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by Harry Haywood (Author), Rebecca Hall (Foreword by), Charisse Burden-Stelly (Introduction by)
A major work in the Black Communist tradition by worker-intellectual Harry Haywood, now in a new edition featuring a foreword by Dr. Rebecca Hall and an introduction by Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly.
In 1948, Harry Haywood, a leading member of the Communist Party USA, published Negro Liberation, a pathbreaking book that lays out his argument that the Black Belt South constitutes a distinct nation and an internal colony of U.S. imperialism. Applying a Marxist-Leninist lens to questions of nationalism, colonialism, and land distribution, Haywood lays out the dire stakes of Jim Crow violence and oppression and critiques the emptiness and insufficiency of liberal solutions. Along the way, he makes a powerful case for Black self-determination.
Framed by Rebecca Hall's moving meditation on her father's legacy and Charisse Burden-Stelly's clear-eyed case for how Haywood reveals the contradiction between ruling-class politics and Black liberation today, this new edition of Negro Liberation is a must-read for anyone fighting against oppression.
Author Biography
Harry Haywood (1898-1985) was a worker-intellectual. He studied at the Lenin School in Moscow, then returned to the United States in 1930 to become a leading member of the Communist Party of the United States.
Rebecca Hall, JD PhD, is an independent scholar, activist, and educator. She writes and publishes on the history of race, gender, law, and resistance as well as articles on climate justice and intersectional feminist theory. Her most recent book, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (Simon & Schuster, 2021) has won multiple awards, and was a finalist for the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards and the Pen America Open Book Award. Wake was listed as a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, the Washington Post, Forbes, and Ms. Magazine. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including a 2022-23 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellowship.
Charisse Burden-Stelly is associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. She is the author of Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States; coauthor of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History; and the coeditor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing and Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State, a collection of essays by Percy C. Hintzen.
