African American Independent Politics on the Left

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Notes

* In these elections Socialist candidate Frank Crosswaith had third party opposition from African American Communist candidate James Ford.

* In 1931 Frank Crosswaith ran for this State Legislative district and captured 511 votes for 3.8%.

** Up until 1938, elections for the State Legislative districts were for a single year at a time.

* Write–in votes.

1. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black and Conservative Political Movements,” The Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes Vol. 37 (October, 1969), 177–183. See also, Oscar Williams, Jr., “The Lonely Iconoclast: George Schuyler and the Civil Rights Movement,” in Gayle Tate & Lewis Randolph, eds., Dimensions of Black Conservatism in the United States (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 163–178; and George Schuyler, Black and Conservative (New York: Arlington House, 1966).

2. See Congressional Quarterly, Guide To U.S. Elections vol. 2, 4th Edition (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 2001), 1174.

3. Bruce Ransom, “Black Independent Electoral Politics in Philadelphia: The Election of Mayor W. Wilson Goode,” in Michael Preston, Lenneal Henderson, Jr., and Paul Puryear, eds., The New Black Politics 2nd Edition (New York: Longman, 1987), 256–289.

4. For an overview see Hanes Walton, Jr., The Negro in Third Party Politics (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1969), 61–74, and “Black Female Presidential Candidates: Bass, Mitchell, Chisholm, Wright, Reid, Davis and Fulani,” in Hanes Walton, Jr., ed., Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994), 251–273.

5. Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties (New York: Free Press, 1972) and Hardy Frye, Black Parties and Political Power: A Case Study (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980).

6. Steven Rosenstone, Roy Behr, and Edward Lazarus, Third Parties in America: Citizen Response to Major Party Failure(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 170.

7. “The Negro's Political Tactics, 1837” in Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of The Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1957), 174.

8. “Political Action Against Slavery, 1852,” ibid., 337.

9. Ibid.

10. “A Negro Emigration Convention, 1854,” ibid., 365.

11. “Negro Voters Endorse The Republican Ticket, 1856” ibid., 388.

12. Peter Clark, “Socialism: The Remedy For the Evils of Society,” in Philip Foner and Robert James Branham, eds., Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 584. See also Herbert Gutman, “Peter H. Clark: Pioneer Negro Socialist, 1877,” Journal of Negro Education Vol. 34 (Fall, 1965), 413–418; and Philip Foner, “Peter H. Clark: Pioneer Black Socialist,” Journal of Ethnic Studies vol. 5 (Fall, 1977), 17–35.

13. Adam Prezeworski and John Sprague, Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 1.

14. Ibid.

15. For the most recent examples see Philip Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977), 318–341, and Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 242–254. For older examples see Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), and his Race and Radicalism: The NAACP and the Communist Party in Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964); William Nolan, Communism Versus the Negro (Chicago: Regnery, 1951). See also Vaughn Bornet, “Historical Scholarship, Communism and the Negro,” Journal of Negro History Vol. 38 (July, 1952), 304–323.

16. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans, 339. See also Irwin Marcus, “Frank Crosswaith: Black Socialist, Labor Leader, & Reformer,” Negro History Bulletin Vol. 37 (August–September, 1974), 287.

17. See Frank Crosswaith, “The Negro Program of the Socialists,” Crisis Magazine (September, 1932), 279. For a list of articles and books where the error has been cited see, Marcus, p. 287; Walton, The Negro in Third Party Politics, 65.

18. Walton, The Negro in Third Party Politics, 61

19. Jeffrey Perry, ed., A Hubert Harrison Reader (Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 51–52.

20. David Levering Lewis, ed., W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 577–578.

21. Perry, 136.

22. Ibid.,142.

23. Hanes Walton, Jr., “Black Presidential Participation and the Critical Election Theory,” in Lorenzo Morris, ed., The Social and Political Implications of the 1984 Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign (New York: Praeger, 1990), 49–64.

24. Gerald Meyer, “American Labor Party, 1936–1956,” in Immanuel Ness and James Ciment, eds., The Encyclopedia of Third Parties in America Vol. 1 (New York: Sharpe Reference, 2000), 138.