Harry Haywood

The theoretical axis running through Haywood's entire life was the 'Black Belt thesis,' established by the Comintern resolutions of 1928 and 1930. While studying in Moscow, he applied the criteria of a nation laid out in Stalin's Marxism and the National Question (1913), a historically constituted, stable community with a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup expressed in a common culture, to Black Americans in the South. The thesis held that African Americans concentrated in the Deep South's Black Belt constituted an oppressed nation within the United States, possessing the full right to self-determination up to and including secession. This was a theoretical breakthrough that reframed the Black question not as a matter of racial prejudice or moral failing but as an unfinished agrarian-democratic revolution, a central prop of imperialist class rule. In his 1948 book Negro Liberation, Haywood argued that the betrayal of Reconstruction through the 1877 Hayes-Tilden Compromise had frozen Black masses as landless sharecroppers and semi-slaves, and that without resolving this question of 'land and freedom,' neither genuine equality nor working-class unity was possible. The thesis became the central cause of his 1959 expulsion when the CPUSA, following de-Stalinization, officially abandoned the demand for self-determination. Haywood carried it forward as a foundational political principle through his leadership in the Maoist New Communist Movement.

Haywood arrived in Spain in April 1937 and was appointed to the staff of the XV International Brigade. He was soon named Regimental Commissar of the Second Regiment under Major Jock Cunningham, providing political leadership to the Lincoln, British, and Washington Battalions. In stark contrast to the strictly segregated US Army of the era, the International Brigades were integrated units where Black and white soldiers served as equals, and Haywood embodied this egalitarian internationalism. During the Brunete Offensive of July 1937, the XV Brigade suffered devastating losses. Oliver Law (the first Black commander of an integrated American army unit in history) was killed in action, and the survivors of the Lincoln and Washington Battalions were merged into a single unit. In August 1937, Haywood joined Langston Hughes and Walter Benjamin Garland in a live radio broadcast from Madrid to the United States, calling for international solidarity against fascism. For Haywood, Spain was more than a military intervention. It was the concrete realization of his conviction that fascism posed an existential threat to people of color worldwide, and an embodiment of the communist ideal of working-class internationalism across racial lines, a foundation for the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist politics he carried forward for the rest of his life.