The Communist Party: The Black Panther Party

The Communist Party continued, even after splits and defections left it much smaller, into the 1960s. The parties’ fortunes appeared to revive for a while 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 's abandonment of militant Black struggle went hand in hand with its support for Roosevelt, its accommodation to liberalism, and its turn away

Even so, persecution on blacks became more frequent and widespread than before. One such period followed the First World War, which had raised the hopes of some 360,000 Blacks who had entered military service and had migrated North in search of higher paying jobs in the war industries. After the war, instead of having their hopes for a better life met, Blacks were met with violent racist reaction. It was the norm for Blacks to come across “racial persecution, lynchings, murders, inequalities and general scorn” (45). In addition to race riots in the North. Blacks were pushed out of the better jobs they had held in wartime and were systematically excluded from the unions. Many people from all over the country were angry only with the terrible economic plight of African Americans but also with the fact that the racism on which the Western World was built dominates their lives. Nonetheless, a lack of post-World War I political alternatives made communism as presented by the soviets particularly attractive to African Americans (35) Many African Americans were encouraged by this idea of an alternative, racism-free society to forsake the barriers of the color line (98)” Therefore, many felt that there could be no separation of the problem of racism from the problems of the economic, political and cultural degradation of that

World War I had profound implications for the development of a radical black ethnic consciousness amongst African American intellectuals. As Black intellectuals became increasingly aware that the principle of national self-determination did not apply to them, the underlying imperialism of the League of Nations became more and more apparent. Lenin 's internationalist theories of revolution also traveled quickly to the United States. Black radicals in Harlem who had taken up the banner of self-determination used internationalism and revolution to modify and transform Black Nationalist ideologies. It was in this context that the ideas of Marcus Garvey struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of