Manning Johnson – 1958: The Communist Plot to Exploit Blacks

LTRP Note: The following is an extract from Manning Johnson’s 1958 book, Color, Communism, and Common Sense, which Lighthouse Trails reprinted a special edition in 2021. As LT author Roger Oakland has often said, history repeats itself, and we can see that from today’s events.

Lighthouse Trails stands against any form of racism because we know that God loves all people and tells us to love all people, and the color of one’s skin should make no difference in how we are to treat others and regard them. That said, Manning Johnson uncovered the exploitation of black people by those who pretended to care about them. That was over 60 years ago, but we see the same thing happening today.

“Red Plot to Use Negroes”

By Manning Johnson

Stirring up race and class conflict is the basis of all discussion of the Communist Party’s work in the South. The evil genius, Stalin, and the other megalomaniacal leaders in Moscow ordered the use of all racial, economic, and social differences, no matter how small or insignificant, to start local fires of discontent, conflict, and revolt. “Who could tell which of these issues could start a general conflagration” that would sweep across the former Confederate States from Maryland to Texas?

Black rebellion was what Moscow wanted. Bloody racial conflict would split America. During the confusion, demoralization and panic would set in. Then finally, the Reds say:

Workers stop work, many of them seize arms by attacking arsenals. Many had armed themselves before . . . Street fights become frequent. Under the leadership of the Communist Party the workers organize Revolutionary Committees to be in command of the uprising. Armed workers . . . seize the principal government offices, invade the residences of the President and his Cabinet members, arrest them, declare the old regime abolished, establish their own power. . . .1
The only fear of the white Communist leaders was that as a result of their efforts, this black rebellion would break out before they were ready in the decisive industrial cities of the North.

What if one or five million Negroes die in an abortive attempt to establish a Negro republic? Is not the advance of the cause worth it? A Communist is not a sentimentalist. He does not grieve over the loss of life in the advancement of Communism.

This plot to use the Negroes as the spearhead, or as expendables, was concocted by Stalin in 1928, nearly ten years after the formation of the world organization of Communism. Prior to this time, the periodic Moscow gatherings did little more than pass resolutions. Any credit for the change belongs, in the main, to a handful of Negro lickspittles like James W. Ford, Harry Haywood, Otto Hall, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, and Otto Huiswood, to mention a few.

They were the ones who, again and again, begged their masters in Moscow to force the white leaders of the Communist Party in the United States to organize and use the Negroes. They were the ones who got in on the ground floor of the conspiracy. They are the ones that history may well record as the political Uncle Toms who plotted with a diabolical alien power the moral decay, physical slavery, and spiritual death of their own race.
The perfidy and frustration of these Negro Reds is all the more infamous when one reads from the pen of a top Negro Communist who wrote:

Prior to the Sixth Congress, white chauvinism [race prejudice] . . . made progress in Negro work well-nigh impossible. . . . White chauvinism manifests itself . . . in open or concealed opposition to doing work among Negroes. . . . The tendency . . . was to ignore the leading Negro comrades when formulating policy. . . . As punishment for their opposition . . . the older Negro comrades were refused support [financial] . . . in getting out the weekly news service which was being sent out to some three hundred Negro newspapers. . . .

[A] Negro comrade was disciplined for his insistence in bringing before the Conference the tabooed question of Negro work.2 (emphasis in original)

The above Red author gives James W. Ford credit for bringing this matter to the attention of the White Fathers in Moscow which resulted in immediate action. Negro Communists were given jobs in the apparatus. Most of them were given professional revolutionary training in the United States and Russia under direct orders from Stalin. As a result, Negro Reds began looking to Moscow. Stalin became the great and just “Father” who could be relied upon to settle the many differences between white and Negro Communists.

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During the three decades which have elapsed since the Sixth World Congress in Moscow, the American Communist Party has conducted many campaigns and formed and infiltrated a large number of organizations among Negroes. From the bloody gun battles at Camp Hill, Alabama (1931) to the present integration madness, the heavy hand of Communism has moved, stirring up racial strife, creating confusion, hate, and bitterness so essential to the advancement of the Red cause.

One may recall organizations formed, directed, controlled, and led by Reds and fellow comrades such as: American Negro Labor Congress, League of Struggle for Negro Rights, International Labor Defense, National Negro Congress, Sharecroppers Union, the Civil Rights Congress, Negro Labor Victory Committee, Southern Negro Youth Congress, Negro Labor Councils, etc., ad infinitum, that exposed millions of Negroes to Communist ideas.

The list of sponsors, officers, and contributors reads like a Who’s Who in the Negro intellectual, professional, labor, and religious circles.

Through the aforementioned organizations and many others, Negro institutions of higher education like Howard University were penetrated to subvert teachers and students and thus politically contaminate the intellectual stream of Negro life.

White leftists descended on Negro communities like locusts, posing as “friends” come to help “liberate” their black brothers. Along with these white Communist missionaries came the Negro political Uncle Toms to allay the Negro’s distrust and fears of these strangers. Everything was inter-racial, an inter-racialism artificially created, cleverly devised as a camouflage of the Red plot to use the Negro.

Related Reading:

Critical Race Theory, Southern Baptist Convention, and a Marxist “Solution” That Will Not Work