Green, Gil, 1906-1997

Gil Green (1906-1997), born Gilbert Greenberg in Chicago, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was a Communist youth leader in the 1930s, a member of the Communist Party's Politburo, a Smith Act defendant, and the chief (albeit unofficial) figure of a reformist current in the CPUSA through 1991. He joined the Young Workers League (later the Young Communist League) in 1924, and shortly thereafter, the CPUSA, and in 1932 became national secretary of the YCL, a position he held throughout the decade, training a generation of Party cadres and leading the League to a position of influence in the American Youth Congress. In 1941 Green became head of the Party in New York State, but had to relinquish this title in 1945 due to his association with Earl Browder, the ousted Party head, and moved to Illinois, where he headed that state's Party organization. Convicted under the Smith Act in 1949, Green became a fugitive, surrendered in 1956 and was released from jail in 1961. By 1966, Green was again head of the New York Party, but resigned this position in 1968 to protest the CPUSA's endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He remained an elder statesman until 1991, when he left the Party and helped to found the Committees of Correspondence, a social-democratic organization.