James S. Allen, born Sol Auerbach, (1906–1986) was an American Marxist historian, journalist, editor, political activist, and functionary of the Communist Party USA. Allen is best remembered as the author and editor of over two dozen books and pamphlets and as one of the Communist Party's leading experts on African-American history.
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Sol Auerbach, later known by the pseudonym James S. Allen, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1906, the son of ethnic Jewish parents that arrived in America from the Russian empire in that same year.[1]
Upon completion of high school, Allen enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia, where he studied philosophy.[1]
A committed radical from his collegiate days, Auerbach traveled to the Soviet Union in 1927 as part of the first American student delegation to the Soviet Union.[1]
Auerbach was expelled from college 1928 for radical activities.[1] He joined the Communist Party and began writing for the party newspaper, The Daily Worker. The intelligent Auerbach was soon promoted to the editorship of Labor Defender, official organ of the International Labor Defense — the Communist Party's mass organization dedicated to civil rights and legal aid matters.[2]
During his formative years in Philadelphia Auerbach had developed a strong interest in African American life, which lead to his appointment in 1930 as editor of the Communist Party's first newspaper produced south of the Mason-Dixon line — The Southern Worker.[3] Auerbach adopted the Party name "James S. Allen" at this time and he traveled to Chattanooga, Tennessee with his wife Isabelle Allen to establish and edit the weekly paper.[4] Necessarily produced under clandestine conditions, The Southern Worker bore a false dateline indicating it was produced in Birmingham, Alabama in an effort to confuse local police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[2]
The Southern Worker was launched on August 16, 1930, with a print run of 3,000 copies.[2] Although billed as "a paper of and for both the white and black workers and farmers,"[2] in actual fact the content was heavily skewed towards coverage of the daily life and problems of the region's black population.[5]
In this capacity Allen consistently advocated for the Communist Party's political line of the day, which included a demand for self-determination of the so-called "Black Belt" of the American South, populated at the time by nearly one-half of the country's entire African-American population.[3]
Despite breathless speculation at the time and thereafter that the Communist mobilizing slogan "Self-Determination for the Black Belt" was a call for national secession, Allen later dismissed this view with the words "we weren't stupid."[6] For all the brashness of the "self-determination" slogan, in the view of historian Mark Solomon the actual meaning of the phrase was rather more modest:
"Self-determination was defined as democracy at its essence: self-government, self-organization, social and economic equality, the right of blacks to run their own lives without the relentless terror and racism that dogged their steps and made every waking day a living hell."[6]
As a member of the Party's Southern District committee, Allen played a prominent role in all of the CPUSA's major regional activities during the early 1930s; the organizing of Alabama sharecroppers, the Harlan, Kentucky miners' strike and the Scottsboro case.
At the behest of the Communist International, Allen was sent to Manila, capital of the Philippines (then an American protectorate) in 1938 with instructions to end sectarian squabbling and achieve unity between the Communist Party of the Philippines and the rival Philippine Socialist Party, established in 1933.[7] This was accomplished successfully, with Allen writing a long and detailed report on his trip on February 13, 1939, shortly after his return to America.[7]
Allen was then assigned a position as the foreign editor of the Sunday Worker — a weekly newspaper launched in January 1936 as an effort to reach a broader audience than did the more intense and authoritative Daily Worker.[8] The Sunday Worker was edited by Al Richmond, who later remembered Allen as "a scholarly, serene man who did the serious political commentary and analysis."[8]
Allen was drafted into the United States Army in 1944.[1]
During the Cold War years Allen was compelled to appear as a witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.[1]
On February 21, 1952, Allen was called before the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, in conjunction with its investigation of the Institute of Pacific Relations.[9]
From 1958 until 1966, Allen was the secretary of the CPUSA's National Program Committee, in charge of developing programmatic and educational documents for the party.[1] In this capacity, Allen helped develop early drafts of the party program and corresponded with a number of important figures in the party establishment, including Herbert Aptheker, William Z. Foster, John Howard Lawson, and Pettis Perry.[1]
From 1962 to 1972 Allen headed International Publishers, the Communist Party's publishing house.[1] He later served as American editor of the 50-volume Marx-Engels Collected Works project, a joint publishing project between International Publishers, Lawrence and Wishart in the United Kingdom, and Progress Publishers in Moscow.[1]
James S. Allen died in 1986.
Allen's papers are held by the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University in New York City.[1] The collection includes approximately 1500 pages of investigative documents dealing with Allen that were written over the years by special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[1] Also included is the manuscript of an unpublished memoir entitled "Visions and Revisions," part of which was published posthumously as Organizing in the Depression South: A Communist's Memoir in 2001.[1]