WEB DuBois Clubs of America

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WEB DuBois Clubs of America, were, in the mid to late 1960s, the youth wing of the Communist Party USA.

Towards a new national organization of communist youth

After the Conference of Socialist Youth in March 1964, it was decided to hold the next convention in Chicago, and there form a new national youth organization. The Coordinating Committee determined to switch the meeting place to San Francisco, however, and to hold it on June 19 through 21, 1964.

Copies of The Convener, position papers, schedules of activities, copies of agenda and other materials, were widely circulated prior to the meeting, and attendance from all parts of the country was anticipated. Carl Bloice edited The Convener, assisted by Michael Myerson, Terence Hallinan, Eugene Alexander, Hugh Fowler, Keith Glick and Phyllis Glick, Gerrit van der Hoogt, Kathy Olson, Tom Waite, Luria Castell, Stephan Argent and Sue Miller.

Pre-Convention regional meetings were held in Wisconsin, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. Materials were distributed, generally echoing the current party line about getting out of Viet Nam, changing our government to a Socialist system, resisting the draft, and participating in all civil rights movements. There were some who preferred to hold the new youth organization somewhat aloof from other Left groups, but it soon became apparent that this attitude was impracticable. The National Coordinating Committee was expanded to thirty people, and they actually made all preparations for the San Francisco meeting.^[1]

Demonstration and arrests

Members of the San Francisco DuBois Club proudly claimed that they led the demonstrations in San Francisco that resulted in a total of 395 arrests and pointed out that there were "... several new and important features to these demonstrations. One was the audacity and determination of the participants. Another was the widespread popular support that they obviously had and the positive results they were able to bring about. The most significant is that they were led by a Socialist youth group, the W.E.B. DuBois Club."^[2]

Signing the "Call"

Those who signed the "call" for this June 1964 convention, as set forth on page 15 of The Convener No. 4, were:

The convention

Marvin Treiger presided at the opening session of the convention, outlined the procedure and general program, and the group then divided itself into sections on organization, civil rights, Puerto Rico, Negro problems, unemployment, Bracero farm workers, peace, civil liberties, education & culture, political action, Viet Nam, and Socialist youth unity. Terence Hallinan's statement entitled "We Must Now Begin to Speak," was widely distributed and served to establish the general tone of the convention, being a five-page document which set forth the history and accomplishments of the W.E.B. DuBois Club of San Francisco and pointed out that there were five clubs in the general area and three in process of formation. He declared:

San Francisco, it is true, has long had a reputation as a progressive town. But, there are still the same problems here as in any major city. When we first started, none of the mass organizations would have anything to do with us. When the United San Francisco Freedom Movement, for example, was launched a year and a half ago, we tried to participate. There was such an uproar that we were forced to withdraw our application and were not even permitted to attend meetings. Today we have a situation where the same CORE leader who led the campaign against us declares to the press that if Khrushchev wants to come walk on their picket lines, he is welcome, and the secretary of the San Francisco DuBois Club is a member of the executive board of the San Francisco United Freedom Movement.

This position we now enjoy has not come to us easily. We have it only because we were willing to fight for it. Conditions today are such that we have been able to mobilize a great number of young people and to show the mass organizations that any repercussions they might suffer from working with a socialist youth organization would be more than compensated for by the help our club could provide. It is the firm belief of those of us in the Bay Area that the conditions for a Socialist youth organization on the order of the DuBois Clubs exists in every major city and campus in the country.^[4]

Dissension and walk-out

The various sections then convened at the ILWU Building; at 60 Leavenworth Street, Apartment 22; at 918 Buchanan Street, 1007 McAllister Street (San Francisco DuBois Club headquarters), and at the office of the American-Russian Institute, 90 McAllister Street. This latter organization was an old Communist front, headed by Holland Roberts, former Stanford University professor, and for many years head of the Communist School in San Francisco.

These various workshops continued through Friday and Saturday, June 19 and 20, and reported to the general meeting. Treiger caused the first of a series of angry outbursts and disagreements when he stated that minority reports could not be read, but would be ruled out of order because there was too much to be done and too little time. A compromise was finally effected when it was declared that the majority report would be read in its entirety, and that there could be one opposition speaker who had three minutes to present his views. There could only be three suggestions for amendments. Immediately after lunch on Saturday, the majority adopted the tactic of presenting two or three amendments, and leaving no chance for any substantial change of the original report. Minority reports were never permitted to be presented. The chair also adopted the practice of recognizing only the most unpopular delegates for opposition remarks, so that there was actually little danger of the majority faction losing its iron grip on the convention.

There were wide varieties of radicalism represented: the Maoists, the Trotskyites, the Socialists, the Anarchists, the independents, the various autonomous local groups.There was much acrimony, much shouting; and it soon became clear that a slowly-mounting anger and resentment was developing as it became ever more evident that a small faction was in control and would brook no challenge to its power. And this was the Moscow line Communist group, consisting of the leadership in the DuBois and Youth Action Union organizations. They had dominated the National Organizing Committee, then the National Coordinating Committee that set up the San Francisco Convention, and the Socialist Youth Conference in March.

During discussions of the proposed constitution, Robert Kauffman suggested that as Article III specified no person should be eligible for membership who opposed the principles and policies of the new organization, then no member of another national Socialist youth group should be entitled to vote or hold office. This was aimed at the Young Socialist Alliance and Progressive Labor Movement, and precipitated much argument. Carl Bloice declared that no effort was being made to unite the Left, and that no member subscribing to other ideologies would be allowed to influence policy decisions. At that point another Negro delegate said that he came for the purpose of welding together a broad movement of Socialist youth—not to form a rigid organization preoccupied with expelling anyone daring to disagree with its program.

Allan Sharp, a delegate from the national committee of another nationwide youth organization, then declared that the invitations to the San Francisco convention had been a hoax; that there was never any real intention of forming a broad youth group, and that neither he nor his followers would be able to participate under the provisions then being adopted. At that point, Sharp started walking out of the meeting, and was followed by others until approximately one-third of the delegates had permanently deserted the convention. Those who remained were the faithful members of the DuBois Clubs, Youth Action Union, and a few other of the more radical and Communist organizations. Even the San Jose State College unit of the DuBois Club announced that it had no intention of affiliating with the new national movement.

About 139 people remained, and it was now apparent to them that they had gone too far, and that their rigging of the meeting to concentrate power and warp the membership to the radical ideological views of the small core of leaders had provoked too much resentment. They then rescinded the proposal about exclusion of other Socialist groups. As one observer remarked, this was the inevitable penalty that plagues a group that first puts itself together as a small, tight little center of control and then seeks to hold a rubber-stamp convention.^[5]

California clubs

In 1964 there were five DuBois Clubs operating in Southern California.

• DuBois Central was comprised mostly of Mexican-American members, and was headed by Alan Zak and Sue Green.
• DuBois South, a small unit with about seven to ten members who attended with any regularity, was headed by Victor Oliver and Franklin Alexander.
• DuBois West, which devoted itself almost exclusively to the UCLA campus, was headed by Ruth Greenbaum, and was the most active of the five.

There were also skeleton clubs, one of which operated in the Santa Monica-Venice area.

Into action

The formation of the DuBois Clubs of America was concluded on June 21, 1964. The announcement was mailed from the newly-established national headquarters in San Francisco, a series of regional conferences were scheduled for the late summer, and plans were made for the building of a network of local chapters. Funds were solicited for the support of the temporary national office at 1007 McAllister Street, San Francisco, and plans were made for publication of newsletters both from the Bay Area and Southern California organizations. This was accomplished in the south with the issuance of The Correlator, and in the north with the appearance of Insurgent, in the spring of 1965. Carl Bloice editsed this publication, and the first issue contained material presented under the joint efforts of the staff and contributors.

They included Celia Rosebury, managing editor; Karol Burkett Supriano, art editor, and former secretary of the Marxist School of Social Science in San Francisco; Howard Harawitz; David Castro; Michael Folsom; Steve Murdock, from the Peoples World, and John Haag, owner of a Venice West restaurant, and a leader of the Southern Calfornia West DuBois Club.^[6]

References