Mustering out of the U.S. army in 1919, Harry Haywood stepped into a
battle that was to last the rest of his life. Within months, he found
himself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S.
history and realized that he'd been fighting the wrong war--the real
enemy was right here at home. This book is Haywood's eloquent account
of coming of age as a black man in twentieth-century America and of
his political awakening in the Communist Party.
For all its cultural and historical interest, Harry Haywood's story
is also noteworthy for its considerable narrative drama. The son of
parents born into slavery, Haywood tells how he grew up in Omaha,
Nebraska, found his first job as a shoeshine boy in Minneapolis, then
went on to work as a waiter on trains and in restaurants in Chicago.
After fighting in France during the war, he studied how to make
revolutions in Moscow during the 1920s, led the Communist Party's
move into the Deep South in 1931, helped to organize the campaign to
free the Scottsboro Boys, worked with the Sharecroppers' Union,
supported protests in Chicago against Mussolini's invasion of
Ethiopia, fought with the International Brigades in Spain, served in
the Merchant Marines during World War II, and continued to fight for
the right of self-determination for the Afro-American nation in the
United States until his death in 1985.
This new edition of his classic autobiography, Black Bolshevik,
introduces American readers to the little-known story of a brilliant
thinker, writer, and activist whose life encapsulates the struggle
for freedom against all odds of the New Negro generation that came of
age during and after World War I.