Council on African Affairs, 1941–1948
From 1941 to 1948 what initially had started out as the International Committee on African Affairs was transformed into the Council on African Affairs. Among the persons closest to Yergan during this time was stenographer Frieda Neugebauer, who continued to handle his daily correspondence in both the CAA and the NNC, though not always alone. Between 1942 and 1943 Max’s profile grew considerably, aided significantly by Frieda, operating both within and beyond each office, organizing media and travel appearances.
Although there had been losses, there were also significant gains, not always from active participation but from the standpoint of name recognition on the CAA’s masthead. From its inception in 1941 this successor to the ICAA boasted such luminaries as Franz Boas (until his death a year later); sociologist and author of Black Bourgeoisie, Dr. Edward Franklin Frazier; record producer John Hammond; and educator Mary McLeod Bethune. While Yergan’s travels were as a rule neither as extensive nor as frequent as Robeson’s, there were times when the two had overlapping speaking schedules, including tours in the United States and, in at least one case, in 1944, a major junket conducted within Canada.
After a regular CAA January meeting, Yergan and Robeson set off to tour the far North. In early February Yergan spoke from Toronto on the CBC’s Trans-Canada network on “The Atlantic Charter and the Colonial People in Africa.” In remarks relayed by the NNC print organ he said,
Within the framework of the Atlantic Charter there exists today the realistic possibility—indeed, the necessity for carrying forward a broadly-conceived plan for meeting the education and health needs, providing the economic development, and insuring speedy advancement toward complete responsible self-government for the African people.135
That month he invited Eleanor Roosevelt to a Robeson testimonial.136 Back from Canada in March Max met for two hours with State Department chief of African affairs, Henry S. Villard, on lend-lease, Ethiopia, Liberia, jurisdictional and territorial problems, Africa’s place in the postwar planning, world security, and Negro personnel and public relations in the department. Accompanied by CAA members Edith Field and Alphaeus Hunton, the delegation met Villard and assistant Charles W. Lewis.137
In mid-April the council held a widely publicized conference on Africa. Clark M. Eichelberger, director of the League of Nations association since 1934, asked Ralph Bunche’s opinion of the conference and its sponsors, receiving a detailed critical reply:
The Council followed the party line during the days of the Stalin-Hitler Pact and switched back when Hitler invaded Russia. It wasn’t very active, however, and little was heard of it until about a year and a half ago when it started sponsoring meetings. Paul Robeson is used primarily as the “big name” to attract attention; Yergan is the Council. Hunton, who has been a consistent fellow-traveler if not a party member at Howard for years, and who knows absolutely nothing about Africa, was taken on as Educational Director about a year ago. Edith Field, the Treasurer, is the wife of Fred Field, formerly of the IPR, and follows Fred’s line, which is strongly partyish.138
Giving Eichelberger Yergan’s CAA history, Bunche indicated that the conference might be interesting but warned him not to be drawn in by Max, calling him “a very clever article.”
The timing and subject matter of the conference on Africa attracted dignitaries galore, including Francis Nwia-Kofi Nkrumah (later known as Kwame); Ibango Udo Akpabio, president, African Students Association; Mary McLeod Bethune; Joseph Chamberlain, Columbia University professor; National Maritime Union president Joseph Curran; Ray-ford W. Logan; J. M. Obermeier, president, Local 6, Hotel and Club Union, AFL; Cecilia Cabaniss Saunders, executive secretary, Harlem Branch Y; Bishop David H. Simms; and Dr. Henry Sigerist of Johns Hopkins University. Convened to discuss compulsory labor, the industrial color bar, wages and working conditions, mechanization, and the disposition of ex-Italian territories, among other topics, the meeting was well publicized.139 Max’s timely analytical essay, “The Future of Africa,” appeared scarcely a week later.140
Both the conference and the writings that framed it made the point that it was time for Africa and Africans to be viewed differently, as economic actors in their own right deserving of dwelling in a world that transcended the nations of superior and inferior races, a world that could come in the postimperial, postcolonial, postwar world. At the conference in particular Yergan proposed an international agency to supervise and improve all colonial territories. Max then involved himself in planning an NNC “I am an American Day,” helping out in the organization of a National Council of Negro Women testimonial for Mary McLeod Bethune, publicizing his African Affairs observations, and urging FDR’s reelection.141
Vox Populi, 1945–1947
Yergan played a very important role within the People’s Voice from 1945–1947. In a position of power facilitated by his association with Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., he gradually became one of the power brokers behind the popular newspaper. Yergan having been scrutinized by the FBI since PV’s inception, his links to the tabloid had been noted in his dossier, along with his Daily Worker photos and columns, NNC letters to the president, personal telephone conversation logs, and, occasionally, even detailed summaries of his movements.
PV had played a major role in publicizing Council on African Affairs campaigns, including a later controversial effort to relieve South Africa’s Middledrift drought in 1943. A key to Yergan’s evolution lay in events that took shape during 1945. This was when he intuited that things had begun to change, though if others noted it they did so in whispers. As the year opened, Max maintained his profile as president of the NNC and executive director of the Council on African Affairs. Advocating maximal postwar economic inclusion, the NNC sponsored a Reconversion and Full Employment meeting devoted to predicting problems facing African-Americans after demobilization. The conclave followed a War Manpower Commission report presaging that peacetime production conversion, seniority, and veteran preferences would all be bad for Black labor in a postwar world.142
Although this major NNC campaign took up considerable space in the People’s Voice, references to President Yergan, frequent occurrences whenever the Congress was mentioned, were now strangely lacking for most of January and February, when the NNC National Board met, declaring unity in action among Negro groups its dominant theme for 1945.143 But by February 27, at least part of the reason for his omission was made clear. On that date news broke of his divorce from Susie Wiseman, his spouse since 1920.144 Together they had had three sons and a daughter, all but the first born while the Yergans were domiciled in South Africa. Upon returning to North America in 1936, however, the couple had become estranged. Yet it was not until nine years later that their contract was formally dissolved. A fortnight later, People’s Voice announced the schism.145
The end of any marriage is always some kind of milestone, as the failed union had become a millstone. It was preoccupations with personal matters that tore Max’s attention away from both the NNC and the Council on African Affairs. Those close to him knew he had been seeing a New York physician, Lena Halpern, a socialite who was said to have once had a radical background. In the short run, Yergan’s public appearances and pronouncements appeared much as they had in the past. But then, the week after he and Adam Clayton Powell addressed an April 6 NAACP conference on colonial problems chaired by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois and held at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library,146 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died suddenly. In his official capacity as NNC President, Max hastened to cable the new chief executive:
In this hour of great responsibility you have our complete confidence, and we shall continue doing our part for the achievement of the great goals to which our country and its allies are committed.147
Max eulogized the beloved New Dealer in the next issue of the People’s Voice.148 Close on the heels of FDR’s passing, Yergan was in San Francisco for the opening of the World Security Conference out of which the United N
ations organization sprang. Max had struggled to obtain observer status, attempting to secure credentials through the offices of Ralph J. Bunche, whom he had once tried to recruit for the Council on African Affairs. Bunche, however, had other ideas. Not wanting to seem intimately associated with a man widely known as a friend of the Communist Party, Bunche gave Max the cold shoulder. Incensed at this rebuff, Yergan revealed as much to their mutual acquaintance, Archibald Macleish. The terms used to communicate his displeasure with his onetime acquaintance proved intemperate. Neither Macleish nor Bunche kept silent about Yergan’s remarks, as indicated by this telling report of their interviews with him, which turned up at the FBI’s Washington office:
Max Yergan has had a number of discussions with ARCHIBALD MACLEISH of the US State Department on the Council [on African Affairs]’s program, and has expressed confidence of being successful in gaining the support of RALPH BUNCHE, Division of Dependent Areas, US State Department, of whom he said, “He knows we can do a job on him any time we like. He also knows we are not subservient to the State Department.” Yergan, according to a confidential source has also conferred at length with Liberian and Haitian delegates and representatives of negro pressure groups in respect to the colonial problem.149
Within the preceding year, Max’s FBI file had grown considerably, prompting Bureau director J. Edgar Hoover to order installation of technical surveillance devices, i.e., wiretaps, in his work site and residence. It is unclear but highly unlikely that Yergan was alive to this.150 The flippant quip from Jonathan Daniels to a White House colleague overstating Max’s status as a high-ranking Negro “red” surely did not help matters any. Taking care to send back regular reports about the activities of himself and CAA leaders W. Alphaeus Hunton, Du Bois, and Robeson, Yergan kept his name before the People’s Voice audience. All the while his dossier remained high in the minds of spywatchers in the intelligence community. They traced his interpersonal encounters, the dissolution of his marriage, his travels, public or private utterances, and actions, scrutinizing all of his moves. Without fully knowing it, he had reverted to the position he had had in South Africa.
Max was concerned to stress the linkage between the domestic needs of Negroes and the international triumph over fascism. He also retained his concern for Africans and other colonized peoples. In this regard his concerns were not very distant from those of Dr. Du Bois. Yergan still saw the needs of both colonized Africans and American ethnic groups as benefiting from the alliance that had won the war in Europe. In May he wrote,
We won this war through the unity of all the progressive forces of America in support of the Anglo-Soviet-American coalition which alone made victory possible. That same unity—among the democratic peoples of America, and between our country and our powerful allies—can secure in peace the goals for which we fought this people’s war. As a necessary force in the coalition of national unity to win the war, the Negro people have made great strides toward freedom. As a still necessary force in the even broader coalition of national unity to win the peace, we shall consolidate and extend our wartime gains until full democratic rights have been attained.151
In his estimation of the world situation, Max still followed the Soviet Union’s lead. This was especially evident in relation to plans being forged for United Nations trusteeship. Such a prospect, aimed at updating the late League of Nations mandate system, was being considered for territories previously under German control just prior to World War One, and subsequently administered informally by Allied powers like Britain. Yergan saw this plan as containing certain pitfalls, in mid-May 1945 admonishing that “the central issues involved in the American proposals for international trusteeship over colonial territories are being obscured by the dangerous emphasis being placed upon the protection of national interests, military or economic, as opposed to collective security.” To strengthen his point, Max praised a statement made by Soviet foreign minister V. M. Molotov as indicating more genuine understanding of the colonial trusteeship problem.152
Yergan continued to push this line through May and June. During the week of May 11, 1945, while delivering a self-government speech for Chicago’s branch of the Council, he said cautiously that while the world conference proposals on dependent territories did not go far enough, they formed a basis for real progress for colonial peoples. Stressing constant vigilance, he said of the California United Nations conference, “Out of San Francisco will also come the organizational machinery backed by agreement and power which will enable peace-loving peoples to proceed along the paths to be charted in San Francisco.”153 He followed this up with a telegram to leaders in San Francisco criticizing Britain’s trusteeship plan:
We regard the British proposal for regional commissions for international cooperation as a departure from principles already projected for the world charter in that there is deliberate exclusion of independence for colonial peoples as one of the commission’s objectives.… Regional commissions which evade the goal of self-government will be regarded by colonial peoples as instruments of foreign domination.154
Late in June 1945, Max joined a National Conference of Negro Leaders called by Mary McLeod Bethune. Representing the NNC, Yergan sat on two committees, one on Colonial Problems chaired by Ray-ford Logan, with Walter White, Wyatt Dougherty, and Eunice Hunton Carter, and a Drafting Committee, led by William Hastie, with George L. P. Weaver, Rayford Logan, Doxey Wilkerson, Charles Browning, Estelle M. Riddle, R. O’Hara Lanier, and Ted Poston. Channing Tobias convened the assembly.155
The following month, however, a dramatic event occurred. French Communist Party head Jacques Duclos, widely believed to be acting upon Stalin’s orders, sent an open letter criticizing Earl Browder, his U.S. counterpart and a close Yergan acquaintance. Browder was purged from the Party’s leadership, and the war-era Communist Political Association was reconstituted as the Communist Party, USA. William Z. Foster replaced Browder. This change of line and personnel exacerbated extant tensions within the NNC. Overtly this was difficult to detect, but Max was slightly modifying his stance. Yergan had felt good about Browder, and his ouster undoubtedly stung him. By August, he was exulting in the victory of the British Labor Party, arguing that this win far surpassed in significance a North American change from Republican to Democratic administrations; for him it was tantamount to a scenario in which “true liberals” in the southern states, in alliance with Negroes, turned out the plunderers who had misruled those states. This was its import:
1. Since slave trade days Great Britain has plundered, robbed and oppressed Africa, the West Indies and other colonial areas; now decency has a chance;
2. A Labor Party win may presage colonial independence; though not yet anti-imperialist, Labor is moving in that direction, stripping British robber barons of their might.…
3. A Labor victory can serve to reopen quickly and correct the highly unsatisfactory action of the San Francisco conference on the rights of colonial people.
We here in America must now raise our voices more loudly against this one outstanding failure at San Francisco. We must demand of our own government, the Truman administration, that it reverse the denial of freedom for colonial people of which the American delegation at San Francisco was guilty. The action of the British people in their recent elections should inspire us in this task.156
Yergan followed this editorial with a six-point program that he sent to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and to Edward R. Stettinius, the U.S. representative to the United Nations (both southern-born). A copy of this document was printed in full in the September issue of the CAA organ, New Africa. Among its principal aims were that Eritrea be restored to Ethiopia and that Libya and Italian Somaliland be placed under the administration of an international commission representing the major powers, including the USSR or the UN. Moreover, the Council opposed annexation of existing mandatories in Africa, urging that these be brought immediately under the UN Trusteeship Council’s jurisdiction. The CAA proposed similar sanctions for Portuguese
and Spanish overseas possessions in Africa on the grounds that as fascist regimes these nations had no more right to hold colonies than Germany or Japan. The CAA also pushed for the UN to promote the economic and political rights of colonial Africans and to draw up five- to ten-year programs leading to self-government and independence within a specified period.157 The Council sought to interest others within its orbit, such as noted sociologist and radical Democrat E. Franklin Frazier, in supporting these proposals.158 At year’s end, Max remained highly visible in the CAA, aiding Johannesburg psychiatrist Wulf Sachs, author and editor of an antifascist periodical, The Democrat, in his U.S. tour in the late fall. The Council lauded Sachs’s work as an advocate for the extension of democracy and equal rights to the African and other non-European populations of South Africa.159 Yergan stayed on as NNC president, piloting a December Detroit banquet.160 But all was not well.
Through the course of 1945, Yergan clung cautiously to the boundaries of left-liberal thought, in both domestic and international issues. Among the latter, his arena of expertise remained African affairs. In the same way that the National Negro Congress contemplated the complexion of the post–World War Two Black American situation, Max, Du Bois, Robeson, Hunton, and his other CAA colleagues considered the future of Africa in the postwar epoch. Prominent in this connection was the disposition of colonialism itself, specifically, how racism might affect democratic rights, or, as Du Bois put it in the title of one of his books, articulation among “Color and Democracy, Colonies and Peace.”
Tie-ins between these national and international racial matters were logical for that set of persons of African descent who had come to maturity in an era of racialized thinking. These “race men (and women)” had become the leadership stratum of the early twentieth century. Privileging race gained further impetus by colonial expansion, as reflected in the Garvey movement of the World War One period and thereafter. It was rejuvenated by fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, and Japanese imperialism. To counter these associations, leftists posited explicit links between race and antifascism, as Jim Crow and anti-Semitism became hot-button issues on both sides of the Atlantic during the Second World War. Politicized African-Americans, alive to the contradiction inherent in risking their lives overseas for rights denied them at home, pledged to fight a two-front war.
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