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(CIVIL RIGHTS.) COMMUNIST PARTY.
An extraordinary collection of
54 African American Communist Party pamphlets on Emmet Till, Angelo
Herndon, and more.
8vo and 12mo, printed and pictorial wrappers;
CONDITION GENER
-
ALLY VERY GOOD
,
SHOULD BE SEEN
.
New York: American Communist Party, 1940’s-1960’s
[1,500/2,500]
A FINE COLLECTION THAT INCLUDES
:
Negroes in a Soviet America, Racist Poison in School
Books, James Jackson’s Meaning of Black Power, The Negro People and the New World Situation,
Angelo Herndon’s You Cannot Kill the Working Class, The Ingrams, Lynching and Frame-up in
Tennessee, Haygood and Howard’s Lynching, numerous titles by Ben Davis, Pettis Perry’s “This too
is lynch law,” The Ingram’s Shall Not Die, My Name is Wesley Robert Wells, Behind the Florida
Bombings, Behind the Lynching of Emmet Till, The Path of Negro Liberation, and many more.
The African American wing of the Communist Party produced scores of pamphlets like these to get
the message across that they were on the side of the black man more so than the NAACP or the
Urban League. There was a grain of truth to this. In the case of the Scottsboro Boys, they were the
lead counsel. In the 1950’s, in the pitch of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings,
the party was still a force to be reckoned with. However, despite their best efforts, communism never
really caught hold in the African American community. The taint of the Soviets, and something “for-
eign” was simply too much to overcome.