Pettis Perry

Perry c. 1952

Pettis Perry (January 4, 1897 – July 24, 1965) was an American Communist Party official.

Biography

Perry was born on a tenant farm near Marion, Alabama. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s, where he worked as a farm laborer in the Imperial Valley. Perry was inspired to join the Communist Party because of its work on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys. In 1933, Perry became the first African-American candidate for Lieutenant Governor of California, running on the Communist Party ticket.

Perry moved from California to New York City in 1948. In New York, Perry directed the Party's National Negro Commission until 1954. In 1949, Perry began a campaign to eliminate white chauvinism and racism in the Party, traveling to Party branches around the country to discuss the issue. While acknowledging the validity of Perry's concerns, Steve Nelson and Joseph Starobin argued that the campaign had been divisive and harmful to the Party.

Perry's FBI mugshot, 1951

Perry was arrested on June 20, 1951, with twenty other Communist Party leaders, under the Smith Act. During the trial, Perry argued that the proceedings were unfair, describing them as "a frameup so enormous as to resemble the Reichstag Fire trial". He and seven of the other defendants were sentenced to three years in jail and fined $5000. After his release from prison in 1957, Perry continued working in the Party and died in Moscow in 1965.

Perry was the inspiration for the character of Bart, a Black Communist leader, in Chester Himes' novel Lonely Crusade.

References

  1. ↑ Boyer, Richard O. (December 1951). "Pettis Perry: The Story of a Working-class Leader". Masses & Mainstream. 4 (12): 17.
  2. ↑ Sides, Josh (2003). L.A. city limits : African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the present. University of California Press. p. 32. ISBN 9780520248304.
  3. ↑ Horne, Gerald (1997). Fire this time : The Watts uprising and the 1960s. Da Capo Press. p. 5. ISBN 0306807920.
  4. ↑ Jurich, Joscelyn (October 2017). "Pettis Perry and the "Negro Question"". American Communist History. 16 (3–4): 8.
  5. ↑ Shannon, David A. (1959). The decline of American Communism: A history of the Communist Party of the United States since 1945. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. p. 245.
  6. ↑ Duberman, Martin B. (1996). Paul Robeson. New York: The New Press. p. 420. ISBN 156584288X.
  7. ↑ Barrett, James R. (1999). William Z. Foster and the tragedy of American radicalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. p. 243. ISBN 0252020464.
  8. ↑ Tish Sommers, activist, and the founding of the Older Women's League. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. 1991. p. 125. ISBN 0870496913.
  9. ↑ Lannon, Albert Vetere (1999). Second String Red: The Life of Al Lannon, American Communist. Lexington Books. p. 125.
  10. ↑ Marable, Manning (1991). Race, reform, and rebellion : The second Reconstruction in black America, 1945-1990. University Press of Mississippi. p. 31. ISBN 0333564332.
  11. ↑ Caute, David (1979). The great fear : The anti-Communist purge under Truman and Eisenhower. New York: Simon and Schuster. p. 199. ISBN 0671248480.
  12. ↑ Johnpoll, Bernard K.; Klehr, Harvey, eds. (1986). Biographical Dictionary of the American Left. Greenwood Press. p. 313. ISBN 0313242003.
  13. ↑ Wald, Alan M. (2007). Trinity of passion : The literary left and the antifascist crusade. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. p. 249. ISBN 9780807830758.