This continues the study I began here and here.
This, to me, was a spectacle of glory; and yet, because it had condemned me, because it was blind and ignorant, I felt that it was a spectacle of horror. The blindness of their [Communists’] limited lives—lives truncated and impoverished by the oppression they had suffered long before they had ever heard of Communism—made them think that I was with their enemies. American life had so corrupted their consciousness that they were unable to recognize their friends when they saw them. I knew that if they had held state power, I should have been declared guilty of treason and my execution would have followed.—Richard Wright, 1944[1]
Forty-seven years later, another Stalinist uttered those three words:
Had that leadership [of the Communist Party] held state power, past history suggests that those signers [of “An Initiative to Unite and Renew the Party”] would now be dead.—Herbert Aptheker, 1991[2]
About a year after Wright arrived in New York, an anti-Stalinist revolutionary was also New York-bound from England, but a Stalinist graciously but firmly warned him:
There was a black man who had joined the CP [Communist Party of Great Britain]. He said to me that you could do that in Britain and keep breaking up their meetings, but in America, if you carry on like that, they will kill you. As far as the police were concerned, if a Stalinist killed a Trotskyist, they would have no part of that, so just take it easy. The difference between British democracy and democracy in the United States is that there you have to be aware, not of the government, but of the Stalinists.—C. L. R. James, circa 1938.[3]
In 1978, on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in Manhattan’s financial district, where I would listen to Gabe Monheim expound the Scriptures and soon come to Christ, an older Stalinist I had known a few years earlier—his face contorted in hatred and words dripping in bile—volubly branded me a “counterrevolutionary traitor.” I have no doubt that had “tough Tony from Da Bronx” taken the bait, he would have met the fate that James’s Stalinist acquaintance predicted.
Notes
[1] Richard Wright, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1944, 54; italics mine. This was the second part of a two-part series that became a chapter of The God That Failed, Richard Crossman, ed., Columbia University Press, 2001; originally, The God That Failed: A Confession, Harper & Brothers, 1949.
[2] Herbert Aptheker, December 14, 1991, cited in Gary Murrell, “The Most
Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 2015, 335; italics mine. For an account of that “initiative” and its denouement, see Jaiveer Kohli, “The Last American Communists: The Story of the Fall of the Communist Party USA,” The Journalist as Historian, May 22, 2019.
[3] Interview of C. L. R. James by Al Richardson, Clarence Chrysostom, and Anna Grimshaw in South London, June 8 and November 16, 1986; italics mine.
As an editor and bibliophile, I agree with the many critics of this book’s infelicities (typos, organizational issues, lack of index, and so forth). Nevertheless, I thank God James Heartfield wrote it, that he spilled his cornucopia of insights out of his head and onto paper. Let some publisher step forward to polish its contents so it passes conventional muster. Until then, however, students of this endlessly fascinating subject should benefit from the author’s vast knowledge of how things hung together eighty and ninety years ago—I say this even though the underlying worldview is not mine. 
History, 1600–2020, 2022; The Blood-Stained Poppy: A critique of the politics of commemoration, 2019; and The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 2016—to cite a few), Heartfield gives off no whiff of the Olympian stuffiness of many academics, as we expect of the lecturer we find on YouTube. I recommend watching his 2016 talk on C.L.R. James and the Left’s opposition to taking sides in the Second World War and the ethical issues that opposition posed. Heartfield’s reference (on page 151) to James’s 1940 penny-pamphlet “My Friends” A Fireside Chat on the War—written under the pseudonym “Native Son” (which momentarily confused me, since in 1940 Native Son’s author, Richard Wright, was still a “The Yanks Aren’t Coming” Stalinist)—led me happily to the tattered copy available on archive.org.
His courage and oratory are almost enough to explain how he came to lead the Civil Rights Movement (CRM). We must not, however, overlook his profession: he was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, an academically trained preacher in the Baptist tradition. Such titles bestow an odor of sanctity. They didn’t deflect the assassin’s bullet—ultimately set into motion by whom, we may never know
When the truth is being obscured, one may make an exception to the nil nisi bonum rule.
