Communists and Community

Histories of the Communist Party's role in local political struggles are much needed and deserve careful scrutiny. Communists and Community, a study of Detroit-area communists, promises much in this regard. As an account of the Detroit party's work in the 1940s and 1950s, its author draws our attention to the Party's leadership in the struggle against anti-Black racism. For example, Pettengill's creates strong narratives of the struggle over who would occupy the Sojourner Truth housing development, the fight for accountability in the Detroit Police Department for its racist brutality, postwar battles to integrate recreational facilities and federally funded housing projects, the postwar “crusade” for peace, and the endless task of linking community concerns with the labor movement. In addition, Pettengill's healthy skepticism of the fabrications, distortions, and paranoid conspiracy theories of Detroit's red-baiters in the 1950s reminds us of the role anti-communism played in weakening the social democratic potential of the era as well as the foundation of the modern conservative movement and its resistance to racial equality.Like the historical period in which anti-communism proliferated, however, this book contains a number of debilitating contradictions. For example, Pettengill argues that a Communist Party-led mass protest against racist police brutality in 1946 could not “repair [the Party's] image” (97). The Detroit Police attempted to cover up the murder of fifteen-year-old African American Leon Moseley to protect two white officers, and initially blamed the teenager for his own death. The success in pressuring the conservative city government to arrest and try the two officers could not rescue the party from the looming anti-communist backlash. Unfortunately, Pettengill fails to develop a framework for understanding political power, in particular from a class perspective. What amount of power does a working-class movement hold if it can mobilize thousands of people to force a Republican-identified mayor, who favored his white, conservative constituency and oversaw a covert “Red Squad” investigation of the Communist Party, to arrest and try two white police officers? The communists, the Detroit chapter of the Civil Rights Congress, and thousands in the African American community and the mass organizations that aligned themselves with the Communist Party refused to accept the official story and the system of white supremacy that underpinned it. Their willingness to fight in the media, the courts, and the streets forced the city to address the truth about the police murder and to drew broader attention to systemic police racism.To understand the Cold War and the Red Scare in an honest fashion, however, scholars need to speak to the truth about such events. It was not merely a stained image that opened the Party up to attacks. It was specifically its willingness to fight to end white supremacy that made it a target for attack. The power Detroit's working class wielded through the network of Communist Party, labor unions, other independent, radical political formations, and allied mass organizations threatened the dominance of white elites who relied on the police to enforce their power and to suppress insurrection. It was the Party's theory, its actions, and its successes in championing a nonracist working-class movement that caused it to be targeted for repression. When McCarthyites and red-baiters attacked the Party for aiming to overthrow the “government,” they did so behind an ideological facade that invented a unity of capitalist class dominance with white supremacy as the “government.”The author likewise fails develop a usable framework of systemic white supremacy that prevents a deeper understanding of the various phenomena he describes. For example, in his discussion of the Sojourner Truth incident and the Belle Isle riot, both which centered on anti-Black racism, Pettengill states that most whites who protested inclusion of Black people were not white supremacists (34). White Detroiters, as Pettengill records, claimed that living near Black people would reduce their property values or justified white privilege in the allocation of new housing or exclusive access to recreational facilities. He reports that whites launched violent attacks and mass protest campaigns to deny access for African American city dwellers. But Pettengill reduces these mass actions to motives of economic anxiety and fears about increasing cultural diversity. Instead, real fascists and KKK leaders exploited these anxieties to enforce a racial hierarchy in all aspects of life. By adopting this approach, however, he distances those far-right elements from the white leadership of the city and its major institutions, and invokes a narrative that limits the agency of white working-class Detroiters as simply exploited, unwitting participants in a white supremacist drama. He lets the latter off the hook for its overt and violent anti-Black racism. In so doing, this study leaves unattended the historical necessity of the Communist Party's role in blocking fascist dominance in the United States and in practicing an intersectional model of class struggle for racial equality and Black liberation

Communism · Democracy · Police brutality · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Racism · Scrutiny · Skepticism · Sociology · Law · Race, History, and American Society