in holding a meeting with all the Negro comrades to discuss the question before they leave.
d) To postpone discussion until Com. Huiswood returns.
d)[sic] Comrade Ford to leave on the 5th of Sept. in order to catch the boat on the 11th.
Ford - Ercoly
He is to stop at Geneva to see the necessary people for improving the movement for Etheopian defence. There is to be no publicity attached to this trip at all.
II. Party personel.
a) To recommend to Secretariat to replace Comrade Sherman No. 1 by Sherman No. 2 (Darcy) (Randolf) [illegible handwriting]
b) Sam Brown to return as soon as his unfinished business is settled, but not later than October, a new referent to be sent here by the American Party only when the C.C. received instructions from the C.I., the candidate to be decided at that time [illegible handwriting]
1. The name Browder is crossed out and the name Paterson written above it.
[I]First page of death certificate for Lovett Fort-Whiteman, 13 January 1939, Russian Ministry of Interior. Original in Russian with a few illegible annotations. Fort-Whiteman's place of birth is incorrectly identified, as is the date of his arrival "for training." He probably arrived in 1938. The second page of the certificate (reproduced in facsimile here) contains Fort-Whiteman's fingerprints. The authors thank Alan Cullison of the Associated Press for making this document available.
Death certificate blank file sheet No. 204973
DEATH CERTIFICATE
13th day of January 1939
Undersigned: Physician in charge of medical sector Kurenkova
Representative of URCh [accounting and distributing unit] Kucherenko
Representative of NKVD Samonen
Have drafted the present document certifying that the prisoner
Surname, name and patronymic Fort-Whiteman, Lovett
Year and place of birth 1894 American
Permanent address 19 Peschannia St., Semipalatinsk
Nationality American
Social position White-collar worker
By whom and when convicted Special board of the NKVD of the USSR
art. of criminal code Anti-Soviet agitation sentenced to 5 years
Other distinguishing features Above-average height, normal build, black
hair, normal nose. Arrived for training 12/11/39
Time and place of death 13/1/39 at 1:00 at night en route [from] infirmary to the hospital at Ust-Taezhny
Diagnosis Decompensated heart defect with severe edema
Cause of death Weakening of cardiac activity
Remarks Corpse examined: examination did not indicate violent death.
[Corpse] may be buried in [illegible]
Phvsician in charge of medical sector Kurenkova
Representative of the URCh OLP YuGPU [Accounting and distributive unit of the Detached Camp Section of the Southern Mining Industry Administration] Kucherenko
Representative of the NKVD Alexsandr Samonen
[I]American Representative to the Comintern to Gosizdat, RTsKhIDNI 495-14-132. Undated, but it is a reply to the letter of 6 September 1938 (document 93). Original in English.
COPY
[illegible stamp]
Gosizdat,
Moscow,
[illegible handwriting]
Dear Comrades:
We have received an inquiry from Comrade Mary Reed, book reviewer of the Leningrad Gosizdat, requesting information as to the political status of some American authors, whose books are included in the Leningrad plan for the present year. She states that nothing is known about these authors.
1. About Scott Nearing and his book "Free Born". It is our opinion that nothing should be published by Nearing, and especially this book. Nearing, himself, is a "socialist free-lancer" with very curious and dangerously demoralizing political ideas. He "resigned" from the CPUSA some years ago because the Party and the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute rejected a "work on imperialism" which distorted everything Lenin ever said on the question. Nearing has no connection with the CPUSA or any of its sympathetic organizations and does not speak for any of these organizations. The CPUSA has cut Nearing off from all contact with its organizations and audiences. His book "Free Born" refers to Lovett-Fort Whiteman as a leader of the Negro Congress. Whiteman is a Trotskyist.
2. If the "Boyd" which Mary Reed refers to is Thomas Boyd, he was a Communist and promising revolutionary writer who died in 1935.
3. Grace Lumpkin is generally considered alright. Her books and plays are utilized by the CPUSA.
4. About Pinchon and his book "Viva Villa". We know nothing about him.
5. About Snow. If this is Edgar Snow, we advise not to publish. Not enough time has elapsed to warrant any belief that Snow is definitely alright or no good. If you remember, Edgar Snow published last year an extensive book on the Chinese Revolution "Red Star Over China." He spent mainly months with the 8th Route Army and two thirds of his book was finely written, sympathetic and excellent information. But the third part of the book, where Snow delved into politics, was vicious Trotskyist propaganda and anti-Communist. All of the woes of the Chinese people and the "defeats" of the Chinese revolution he laid to "Stalin" and to "the Comintern".
The CP attacked this book and declared it to be Trotskyist poison. Thereupon Snow connected with the Party and pleaded to have the "ban lifted". He stated that he was generally not "conscious of political matters" was "essentially a descriptive writer" and "was mislead" into writing this part of the book, on the basis of materials gathered from "associates" in Shanghai. Since his wife is well known as a Trotskyist it is obvious that his Shanghai "associates" were Trotskyists. Snow declared to the CPUSA that he would destroy the entire third part of the book and rewrite it to the satisfaction of the CPUSA for future editions.
Whether Snow agreed to this because of conviction and honesty, or to assure a greater circulation for his book by making it acceptable to us, is yet not definitely known. But whether Snow, as a young promising writer, was actually tricked and influenced by Trotskyism in this instance and his future works will be politically honest, or whether he is actually a Trotskyist, insufficient time has elapsed since this incident for us to determine. Until then certainly none of his books should be published.
[emphasis added on document 94]
A summary of Fort-Whiteman's leadership of the ANLC is available here (http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/american-negro-labor-congress-tf/). A more thorough biographical account can be found in Glenda Gilmore in Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950.
The following is an excerpt from The Soviet World of American Communism, by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Kyrill M. Anderson, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998, pages 218-227. Relevant Soviet documents and all footnotes have been included at the bottom of the post. My apologies for not knowing how to display these in vBulletin with the proper conventions.
One of the early black activists in the American Communist movement and in 1924 the first African-American to attend a Comintern training school in Moscow, Fort-Whiteman became the first national organizer of the American Negro Labor Congress, the party agency to organize black Americans. A fellow Communist at the founding convention of the congress recalled the extraordinary impression he made:
Fort-Whiteman was truly a fantastic figure. A brown-skinned man of medium height, Fort-Whiteman's high cheekbones gave him somewhat of an Oriental look. He had affected a Russian style of dress, sporting a robochka (a man's long belted shirt) which came almost to his knees, ornamental belt, high boots and a fur hat. Here was a veritable Black Cossack who could be seen sauntering along the streets of Southside Chicago. Fort-Whiteman was a graduate of Tuskegee and, as I understood, had had some training as an actor. He had been a drama critic for The Messenger and for The Crusader (45).
During the years 1928-1930 the Comintern called on the CPUSA to support the right of African-Americans to self-determination in the Black Belt, the area of the American South that had a majority black population. Fort-Whiteman did not jump at the command, and he lost his leadership post (46). The new black leaders did not enjoy having a defeated rival around, so to get him out of the way-and as consolation in view of his past service-the Comintern gave him work in Moscow.
Fort-Whiteman made the move with enthusiasm, telling an acquaintance, Homer Smith, that he was "coming home to Moscow." He married a Russian and, a friend noted, "adopted the practice of many Russian Communists of shaving his head, and with his sallow brown complexion and his finely-chiseled nose set into a V-shaped face he resembled a Buddhist monk." Smith, a young black American journalist who was in Moscow at the time, remembered that Fort-Whiteman "attempted to make himself into the ideological mentor of other black Americans living in Moscow" and invited groups of blacks to meet in his apartment to discuss Marxist theory. Smith also noted that Fort-Whiteman
was often sent on speaking tours to Russian industrial and farming centers. On these tours he pleaded fervently for formal and material support for the Scottsboro Boys and Angelo Herndon, the Atlanta youth who had been sentenced to a Georgia chain gang for leading a thousand Negro and white families in a relief march on the capital in Atlanta. He expounded loud and long on lynchings, Jim Crow and oppression of his people in America and condemned with fiery emotions the enslavement of black people in the African colonies of European imperialist nations (47).
But in 1933, after three years in Moscow, Fort-Whiteman decided that he would like to return to the United States (of which he was still a citizen) and applied for permission to do so from the CPUSA (48). His request was not granted. Fort-Whiteman never returned, and three years after he made his application, he disappeared. Neither Soviet authorities nor the CPUSA ever explained what became of him. In his 1964 memoir Smith writes that in 1936 he called at Fort-Whiteman's apartment, where Fort-Whiteman's wife said that her husband wasn't home and asked him never to come back. Smith comments, "I had been living in Russia long enough to understand the implications" of these words, adding: "Bits of information reaching me from different sources afterwards indicated that he had died in a concentration camp about two years after his disappearance. I, of course, had no means of confirming this information, but I do know that he was never seen again" (49).
In his 1988 memoir, Black on Red: A Black American's Forty- Four Years inside the Soviet Union, Robert Robinson, an emigre to the Soviet Union in 1930 who had remained until 1974, was able to help explain what had caused Fort-Whiteman's downfall. Robinson had known Fort-Whiteman casually, and he claimed that in 1936 Fort-Whiteman
offered some criticism of a book by Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks, during a discussion at the Foreign Club. A black lawyer from the upper echelon of the Community [Communist] Party USA was in the audience, and he stated during the evening that Whiteman's criticism of the book was counter-revolutionary. About three weeks later, Whiteman was summoned to NKVD headquarters and told that he was a counter-revolutionary and was to be banished from Moscow. He was ordered to be in a certain town on a specific date, and immediately on arrival to report to the local police. None of us ever heard from Whiteman. However, in 1959, I heard news of Whiteman's fate. A Russian who had been banished to the same town as Whiteman was rehabilitated by Khrushchev and allowed to return to his family in Moscow. This man told a friend of mine that Whiteman was assigned to his group of laborers, and was severely beaten many times when he failed to meet the norm. He died of starvation, or malnutrition, a broken man, whose teeth had been knocked out (50).
Smith's memoir was written nearly thirty years and Robinson's more than fifty years after the events in question, and both were based in part on second- or thirdhand information. Like many accounts written by American leftists disillusioned with the Soviet system, these books have been ignored by most scholars. Although the position of African-Americans in the CPUSA has been a major focus of late twentieth-century historians, most have avoided speculating about the disappearance and probable death of one of the CPUSA's leading black figures of the 1920s. With the opening of Soviet-era archives, however, we now know what happened to Lovett Fort-Whiteman (51).
In 1935 Fort-Whiteman was the subject of a Comintern committee meeting concerning a number of matters related to the American party. The minutes of this meeting, document 64, show that three CPUSA leaders were present: Earl Browder, "Sherman" (the alias for the CPUSA representative to the Comintern; at this time, William Schneiderman), and Sam Darcy, who had recently arrived in Moscow and was slated to replace Schneiderman. Also in attendance were I. Mingulin, a senior Comintern official of the Anglo-American Secretariat, and "Gerhardt"-Gerhart Eisler, who had just returned from the United States after serving as the Comintern representative to the CPUSA.
The minutes record the following resolution: "In view of reported efforts of Lovett Whiteman to mislead some of the Negro comrades, decided that Comrades Paterson and Ford take the initiative in holding a meeting with all the Negro comrades to discuss the question before they leave" (52). The minutes do not say what Fort-Whiteman had done that had displeased the Comintern and the CPUSA. William L. Patterson and James Ford, the two comrades mentioned, were high-ranking black CPUSA leaders. Patterson was a lawyer, and he is one of the few people then in Moscow who might fit Robinson's description of the "black lawyer from the upper echelon" of the American party who publicly denounced Fort-Whiteman a few weeks before his arrest (53).
Fort-Whiteman is also mentioned in an undated CPUSA report concerning support for Trotskyism within the party, which bluntly declares: "Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a Negro Comrade, showed himself for Trotsky" (54). And in document 94 (see chapter 4) Pat Toohey, the American representative to the Comintern, replies to an inquiry about Fort-Whiteman with the statement: "Whiteman is a Trotskyist." By 1938 anyone in the Soviet Union identified as a Trotskyist by a ranking official of the Comintern was either dead or in the Gulag.
Fort-Whiteman, in fact, was in the Gulag, and he was soon to die. In 1996, records about Fort-Whiteman compiled by the NKVD, the Soviet political police, in the late 1930s surfaced in the archive of the internal security service of the newly independent nation of Kazakhstan (55). The documents show that on 1 July 1937 a "special session" of the NKVD held in Moscow sentenced Fort-Whiteman to five years of internal exile for "anti-Soviet agitation" (56).
The NKVD sent Fort-Whiteman to the city of Semipalatinsk in Soviet Kazakhstan. There he found work teaching at local schools. As the Great Terror continued, however, Soviet authorities administratively increased (that is, without a hearing) many of the punishments they had earlier imposed. On 8 May 1938 an NKVD board changed Fort-Whiteman's punishment to five years' hard labor (beginning from that date). From Kazakhstan, he was sent to the Sevostlag prison labor camp near Magadan, in northeastern Siberia.
The prison labor camps around Magadan, especially the Kolyma goldfields, were among the most lethal in the Gulag system. Document 65 shows that Fort-Whiteman did not last long there. This document is Fort-Whiteman's official NKVD death certificate, stating that he died on 13 January 1939 at the Sevostlag labor camp at the age of forty-four. For identification purposes the report included fingerprints taken from his corpse.
Footnotes to pp. 218-227:
45. Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978), 143-44.
46. See Harvey Klehr and William Tompson, "Self-Determination in the Black Belt: Origins of a Comintern Policy," Labor History 30, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 354-66.
47. Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1964), 78, 81. Smith is mentioned in document 64.
48. Lovett [Fort-]Whiteman to CPUSA, 21 September 1933, RTsKhIDNI 515-1-3102.
49. Smith, Black Man in Red Russia, 83.
50. Robert Robinson, with Jonathan Slevin, Black on Red: A Black American's Forty-Four Years inside the Soviet Union (Washington: Acropolis Books, 1988), 361.
51. There is no mention of Fort-Whiteman's fate nor any commentary on his disappearance from the American scene in Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Philip Foner and James Allen, eds., American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1919-1929 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); or Philip Foner and Herbert Shapiro, eds., American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary
History, 1930-1934 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). Earl
Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919-1990 (EastLansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 54, reports rumors that Fort-Whiteman had become disillusioned and had lived in poverty in the Soviet Union until his death sometime before World War II. Gerald Home, "The Red and the Black: The Communist Party and African-Americans in Historical Perspective," in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed. Michael Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, and George Snedeker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 199-237, never mentions Fort-Whiteman at all.
52. A large delegation of Americans was in Moscow at that time for the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, which was just ending.
53. The minutes instructing Patterson to act against Fort-Whiteman date from August 1935, however, while both Smith and Robinson put the arrest in 1936, so he may not have been the man. In his career in the CPUSA, Patterson served as a party organizer in Chicago and New York, an official of International Labor Defense, director of the party's Scottsboro Boys campaign, director of the Civil Rights Congress, and a member of the Political Bureau.
54. "Discussion Meetings on the Question . . . ," RTsKhlDNI 515-1-4109. From internal references, it appears that this undated document was written in the mid-1930s.
55. Alan Cullison, Associated Press correspondent in Moscow, located these documents, and the authors thank him for his willingness to share his research.
56. Special sessions of the NKVD were not trials in the Western sense. Rather, they were a method of imposing criminal penalties by administrative action. During the Great Terror, NKVD boards would meet in secret, following arrests and secret interrogations, to determine guilt and impose penalties on those accused of ideological crimes. "Anti-Soviet agitation" was a favorite charge. It derived from section 10 of article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code of 1926, which declared that it was a crime punishable by imprisonment (with no upper limit on the term) to engage in "propaganda or agitation, containing an appeal for the overthrow, subverting, or weakening of the Soviet power. . . and, equally, the dissemination or preparation or possession of literary materials of similar content."
Excerpt from "Minutes of Sub-committee CPUSA Meeting on Organisational Questions," 25 August 1935, RTsKhIDNI 495-14-1. Original in English. There are a number of illegible scribbles in both English and Russian.
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
MINUTES OF SUB-COMMITTEE CPUSA MEETING ON ORGANISATIONAL
QUESTIONS - Aug. 25, 1935.
Present: Comrades Browder, Mingulin, Gerhardt, Darcy, Sherman.
QUESTIONS
I. Disposition of Negro comrades.
a) Homer Smith.
b) Johnson (Ross). Not a Party member; question of our helping him to establish his American citizenship.
c) Jones.
d) International Negro Committee.
e) Return of Ford.
Ford - Ercoly
II. Party personel.
DECISIONS
I. Disposition of Negro comrades.
a) Homer Smith: To refer the entire case to Corn. Chernin, with a recommendation that he be established as a sympathising correspondent in Moscow, to issue press services to all countries having Negro newspapers. Homer Smith is not a Party member.
b) Johnson (Ross): To get further facts and to make decision only after facts are established.
c) In view of reported efforts of Lovett Whiteman to mislead some of the Negro comrades, decided that Comrades Paterson(1) and Ford take the initiative in holding a meeting with all the Negro comrades to discuss the question before they leave.
d) To postpone discussion until Com. Huiswood returns.
d)[sic] Comrade Ford to leave on the 5th of Sept. in order to catch the boat on the 11th.
Ford - Ercoly
He is to stop at Geneva to see the necessary people for improving the movement for Etheopian defence. There is to be no publicity attached to this trip at all.
II. Party personel.
a) To recommend to Secretariat to replace Comrade Sherman No. 1 by Sherman No. 2 (Darcy) (Randolf) [illegible handwriting]
b) Sam Brown to return as soon as his unfinished business is settled, but not later than October, a new referent to be sent here by the American Party only when the C.C. received instructions from the C.I., the candidate to be decided at that time [illegible handwriting]
1. The name Browder is crossed out and the name Paterson written above it.
[I]First page of death certificate for Lovett Fort-Whiteman, 13 January 1939, Russian Ministry of Interior. Original in Russian with a few illegible annotations. Fort-Whiteman's place of birth is incorrectly identified, as is the date of his arrival "for training." He probably arrived in 1938. The second page of the certificate (reproduced in facsimile here) contains Fort-Whiteman's fingerprints. The authors thank Alan Cullison of the Associated Press for making this document available.
Death certificate blank file sheet No. 204973
DEATH CERTIFICATE
13th day of January 1939
Undersigned: Physician in charge of medical sector Kurenkova
Representative of URCh [accounting and distributing unit] Kucherenko
Representative of NKVD Samonen
Have drafted the present document certifying that the prisoner
Surname, name and patronymic Fort-Whiteman, Lovett
Year and place of birth 1894 American
Permanent address 19 Peschannia St., Semipalatinsk
Nationality American
Social position White-collar worker
By whom and when convicted Special board of the NKVD of the USSR
art. of criminal code Anti-Soviet agitation sentenced to 5 years
Other distinguishing features Above-average height, normal build, black
hair, normal nose. Arrived for training 12/11/39
Time and place of death 13/1/39 at 1:00 at night en route [from] infirmary to the hospital at Ust-Taezhny
Diagnosis Decompensated heart defect with severe edema
Cause of death Weakening of cardiac activity
Remarks Corpse examined: examination did not indicate violent death.
[Corpse] may be buried in [illegible]
Phvsician in charge of medical sector Kurenkova
Representative of the URCh OLP YuGPU [Accounting and distributive unit of the Detached Camp Section of the Southern Mining Industry Administration] Kucherenko
Representative of the NKVD Alexsandr Samonen
[I]American Representative to the Comintern to Gosizdat, RTsKhIDNI 495-14-132. Undated, but it is a reply to the letter of 6 September 1938 (document 93). Original in English.
COPY
[illegible stamp]
Gosizdat,
Moscow,
[illegible handwriting]
Dear Comrades:
We have received an inquiry from Comrade Mary Reed, book reviewer of the Leningrad Gosizdat, requesting information as to the political status of some American authors, whose books are included in the Leningrad plan for the present year. She states that nothing is known about these authors.
1. About Scott Nearing and his book "Free Born". It is our opinion that nothing should be published by Nearing, and especially this book. Nearing, himself, is a "socialist free-lancer" with very curious and dangerously demoralizing political ideas. He "resigned" from the CPUSA some years ago because the Party and the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute rejected a "work on imperialism" which distorted everything Lenin ever said on the question. Nearing has no connection with the CPUSA or any of its sympathetic organizations and does not speak for any of these organizations. The CPUSA has cut Nearing off from all contact with its organizations and audiences. His book "Free Born" refers to Lovett-Fort Whiteman as a leader of the Negro Congress. Whiteman is a Trotskyist.
2. If the "Boyd" which Mary Reed refers to is Thomas Boyd, he was a Communist and promising revolutionary writer who died in 1935.
3. Grace Lumpkin is generally considered alright. Her books and plays are utilized by the CPUSA.
4. About Pinchon and his book "Viva Villa". We know nothing about him.
5. About Snow. If this is Edgar Snow, we advise not to publish. Not enough time has elapsed to warrant any belief that Snow is definitely alright or no good. If you remember, Edgar Snow published last year an extensive book on the Chinese Revolution "Red Star Over China." He spent mainly months with the 8th Route Army and two thirds of his book was finely written, sympathetic and excellent information. But the third part of the book, where Snow delved into politics, was vicious Trotskyist propaganda and anti-Communist. All of the woes of the Chinese people and the "defeats" of the Chinese revolution he laid to "Stalin" and to "the Comintern".
The CP attacked this book and declared it to be Trotskyist poison. Thereupon Snow connected with the Party and pleaded to have the "ban lifted". He stated that he was generally not "conscious of political matters" was "essentially a descriptive writer" and "was mislead" into writing this part of the book, on the basis of materials gathered from "associates" in Shanghai. Since his wife is well known as a Trotskyist it is obvious that his Shanghai "associates" were Trotskyists. Snow declared to the CPUSA that he would destroy the entire third part of the book and rewrite it to the satisfaction of the CPUSA for future editions.
Whether Snow agreed to this because of conviction and honesty, or to assure a greater circulation for his book by making it acceptable to us, is yet not definitely known. But whether Snow, as a young promising writer, was actually tricked and influenced by Trotskyism in this instance and his future works will be politically honest, or whether he is actually a Trotskyist, insufficient time has elapsed since this incident for us to determine. Until then certainly none of his books should be published.
[emphasis added on document 94]