Lenin personally initiated Communist recruitment of American Blacks in 1921

Evidence

The Communist parties did not actively recruit Blacks until 1921. This change in policy seems to be largely the responsibility of Lenin, and is even more remarkable when we recall that Lenin’s name was barely known to any of the national elements in the American movement four years earlier. Nevertheless, it was Lenin who raised the “Negro Question” at the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920. And it was Lenin who wrote to the party in America, “some time in 1921 expressing surprise that their reports to Moscow made no mention of party work among Negroes and urging that they should be recognized as a strategically important element in Communist activity. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1029

Categorization

• XREF: Directly advances the reader’s stated goal on the rise of the Black radical tradition by showing who in the Communist hierarchy first drew Blacks into the movement.
• QUESTION: What exactly did Lenin see as ‘strategically important’ about American Blacks — was it revolutionary potential or geopolitical calculation?