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The authorities did not move to "restore order,"
incidentally, until after Afrikan World War I vets broke
into the 8th Illinois Infantry Armory, and armed
themselves with rifles to take care of the white mobs. (45)
This was the vigorous "warm-up" for the steel
strike. It was not surprising that the Afrikan exile communities
were less than enthusiastic about supporting the
strike of the same people who had spent the past two years
attacking them. Given the history of the A.F.L. it was
possible that an outright triumph of the A.F.L. unions
might have meant renewed efforts to drive Afrikan labor
out of the mills altogether. It was typical settleristic thinking
to make Afrikans responsible for the failure of a white
strike, which was never theirs in the first place.
Both the strike leadership and the bourgeoisie
cleverly promoted this hatred, encouraging the European
immigrant and "native-born" settler alike to turn all their
anger and bitterness onto the Afrikan nation. Perhaps the
most interesting role was played by William Z. Foster, the
chief leader of the strike. He was one of the leading
"socialist" trade-unionists of the period, and in 1920
would become a leader in the new Communist Party USA.
From then on until his death he would be a leadinn - figure -
of settler "communism." Even today young recruits in the
CPUSA and Mao Zedong Thought organizations are
often told to "study" Foster's writings in order to learn
about labor organizing.
No longer was it just a question of some Afrikans
not following the orders of the white labor. Now Foster
was openly saying that the entire Afrikan "race" was the
enemy. Could the imperialists have asked for more, than
to have the leading "communist" trade-union leader help
them whip up the oppressor nation masses to repress the
Afrikan nation?
The Cossacks were the hated and feared special
military of the Russian Czar, used in bloody repressions
against the people. Only the most twisted, Klan-like mentality
would have so explicitly compared the oppressed
Afrikan nation to those infamous oppressors. And was
this message not an incitement to mob terror and
genocide? For the poor immigrants from Eastern Europe
(much of which was under the lash of Czarist tyranny) to
kill a Cossack was an act of justice, of retribution. The
threat was easy to read.
In case Afrikans didn't get Foster's threat (which
was also being delivered in the streets, as we know), Foster
made it even more plain. He said that if Afrikans failed to
obey the decisions of settler labor: "It would make our industrial
disputes take on more and more the character of
race wars, a consummation that would be hinhlv iniurious
William Z. Foster had, as the saying goes, "pulled
defeat out of the jaws of victory." Foster based the strike
on the A.F.L. unions, despite their proven record of
treachery and hostility towards the proletarian masses.
That alone guaranteed defeat. He encouraged white
supremacist feeling and thus united the honest elements
with the most reactionary. Despite the great popular support
for a nation-wide strike and the angry sentiments of
the most exploited steelworkers, Foster and the other
A.F.L. leaders so sabotaged the strike that it went down to
defeat. The one "smart" thing he did was to cover up his
opportunistic policies by following the capitalists in using
Afrikans as the scapegoats.
In his 1920 history of the strike, Foster (the supposed
"communist") repeated the lie that Afrikan workers
had "lined up with the bosses. " In fact, Foster even said
that in resolving the differences between Euro-Amerikan
and Afrikan labor "The negro has the more difficult part"
since the Afrikan worker was becoming ' a professional
strike-breaker. " And militant white workers knew what
they were supposed to do to a "professional strikebreaker."
Foster's lynch mob oratory was only restrained by
the formality expected of a Euro-Amerikan "communist"
leader. His white-supremacist message was identical to but
more politely clothed than the crude rants of the Ku Klux
Klan. He warned that the capitalists were grooming
Afrikans as "as race of strike-breakers, with whom to hold
the white workers in check; on much the same principle as
the Czars used the Cossacks to keep in subjugation the
balance of the Russian people. " It's easy to see how Foster
became such a popular leader among the settler workers.
During the 1919 race riots, a white mob chases a Negro into his homeand
then stones him to death with bricks. He is dead by the time the
police arrive.
74