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The Discovery of the Communist Movement
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ON THE strength of this speech, my husband was elected among the delegates to attend an interracial Seminar in North Carolina. Here for the first time he came in contact with white people who did not consider themselves the natural superiors of Negroes, or at least did not go out of their way to impress this feeling upon him. Here he met for the first time a Communist, a brilliant student of the the labor movement, and others determined to fight for full democratic rights for the southern people, black and white

From that summer of 1931 onward my husband read everything that he could find on the world's socialist movements. He discovered that Marx, a German, and Lenin, a Russian, had given hope to oppressed people everywhere by their scientific research and writings on the origins of poverty and tyranny and had pointed out the solution for these evils which had been plaguing mankind for generations.

Through the study of communism, my husband discovered that the Negro people have a powerful ally in the white workers and that it is to the self-interest of both to unite in common struggle. He discovered that the goal of the landlord, big-business combination is to strip the poor people of the South of all means of expressing their will for a better life through the use of the odious doctrine of "white supremacy" and "legal" and extra-legal terror. He could foresee the awakening of a tremendous vote movement in the South which would challenge the rule of those so long in the saddle. He found that the task of correct leadership was to fight for this unity of the Southern people - Negro and white workers - to weld it, and to win allies for them in the nation and throughout the world.

Others, with full conviction, have chosen different paths leading to Negro freedom. Some still say education alone will do the job.

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Others propose to reach equality through success in business. Some would place complete reliance upon court decisions. Some few still see no hope in the U.S.A. and turn their eyes wistfully to Africa as a "homeland."

Marxism taught my husband to seek the answer here in an alliance of the Negro people with white workers for immediate social gains and the eventual establishment of a social system in which economic exploitation and Jim Crow oppression would be profitable to no one and would cease to exist.

Youth Activities

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FROM the days of the Youth Seminar onward, Jack was more occupied with fighting for the rights of his people than with his classroom textbooks. Nevertheless, he graduated from college in less than the prescribed four years with an average assortment of grades. Though some of his professors ranked him as a superior student, he is better remembered by his classmates for his extracurricular activities; his organization of a ^[[underline]]Marxist Club[[/underline]] and the ^[[underline]]Proletarian Students Party[[/underline]] which won leadership of the student government and several of the various other campus organizations. They remember his leadership of the Cooperative Independents Club with its ambitious program "to train leaders for the deliverance of our people, through militant action, form every semblance of racial and class oppression." This group established contact with white students in nearby colleges and held a conference for the abolition of Jim Crow in education.

College Editor, Debater, Organizer

They recall his editorship of the students paper, "The Panther," with its militant editorials against war, for the freedom of the Scottsboro Boys, for academic freedom, and on other current issues. They remember him as an ardent speaker. They recall the time when he and a colleague debated a team from Lincoln University