Pittman, John, 1906-1993

John Pittman (1906-1993), an African-American communist journalist, was born in Atlanta, graduated from Morehouse College, and received an M.A. in Economics (1930) from the University of California at Berkeley, with a thesis titled "Railroads and Negro Labor." After a brief stint at Stanford Law School, and jobs as a waiter on the Southern Pacific Railroad and as secretary to art patron Noel Sullivan, in October, 1931 he founded and served as editor of the San Francisco Spokesman (a weekly newspaper for the Bay Area African American community), which by 1934 had been renamed The Spokesman, reflecting Pittman's broader ambitions and leftward political evolution. During that year's San Francisco general strike, he lent The Spokesman's printing presses to the fledgling Communist Party newspaper, the Western Worker, resulting in their destruction by right-wing vigilantes. Then Pittman went to work for the Western Worker, becoming by 1941 the editor of its successor, the (daily) People's World. In this capacity, he was a frequent guest on radio station KSAN (San Francisco) in 1941-1942. In 1945 he covered the founding conference of the United Nations, and in 1946 received his divorce from his first wife Merle Nance Pittman. In 1947 Pittman traveled to Europe as a correspondent for the Communist Party's newspapers Daily Worker (New York) and People's World, and for the Chicago Defender, a trip made possible by progressive notables including Lena Horne, Paul Jarrico, Albert Maltz, and Dalton Trumbo, whose financial support was coordinated by Los Angeles attorney Leo Gallagher. After his return he married fellow communist Margrit Adler, a German-Jewish antifascist refugee and German-American political activist. They remained in New York until 1955, when they moved to San Francisco with their two children, Carol and John Peter. There Pittman again worked for the People's World. From 1959-1961 the Pittmans were Moscow correspondents for the CPUSA press. In 1968 Pittman came to New York to become the founding co-editor of the Daily World (the result of the merger of the Party's West and East Coast weekly newspapers). In the late 1970s Pittman went to Prague as the Party's representative on the editorial board of the World Marxist Review, returning to New York in 1987. In addition to his newspaper writings, Pittman contributed some two dozen articles to the Party's monthly journal Political Affairs, and wrote Africa Calling, Isolate the Racists: The Liberation Struggle in Southern Africa(1973), and (with Margrit Pittman) Sense and Nonsense About Berlin(1962) and Peaceful Coexistence: Its Theory and Practice in the Soviet Union(1964).