Amis, B. D. (Benjamin DeWayne), 1896-1993

While little known today, during the late 1920s and the 1930s, B.D. Amis was one of a small cadre of African Americans leading the fight for workers’ rights and racial justice. Urbane in demeanor and a dynamic speaker, he was one of the most important Black activists of his time. His commitment was to the working class and, in particular, the Black working class.

Amis was born in Chicago in 1896. In his youth he was influenced by the anti-lynching writings of pioneering journalist and civil rights crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who became his mentor while he was still in high school.

Amis became politically active in the early 1920s and by 1928 was president of the NAACP branch in Peoria, Ill. He addressed many civic and church groups about the activities and goals of the NAACP and gave speeches in defense of the rights of his people. A May 1928 article in The Peoria Journal described him as a man who “has a pleasing personality and made a deep impression upon his hearers this morning.”

After discussions at the 1928 congress of the Communist International, the Communist Party USA had pledged to take up the “Negro Question.” The CPUSA leadership invited Amis to come to New York after seeing his effectiveness as a local activist. The party’s determination to address the issue of Black rights was extraordinary because almost no other non-Black organization was willing to address this issue in the 1920s and 1930s.

Amis was also one of the first native born and working-class Black leaders of the party. Other early Black Communist leaders, such as Cyril Briggs and Otto Huiswoud, had been born in the Caribbean and had college educations.

Communism’s appeal to Blacks

It is not surprising that the Communist platform was attractive to African Americans in the 1920s and the 1930s. The Black community still strongly felt the legacy of slavery and the betrayal of Reconstruction. There were also thousands of Black soldiers who had fought for democracy in World War I, only to return home to an America rife with Jim Crow laws, segregation, discrimination, lynching, and near-peonage for many southern Black farmers.

Black workers were generally excluded from labor unions. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, Black workers, who already were suffering economically, lost jobs by the tens of thousands. Three to four times as many Blacks as whites ended up on the relief rolls in urban areas. The Communist Party, by virtue of its openness to Blacks and willingness to take up the Negro Question, became the choice for Amis and other prominent Blacks of the era.

The NAACP and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, also known as the Back to Africa movement, were other organizations vying to represent the interests and needs of the Black population at that time.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, had proposed his idea of educating the best and most capable Blacks, a “Talented Tenth.” Garvey was interested in racial uplift through Black economic and political independence. The party, however, offered a political arena and an activist agenda to deal with the Negro Question that these organizations eschewed.

Writer, speaker, mass leader


This anthology of his key writings and speeches reveals the deep commitment to the working class by his generation of African American Marxists. His classics, such as ‘Lynch Justice at Work’ and ‘They Shall Not Die!,’ as well as his speech nominating William Z. Foster for president at the 1936 CPUSA Convention in Chicago, are included. This work also features important documents penned by Amis and found in the former Soviet archives and in the private holdings of the Amis Family. It also includes many of Amis’ theoretical works found in international documents, such as the CPUSA’s International Press Correspondence, and a selected bibliography on the research scholarship pertaining to African Americans and communism.
As a member of the National Committee of the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), Amis plunged wholeheartedly into CPUSA activities and quickly became one of its most visible members. He recruited, organized rallies, spoke at conferences, and wrote articles for the Daily Worker, the CPUSA’s newspaper and predecessor of the People’s Weekly World.

Articles such as “ANLC as Mass Organization of Negro Workers,” “Vote Communist – Negro Workers,” “Fight Against White Chauvinism,” “Negro Workers Are Hard Hit by Unemployment; Must Organize,” and others are indicative of the issues that concerned not only him but also the party as a whole.

In 1930, Amis became the general secretary of the newly formed League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR) and an editor of its publication, The Liberator. The role of the LSNR was to publicize the issues of the day, especially lynching, through rallies, conferences and picketing. The well-known Black poet Langston Hughes was the group’s honorary president.

Among its other activities, in 1933 the LSNR drafted a “Bill of Rights for the Negro People,” which was carried to Washington by 3,500 demonstrators demanding that the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration enforce the Constitution and give Black Americans their rights.

Aside from his engagement with many movements for social justice and equality, Amis was involved in three of the most celebrated political frame-up cases of his time: the Scottsboro case, the Angelo Herndon case, and the case of Tom Mooney.

The Scottsboro 9

In 1931, just after he had written the pamphlet “Lynch Justice at Work,” came the event that was to epitomize lynch justice and symbolize the oppression of Black Americans: the Scottsboro case. Nine Black youths riding on a freight train were falsely accused of raping two white women.

Today it is hard to imagine the resonance that the case had in the 1930s. It pitted Southern lynch justice against the legal challenge to racism and discrimination, the more conservative NAACP leadership against the more militant Communist Party, and the power of direct action against the passiveness of the legal process.

The party immediately recognized the significance of what was happening and acted swiftly to organize the defense for the nine accused youths through the International Labor Defense (ILD). Amis contributed to the defense effort as author of the pamphlet “They shall not die! The story of Scottsboro in pictures,” put out by the LSNR. The cry, “They shall not die!” spread not only throughout the United States, but across Europe as well.

The strategic decision to organize mass demonstrations, to issue posters, and to write articles brought national and international publicity that ultimately saved the lives of the accused.

Amis was deeply involved in all of this, including traveling to Alabama. The virulent racism spurred a clamoring for the deaths of the accused in spite of the overwhelming proof of their innocence. The party took an open and committed stand against racism and injustice, thereby enhancing its standing in the Black community.

The success of the activist tactics of the Scottsboro case would eventually lead to A. Philip Randolph’s proposed March on Washington in 1941, the Montgomery bus boycott, the 1963 March on Washington, and the civil rights movement. The LSNR and the ILD demonstrated that picket lines, pamphlets, posters, magazine and newspaper articles and anti-lynching rallies could be effective tactics in the fight for workers’ rights and justice for African Americans.

Herndon and Mooney

The very next year, 1932, 20-year-old Angelo Herndon, a member of the Young Communist League, was arrested in Atlanta and later sentenced to 18-20 years on a Georgia chain gang for attempting to “incite insurrection” based on his possession of Communist literature. Soon the ILD was leading a nationwide campaign for his freedom.

Herndon wrote in his autobiography, “Let Me Live,” that at the first All-Southern Conference for the Scottsboro Defense in Chattanooga, May 31, 1931, “Perhaps the most eloquent address of the meeting was made by B.D. Amis. … He brought both whites and Negroes to their feet cheering loudly. … So great was the enthusiasm and militancy of the audience that the cops looked scared.”

The third highly visible case that Amis had a connection to was that of the militant labor leader Tom Mooney, who had been convicted of a bombing in San Francisco. Mooney was sentenced to death, later reduced to life, even though the evidence against him was shown to have been faked and several witnesses’ testimony was proven false. Amis read a statement written by Tom Mooney’s aged mother Mary to crowd of 12,000 at the Bronx Coliseum in February 1932.

Further recognition of the stature that Amis had during this period is Nancy Cunard’s inclusion of his essay, “The Negro National Oppression and Social Antagonisms,” in her seminal anthology, “Negro.” The list of contributors to this now classic work looks like a Who’s Who of the 1920s and 1930s. Amis was right there among them.

Party and union leader

Amis went on to become the district organizer for the Communist Party in Cleveland for a couple of years and traveled to the Soviet Union on two occasions. The second trip lasted about a year-and-a-half. While there, he took courses in Marxism, traveled with other Americans, such as Paul Robeson, and wrote articles for the Negro Worker, the newspaper of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers.

Upon his return to the United States, Amis settled in Philadelphia and joined the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) as a field organizer. He also was the head of the Philadelphia committee of the National Negro Congress, an organization established in 1936 to “secure the right of the Negro people to be free from Jim Crowism, segregation, discrimination, lynching, and mob violence” and “to promote the spirit of unity and cooperation between Negro and white people.”

Amis was also the chairman of the Philadelphia Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia and member of another committee to raise funds for the defense of the Republican (anti-fascist) government of Spain. As if these activities were not enough, Amis also ran as the Communist candidate for auditor general of Pennsylvania in 1936 and made an “Appeal to the Colored Voters to Vote Communist” on a local radio station.

By the late 1930s Amis had begun to shift from political activism to union organizing. He was having success with the SWOC and in two years had organized 15 groups of steelworkers into unions or lodges, negotiated union contracts, had acted as spokesman in labor board cases.

Among the companies organized were Lukens Steel, Allenwood Steel and the Pacific Steel Boiler Company. An article in the October 16, 1938, Philadelphia Independent said, “The labor press hailed his victory in organizing the J.E. Lovergan Company of Philadelphia, pointing out that for 100 years this had been a nonunion concern.”

His success with the steel workers led the local joint board of the Hotel, Restaurant and Service Employees International Alliance and the Bartenders International League to ask him to organize the Black service workers in Philadelphia, who were subject to “unequaled exploitation,” in the words of a trade unionist of that time.

Once again it didn’t take long for Amis to have success. He organized Local 758 of the Colored Catering Industry Workers, and soon local newspapers were reporting that for its members in Philadelphia, “Wage increases have become effective for all cooks and kitchen employees, porters, etc., at leading caterers.” He also won jobs for them at the new Cotton Club restaurant.

Unfortunately, Amis’ success with Black workers brought resentment from white unions, who called upon the international union, headquartered in Detroit, to dismiss Amis and to have Local 758’s business transacted through the local white union. This move demonstrated how embedded racism was in the AFL. This changeover in power eventually nullified many of the gains that Amis had won.

A unique vision

Amis’ career represents a remarkable record of unrecognized achievement during an incredibly racist and anti-union period. The Communist Party made much of this possible through entities that led the fight for racial justice and workers’ rights such as its Negro commission, the American Negro Labor Congress, the International Labor Defense, the Trade Union Unity League, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and the National Negro Congress.

Perhaps if more people knew the stories of how ordinary individuals such as Amis (or Ned Cobb or Fannie Lou Hamer) rose to extraordinary achievement, they would be encouraged to take on the questionable activities of many of today’s governmental and corporate leaders.

B. D. Amis (Benjamin DeWayne Amis; 7 July 1896 – 9 June 1993) was an African American labor organizer and civil rights leader. Particularly influential in the fight for African Americans' and workers during the period of official segregation in the South and informal discrimination throughout the country, Amis is most remembered for his militant Communist activism on behalf of the notable legal cases of the falsely-accused Scottsboro Boys, the African American organizer Angelo Herndon, as well as the white labor leader Tom Mooney.[1]


Contents
1 Biography
2 See also
3 Further reading
4 References
5 External links
Biography
Born Benjamin DeWayne Amis in Chicago, Illinois in 1896, Amis went by B.D. Amis throughout his life, although often signing his letters as "B. DeWayne Amis" in the 1930s. Growing up in the black neighborhoods of Chicago, B. D. Amis was strongly influenced by the anti-lynching writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a Southern-born African American journalist, civil rights leader, and women's rights activist then living in Chicago.

Politically involved since the early 1920s, by 1928, Amis was president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Peoria branch. The recently founded Communist Party, organized on a favorable position towards African Americans, provided an invitation to a meeting in New York City, which made a profoundly interested him as one of the few non-black organizations in the 1920s willing to seriously struggle against racism, and Amis would soon be working with William Z. Foster, the party leader and presidential candidate, whom Amis would help renominate together with the African American vice president nominee James W. Ford in 1932.[2]

Amis began contributing to Party journals not long afterward. The 1930 "Lynch Justice" attacked the Communist Party's leftist opposition, the less radical Socialist Party, which, although progressive in relation to the idea of African American equality in the northern states, had decided to abstain from taking a position on the rights of African Americans. Amis wrote:

The New Leader, official organ of the Socialist Party, states very plainly the position of the Party to the Negro masses. In the state convention at Virginia the Socialist misleaders of labor declared the racial problem most difficult to solve. "Almost all southerners believe in segregating the Negro and depriving him of social and political rights that whites enjoy. The southern Socialists must adjust their tactics to this state of affairs. The northern pamphlets, leaflets, and newspapers are frequently useless, if not harmful in the South...The Socialists of Virginia are good Socialists. . ." In this manner the Socialist Party solves the "difficult racial problem" by declaring that it must be solved in "Southern style." "Southern style" calls for lynching, segregation, mob terrorism, and the worst forms of persecution and extra exploitation of the Negro poor farmers and agricultural laborers.[3]

From 1930, Amis headed the newly formed League of Struggle for Negro Rights, a radical organization formed on the basis of Leninist principles; although seeing black sovereignty in majority-black areas of the South as an ideal, given the fever-pitch racism then prevailing in the United States, the organization focused on publicizing the plight of the oppressed black minority through its newspaper, The Liberator, which B. D. Amis edited, and on promoting direct action protests against lynching, tenant evictions, and the Jim Crow segregation laws, as well as racism in the legal system and other manifestations. In 1933, the League issued a "Bill of Rights for the Negro People" – a document calling on Franklin Roosevelt to protect African Americans; a petition for action from the president was carried to Washington, D.C. by 3,500 activists.[4]

In 1931 – almost right after Amis had completed writing "Lynching Justice" – the Scottsboro Boys case came to light in Alabama: nine young black men who had gotten into a fight with a group of white youth were subsequently charged with raping two white women. By sundown on the same day, a freshly formed lynch mob was demanding that the youths be surrendered to them for immediate lynching. Authorities pleaded against mob violence by promising speedy trials and asking "the Judge to send them to the chair";[5] fifteen days later, eight were sentenced to death, and the Communist Party managed to convince the parents of the minors to let International Labor Defense take charge of the defense. Deeply involved in the case, Amis travelled to Alabama. Amis' 1931 commentary about the case, juxtaposed against a set of photographs from Scottsboro, "They Shall Not Die! The Story of Scottsboro in Pictures" – published in the June 6 copy of The Liberator – galvanized as a rallying cry for the accused defendants at the beginning of the trials.

B. D. Amis' son, Dr. Barry D. Amis, writes that

The party immediately recognized the significance of what was happening and acted swiftly to organize the defense for the nine accused youths through the International Labor Defense. . . "They shall not die!" spread not only throughout the United States, but across Europe as well.[4]

Amis and Scottsboro historian William T. Howard writes that Amis' article "gave the Party campaign its slogan," which spread far beyond both the Deep South and the United States.[6] In addition to the coverage of the case received in the Soviet Union, where "the word 'Negro' was [at the time] synonymous with Scottsboro boys,"[7] Communist-organized protests were soon being arranged globally – far from the initial demonstrations organized in Harlem. William T. Howard writes that

Communists, black and white, participated in a host of protests against the Scottsboro verdicts... On May 16, six thousand workers paraded in a Harlem Scottsboro demonstration. . . on June 27, five thousand African American and white workers paraded through the streets of Harlem in a Scottsboro protest march. Internationally, on June 9, Scottsboro protests took place before the United States Legation at Riga, Latvia. . . On July 3, about 150,000 German workers filled the Lustgarten in Berlin and heard Mrs. Ada Wright pleas for the lives of her sons and the other Scottsboro defendants.[6]

The Communists proceeded to appeal the case upward on the hierarchy of the judicial system. Although the Scottsboro Boys, now considered entirely innocent of any charges, did serve time for their convictions after a subsequent retrial, their defense by the Communists succeeded in a number of pioneering ways, notably exposing for the entire nation the racism inherent in Alabama's court system. With ILD-hired attorney Sam Leibowitz embarrassing the Alabama prosecutors by noting in front of the Supreme Court that African Americans were entirely excluded from Alabama juries, the Alabama court system was forced to add one black man to the jury – though he was easily outvoted by the eleven white jurors, the event was the first time that the racial balance of the jurors was made an issue in the proceedings. Moreover, the post-retrial sentencing of the Scottsboro boys demarcated the first time that a black man had been sentenced to anything other than death in the rape of a white woman in Alabama. Sam Leibowitz and the Communist Party's ILD attorneys also succeeded in proving that the black names added to the roster of jurors for the review of the Supreme Court had been forged by the state. All of the boys managed to escape the death sentences originally handed out by the local Scottsboro, Alabama court; with international pressure mounting on the state, four were released as innocent of the charges as soon as the late 1930s.

As the campaign to secure the freedom of the accused Scottsboro Boys was being run, the jailing of Angelo Herndon, a teenaged African American communist convicted of insurrection after attempting to organize black industrial workers in 1932 in Atlanta, Georgia, became another cause for fierce activism, as Georgia authorities sought to make a case against Herndon based on his advocacy of communism: Herndon had led a racially integrated march of the unemployed in 1932 and was subsequently arrested when Georgia police found Communist Party literature was found in his bedroom. Amis, as leader of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, participated in the campaign for Herndon's release, although the party's efforts were already heavily committed to the release of the nine Scottsboro teenagers.

Amis' other work for the Communist Party took him to various locations within the country. He went on to become District Organizer for the Communist Party in Cleveland. He also travelled outside the United States. He took advantage of the opportunity to study formally in the Soviet Union as well as to hone further organizing skill, and contributed writings for the Negro Worker, the newspaper of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers while working abroad.[8]

The 1930s also saw Amis engage in the radical campaign to free Tom Mooney, the militant white socialist labor leader whose jailing in the 1910s, like those of the African American defendants, had been conducted in a lynch mob atmosphere – even as evidence against Mooney had also been faked and testimony against the activist would be revealed as perjured.[8] In his capacity as a politician, Amis to publicize the Mooney case among both black and white workers. Nominating William Z. Foster for presidential candidate during the Communist Party's Chicago convention in 1932, Amis spoke of Foster's support for Mooney figured prominently in Amis' endorsement; Amis described Foster as "an outstanding fighter" for the freedom of Tom Mooney as well as Edith Berkman and the Scottsboro Boys, all reasons "which prove his ability to lead workers today in deadly struggle against war and capitalism" and showing "the revolutionary way out of the crisis. . ."[9]

Having moved to Pennsylvania in the 1930s, Amis ran a 1936 campaign for state general auditor and supporting the national Foster-Ford campaign in the national electoral race. His later activity included organizing the Catering Industry Employees Union, Local 758, an African-American local of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union (AFL), serving as an elected officers of both unions in the later 1930s and early 1940s.[10]

A longtime activist in Pennsylvania, Amis subsequently worked for the Gulf Oil Company, while continuing his radical union and community organizing activities.

Amis died in Alexandria, Virginia on June 9, 1993, thirty days before his 97th birthday – committed to his radical principles throughout his life.[11]

Amis' son Barry D. Amis, a Professor of Education at Michigan State and Purdue universities, helped pioneer the development of African American literature courses at Michigan State.[12]

Amis' archive of papers and important documents, made public for the interests of general research by the Communist Party, presently reside at New York University's Tamiment Library