Abstract

For nearly a decade American Communists generally ignored the problems of African Americans, much as Socialists had done. The Comintern's involvement with national liberation movements and the activism of some "new Negro" militants put some pressure on the American Party to move into this area. But this did not challenge the Party's basic focus on the working class, against which all else was seen as a diversion. In 1928 the 6th Congress of the Comintern resolved that the Negro population of the "black belt" was a subject nation, thus capable of engendering a "national revolutionary movement," and ordered the American Party to give work on the Negro question high priority. The Party eventually found in the "Scottsboro Case" an issue that made the situation of African Americans a matter of international concern for the first time since the Civil War, and locked it into the American radical/liberal political agenda. The first part of this article deals with the situation before the 6th Congress; the second part with the Resolution and its consequences.