Strategy for Freedom
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Henry Winston was born in 1911 in Mississippi in the very shadow of the defeat of Black Reconstruction. The lives of Black folk at that time were not that different than during chattel slavery. They had no rights, worked land they could not own, and never rose beyond crushing debt and deep poverty. The working mass of Black folk ultimately constituted a Black proletariat, super exploited and racially oppressed. Many of Winston’s relatives and neighbors had been slaves. His mother headed his family, which included two sisters. Escaping Mississippi, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri. The poverty and racial oppression of Mississippi followed them, forcing Winston to drop out of school and seek work by going on the road. Amid the collapse of the world capitalist economy and the start of the Great Depression in the 1930’s, Winston found himself part of a generation of young people who were a stranded population; uneducated, unemployed, homeless, hungry and without futures. They were a vast army of the unemployed. They travelled in freight cars, lived in hobo camps on the side of railroad tracks. Of this vast army, many gave up, some turned to crime and hopelessness. Winston found among youth like himself the unemployed movement and the unemployed councils that believed in fighting back rather than giving up. Here he met members of the Young Communist League and the Communist Party. He began to study politics, philosophy and economics. He came to realize that there were few, if any, individual answers for the mass of impoverished and destitute youth, and that struggle was their sole hope. The life lessons Winston learned in his early life would be a compass helping him navigate contradictions and obstacles for the rest of his life.
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Born in the shadow of the defeat of Black reconstruction and shaped as a young man by the Great Depression, Henry Winston's life exemplifies the search for clarity in times of crisis, the struggle for world peace and principled unity among working people, and the substance of true freedom in America. We will commemorate the life and vision of Henry Winston, Chairman of the Communist Party USA from 1968–86, with a weekend of panels, discussion, music, and art.
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