“Artificiality of color line”: Rose Pastor Stokes and the Limits of Black-Jewish Solidarity in Early Twentieth Century America

• In Event: Race and the Jewish Radical Left

Abstract

In 1922, Jewish social activist, writer, and communist Rose Pastor Stokes traveled to Moscow to attend the Fourth Annual Comintern Congress, where she articulated her fundamental stance on American racism. Notable for its focus on issues of global anti-colonization, the Fourth Comintern hosted, for the first time, a commission to discuss the particular nature of the “American Negro Question.” Like others on the radical Jewish left at the start of the twentieth-century, Pastor Stokes rarely directly concerned herself with issues of American racism (although she did decry Jim Crow segregation and racial violence during her numerous travels into the South). In Moscow, however, Pastor Stokes served as a reporter for the Comintern’s “Negro Question” commission, ostensibly helping to draft what became the “Theses on the Black Question.” Under an alias, she also contributed her own “Minority Report” addendum, calling on the white and Black working-classes to overlook the “bourgeois color psychosis” in order to form a powerful, anti-colonial solidarity.

This paper examines Pastor Stokes’ Leninist interpretation of American racism, and places her Comintern analysis in conversation with broader studies of Jewish horizontal alliances in the United States. In recent years, scholars have pointed to the complexities behind the racial “silence” of Jewish radical feminists (see Clare Hemmings (2018)), and as well as the limits liberal horizontal alliances between Jews and racial groups like Black Americans and Native Americans (see Marc Dollinger (2018); Cheryl Greenberg (2006); David Koffman (2019)). In line with these studies, this paper further argues that the Jewish imagination of racial equity was often inconsistent with the realities of the American racial landscape. From her position on the early twentieth-century Jewish left, Pastor Stokes envisioned an anti-colonial class solidarity among all races of workers, a proposal which ultimately undermined the specific history of American anti-Black racism. Importantly, this paper shows that Pastor Stokes operated from a milieu of both Jewishness and whiteness when crafting her ideology of a class-based racial universalism, both of which colored her perception of the possibilities of simultaneous Jewish and Black liberations on American soil.

Author

• Jacob Morrow-Spitzer, Yale University