Re-reading Peter Cole’s marvelous Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly amidst a global pandemic has been something of a revelation. The book makes a case for Fletcher’s relevance to the most urgent political projects of the present, and reminds us of his important role in history. This spring, sheltered at home, I streamed Reds—Warren Beatty’s three-hour masterwork about the Russian Revolution as told through the romance of American journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant. The movie reminded me how acutely Fletcher has been missing from accounts of the past.
I hadn’t seen Reds since its theatrical release in the early 1980s. A college student and die-hard Marxist who spent the previous summer reading the first two volumes of Capital and all three volumes of Lenin: Selected Works, I vividly recall tearing up as Reed and Bryant joined throngs of workers marching down the streets of Petrograd toward the Winter Palace, singing the “Internationale” in Russian.
Seeing it again after all these years, I suddenly remembered that I had also found the film unsettling because of its whitewashing of the left. Here was a considerable slice of American-Communist history without Negroes or a “Negro Question.” One would never know from the film that John Reed was the first American to address the Communist International on “The Negro Question in America.” Delivered on July 25, 1920, just three months before his untimely death, his speech excoriated U.S. racism, condemned lynching and disfranchisement, and heralded a new revolutionary movement among black workers and intellectuals such as A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, editors of the socialist-leaning Messenger magazine. And yet, while urging Communists to support black struggles for social and political equality, Reed argued that their main task should be “to organize Negroes in the same unions as the whites. This is the best and quickest way to root out racial prejudice and awaken class solidarity.” The Industrial Workers of the World, he insisted, had been doing this all along.
In fact, Benjamin Harrison Fletcher should have shown up in Reds, and not just in cameo. Reed first met Fletcher in 1910 and, like everyone in the IWW’s circle, came to regard him as one of the most talented organizers the Wobblies ever produced. Even those hostile to the Wobblies acknowledged Fletcher’s venerated status. The Messenger dubbed him “The most prominent Negro Labor Leader in America.” A target of the First World War’s Red Scare, Fletcher also became one of the most prominent black political prisoners in the country. He was the only African American among the 101 Wobblies convicted of violating the 1917 Espionage Act, for which he served nearly three years in Leavenworth. Even after his death in 1949, long past the Wobblies’ heyday, Fletcher remained widely respected. The fairly conservative black-owned newspaper the Atlanta Daily World ran a glowing obituary calling Fletcher “One of the most brilliant Negroes ever associated with a leftist organization” and “highly respected for his scholastic ability and his oratorical efforts.” That author’s point, that Fletcher was jailed because “mass hysteria swept the country and new laws, criminal syndicalism made its appearance . . . as a weapon to prosecute supposed subversives,” was not lost on readers living through a second, more virulent Red Scare.