The UNIA predated and preconditioned the CPUSA’s Black success

Evidence

Lenin had compelled the American Communist Party to take the Black American as a critical element in its policy and organization. Stalin, himself a member of a Russian national minority, had been the authority through which the Comintern and the American Communist Party had come to recognize Blacks as an oppressed nation. And for a while the policies directly influenced by these two Bolsheviks had been successful: thousands of Blacks came into the CPUSA during the 1930s in response to the party’s attentions and expressed intentions. However, in the background were the UNIA and the Brotherhood. They had established the political and ideological preconditions for the party’s policies and its successes. It was the UNIA that had embodied the Black radical tradition and primed the Black masses with a sense of nationhood. It was the UNIA and the ABB through which many of the early Black activists in the party had passed. And it was the UNIA and the Brotherhood that had demonstrated the capacities of Blacks to organize politically and respond ideologically. It remains a telling point on the nature of the early American Communist movement that the significance of these examples had to depend upon Soviet-directed policy to be revealed. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1070