History: Communism and Negro White Relations Essay examples

Submitted By seahawks1111
Words: 1927
Pages: 8
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Durrell Johnson
9/19/2013

And resentful of those seek, self righteous Negroes who sat and “ruled” as functionaries of the Harlem Communist Party, parroting everything the white folks said downtown about “Negro rights”. What was the difference between these favored Negroes in the Communist Party and the Negro man on the street whose reality was so remote from what the party preached? How could Negros come out of this Negro relity and wind up so far removed from it after a spell of Communist indoctrination? Clyde thought he knew Negroes and he did, but he didnt know all Negros in terms of all Negros real attitudes towards whites. This was important for any estimate and understanding of negro white relations in an organization like the Communist Party. Clyde would understand or could gauge the sentiments of working class Negros very well. But all the Negroes very well. But all the Negros in the Communist party were not working class, but a great many of them were middle class and quite bourgeois. It was this type of Negro the Clyde had to learn about before he could arrive at a point of view of real clarity on the Negro question in the United States even though he, himself, was a Negro. In Clydes love affair with Maine, he was beginning to see the problems and the outlooks of Negros, with middle-class ideas. Maxine was extremely beautiful. Her mother and father were haitian immigrants whose combined factory earnings had put this young lady through college. But in so doing, they had educated her beyond recall of the working-class ideas were concerned. Maxine was not upper middle class by family rearing but came to desire middle-class social position after graduating or in the process of her education. Maxine joined the Communist party but for purely social reasons. She never understood Marxism and really didn't care about it. What she really wanted was to be hobnob socially with Bernice, the learned and accomplished professor of languages at her fashionable Greenwhich village apartment. It was no dought, that Bernice, who included Maxine to join the party. As far as Clyde was concerned, Maxine grew hotter and colder. Her motivations socially and racially were contradictory. She was a striver in every sense of the word and she clung to Clyde because she respected his ideas. Emotionally, however, she was not constant towards Clyde. There were stretches of weeks when Clyde did not see Maxine so involved was he in the party work and she in socializing the village. After a number of weeks they would get together for long evening talks. Maxine at last admitted to Clyde that she was an extremely mixed up girl and was unable explain why. Clyde sensed the reason and told her that she was having problems with identification in questions of race color and class. She said she was not ready to marry anyone at the time but that she would think about it. She asked Clyde when he was going to write that famous book or that great play he often talked about. He said he would one day, but that great play he often talked about. He said he would one day, but that he had to learn so much more about life around him, and that he saving his writing ideas for a later date. He told Maxine that he thought joining the Communist party would change her and help her come to terms with her own reality in the Negro world. Maxine would never articulate her social wants in so many words, but the reality she wanted for herself was the conventional status on a certain social level with good clothes, a car and ultramodern conveniences. College had given her a package of desiar along with her education, and her yearnings for the pictorial ingredients of vogue magazine were not the least affected by the implied austerity of the Communist movement never materialized. She sought social acceptance among monied marxist sympathizers, mostly white and these achievements kept her in the party. Clyde knew that he could never, as a party member, aspire to things that
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