Soviets Funded Black “Freedom” Journal

[Rheo]

Accuracy in Media:

Newly declassified documents from Operation SOLO, an FBI program to infiltrate the Communist Party of the United States, reveal that a journal called Freedomways, which was influential in the black community for decades, was subsidized by the Soviet and Chinese Communist Parties.

 

Freedomways has been called “one of the most influential African-American literary and political journals of the 1960s and 1970s.” It began in 1961 and ceased publication in 1986.

 

During the 25 years it served as a propaganda organ for the CPUSA and Soviet front organizations such as the World Peace Council, Freedomways published articles by such figures as:

 

Derrick Bell, one of Barack Obama’s academic mentors and a Harvard professor;

Martin Luther King, Jr., the slain civil rights leader who turned against the Vietnam War and has been honored with a national memorial in Washington, D.C.;

John Lewis, a Democratic member of Congress from Georgia and critic of the conservative Tea Party movement; and

Jesse Jackson, a former aide to King and Democratic candidate for president who has recently been stirring up racial resentment over the killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin.

 

Freedomways grew out of a Soviet campaign, launched after the Russian revolution, to exploit the “Negro question” in the U.S. and manipulate blacks and members of other minority groups for Communist purposes. The goal was a “Soviet America.”

 

In 1981, a communist-inspired Black Liberation Army, with the help of the Weather Underground, waged a campaign of terrorism and murder that resulted in the deaths of two police officers and a Brinks guard.

 

The SOLO documents demonstrate that the Soviet Union illegally provided funding, reportedly more than $28 million, to the CPUSA. The documents are based on FBI informants, Morris and Jack Childs, who had infiltrated the highest levels of the CPUSA and had participated in meetings with foreign communist parties.

 

President Ronald Reagan awarded Morris Childs (and posthumously, Jack) with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their work for the U.S.

An FBI memo dated March 3, 1959, which summarized a meeting between CPUSA officials and the Soviet Communist Party, reveals that CPUSA official James Jackson had asked Soviet officials about “the possibility of a Negro magazine dealing with theoretical questions.” Jackson was the party secretary in charge of “Negro and southern affairs.”

[Rheo]

SOLO Part 01 of 101-FBI files

175 pages

[Rheo]

The FBI Releases the “Operation Solo” Files—Showing us more Truth about American Communism

The PJ Tatler

8/3/2011

You can find all of the releases here. They contain many gems. One of my favorites concerns the orders from one of the chiefs of the Soviet Politburo, Mikhail Suslov, who tells the comrades that the Party has to give up its thesis that American blacks composed a separate nation and had to fight for the right of self-determination for its majority in the black belt of the South.

Suslov, who under Brezhnev would become the chief ideologue of Moscow, told them they cannot make policy based on 30 year old Comintern directives, at a time when American blacks lived in urban areas and were fighting for civil rights and desegregation. He gave them the go ahead to get involved in the freedom movement that was then beginning to emerge, and join its fight in order to try and give it direction.

 

Read the releases for yourself. You will find more proof that in the old Cold War days, it was the anti-Communists who were right, and not their legion of apologists.

[Rheo]

Am I the only one not aware of these files until now? ha.

Finding it fascinating reading.

 

carry on!