Lenin personally ordered American Communists to recruit Black radicals from 1921 onward

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. The American Communist Party then began its recruitment of Blacks, primarily, though, radical Black intellectuals and nationalist organizers. The nucleus, as we have pointed out, was those who made up the majority of the Supreme Council of the African Blood Brotherhood. Still, the historical and theoretical antecedents of the American Communist Party’s work among American Blacks and its eventual positions on Black nationalism were substantially drawn from the experiences of Russian revolutionists. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1029

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the African Blood Brotherhood material from earlier chapters of this book — the recruitment nucleus coming from the ABB Supreme Council.