Justice  /  Book Review

“There Is a Scottsboro in Every Country”

A review of two new books that illuminate a range of still unrealized visions of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-racism.
Joseph Morris/ Flickr

When we speak about a future in which all black people in America can be free, it’s hard to picture how, exactly, that freedom might look. Many black communists in the 1930s visualized black autonomy within the United States as a place, with clear delineations between the lands of the free and of the unfree. In response to the demands of black workers’ associations and black nationalist alliances, the Communist International (Comintern) introduced, in 1928, a vision of black political power and black liberation called the “Black Belt”: a sovereign black nation within the southern United States. In its 1930 resolution, the Comintern explicitly endorsed this answer to the “Negro Question,” acknowledging the super-exploitation of black workers under Jim Crow and supporting the political self-determination—even the secession—of majority-black areas of the United States.

When communists of 1928 imagined a “Black Belt,” what, or who, or where did they have in mind? While the Black Belt was an ideological commitment to black self-determination, rather than a concrete plan of action, black communists of that era nevertheless created maps of the territory this nation would occupy in the US South. In one such map, a jagged crescent of dark ink scythes through the southern half of the United States, demarcating a territory that stretches from Maryland to Texas. As the news reminds us daily of the lack of spaces that are free of violence for all people—and particularly people of color—I was struck by the power of these images indicating where black liberation could reside, even as they remained rough renderings of an incomplete, improbable plan.

Where we gather to plan for freedom, and among whom we gather, can determine the shape and scale of our visions for the future. In today’s political discourse, “identity politics” are often dismissed as exclusionary, limited, and divisive grounds for political organizing. New books by Margaret Stevens and Anne Garland Mahler that look to the histories of the Communist International and the Tricontinental movement, respectively, provide an expansive vision of the work that organizing around color and region can do—one that configures black American freedom as part of a whole constellation of global struggles against oppression. Both books trace how national conversations about black freedom became international debates within the left that grew in tandem with multiracial workers’ movements.

Stevens’s Red International and the Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 19191939 and Mahler’s From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity each reshape assumed geographies of black liberation, with the goal of illuminating a range of still unrealized visions of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-racism.