The Communist Party USA and African-Americans - The New Left and Afterwards

The New Left and Afterwards

The Communist Party continued, even after splits and defections left it much smaller, into the 1960s. It made efforts to reestablish itself among students through the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, named after one of the original founders of the NAACP, who joined the CPUSA in 1961. Other youth organizations, such as the Che-Lumumba Club in Los Angeles, flourished for a time, then disappeared.

The parties’ fortunes appeared to revive for a while in the late 1960s, when party members such as Angela Davis became associated with the most militant wing of the Black Power movement. The party did not, however, reap any long-term benefits from this brief period of renewed exposure: it did not establish any lasting relations with the Black Panther Party, which was largely destroyed by the early 1970s, and did not recruit any significant number of members from those organizations or win them to its politics.

The party maintained some standing in the black community through its former allies, including Coleman Young of Detroit and Gus Newport in Berkeley, California, who were elected to office in the 1970s.