Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

The second essay in the collection analyzes Black communism and the American Left. Kelley is interested in how Communists and Leftists engaged with what was called the “Negro Question”—that is, how Black people represent both the core of the class struggle in the United States and a particular case in that context. Kelley argues that while the Left does aim to eradicate racial oppression, white members and leadership do not always understand or correctly answer this “Question.”

Kelley begins with a history of Marxism, starting in 1848 with the publication of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto and the formation of the International Workingmen’s Association, also known as the First International, a meeting of labor unions, socialists, and other leftists. The Communist Manifesto laid out the goals and aims of the nascent Communist movement. Shortly after, German Marxists came to the United States and founded the first Communist clubs, which admitted all people regardless of race. However, white socialists largely overlooked the special case of Black Americans, believing that all struggle was class struggle and that racial divisions would disappear once the class struggle had been won. As the Socialist Party of America reached the turn of the twentieth century, they felt that “Racism was merely a feature of capitalism—kill the latter and the former would wither away” (41).