◆ SpookStack

What they demand is that any man who admits tg being a member of the Communist Party be fired im. mediately on the grounds that no man can be loyal to the United States and be a Communist. it is my belief that it is precisely at this point that we take our stand and defend the right of any Communin to maintain bis position as an employee of the Gover. ment of the United States. To take any less Position than this is to throw overboard such primary rights as the freedom to think and to hold whatever beliefs one chooses. (Hearings, p. 107; emphasis added) Anyone holding Aubrey Williams’ views on the em. ployment of admitted Communist Party members in the U. S. Government could be expected to welcome the aid of Communist Party members in the drive for integra. tion. Aceerding to Abner W. Berry’s account of the High lander Folk School seminar in the Daily Worker (Sepn. 10, 1957, p. 5) Aubrey Williams spoke “prophetically" when he declared that the present situation in the South “is only a short step to general violence” and that the “stuff out of which rebellions are made is definitely being planted.” in the later years of its existence, Aubrey Williams was president ef the Southern Conference for Warns we Rade micrengee ior mnuinag Welfare. The name of Aubrey Williams was attached to a brief amici curiae on behalf of the Communist Party, at the October 1955 Term of the U. S. Supreme Court. Other red-hot integrationists whose names appear on this defense of the Communist Party include the fol- lowing: John M. Coe, James A. Dombrowski, W. E. B. DuBois, James W. Ford, W. A. Hunton, and William L. Patterson. Aubrey Williams is, and has been for many years, a member of the executive committee of the Highlander - Folk School. It would be superfluous to add further details of the many Communist affiliations of Aubrey Williams. Martin Luther King The Rev. Martin Luther King, president of the Montgomery (Ala.) Improvement Association and pas- tor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, delivered the closing address at the Highlander Folk School seminar. King is the nationally acclaimed Negro leader of the iicgialion forces in the South. He is scheduled as one foe foooieild op.akers at the forthcoming assembly of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the Ll. S. A., in December. It is of great significance that King is in close touch with such Communists and pro-Communists as were assembled at the Highlander Folk School seminar. The Communists would like nothing better than to take him under their wing. | | . Leading Communists have been writing enthusias- ueally about King’s movement. In the April, 1957, isaue of Political Affairs, Benjamin J. Davis writes of “the pational upsurge Of the Negroes in the South, spear- beaded by the non-violent integration movement.” (p. 13) Jn his new book entitled Toward Negro Freedom, the editor of Political Affairs, Herbert Aptheker, writes of King’s bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, as fol- bows: And in Montgomery, Alabama, there is the epic struggle of the entire 50,000 members of its Negro community .. . Here, with women in the lead, is the unparalleled and unbreakable splendor of an entire people speaking out to the world in tones of purity and self-sacrifice and saying: “We will live in free- dom, in our own day and here in our own city.” {p. 180) Such rhetoric is calculated to ingratiate the Com- munists with the Rev. Martin Luther King and his large following. The art of flattery is the current tactic of Communist penetration. The tactical crudities of the Party's early years have given way to subtle refinements in pevetrating Negro organizations and movements. The Communist Party, however, does not repudiate its former methods which breathed revolutionary fire and brimstone. Writing in Political Affairs, James E. Jack- sen (one of the top Negro leaders of the Communist Party) says: It has for three decades been the honorable (sic) task of Communists to set a high standard of devo- tion to and energetic leadership in the fight for Negro lights. Recognizing the special national character of this question, we have raised our voices among the workers when others stood mute. (Resolution pre- seated to the 16th National Convention of the CPUSA by James EB. Jackson, chairman of the Sub- committee on Negro Rights; Political Affairs, March, 1957, p. 34), Jackson thus fondly embraces the Communist Party’s tecord in the African Blood Brotherhood, the American Negro Labor Congress, the League of Struggle for Ne- gro Rights, the National Negro Congress, and other misadventures in its efforts to kindle revolutionary ardor among American Negroes. Now, the Party looks upon Martin Luther King’s work and movement as a new opportunity to incite racial animosity, and upon King’s attendance at the Highlander Folk School seminar as a most desirable contact. In its present adulation of Martin Luther King and his kind of “liberation” movement, the Communist Party still bows reverently at the altar of Marxist- Leninist Theory. James E. Jackson, quoted above on 23