Boundless Benefits

Negroes who are bona fide U. S. citizens are in high favor at Moscow as potential workers for a Soviet revolution in the U. S. Such a Negro is William Lorenzo Patterson, frankly a Communist, who after three and one-half years in Russia returned to the U. S. last week on his valid U. S. passport and began at once to preach Communist doctrines which appeared in front-page position before the 41,000 Negro readers of Harlem's Amsterdam News. Communist Patterson is a member of the New York Bar, a former law partner of two Negroes who are now Assistant District Attorneys in New York City. As a youth he was the only pupil of his race at Mill Valley (Calif.) High School, was nevertheless elected by his white fellows captain of the baseball team. After working his way through the University of California, after practicing law and joining the Communist party in New York, he went in 1927 to Russia.

"After a critical comparison of the Soviet system with Capitalism in other countries," said Lawyer Patterson last week, "I am convinced that when the Negro masses of America come to understand more clearly the ideology of Communism they must accept it as the only genuine relief from their present plight. . . .

"Under Capitalism they are doomed to exploitation and oppression. The door to better things is closed to the American worker by his wage scale. In Russia, where private profit is being progressively abolished, there will be no limit to the benefits the worker may receive.* When the Negro realizes the superiority of that system he is bound to accept its tenets."

There is almost no limit to the benefits a likely U. S. Negro may receive just now in Moscow. A scholarship awaits him at the "Lenin School" for propaganda and revolution maintained by the Third International. At periodic congresses of the International, he proudly finds the U. S. Communist Party represented by a Negro or Negroes who state, amid cheers, that Communism is spreading like wildfire among their race in the U. S. Also, in Moscow a Negro can take a white bride without exciting comment. Prudently Communist Patterson left his white bride of 15 months with her parents in Moscow when he returned to the U. S. last week.

What U. S. Negroes are eager to hear about Russia is the truth of the so-called "lynching incident" (the Negro was not lynched) in a Soviet factory at Kharkov. The story, as retold last week by Communist Patterson: "Lewis and Brown, two white Americans from the South who were working side by side in a large tractor plant in Kharkov with Robinson, an American Negro, objected to his eating in the same dining room with them. When brought to trial, their fellow-workers found them guilty of race discrimination and sentenced them to two years in prison or expulsion from the country for twelve years.

"Both realized their error and were profuse in their apologies. Lewis took the expulsion and left the country, while Brown remained to face the music. Later, a worker in Moscow who had lived in America for 13 years asserted that Lewis and Brown were right. This called forth wholesale condemnation from the Soviet Press, which adopted the slogan, 'We can use American industrial technique, but not American race prejudice.' Here in a nutshell is the Soviet attitude that should prove its sincerity to the American Negro."

In Russia, according to Communist Patterson, he made his living by writing and lecturing on Capitalist countries. He now plans to make it in the U. S. by writing, lecturing on Red Russia.

Black Reds. Greatest show of Red strength made thus far in the Negro section of the largest U. S. city was a recent "propaganda trial" in Harlem, attended by 2,000 spectators, patterned closely after similar trials in Moscow and staged by the Communist Party.

The crowd saw a "judge," "jury," "prosecutor," "defense attorney" and the "prisoner": a Finnish janitor who spoke no English. He was charged with "white chauvinism" (i. e. race prejudice). Stupid persons in the audience probably thought that this was a real court, that the Communist International has power, even in the city of New York, to punish a white man for incivility to Negroes.

The Finnish janitor was represented by a Negro defense attorney who at once pleaded the prisoner "guilty," appealed for mercy to the so-called Court. Anyone hearing this appeal might have supposed that the prisoner was in gravest peril. "Don't expel him from the party!" begged Negro Counsel Richard B. Moore (onetime Communist candidate for State's Attorney General). "Expulsion from the party is worse than death at the hands of the bourgeoisie! I would rather have my head severed by lynchers than be expelled from the Communist International!"

As in Moscow, the extreme sentence was imposed upon the prisoner, one August Yokinen. In shame and meekness he hung his head--but that was not quite the end of the show.

Federal agents took Finn Yokinen to Ellis Island, although he said he had taken out his first papers. He had just been expelled from the Communist Party, but Ellis Island officials prepared to deport him as "a member of an organization advocating the overthrow of the Government by force and violence."

Under $500 bail, promptly supplied, the Finn went temporarily free while his attorneys (real ones this time) presented an appeal. In the mock-sentence of the Red court it had been provided that Janitor Yokinen may be re-admitted to the Communist Party if he: 1) diligently agitates for admission of Negroes to the Finnish Workers' Educational Club of which he is janitor and in which he committed "white chauvinism" by objecting to the presence of three Negroes; 2) joins the League of Struggle for Negro Rights; 3) leads a demonstration against "Jim-Crow" restaurants in Harlem.

*Ordinary workers of any color may hope in Russia to receive boundless benefits eventually, but today they do receive: 1) wages in rubles officially worth sic which will actually buy about what gc will buy in the U. S.; 2) employment at the extreme high tempo of the Five-Year Plan, calling for greatest possible exertion by every worker: 3) cards entitling the worker to buy at Government monopoly stores, if willing to stand for hours in line (see p. 19).

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