Afro-Latin American newspapers included extensive coverage of Black populations in other countries. Articles on Black populations and race relations in Latin America, the United States, and Europe and Africa are examples of “practices of diaspora,” international communication and engagement among Black peoples that grew out of, and helped to forge, feelings of connectedness and racial solidarity. The Black press also reported on, or offered commentary on, more formal political movements promoting Black internationalism, such as Garveyism. Black papers in Argentina and Uruguay reported regularly on their northern neighbor, Brazil. Cuban papers included Puerto Rican and Dominican writers and discussions of Haiti. Throughout Latin America, writers and intellectuals of all races watched with mixed horror and fascination the workings of racial segregation and anti-Blackness in the United States. Diasporic ties were further thickened by travel, migration, and personal connections and friendships among African American and Afro-Latin American writers and intellectuals.

This chapter charts the development of frameworks and terminology with which revolutionary memory would be constructed during the republic. It begins with Guomindang efforts to tame May Fourth energies, allying the student movement to party-led workers and peasant movements, and tethering them to the evolving organs of state power. With the formation of the United Front between the Guomindang and Communist Party in 1924, May Fourth’s political groundwork would give way to an era of formal national construction (jianshe) when perceptions of rural society would crystallize within a revolutionary program. Originating in shared communications offices in Canton during the United Front, what began as rhetorical devices tested over 1926 in Mao’s strategic texts, such as lieshen (evil gentry), crystallized within months into class designations. The chapter then turns to the field of political journals based in Shanghai in the late 1920s, focusing on Guomin gonglun (The Citizens' Opinion). The interaction of social-scientific study with political mobilization gave wide currency to shorthand terms for understanding rural communities, one that pitted an evil gentry against a generalized peasantry. Moral language originally used to describe social injustices was refashioned as a tool for policing party discipline.

Progressive ambivalence about rights in general, and their indifference to issues of racial justice, might have led to inattention to issues of race at the Supreme Court. It did not, because of the complicated relation between liberalism in politics, conservative libertarian impulses, and the depth of outrage at gross injustices in the cases that reached the Court. Most notable were the Scottsboro cases, where the Communist Party outmaneuvered the NAACP to gain control, and then used the cases as part of a strategy of “labor defense,” mobilizing large numbers of people to place pressure on the courts, as the theory had it. The theory, though, was at war with itself: According to it, courts were tools of capitalist oppression but could be brought to heel by a mobilize public even if capitalism remained in place.

Radical political dissent on the right and left presented the Court with numerous problems. Overall, the Court developed a law of free expression that offered substantial protection to political dissidents. It invalidated a Minnesota statute authorizing courts to issue injunctions agains publication of liberlous material and a California statute banning display of the Communist red flag. It invalidated convictions of Communist organizers in Oregon and Georgia. And, protecting dissident news writers against political retaliation, it upheld the application of the National Labor Relations Act to the Associated Press and other news organizations.

In developing the substantive law under the NLRA the Court addressed the scope of the NLRB’s powers -- to order specific remedies, to disqualify “company unions, and to define what counted as an appropriate bargaining unit. The Court’s decisions were influced by the highly politicized environment around and within the NLRB, and especially by its obvious bias in favor of the more liberal Congress of Industrial Unions and against the more conservative American Federation of Labor.

Wright’s literary career was encouraged by the Communist Party-sponsored John Reed Club and nurtured within the proletarian literary movement whose writers were committed to representing class inequality and warfare from the standpoint of the eventual triumph of the proletariat. Like many other proletarian writers, his fiction is, therefore, strongly influenced by the philosophy of dialectical materialism popular within the Communist movement. Wright’s fiction, notably Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, powerfully synthesizes a dialectical perspective with literary realist and naturalist representational techniques, although he also experimented with avant-garde literary techniques he associated with the likes of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, as evident in Lawd Today! His fiction depicts the ways in which his mostly poor, working-class black characters suffer intensely from the class system of capitalism and the racism it engenders. It also depicts the inherent potentials within his characters’ lives to transcend ideologically and materially the inimical social system at the root of their suffering.

Archival documents from a construction and engineering team show that people went through the motions in a slapdash way when filling out forms detailing what they had done in April, May, and June 1989.

Policy documents show that the post-massacre purge was akin to a political movement, or yundong, but was not allowed to be called a yundong. Central purge officials carefully identified purge targets and procedures in their effort to punish disloyalty and reward compliance in late 1989 and early 1990.

This chapter examines friendships and their political importance among leading members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PRNP) and the Community Party USA (CPUSA) from the late 1930s to 1945. This was a time of heightened repression against the PRNP and also a time when the CPUSA had adopted Popular Front politics. They key figures in the chapter are Pedro Albizu Campos and Juan Antonio Corretjer, leaders of the PRNP, and Earl Browder and Consuelo Lee Tapia de Lamb from the CPUSA. The men's friendships developed in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where they were imprisoned, and continued in New York City. The chapter illustrates what we can learn about how parties and political activists function beyond or in contradiction to their printed statements by paying attention to how personal relationships affect politics and vice versa.