Early American Communists initially neglected Black issues entirely

Evidence

Draper’s summary of the early American Communists and Blacks is almost identical: “The Negroes counted least of all in the early Communist movement. Not a single Negro delegate seems to have attended either [the Communist or Communist Labor parties’ conventions]. So little was the Negro problem in the Communist consciousness that the Communist Labor program had nothing at all to say about it. The Communist party’s program connected the ‘problem of the Negro worker’ with that of the unskilled worker. The basic analysis was inherited from the Socialist movement: ‘The Negro problem is a political and economic problem. The racial oppression of the Negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each intensifying the other.’ The American Communists did not depart from this traditional Marxist attitude until the next decade. In this area, as in so many others, the American Communists at first followed in the footsteps of the historic Left Wing.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2250

Categorization

• XREF: Establishes the vacuum and the analytic posture (race as mere expression of class) that the Black radical tradition’s distinct Marxism was forged against.