MS: The CPUSA’s central committee had identified African Americans as a subjugated people as early as 1926 — a nation within a nation and entitled to self-determination. CPUSA drafted a resolution to establish a Negro Soviet Socialist Republic in the Black Belt South. District 17 was created essentially for this purpose in 1929.
Early in the process, District 17 comrades realized that Black Belt sharecroppers were not interested in either secession or in creating a separate republic. How, they asked, was that different from segregation? The goal of poor sharecroppers — black and white — was to become part of the larger American society and eligible for a fair share of the nation’s wealth.
By 1933, District 17’s daily priorities were to organize the unorganized, the unemployed, and the black sharecroppers of Tallapoosa County. Central Committee headquarters in New York City was not happy about this, but did not sanction them. The Central Committee ultimately dropped the Black Belt self-determination theory in 1935.
AD: Generally speaking, who were the members of District 17?
MS: The staff of District 17 consisted of young Communist-trained organizers, mostly white and many from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston. CPUSA sent them south just prior to the Great Depression. Most were deployed to Birmingham, “the Pittsburgh of the South,” to organize coal miners and steelworkers. Their median age was twenty-four. District 17 was given responsibility for Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia — a huge territory. Most of these comrades had never been South before.
Within six months of arriving, the reds experienced an influx of unemployed industrial and mill workers, laborers, and starving sharecroppers pouring into Birmingham, Atlanta, and Chattanooga seeking jobs or relief. At that point they began organizing unemployed worker councils.
Many young reds were Jewish, well-educated (some college students), and idealistic. Others were second-generation radicals whose parents had either been associated with the labor movement or were former members of the party in Europe.
Some white women also served as organizers, a few local white (Southern) female sympathizers raised funds, but black women were more significant participants in the movement. They generally worked with the unemployed councils in Birmingham. They organized, recruited, demonstrated, and confronted the city’s relief agencies and the Red Cross for their callous treatment of the poor. Many of these women were arrested, beaten, and jailed.