NONFICTION
‘A Life in Red: A Story of Forbidden Love, the Great Depression, and the Communist Fight for a Black Nation in the Deep South’
by David Beasley
John F. Blair
$26.95, 224 pages
David Beasley’s “A Life in Red” is a pocket companion to “Without Mercy” (2014), his account of Georgia’s execution of six black men on one day in 1938.
This time, Beasley chronicles another forgotten drama of the state’s Great Depression-era: the Fulton County death-penalty trials of fearless communist organizers Angelo Herndon and Henry Newton, one of the so-called “Atlanta Six.” All were charged under Georgia’s dubious insurrection statute.
Herndon and Newton were young black men drawn to the American Communist Party by its uncompromising advocacy for racial equality. Newton had been tutored in the Soviet Union, where a quixotic strategy to create a separate black nation in the Deep South was conceived by party elders. The alleged distribution of literature promoting the Russian scheme surfaced as evidence in their Atlanta courtroom battles.
A fascinating peek at an under appreciated corner of Atlanta history, “A Life in Red” concentrates on Henry Newton and his wife, Jane. The interracial couple circulated in the tough communist cults of the ‘30s in Chicago and New York, forming a “family unit” with fellow party member Richard Wright. According to Beasley, Jane Newton helped shape Wright’s novel, “Native Son,” which featured a thinly disguised member of the Atlanta Six.
The author also examines the careers of prominent African-Americans Benjamin J. Davis Jr. and Benjamin Mays, equally determined foes of segregation who chose radically divergent strategies. Davis, a national figure who grew up in Georgia, became a communist while serving as Angelo Herndon’s attorney. Mays experienced a different kind of revelation when he met Mahatma Gandhi in 1936; in time, the future president of Morehouse College would profoundly influence the thought of Martin Luther King Jr.
While Beasley has contempt for the Bolshevik creed, he acknowledges that committed Marxists in the South anticipated the civil rights struggle by decades. Yet when the movement’s political victories came in the 1960s, “A Life in Red” concludes, it would be guided by a spiritualized political philosophy developed in part by Mays, one that fused Gandhi’s nonviolent tactics with the emotional intensity of the African-American church tradition.
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