Henry Winston

Henry M. Winston (April 2, 1911 – December 13, 1986) was an African-American political leader and Marxist civil rights activist.

Winston, committed to equal rights and communism, was an advocate of civil rights for African Americans decades before the idea of racial equality emerged as a mainstream current of American political thought.

Winston was left permanently blind as a result of being denied medical treatment by the US Government while he was imprisoned for his communist beliefs.

He was born on April 2, 1911, to Joseph and Lucille Winston in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Henry grew up there and in Kansas City, Missouri.

The economic situation of the poor Winston family was troubling enough to force Henry to leave high school early.

Though once again unemployed after the start of the Great Depression, Winston's organizational skills and intellect came to the fore when he took a position with the Kansas City Unemployed Council at 19.

An early member of the Communist Party USA, Winston was elected to the party's National Board in 1936, serving as Chairman of the CPUSA from 1966 to 1986.

By 1936, Winston was serving the Communist Party USA as both the national organizational secretary of the Young Communist League and a member of the Communist Party National Board.

As a high-ranking member of the Communist Party organization, Winston encouraged members of the party to sign up for military service to fight Fascism and Nazism in the Second World War.

Winston himself served in the Army, participating in the liberation of France from Nazi occupation.

He marked the war's end with an honorable discharge from the military.

Back to political activity after his World War II discharge and the reorganization of the Party in 1946, Winston, along with the rest of the CPUSA leadership, was a victim of an early Cold War attempt by the American government to "decapitate" the Communists' leading ranks.

In 1948, Winston, together with other notable leaders within the Communist movement, was brought to trial in the Foley Square trial on charges of violating the Smith Act for encouraging the overthrowing of the American government.

Unable to produce evidence that any of the leading party members had actually called for the armed overthrow of the American government, the prosecution, boosted by the American public's antipathy toward radical activists during the opening years of the Cold War, based its case on selective interpretation of quotations from the works of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and other revolutionary figures of Marxism-Leninism.

They also relied on the testimony of "witnesses" hired by the FBI.

During the course of the trial the judge held several of the defendants and all of their counsel in contempt of court.

Convicted of revolutionary insurrection alongside the rest of the defendants for advocating the ideas of Marxism, Winston escaped while on bail.

In disguise, traveling around the country under a false name, Winston was sheltered by people sympathetic to Marxism and leftist political work.

Winston's state of health began to see a rapid deterioration throughout the late 1950s.

Undeterred from maintaining his links with the party above-ground, Winston continued his activities from within the party's underground organization: his 1951 pamphlet on party organization, "What it Means to be a Communist," was produced by the Communist Party while Winston was still underground.

By 1958, he began to suffer from headaches and dizzy spells; no adequate treatment was administered to him until 1960; by then, although a tumor was removed when he was transferred to a hospital New York, Winston was left permanently blind as a result of denied treatment.

Winston's release, now sought even by anti-communist preachers and liberal activists, was refused.

Following his surrender to federal authorities years later, Winston served out his sentence in Terre Haute, Indiana, remaining imprisoned, despite severe health problems, until his release in 1961.

Addressing President Kennedy in a 1961 debate, Comandante Fidel Castro, whose July 26 Revolution swept the Communists into power two years earlier, called for the release of Winston and other political prisoners.

Against the backdrop of both waves of protests from various quarters of the United States in addition to criticism from across the world, the Kennedy administration allowed Winston executive clemency, following which he was permitted to seek medical attention in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

The same year, the Supreme Court, in Noto v. United States (1961), put an end to the jailing of party leaders, having reversed a conviction under the membership clause because the evidence was insufficient to prove that the Party had engaged in unlawful advocacy:

"[T]he mere abstract teaching of Communist theory, including the teaching of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action. There must be some substantial direct or circumstantial evidence of a call to violence now or in the future which is both sufficiently strong and sufficiently pervasive to lend color to the otherwise ambiguous theoretical material regarding Communist Party teaching, and to justify the inference that such a call to violence may fairly be imputed to the Party as a whole, and not merely to some narrow segment of it."

The legal recognition of the illegitimacy of the federal government's basis for the imprisonment of party activists was now complete.

Although the party was seriously damaged by the repressive moves, aggressive party activity was now again possible.

In 1964, he spoke to students at the University of Washington, after radical activists staged protests against the university's ban on "communist speakers."

Winston was elected CPUSA Chairman in 1966, sharing the running of the party organization with Gus Hall, the General Secretary.

The 1970s witnessed the publication of two books connecting the long-denied issue of African-American equality in America and the Communist philosophy of class struggle: Winston's Strategy for a Black Agenda (1973) and Class, Race, and Black Liberation (1977), which argued that the struggle for civil rights had reached the stage of fusion with the struggle for economic rights.

In a 1971 lecture to a seminar of Communist Party organizers he said:

"The giant industrial monopolies, the big banks and insurance companies, the financiers and landowners, all spawn racism and use it as one of their chief class weapons to maintain and defend their regime of exploitation and oppression, of enmity among peoples, of imperialist wars of aggression.

It follows that all democratic and antimonopoly forces, with the working class and Black liberation movement in the van, can effectively defend the interests of the vast majority of people only when they actively further the struggle against racism.

This is an essential precondition for the development of a fighting alliance which will unite all democratic and antimonopoly [anticapitalist] forces in the country.

Marx wrote long ago that “labor in a white skin can never be free so long as labor in the black skin is branded.” This profound observation points up the fact that racism is the consciously employed weapon of the white imperialist oppressors, who use it to create division in the ranks of the working class.

And Marx correctly suggests that white workers must take the lead in the struggle against racism.

This is the path which can lead to unity of Black and white workers in struggle, which can achieve Black equality and a real improvement in the conditions of all workers."