Link: Forgotten Revolutionaries.
(((Check this guy out. Looks like every oppressor on Earth was pretty eager to forget this gentleman from Dallas.)))
"Gilmore begins the book with the story of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the first African American to join the Communist Party.
"Born in Dallas, Fort-Whiteman migrated to Tuskegee, Mexico and Canada before settling in Harlem as an editor of the socialist magazine the Messenger in 1917.
"By 1919 his anarcho-syndicalism had morphed into an association with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Communist Labor Party. After he gave a speech in St. Louis on "The Negro and the Social Revolution," he was convicted of sedition.
" Following a brief prison term, he moved to Chicago, where he became a Communist Party organizer specializing in recent black migrants from the South.
"In 1924, Fort-Whiteman traveled to Moscow for the Fifth World Congress of the Third International, where he informed his fellow Communists that "negroes are destined to be the most revolutionary class in America." Enrolling in the KUTV Communist training school (a.k.a. Communist University of Toilers of the East), he remained in the Soviet Union for eight months before returning to Chicago to recruit black Americans for the KUTV and to found the American Negro Labor Congress. Time magazine labeled him the "Reddest of the Blacks."
But later in the decade, after a futile campaign to organize black workers in the South, he found himself on the losing side of a factional and ideological struggle for control of the American Communist Party.
In 1930, after arguing unsuccessfully for a policy of separatism and self-determination in the Black Belt, he essentially gave up on America, fleeing to the Soviet Union, where he married and worked as a science teacher.
Three years later, he changed his mind and tried to return to the United States, but Soviet authorities refused his request. His controversial statements about race and class eventually led to charges of counter-revolutionary heresy and banishment to a Siberian gulag, where he died of starvation in 1939.
Fort-Whiteman's unlikely odyssey from Texas to Siberia is just one of the many extraordinary stories that punctuate the revisionist narrative of Defying Dixie....
