Clarence Hathaway: Civil Rights Pioneer

Although civil rights activists have, at times, been falsely accused of being communist, some Communist Party members, including Clarence Hathaway, did help advance the American civil rights movement.

In the 1930s and ’40s, the Communist Party was prominent in the fight for racial equality in the American South, specifically Alabama, where segregation was oppressive. The party led the initial legal defense of the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white girls. Later, the Communist legal team and the NAACP helped the teens escape the death penalty. Unfortunately, it would take years of hearings and trials before the then grown-men won their freedom.[1]

The American Communists were pioneers in advocating for civil rights, helping to lay the foundation in the 1930s for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Although they were sincere in their desire to end racism and willing to take on the risks for doing so, they also saw supporting civil rights and racial equality as a helpful recruiting tool.

August Yokinen

Hathaway was the “prosecutor” of the Soviet-style show trial of August Yokinen, a janitor at the Finnish Workers Club in Harlem. Yokinen was accused of the rude treatment of three Black men, who were attending a party-sponsored dance at the club. When Yokinen refused to repent, on March 1, 1931, before an audience of about 1,500, the Communist Party held a show trial to determine whether to expel him from the party. The show trial received widespread attention in the media, including a front page story in The New York Times.[2]

Hathaway argued that Yokinen’s actions promoted the false scientific theory that whites are superior to Blacks, which Capitalists use to promote segregation and Jim Crow laws. Yokinen should be expelled because his actions “undermined class solidarity and strengthened the bourgeoisie,” threatening the future of American Communism, Hathaway said.[3] He added:

Comrade Yokinen . . . not only justified the hostility showed to the Negro workers who attended the dance but . . . said that if they were admitted to the club they might go further and enter the poolroom and the bathhouse, and he did not wish to bathe in the same tub used by Negroes.[4]

Yokinen’s “defender” was Richard Moore, one of the party’s top Black leaders. Moore blamed the racist behavior on Yokinen’s unwitting indoctrination into the pervasive white supremacist ideology. Ultimately, the jurors expelled Yokinen from the party but said he might rejoin if he took up the fight against “white chauvinism.”[5]

James Ford

The next year, Hathaway, then campaign manager for William Z. Foster’s 1932 run for US president, convinced party leaders to choose a Black Communist leader named James Ford as Foster’s running mate. Hathaway nominated Ford at the party’s convention. Ford’s selection was “a further step in convincing the masses of the revolutionary sincerity of the Communist Party,” Hathaway stated. Ford also ran as the vice presidential candidate with Earl Browder in 1936 and again in 1940.[6]

Lester Rodney

The move that would have the most dramatic impact was Hathaway’s hiring of Lester Rodney as a white sportswriter to bolster the Daily Worker’s weekly sports coverage. Rodney had sent the newspaper a letter arguing that the paper needed to go beyond social criticism to write more about the joy of sports. Hathaway, a former semipro baseball player and avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan, was easily swayed. Rodney joined the newspaper staff. Hathaway soon promoted him to sports editor and gave him a daily sports section.[7]

With Hathaway’s support, Rodney used the Daily Worker to build a campaign that would “raise hell about the color ban” with Major League Baseball (MLB) officials and team owners, including getting more than 1 million fans to sign petitions urging integration. The campaign also included articles that popularized the Black sports stars and showed they could compete and be accepted in the big leagues.[8] It would take eleven years before Jackie Robinson, whom the Daily Worker highlighted as a major baseball talent in the 1940s, broke the MLB’s color barrier not long after being signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers by owner Branch Rickey.[9]

That was 1947. However, the Communist role in baseball’s integration was not recognized until recently.[10]

NOTES

1 Erin Blakemore, “Why the Communist Party Defended the Scottsboro Boys,” History, February 7, 2020, https://www.history.com/news/scottsboro-boys-naacp-communist-party; Michel Martin, interview with Rebecca Walker, “How ‘Communism’ Brought Racial Equality To The South,” on NPR’s Tell Me More news show, February 16, 2010, https://www.npr.org/2010/02/16/123771194/how-communism-brought-racial-equality-to-the-south. 2 “Race Hatred On Trial,” pamphlet published by Daily Worker, 1931, 5, https://ia801005.us.archive.org/14/items/RaceHatredonTrialCPUSA/RaceHatredonTrial_CPUSA_text.pdf; “Communist Guilty of Race Prejudice,” Ithaca Journal, March 2, 1931, 1. 3 “Race Hatred on Trial,” 10-11; “Race Equality Trial Stirs Harlem Reds,” The New York Times, March 2, 1936, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1931/03/02/96183196.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0; Jodi Dean, “We Need Comrades,” Jacobin, November 18, 2019, https://jacobin.com/2019/11/comrades-political-organizing-discipline-jodi-dean. 4 “Race Equality Trial Stirs Harlem Reds.” 5 “Race Hatred on Trial,” 33; “Communist Party Expels Finnish Janitor at First Mass Trial Held in America for White Chauvinism,” The Lincoln Star, March 2, 1931, 5. 6 Klehr, 80, 88, 330. 7 Irwin Silber, Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 8-11. 8 Marilyn Bechtel, “Lester Rodney: Daily Worker sports editor led struggle to integrate baseball,” People’s World, January 6, 2010, https://peoplesworld.org/article/lester-rodney-daily-worker-sports-editor-led-struggle-to-integrate-baseball/. 9 Andy McCue, “Branch Rickey,” Society for American Baseball Research,” https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Branch-Rickey/. 10 Tom Gallagher, “Lester Rodney, the Daily Worker, and the Integration of Baseball,” Society for American Baseball Research’s The National Pastime 19 (1999), https://sabr.org/research/article/lester-rodney-the-daily-worker-and-the-integration-of-baseball/