2 - Anti-imperial Comrades: Black Radicalism and the Communist Possibility

Summary

This chapter focuses on the critical moments in which institutional Communism as well as Marxist thinking brought activists and thinkers from the French Empire and the United States into contact as they fought to gain rights within their respective national contexts. Disenchanted with the promises of Wilsonian self-determination and the gap between the promise and reality of Republican democracy, many black activists theorized their oppression in Marxist terms, expanding that political theory to incorporate race. Moreover, at various moments the Communist International (Comintern) and the national Communist Parties such as the Parti Communiste Français and the Communist Party of the United States of America offered financial, institutional and rhetorical support that brought black activists together. It brings together Comintern documents from the Russian State Archives of Sociopolitical History into dialogue with both French and American communist and anti-imperial publications such as Le Paria, Crusader, Le Cri des négres, and the Negro World as well as the police surveillance records such as those from the Paris Police Prefecture and the Military Intelligence Records at the National Archives in Washington, DC.