Harry Haywood

Harry Haywood (February 6, 1898 – January 4, 1985), born Haywood Hall, Jr, was an American politician, military general and Marxist theoretician. One of the earliest activists of the Black communist movement, Haywood became a pioneer of the Black liberation struggle and the founding figure of the African National Congress.

During the Second American Civil War, Haywood emerged as the leader of Nat Turner Column which played a decisive role in the Red military campaign against the National Salvation Front forces in the Mississippi River valley, which was marked by fierce fighting and brutality on both sides. After the war, Haywood served as the commanding officer of the Deep South Military District, implementing the socialist reforms under the martial law administration.

The conflicting and uncompromising attitude of Haywood and his record as both general and politician remain controversial up to this day, with many white observers seeing him as a dogmatic zealot. The black communities, however, generally consider Haywood an unyielding champion of the black self-determination and often cite his actions combating the revolutionary excesses and obstructions of justice during the Civil War as the leading factors of ending of terror in the American South.

Early life
Harry Haywood was born Haywood Hall, Jr., on February 4, 1898, in South Omaha, Nebraska, to former slaves Harriet and Haywood Hall, from Missouri and West Tennessee, respectively. They had migrated to Omaha because of jobs with the railroads and meatpacking industry, as did numerous other southern blacks. South Omaha also attracted White immigrants, and ethnic Irish had established an early neighborhood there. Haywood was the youngest of three sons. In 1913 after their father was attacked by whites, the Hall family moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Two years later in 1915 they moved to Chicago, pursuing higher paying jobs in the war industry. Haywood's older brother Otto Hall was among the first black Americans to be drafted into a combat unit. When Haywood turned seventeen, the impetuous youth lied about his age and successfully enlisted into his older brother's regiment, the then 8th Illinois Regiment.

Service in the Great War
The 8th Illinois Regiment was one of the few combat units in the United States Army to be led by black officers at the time. Deployed to France initially under French command, it would be re-designated the 370th Infantry Regiment soon after Haywood arrived in France. Despite his relative youth, Haywood fought with distinction in France, and was very quickly identified for his natural leadership ability, charisma and studious nature. Haywood's political radicalisation progressed hand-in-hand with his advancement in the military, rising quickly in the ranks of the non-commissioned officers as he divided his time between reading Clausewitz's On War and Marxist literature. By the crescendo of the failed Nivelle Offensive in 1917, Haywood had risen to the rank of Company First Sergeant.

Following the promulgation of General Order 127, Hall was given a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant. Due to longstanding policy in the Army to prevent "mustang" officers from continuing to serve in the same units they had been enlisted men in, Haywood was selected as part of the cadre to form the 105th Infantry Division. Haywood become one of the first black officers in an integrated unit.

Haywood would endure no end of scorn from white officers and enlisted, with the mocking nickname "the black sheep" of the 422nd Regiment. Nevertheless, Haywood's own record of bravery as an enlisted soldier and his steady leadership earned him the respect and admiration of the men who served under his command. Compared to the hated pre-war officer class, mustang officers understood the realities of the war for the enlisted men dying by the thousands.

Following the October Revolution, Haywood joined a loose network of radicalised junior officers and NCOs in the National Army. This loose grouping, the Committee of Correspondence, passed around translations of State and Revolution and other socialist tracts. In spite of their reluctance to remain involved in the imperialist slaughter, these clandestine groupings agreed to bide their time for conditions to develop further, and to avoid defeatist actions. This strategy of infiltration was put to the test during the Kaiserschlacht offensive of 1918, where Haywood rose quickly to the position of acting battalion commander due to the enormous casualties his unit suffered in the direct path of Operation Michael. Haywood rose to the challenge and though he would be passed over for permanent command of the battalion, he earned a promotion to major in the National Army in October 1918.

Joining the Communist Party
During the post-war draw down of the US Army, Haywood's division was among the first to be deactivated, freeing him from the Rhineland occupation duty he despised. When presented with the option of promotion to major in the Regular Army in exchange for resigning his commission and entering the Reserve, Haywood took the offer. Haywood elected to remain in Europe for the time being, using contacts he'd made with local German communists to travel to the Ruhr, where he'd hoped to put his skills to more immediate use in the revolutionary situation developing in Germany. While he arrived too late to be of any use to the Ruhr Red Army fighting against the Kapp Putsch, his organizational skills and zeal were quickly noticed. Haywood would serve most of the rest of the year as a liaison between the American Socialist Labor Party and the Communist Party of Germany.

In October 1919, Haywood departed with a group of German and American delegates for Petrograd at the direction of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Based on his military service, Haywood was given a crash course on learning the Russian language that summer and fall, and would volunteer his services to the Red Army. His work was mostly notional, but he did play a roll in grooming communist infiltrators from among the American soldiers captured from the Allied Intervention forces.

Following the end of the Soviet Revolutionary Wars, Haywood would return to the United States, assuming his nom de guerre Harry Haywood. A member of the underground Communist Party of North America, the secret wing of the legal Workers' Party, Haywood would become active in the raising of the Spartacus League paramilitary. Haywood would begin actively writing on the "Negro question," advocating the formation of autonomous black majority republics in the United States during the revolutionary process. As the Comintern transitioned to the Second Period policy, Haywood moved to above ground work, working as a youth leader for the Pioneer League while writing a number of young adult adventure novels set in the Soviet Revolutionary Wars.

The Red May Revolution
During the factional conflict in the late 20s, Haywood aligned with his close friend and colleague William Z. Foster on the party's left flank. As the economy crashed, Haywood resumed his active roll in the Spartacus League, organising relief and resistance in Northern Illinois and Wisconsin to evictions and strikebreaking. Due to his military service in the Great War and Soviet Revolutionary Wars, Haywood was tapped as the main leader of the Chicago Revolutionary Military Soviet in Summer 1932. This shadow organisation, among others, was established by militants of the party's left in the secret Aurora Memorandum to prepare an emerging revolutionary situation.

During the MacArthur Putsch, Haywood took command of Spartacus League and volunteer forces to crush white uprisings across the industrial Midwest, and directed the overthrow and suppression of the state, city and county governments and liberal organisations. With the formation of the Red Army, Haywood became commanding general of the Nat Turner Column, a field army level command responsible for the defense of the provisional capital of Chicago. Haywood would command Red forces during the decisive Battle of Chicago, where he successfully defended the city against General George C. Marshall's Army of the Mississippi before taking the counteroffensive, crushing the White forces in a rapid double-envelopment and capturing Marshall. Following this turning point, Red forces would have the initiative in the Civil War.

Haywood would command the 1st Red Banner Army "Nat Turner" in Operation Freeman, the invasion of Deep South through the Mississippi River Valley. Backed by the full industrial might of the Midwest, and filled with new divisions raised from US Army reserve divisions, the 1st Red Banner Army swept aside the ad hoc and disorganised White resistance constituted from weakly supported National Guard unites and paramilitary volunteers. Haywood reached New Orleans on Christmas Eve 1933, extinguishing the last pockets of White armed resistance in the Midwest.