54 pages • 1 hour read
Robin KelleyFreedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Negro Question: Red Dreams of Black Liberation”
The second essay in the collection analyzes Black communism and the American Left. Kelley is interested in how Communists and Leftists engaged with what was called the “Negro Question”—that is, how Black people represent both the core of the class struggle in the United States and a particular case in that context. Kelley argues that while the Left does aim to eradicate racial oppression, white members and leadership do not always understand or correctly answer this “Question.”
Kelley begins with a history of Marxism, starting in 1848 with the publication of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto and the formation of the International Workingmen’s Association, also known as the First International, a meeting of labor unions, socialists, and other leftists. The Communist Manifesto laid out the goals and aims of the nascent Communist movement. Shortly after, German Marxists came to the United States and founded the first Communist clubs, which admitted all people regardless of race. However, white socialists largely overlooked the special case of Black Americans, believing that all struggle was class struggle and that racial divisions would disappear once the class struggle had been won. As the Socialist Party of America reached the turn of the twentieth century, they felt that “Racism was merely a feature of capitalism—kill the latter and the former would wither away” (41). When white leftist leaders considered Black people at all, their understanding was limited to Black men and did not address the issues faced by Black working women. Even leading Black female socialists in the early 20th century were not as concerned with the issue of race, as Kelley shows with the example of Black socialist campaigner Lucy Parsons, who advocated for women and working people, but not Black people specifically. However, Kelley identifies some outside of the mainstream who were thinking along more intersectional lines, linking racism, patriarchy, and class. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, for example, wrote a groundbreaking study of lynching, connecting the myth of the Black male rapist to the demand by white men that their women be subordinate. W. E. B. Du Bois analyzed how race and class work together to uphold capitalism and imperialism.
In 1917, a peasant revolt culminated in the Russian Revolution, transforming the agrarian monarchy into a Communist state under Lenin. The Third International—a series meetings of meetings that took place that same year, setting the agenda for international Marxist movements—was particularly driven by the twin concerns of race and class. Black leaders formed the African Black Brotherhood (ABB) to analyze and address these concerns. In 1920, Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin specifically directed Marxists to support the Black American struggle for equal rights, giving new energy to the movement. In 1922, at the Fourth International, Black poet Claude McKay addressed the group, arguing that “there could be no successful working-class movement without black workers at the center” (47). Kelley analyzes his argument in detail. However, American (white) Communist leadership did not support McKay and fellow travelers like Marcus Garvey, finding their proposals too radical.
In 1928, the Comintern, another term for the Communist International organization, declared that Black people in the so-called “Black belt” of the United States—the American South where Black people had formerly been enslaved—were a nation unto themselves and had a right to self-determination. This was a controversial stance. Some Communists, both Black and white, believed that all working-class people were united and there should not be a distinction drawn between racial groups. However, others saw this as an opportunity to highlight Black culture and build Black political power. This is one of the earliest examples of what is now known as Black nationalism. Communist and leftist artists and writers worked to articulate this Black culture. Richard Wright, best-known for his novel Native Son, published a “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in 1937, arguing for the development of a Black literature that would take Marxian notions of collective class struggle into account.
Kelley details the case of Paul Robeson as an example of this overlap between Black creative production and Communism. Robeson was a famous American actor and singer who came into contact with working people’s movements while living in London from 1927 to 1939. Later, he was active in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), while also promoting an independent Black radicalism in politics and culture. Robeson made contacts within CPUSA who shared his beliefs, such as the Trinidadian writers and activists C. L. R. James and Claudia Jones. They argued that the only way to revitalize civilization was to place art and culture at the center of life, as they were in Africa and elsewhere before capitalism recentered life around economically productive work. Their critique was animated by their experience of the horrors of what “civilization” had wrought: the Holocaust and the deaths of six million Jews.
The anticommunist policies of the United States government, spurred by the demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy, resulted in the imprisonment, harassment, and blocklisting of many of the leaders of the Black Communist left, including Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. While this limited some of their activity, Black American radical leadership continued to support anticolonial movements in Africa and the Caribbean while advocating for the rights of Black people in the United States, ultimately leading to the 1954 Southern freedom movement, the beginning of the modern American civil rights movement.
Chapter 2 Analysis
The essay “The Negro Question” is primarily concerned with the left’s attempts and failures to address Intersectionality in Resistance Movements.
After an epigraph from the Black Communist revision of the “Negro National Anthem,” Kelley opens the essay with a somewhat humorous, informal address directly to the reader, who is presumed to be part of Black American leftist organizing: “We can spot ‘em from a mile away. […] their whiteness and often their arrogance underscore their visibility in a room full of angry black folk” (36). Here, Kelley is critiquing white leftists, particularly Marxists, who believe that racial problems will be resolved once capitalism has been abolished and who refuse to listen to Black organizers who question this stance. As in the Introduction and “Dreams of the New Land,” Kelley grounds his critique and historical commentary in what is clearly personal experience. This method connects the more formal historical narrative that follows in the essay with contemporary leftist organizing. By drawing on his own experiences in organizing and activism, Kelley highlights how the historical tensions he details in the rest of the essay are still relevant today. He describes the inability of white leaders of the American Left to address the specific challenges faced by Black working people as the movement’s “Achilles’ heel,” or its greatest point of weakness.
Throughout the essay, Kelley uses the word “Negro” to describe Black Americans. While this word is outdated and often considered offensive in contemporary contexts, during the time period Kelley is writing about in this essay, from 1848 to the 1950s, it was the most commonly used term to describe Black Americans, including by Black Americans themselves. The repeated use of the term here is a reminder that debates about the position of Black Americans in international Marxism—while still relevant today—have a history that dates back to the beginnings of the movement.
Kelley’s first book, Hammer and Hoe, describes a moment in history where Marxism and Black civil rights activism worked together to successfully achieve (some of) their political ends. This essay is, to some extent, an extension of this early work of Kelley’s, broadening the scope from rural Alabama to the Black American civil rights movement more broadly.
As a Marxist himself, Kelley deploys a Hegelian dialectical structure in the conventional historical narrative that makes up the majority of the essay. Hegel’s dialectic consists of three steps: thesis, or initial proposition, antithesis, or contestation of the initial proposition, and synthesis, the combination of thesis and antithesis in a way that resolves the tensions between them to form a new proposition. This three-step process is evident in the way Kelley describes the tensions between Marxism and Black civil rights movements throughout the century of history he covers in the essay. He begins with the thesis: the creation of Marxism in Germany in 1848, leading to a belief that all forms of oppression would melt away once capitalism has been overthrown. He then details the antithesis: the unique demands and needs highlighted by the experience of Black workers in the United States. Finally, he describes various attempts over time to reconcile these two propositions into a synthesis that at once holds to the tenets of international Marxism while acknowledging the specific historical and material experience of Black Americans as formerly enslaved and continuously oppressed people. As shown in the discussion of Lenin’s 1920 “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” this synthesis meant not only that Black people adopted Marxism as a political belief but that their participation in Marxism changed the views of the white leadership of the movement. Implied in this analysis is the notion that, absent Black leadership within the Comintern, international Marxism would not have adopted the view that “there could be no successful working-class movement without black workers at the center” (47).
This essay also demonstrates the first literal example in the collection of International Aspects of Black American Radicalism. Through the histories of figures like W. E. B. du Bois and Paul Robeson, who participated in the world-wide Communist organizational meetings known as the Internationals, it becomes clear how Black Americans were influenced by and in turn influenced global leftist organizing. Conventional narratives of the Black American civil rights movement focus entirely on domestic actions. By shifting to an international frame of reference, Kelley contests this conventional narrative and highlights how Black radical organizing was and is embedded within larger, global political leftist movements. This international framework is further articulated in the third essay, “Roaring from the East.”
