Negro Liberation

Chicago: Liberator Press, 1976. Second Edition (Revised, First paperback ed.). Octavo in white wraps; 245 pp: 1 unnumbered leaf of plates, map; 21 cm Near fine thus in mildly foxed wraps; appears unread. Binding tight; leaves clean. Paperback.

Uncommon thus. An important work. Stands as the most systematic articulation of the “Black Belt nation” thesis within American Marxism, arguing that African Americans in the rural Deep South constituted not merely an oppressed race but an internally colonized nation entitled, in principle, to self-determination. Drawing on Leninist theory, Comintern debates, and Haywood’s own experience as a Black Communist organizer, the book grounds its claims in political economy and historical geography, tracing how slavery, Reconstruction’s betrayal, and Jim Crow created a territorially concentrated proletariat and peasantry bound by common conditions of exploitation. Often criticized—both by later Black radical traditions and by liberal civil-rights historiography—for its rigidity and its subordination of cultural politics to class analysis, Negro Liberation nonetheless remains a foundational document and reveals how seriously mid-century revolutionaries grappled with the problem of race as a structural, not merely moral, question within the American state.