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A major work in the Black Communist tradition by worker-intellectual Harry Haywood, now in a new edition featuring a foreword by Dr. Rebecca Hall and an introduction by Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly.
In 1948, Harry Haywood, a leading member of the Communist Party USA, published
Negro Liberation, a pathbreaking book that lays out his argument that the Black Belt South constitutes a distinct nation and an internal colony of U.S. imperialism. Applying a Marxist-Leninist lens to questions of nationalism, colonialism, and land distribution, Haywood lays out the dire stakes of Jim Crow violence and oppression and critiques the emptiness and insufficiency of liberal solutions. Along the way, he makes a powerful case for Black self-determination.
Framed by Rebecca Hall's moving meditation on her father's legacy and Charisse Burden-Stelly's clear-eyed case for how Haywood reveals the contradiction between ruling-class politics and Black liberation today, this new edition of
Negro Liberation is a must-read for anyone fighting against oppression.
List of contents
Foreword by Dr. Rebecca Hall
Introduction by Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly
Preface
- The Problem
- The Plantation-Instrument of Oppression
- Big Business and the Plantation
- The Shadow of the Plantation
- "Liberal Remedies"
- Land and Freedom
- The Negro Nation
- The Negro Liberation Movement¿
Reference Notes
Appendix
Index
About the author
Harry Haywood (1898-1985) was a worker-intellectual. He studied at the Lenin School in Moscow, then returned to the United States in 1930 to become a leading member of the Communist Party of the United States.
Rebecca Hall, JD PhD, is an independent scholar, activist, and educator. She writes and publishes on the history of race, gender, law, and resistance as well as articles on climate justice and intersectional feminist theory. Her most recent book,
Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (Simon & Schuster, 2021) has won multiple awards, and was a finalist for the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards and the Pen America Open Book Award.
Wake was listed as a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, the
Washington Post,
Forbes, and
Ms. Magazine. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including a 2022-23 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellowship.
Charisse Burden-Stelly is associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. She is the author of
Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States; coauthor of
W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History; and the coeditor of
Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing and
Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State, a collection of essays by Percy C. Hintzen.
