Max Yergan

by David Henry Anthony III

  In mid-August Yergan wrote Bunche telling him his comrade Louise Thompson Patterson of the International Workers’ Order had just set sail for “France, England, and perhaps other countries in Europe,” intending to attend a “Conference on Racial and anti-Semitic Affairs” in Paris in September. Max explained that he had told her to see Bunche in London after a visit to Spain, “for there are serious matters which she will also wish to discuss.”96

  By late August, Yergan and the ICAA had arranged a gathering at Manhattan’s International House featuring AAC leader D. D. T. Jabavu and ANC head A. B. Xuma. This meeting was scheduled for Tuesday, September 7, with Channing Tobias presiding and various Black and White dignitaries attending. The flier Max sent out a week in advance was a masterful piece of public relations, capably balancing drama and commitment:

  If Africa is not today in the headlines, it does not mean that life there has ceased to be full of tragic problems. There is a real sense in which Africa’s ills have become chronic. Italy in Ethiopia; France, Britain, Portugal and Belgium in the rest of Africa; Germany’s demands for colonies and the consideration given to these demands by the powers; the ruthless exploitation of the people and resources of Africa; repressive legislation of the most destructive type, and the growing poverty and misery of Africans—these are the facts of African life which constitute first-class headline material. Imperialism is still the menace, the wrecker of human welfare that it always has been and we must not lose sight of its fact and effect.97

  Writing on the eve of the conference, Yergan let Xuma know that Jabavu was to speak on the last ten or fifteen years of South African legislation, under the title “Africans and Modern Politics.” His next charge would be to put forward the claims of the AAC. Max then asked Xuma to expatiate on “The Basis of Repression in South Africa,” or a subject of his own choosing.98 He had had in mind Grondwetism99 and imperialism.

  Nearly six hundred audience members attended the International House forum. Each presenter followed Yergan’s plan. Thomas Jesse Jones of the Phelps Stokes Fund (with whom Max had had a lengthy and checkered history) took offense at the Black criticisms. The next day Jones dressed down Channing Tobias for his association with this event:

  It was inevitable that the American audience should be depressed by the completely discouraging outlook. Practically nothing was said to show that in South Africa there are white and Native people who have been working together, for the improvement of conditions and that progress has been made. The devoted and really heroic services of many white people for the Africans were never once mentioned. This left colored Americans, already acutely conscious of white injustices, still more deeply resentful toward white people. While I entirely understand the distrust of white people by colored people and emphatically regret the prejudices and injustices for which white people are responsible, I know that you share my conviction that many white people are sincerely devoted to the full development of colored people in every part of the world. What a tribute Dr. Jabavu, Dr. Xuma, and Mr. Yergan could have paid to the able and devoted missionaries from Europe and America who have labored faithfully and effectively for the Native people of South Africa. They could have told of the increasing concern of many British and Dutch people in the welfare and in the rights of the Native people. Despite the very unfair division of educational expenditures, Fort Hare Native College is probably the best college for Natives in all Africa, and the school system for Natives is constantly being enlarged and improved so that it now ranks above the school systems of other parts of Africa.100

  Jones’s criticisms notwithstanding (indeed, partly because of them, as he indicated to Dean Frank Wilson), Yergan pronounced the International House event a resounding success.101 This could cut both ways; Jones had shown himself to be someone not to be trifled with, but in that triumphal moment Yergan thought mostly of the palpable victory the ICAA had won.

  Yergan proceeded to plan for an appearance at Lincoln University later that fall.102 At this point in time he began to link the two great “Negro questions,” the problems of Africans and the problems of African-Americans, arguing that “indeed, it is because of the similarity between African and American problems and an historic relation be-tween Africa and America that millions of Americans are deeply interested in the African situation.”103 In what might easily be taken for a Pan-African progressive argument, Yergan makes the case for political parallelism:

  Whatever we may think about the larger issues of peace and war must, of necessity, include Africa and her millions of inhabitants. If we are interested in the industrial struggle in terms of the C.I.O.–A.F. of L.–employer set-up as known in America, we must be informed about the half million workers in the gold mines around Johannesburg, the thousands in the Rhodesian copper mines, and the millions at work on European-owned farms and plantations in Eastern, South Central and Southern Africa. We must know of the low wage levels maintained by industries that pay large profits, of the legal handicaps under which Africans strive to organize their labor, and of the disruptive forces at work in African society due to invasion from without. Repressive legislation, economic handicaps and lynchings, as these take place in Africa, have a familiar ring to Americans.

  Second NNC, Philadelphia, 1937

  On October 15–17, when Yergan was one month into teaching Negro History at City College, the NNC held a second congress at the Metropolitan Opera House in Philadelphia. Introduced there as associate to the national secretary, Yergan gave an address entitled “The Historical Struggle of the Negro People.” As in so many of Max’s projects, this one operated on multiple levels. He thus presented himself in three roles simultaneously: (1) as a leader in the NNC, whose position in its Harlem branch had enabled him to exert influence upon the national executive; (2) as cofounder and executive director of the ICAA, whose interests were both national and international; and (3) as a historian who was both teaching and seeking to make Negro history. There in the shadow of the Liberty Bell, Yergan and the assembled delegates celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. In a rousing speech spelling out the centrality and vitality of “Negro” activism, Max presented his leadership credentials.

  The National Negro Congress looks back over seventy-five years upon four million freed men. Today the Congress voices the deep needs of fifteen million workers for freedom. That span of three-quarters of a century is full of importance. It shows that Negroes were and are aware of the meaning of freedom; it reveals their determination to struggle for that freedom. In 1862 and 1865 Negroes had a share in the human forces which were on the march; today that share is larger; the role of the receiver, of beneficiary, has become less; the job of struggling for one’s self has increased, and that is as it should be.104

  At roughly this time, Yergan was making other friends as well. One was Louise Thompson, who by 1937 held national office in the International Workers’ Order (IWO), a fraternal society with sixteen different national groups designed to aid the laboring masses. Mention has already been made of a Yergan-Thompson meeting that occurred as she prepared to travel to Europe during August 1937. Because IWO national headquarters were located in Manhattan, Thompson occasionally traveled there from her Chicago base, where she undertook to fulfill the bulk of her district organizing duties. In the challenging circumstances facing these national groups, IWO locals served as homes, functioning as cultural centers while promoting solidarity. Occasionally, Thompson would run into Max, whom she and others found to be quite appealing, exuding personal magnetism. The striking picture Thompson paints of him reinforces several contemporary reminiscences:

  So, I would go in for [IWO] board meetings after I went to Chicago—come into New York for board meetings and I think it was during that time period—the Council [on African Affairs] was established in 1937—that I met Max Yergan. Now, it’s interesting, for, most of us, I guess, not only young women, but older women—we looked upon Max as like a saint. He was a very charming man. He did have a wa
y with women, and we all loved him. It was almost like he was a saint. He had this face, this [visage] that was, well, you know what I’m talking about? And we loved him. As a matter of fact, many people adored him.105

  Max wrote a foreword to Martha Millet’s edited IWO volume, Fight the Fifth Column.106

  Rapp-Coudert

  Yergan’s adjunct position at CCNY, while the source of both attention and praise, was also inherently unstable. As temporary faculty he and others always operated under threat of dismissal or replacement. As a politically vocal instructor he managed to bring attention both to himself and to the various causes he represented, but these features of his public life did not necessarily strengthen his position. At the same time, he regularly wrote and published articles in a variety of media, enough to satisfy the requirements of journalism. The problem arose, however, when he and other left-wing faculty members became the focus of attention from two conservative Albany, New York, lawmakers. Rapp and Coudert feared the increase of communist influence on school and university campuses as a threat to the security of the state and nation. They thus began a campaign to root out such activism by targeting the activists around which it tended to revolve. As the only African-American faculty member, Max Yergan had become a prime candidate.

  Since 1937 Yergan had been able to count on his CCNY position to enable him to test ideas in the classroom and enhance his stature through his university connection. Indeed, he had passed up other positions in higher education in order to enjoy the benefits of his CCNY connection. He had previously been encouraged to think about an administrative position in African education, and more than once his allies in the liberal philanthropic establishment suggested him for the position of president of a Negro college. The CCNY position seems to have trumped the others, even though it was not as secure as either of these alternatives. Taking the CCNY job was a calculated risk and the stakes were never clearer than they became in 1941 as the United States inched closer to war.

  A year earlier Rapp and Coudert had taken aim at campus radicalism, not merely at colleges and universities but across the board, including into elementary and secondary schools. Rooting out students as well as faculty, they sought to bring about a “clean sweep” of the institutions of higher learning, then worked backward toward their feeder schools. It would have been impossible for them not to have considered Yergan a worthy adversary.

  By 1941, Yergan had been informed that his contract to teach at City College would not be renewed. The public rationale for his nonreappointment was that he had made no distinctive contribution to scholarship in the field of Negro history. Within the campus Left, however, this was interpreted as part of the “purge of the profs” who were associated with the Communist Party. Even though Yergan was not formally charged as a Rapp-Coudert defendant, there was little question of his political alignments, making it difficult to separate his removal from the political circumstances pertaining under Rapp-Coudert. Yergan’s dismissal was covered in both the establishment and left press, and precipitated an extensive letter-writing campaign directed at the City College administration and officers of the New York Board of Higher Education. Over one hundred letters were sent on his behalf. This support puts him in a somewhat special relationship to Rapp-Coudert. Unlike Morris Schappes, who was indicted for perjury, and Foner, Goldway, and others, who were clearly targeted and terminated by action of the Rapp-Coudert committee, Yergan suffered what might be called “collateral damage.” Nonetheless, his fate should not be viewed as unrelated to that of his other more credentialed, more established left-wing colleagues. It was also an object lesson in the costs of taking stands on the Left, adding to his prestige within the progressive movement, on the one hand, while also raising fears within the intelligence community of his political radicalism and what it might portend. The letters were written by a mixture of former students and rank-and-file friends of Max Yergan and what he was taken to represent. They were generated by men and women of all educational, racial, and class backgrounds and indicate the way in which “the Dr.” was viewed both on and off the City College campus. But these letters could not save his position.

  Harlem Nocturne, 1942–1944

  Between 1942 and 1944 Yergan became one of the most familiar faces in Harlem. Fame, however, had a price and, when combined with outspokenness, dissent, or deviation from prevailing opinion, mainstream or governmental, especially in time of war, could be costly. At such times constitutional freedoms so often taken for granted might be imperiled. Max and his allies operated on their belief in the protections of the Bill of Rights; at the same time, the combined forces of government, the state, and its police arms viewed him with enmity.

  In late January 1942 Yergan held a Council on African Affairs (CAA) meeting; within weeks he set Robeson’s schedule for March and April appearances. On February 14, a new joint venture, the People’s Voice weekly newspaper, hit the stands in Harlem. Led by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., it was intended, according to the Baptist minister, to become “The Lenox Avenue edition of the Daily Worker.”107 Buoyed by black businessman Charles Buchanan, Powell’s foray into journalism was part of a larger strategy to broaden his base beyond Harlem’s limits. It was an idea to which Max would contribute, fiscally and conceptually. Starting in very gradually, virtually imperceptibly, behind the scenes, Yergan became more and more visible in the Voice, as an added name on its editorial masthead, as a face in the crowd of luminaries and speakers quoted in its pages, and, on occasion, as a columnist who penned opinion pieces and investigated an array of African subject areas. The People’s Voice stands as a definitive piece of material evidence of an iron-clad Powell-Yergan partnership, with consequences for both. It was a lightning rod. Four days following the first appearance of the People’s Voice, Yergan wrote Robeson upon returning from a brief respite spent at a Northfield, Massachusetts, hotel. Waiting for him upon his return were arrangements for a “large public meeting concerning Africa in the wake of the Singapore fiasco, and the present predicament of India.” Engaging the urgent issues, arguing that “two points were immediately apparent,” Max enumerated them as follows:

  First, the strategic military importance of Africa[,] since all shipping to the USSR and to the Far East must pass Dakar as well as the Cape of Good Hope at the Southern tip of Africa; and second, the defenceless condition of the African people. As is true in Britain with regard to the cause of allied defeat in the Far East the American people are more eagerly interested in the significance of Africa to the entire allied effort. As you already recognize the American public knows practically nothing about Africa, particularly the internal conditions.108

  Max believed that “the Council should hold a large public forum,” preferably in Manhattan Center “or some other place which will seat about 4,000–5,000 people.” He felt that Robeson could be one of two or three speakers. Robeson’s task, as Yergan saw it, drawing implicit analogies with the aggrieved masses of subject Singapore and embattled India, would be to “deal with the importance of the African people in the same sense that the Chinese and the Indian people are important,” adding that, “In this connexion we could stress the resolution passed at the Council meeting calling for the arming of the African people and extensive utilization of African resources.” Further, Max advised, another speaker could be PM editor Ralph Ingersoll, “who with the aid of large maps and stills portraying the strategic military importance of Africa could talk of the military importance of Africa to the whole cause of the United Nations.” This was a timely gambit. The Allies were just then advancing toward Northern and Eastern Africa. This attention to Africa encouraged a reminder to Robeson that “Africa is increasingly in the news.” For Max, due to the Council meeting and a press release to which it gave rise, as well as an assembly addressed by Frieda the prior Saturday, “it was clear that there is tremendous interest in Africa just now.” He felt they should derive maximum benefit from the situation. That same day, Max gave Robeson added insight into the United Spa
nish Aid benefit at the Commodore Hotel.109 Yergan also referred to Robeson’s “sound action” with respect to what he termed “the Kansas City matter,” about which he enclosed press clips. Yergan’s closing, almost an afterthought, told Robeson of cabling Stephen T. Early, secretary to President Roosevelt, requesting “an immediate appointment to confer on the larger aspect of ‘Negroes and the War.’ “ Again, Max’s rationale was implicitly Pan-African. He argued,