ABSTRACT
Between 1932 and 1984, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) nominated four African Americans as presidential or vicepresidential candidates over the course of eight elections. These candidates and the strategy they embodied of CPUSA outreach to blacks reflect important facets of the changing twentieth-century experiences of African Americans. Born in Alabama in 1893, James William Ford’s personal and family history-his grandfather died at the hands of a white mob and he was part of the Great Migration-epitomized the existential struggle of black people in a white supremacist society. Ford ran as the party’s vice presidential nominee in 1932, 1936 and 1940. After a long underground period of persecution, the party emerged in 1968 to nominate Charlene Mitchell for president. Mitchell, born in Ohio in 1930, grew up in a family who saw the fight for African American equality as part and parcel of the communist struggle. In the 1970s the CPUSA chose Philadelphian Jarvis Tyner (b. 1941), a youthful activist in the labor and civil rights movements of the 1960s, to run as vice presidential candidate. The final twentieth-century Communist Party vice presidential nominee was Angela Davis, born into a black middle-class family in Alabama in 1944. Davis had wide vistas and obtained a world-class education from a private high school in New York City, a baccalaureate from Brandeis, study abroad at Frankfurt and the Sorbonne, and a graduate degree with Herbert Marcuse at the University of California-San Diego.
