Communist International. Negro Commission

At the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow in 1922, the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay called for an "international organization of the Negro" based in the United States, with its own weekly newspaper, defense clubs and cooperative enterprises, to assume the leadership of the anti-colonial struggle worldwide. An international Negro Commission was formed, and a call for a World Negro Congress was put forth. Meanwhile six leading African American civil rights organizations, including the African Blood Brotherhood and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, formed a united front for defense, with a call for an All-Race Conference or Negro Sanhedrin set for February 1924.

Prompted by the Comintern, the U.S. communist party, the Workers Party of America, launched the American Negro Labor Congress in 1925, with a weekly organ, "The Negro Champion," edited by Lovett Fort-Whiteman, to organize the "Negro masses." At the 6th Congress of the Comintern in 1928, the Negro Commission put forward a resolution calling for self-determination for Blacks in the U.S. "Black Belt." Developed by Harry Haywood, an African-American student at the Lenin School in Moscow, and initially opposed by the American delegation, the Black Belt thesis would remain the official communist policy on the "Negro question" in the United States until the late 1950s.

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