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“Nothing Special to Offer the Negro”: Revisiting the “‘Debsian View’ of the Negro Question”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

William P. Jones
William P. Jones
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Abstract

Since the early twentieth century Eugene V. Debs and his essay “The Negro in the Class Struggle” have been cited repeatedly as examples of an alleged indifference among white radicals to African Americans and the historical significance of racism in the United States. A close reading of the essay reveals just the opposite. Not only did Debs support African Americans' struggle for equality, he believed that it was critical to the realization of America's democratic promise. That position alienated him from other white Socialists, but it won the admiration of African American radicals including W.E.B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. This essay examines how Debs's essay came to be interpreted as a capitulation to racism and, over time, alleged indifference to African Americans and the significance of racism in the history of the United States.

Type
Classics Revisited
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 74 , Issue 1 , Fall 2008 , pp. 212 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2008

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References

Notes

2. Socialist and Communist are capitalized when referring to the parties or their members and not when referring to ideologies. Debs, Eugene V., “The Negro in the Class Struggle,” International Socialist Review (November 1903)Google Scholar, reprinted in Debs, Eugene V., Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs (New York, 1948), 63–66, quote on 63Google Scholar; Craig, Robert H., Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States (Philadelphia, 1992), 91–92Google Scholar; Roediger, David R., Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White, The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York 2005), 214Google Scholar; Lichtenstein, Nelson, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York, 1995), 371Google Scholar; Singh, Nikhil Pal, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, 2004), 25Google Scholar; Bates, Beth Tompkins, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: 2001), 37Google Scholar; Pfeffer, Paula F., A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge, 1990), 11Google Scholar. For similar interpretations of Debs see, among others, Sitkoff, Harvard, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade (New York, 1978), 20Google Scholar; Bush, Roderick D., We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York, 2000), 113Google ScholarPubMed; Foley, Barbara, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, NC, 1993), 173Google Scholar.

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