Max Yergan
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Yet it could also be argued that the leadership stratum was fighting for itself as well. Both domestically and in the colonies, educated African-Americans and continental Africans held common aspirations. This was the cohort with which Yergan identified, the so-called school people within South Africa, West Africa’s “been-to” stratum, for example, Nigeria’s Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Gold Coast’s Kwame Nkrumah, and the Afro-Antillean agitator George Padmore. The question for many of these people was, how far would they continue struggling if and when they were able as individuals or as members of a rising class to secure social power? As long as this power was denied them by structural and customary racism, the issue was moot. This was clearly the case in racist South Africa, where long-standing patterns of legislative and customary exclusion steadily rendered majority representation a virtual impossibility. Yet, things were far more fluid in places like the Gold Coast, whose Nkrumah studied the example of India as well as of the USSR.
On the surface, therefore, for many internationally minded Blacks, there did not appear to be a great deal of difference between Du Bois’s theory of the “Talented Tenth” that he and his allies sought to apply in the United States and a colonial variation that then-subject populaces in Africa envisioned themselves implementing in a postimperial world. Internationalism was evident in the Pan-African movement, to which Du Bois, Padmore, and other like-minded globalist New World Black thinkers, including Yergan, were deeply committed. All saw their plight in diasporic terms, and their aspirations were revolutionary. However, granted personal success, how far would these revolutionists go? In fairness to them, and to their time, the answer to this question may not have been possible for them to foresee. If there was to be a “freedom train,” would all of its passengers get off at the same station?
This question was critical to understanding the fate of the international working-class movement of the interwar era, the fight for world socialism, and the personal and professional trajectory of the visible, vocal Max Yergan. It was what separated Karl Kautsky from V. I. Lenin in 1914 and Trotsky from Stalin a decade later, splitting off followers and putative partisans of the former from those of the latter, with Stalinists using democratic centralist state orthodoxy as a politburo proprietary preserve. If Yergan or others within his circle harbored doubts about the potential of a people’s democracy inside the Soviet Union and its fraternal parties, they kept them to themselves. Citizen Max was disciplined from 1936 to 1945; by 1945 the pose became hard to sustain.
The year 1945 saw Yergan preoccupied with domestic and international challenges. On the home front, jubilation over the outcome of the Second World War in Europe was marred by the sudden death of Franklin Roosevelt, which affected him deeply. Overseas, apart from the impending defeat of the Axis powers, his gaze fixed on the disposition of the colonial territories still under European hegemony. This explains his intense interest in the San Francisco United Nations Conference. South Africa remained high on his list of concerns. Though no longer formally a colony, it nursed subimperial ambitions toward Southwest Africa, the former League of Nations mandate taken from Germany at the close of World War One. South Africans were also struck hard by the Second World War. Its peoples, of every description, contributed courageously to the war effort in each one of its theaters.
Now the state had to confront unmet aspirations of African veterans, as well as postwar food shortages. One very hard-hit site was Middle-drift in the Eastern Cape. As Wulf Sachs lectured on the prospects for postwar South Africa, the council mounted a relief campaign during the first two months of 1946. Using Rev. Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist Church as a base, the CAA sponsored a star-studded rally on January 7, where an estimated four thousand audience members heard Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Hubert Delaney, and many others appearing for famine relief.161 By February the Council food drive reportedly sent one thousand dollars cash and fifty-two cases of food aboard the steamship Clan Mellwraith.162 CAA members and friends were incensed at the double standard allowing Africans to face starvation as food needed locally was diverted to European refugees.163
Amidst the Council’s Middledrift food drive, Winston Churchill visited the United States. On March 5, 1946, he delivered his famous “iron curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. In the short run, Yergan’s response was to note Churchill’s omission of the subject of the African famine.164 A week later he and Paul Robeson published a more formal response in a joint letter that included the following passage:
Mr Churchill proposed an alliance which is aimed at preserving the British imperialist system with the help of American troops. He castigated an ally, which only yesterday played a leading role in saving both Great Britain and our country from defeat by the forces of fascism. He deliberately omitted any reference to the widespread suppression by Great Britain of the struggle for freedom among the colonial and semi-colonial peoples of Africa, India, Indonesia and elsewhere. In these respects we regard Mr. Churchill’s speech as a call to war upon the USSR, and continued oppression of colonial peoples. We do not believe the American people will stand for it.165
Meanwhile, council officers continued speaking and organizing for the food drive. CAA educational director W. A. Hunton appeared at an “Africa Speaks” forum at Forest Neighborhood House in the Bronx, where he lectured on “Food in Africa.”166 CAA chair Paul Robeson, on a West Coast tour, addressed a Los Angeles mass meeting on the South African famine toward the end of March. By that time the CAA drive had forwarded eighteen hundred dollars and seventy-seven cases of cans to the African Food Fund in Cape Town for disbursement.167 As the food drive continued, Yergan also played a leading part in a “Help Organize the South!” rally sponsored by the People’s Voice,168 also managing to cable Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the British, French, and Soviet ambassadors, denouncing UN trusteeship.169 Meanwhile, doubts about the composition and intentions of Yergan’s links intensified. Though he still maintained access to the mainstream media, Yergan’s efforts were increasingly being tarred with a red brush. In June, for example, Yergan, Robeson, and other CAA members held a rally at Madison Square Garden attracting some fifteen thousand people. In its coverage of the event, the New York Times used the word “communist” three times, in each instance either directly or very soon afterward followed by the verb “controlled.”170
That same week, Max’s keynote at the tenth annual convention of the National Negro Congress drew fire from iconoclastic Pittsburgh Courier columnist George S. Schuyler, who, calling him a “noted Kremlin apologist,” went on to quote Yergan as saying, “from this point on we will drive for unity within the ranks of the Negro people.” Schuyler retorted,
Whenever Communists talk about unity they mean getting everybody else to follow the Stalinist line. Although the name of the organization implies that it consists of Negroes, Dr. Max emphasized that the Congress must no longer view itself as “merely a group of Negroes, since the advance of the trade union movement lies in the single organization of white and black labor.”
Holding that Yergan added that Black-White worker unity would not sacrifice Negro unity, the Courier editor caviled:
Translated from the Moscowese this means that with the war over and Russia saved, the NNC is going to drive for “capture” of all the Negroes and will use the support of white Reds to that end. Moreover, it means that a drive will be launched to wean the Negroes away from such organizations as the NAACP or to “capture” it and hitch it to the Kremlin chariot. This was the real purpose for which the NNC was organized, and its return to the old policy was anticipated by all those who are hep to the Communist jive.171
A fuller extract of Max’s speech came from another observer, Doxey Wilkerson. Noting the NNC’s foundation a decade earlier on the anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s birth, Yergan hailed the new force that had arisen among Black people. Of it he said, “We saw the potentialities of this development, and sought to hasten the integration of Negro workers into the trade union movemen
t.” Assessing its overall impact Max went on to say of the NNC,
For several years our main emphasis was helping the CIO and other unions to organize, especially in steel and auto. We are proud to take some credit for the growth of Negro-labor unity which makes possible this convention at which there are more outstanding Negro trade union leaders assembled than ever before in the history of our country.172
With the NNC’s help, labor stood in the vanguard of progressive action.
This thrust coincided with preparation of a petition on Negro American oppression to be delivered to the UN, and the continuation of the African food drive.173 The latter was met with a resolution from the African National Congress expressing “sincerest gratitude for assistance given by the Council on African Affairs in the recent distress in Ciskei.” The ANC cable also thanked CAA Chairman Robeson and Executive Director Yergan “for the great stand your council is taking on behalf of Africans who have implicit trust in your representation of their case in world councils which they themselves are barred from attending.”174 But this formal ANC endorsement of the CAA and its leadership in relieving Middledrift did not fully reflect the sentiments of all Black South Africans.
In the late summer of 1946, after a hiatus forced by the grave illness of his spouse, Dr. Du Bois resumed a vigorous, multivalent correspondence with Afro-Caribbean Pan-African intellectual and activist George Padmore. Assessing prospects for reinvigorating interest in Africa-related issues, Du Bois mentioned in passing the efforts of Yergan and the Council on African Affairs, especially its widely publicized effort to provide relief for the devastating famine in the Middledrift region of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.
Writing from Paris, the United Kingdom–based Padmore responded to Du Bois by portraying Max in a novel way, as the noted Pan-African theorist baldly stated,
In regard to Yergan, I do not know the man personally, but there are now quite a number of South African Negro doctors here in England, most of whom are in Manchester and Birmingham; and as they are connected with the Federation, I have had the opportunity of getting their opinion on Yergan. To say the least, it is very low. It would appear from what they assert that Yergan identified himself as much as possible with the white church community in South Africa (the YMCA) and treated the Africans, even the intellectuals at Fort Hare, the students and Professor (D. D.) Jabavu, with the greatest contempt. He was so disliked that it affected his work among the Africans and contributed to his having to leave South Africa. Whatever the truth of these assertions, his name undoubtedly stinks among the South Africans in Britain. No doubt his present efforts constitute an attempt to redress his lost status, but he seemed to have had a warm welcome when he originally went out. No doubt, too, he has contacts with the Communist Party in South Africa and that gives a link with the communists in this African Council, but I am afraid that it will take more than a few food boxes to make this man Max Yergan persona grata with the African intellectuals. However, that should not prevent us from collaborating with them as far as possible.175
Padmore is somewhat disingenuous here; although never a familiar, he did know Yergan, having met him in 1937 at the London flat of Ralph and Ruth Bunche during a European trip undertaken while what was then the International Committee on African Affairs was in its formative stages.176 Much more damaging was the credence Padmore gave to the low esteem in which Max was now allegedly held by expatriate Black South African doctors practicing and studying in the United Kingdom. The supercilious air Padmore attributed to Yergan is corroborated by other acquaintances. One, Phyllis Ntantala, an ex-student at Fort Hare, where the Yergans lived and labored for fifteen taxing years, shared this pointed recollection: “Why did America send Yergan there? He was distant. America had sent Yergan out to show white South Africans how well a black man could live; to show that he could live as well as a white South African.”177 Whether or not Max was aware of them, such musings were auguries of things to come. Taken together, they suggest an alarming discrepancy between the way Yergan saw himself in relation to the South African freedom struggle and the way its vanguard forces viewed him. They also cast light upon his efforts to seek reconciliation with former benefactors. This reflects a level of cognitive dissonance that became even more evident during the course of 1947.
Max’s domestic profile in 1946 pivoted around the NNC June 6 UN petition and various campaigns to increase voter participation in the Jim Crow South. In July he had sought to enlist aid from Black leaders in the prior effort, including mainstream notables like Mary McLeod Bethune, whose petition response was judicious. Acknowledging receipt and promising board consideration of the petition,178 she later wrote,
I am not fully certain about the call for investigation by the UN into the plight of the 13 million Negro citizens here in America. Certainly, from all our discussions we are thoroughly in accord with the necessity for the removal of segregation and injustice of all kinds; but there is a question in our minds as to whether the approach to the existing conditions here in our own US should come through the UN, whose problems for consideration are international rather than national. I have wanted very much to have a full discussion with you on this point in order to have my own thinking straightened.179
In the late fall, the CAA sponsored a visit by ANC leader Alfred Bitini Xuma, an old Yergan acquaintance and sometime correspondent. Yergan, previously ANC external affairs secretary, had through the CAA maintained a close watch on South Africa’s plans to annex former German-ruled Southwest Africa, formerly a League of Nations mandate and now one of the proposed Trust Territories. The outspoken Xuma voice his opinion:
When I was asked by authorities to keep quiet on South African affairs prior to coming to the US I answered them that I would keep quiet if I were dead! I do not think that South Africa should be allowed to annex South West Africa, or any other territory. She does not know how to treat the subjects over which she has control. I will do everything in my power to let the UN committee know the feelings of the people of South West Africa. They do not want South Africa to annex them. The UN should take over the territory as a trusteeship.180
Looking to India for inspiration, the Council kept close counsel with Nehru, along with his U.S.-based representatives and roving ambassadors, such as his sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was in regular contact with Robeson and Yergan in 1946. She appeared at a fall CAA rally protesting South Africa irredentism in Southwest Africa along with Xuma, his countrymen H. A. Naidoo and Senator H. M. Basner, the fiery V. K. Krishna Menon, and Frank Anthony, UN delegate and leader of India’s Anglo-India community.181
Matters came to a head between 1947 and 1948. In late January 1947, Yergan mysteriously failed to show up at an important NNC gathering in Detroit, ostensibly because of inclement weather.182 On Monday, January 26, 1947, Trinidad-born Claudia Jones,183 a high-profile Communist was arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service on a deportation warrant and later released on one thousand dollars’ bail. Communist Harlem Councilman Ben J. Davis called a press conference charging the Justice Department together with the INS with seeking to “make newspaper headlines by intimidating people who hold certain beliefs.”184 The arrest had far-reaching implications, not least for Yergan, who knew Jones well, but also for foreign-born Communists and sympathizers, especially other West Indians.185 It also spurred defections from the National Negro Congress and other organizations that the Justice Department characterized as Communist controlled. A high-level example was that of National Negro Congress legislative secretary Dorothy Kelso Funn, who abruptly resigned from the NNC staff in February 12, ostensibly to return to work as a New York City school teacher the next day. On its face Funn’s exit seemed a straightforward matter:
It is with deep regret that I leave the staff of the Congress. This resignation affects in no way my conviction that the Congress has a very important role to play in the struggle for Negro liberation; that the Congress must be built on the basis of its very correct program. I am no
t resigning from the National Board nor giving up the important task of reconstituting the Brooklyn Council of the Congress. In fact the invaluable experience received in my three years’ association with the organization and its devoted officers will help immeasurably in the tasks that present themselves to the Brooklyn Council.186
But this was by no means Dorothy Funn’s last word about the National Negro Congress.
By March, Labor Secretary Lewis B. Schwellenbach proposed outlawing the Communist Party. Again this prompted swift reaction from communist councilman Vito Marcantonio and left activists Charles A. Petioni, Adam Powell, Gene Connolly, NNC official Revels Cayton, and Yergan.187 The following month the full NNC directorate called “a special meeting of all Eastern seaboard members of the National Board of the National Negro Congress together with local leaders,” to be held inside Max’s office on Saturday, April 26, 1947, at 2:00 a.m. In detailing the need for a summit, President Yergan reflected how deeply tests of patriotism had struck at America’s core as he reported,
At a recent emergency meeting of the Executive Committee of the Congress it was agreed that we should launch an intensive campaign against Executive Order 9835 on Loyalty Dismissals. This latest move on the part of the President is another step in the campaign to further limit the civil rights of government employees, and strikes at the very heart of all progressive activity in the country. Nearly 2/3 of our entire Washington Council membership will be directly affected by this Order if it is carried out in its present form, and ultimately our organization and all true fighters for democracy will be affected adversely. We must act quickly and effectively. We are aware that our Board has many persons in it, but we are asking you to make a very special effort to let nothing interfere with your attendance at this important meeting.188