Communist Racial Democracy, Black Recruitment, and Inter-American Solidarity: The Cases of the United States and Brazil in the 1930s

This paper analyzes how the U.S. and Brazilian branches of Comintern, the CPUSA and the PCB, respectively, deployed race-specific rhetoric in order to label the communist movement as democratic. The communists engaged the issues of race and racial (in)equality to deride the Brazilian and U.S. governments as un-democratic oppressors of the working class, while promoting communist regimes as the only true form of democracy for workers of all races. In other words, communists claimed that the Soviet Union was, quite literally, the sole genuine racial democracy on earth. We will see that a key explanation for this racialized language was the desire to bring working class blacks into the communist fold, in part by undermining other Brazilian and U.S. anti-racism organizations. Communists in the United States and Brazil also expressed solidarity with one another around the problem of racial persecution. Brazilian communists protested the imprisonment of the famous Scottsboro Boys, and communists in Harlem rallied against the jailing of political prisoners in Brazil. In the process, communists in both countries influenced the ways in which democracy was debated in racial terms during the first half of the 20^th century.