The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-05-27
BY GILBERT LEWIS.

At the convention of the Party to be held
- in June many questions in relation to our
work in the South will have to be taken up
and given serious consideration. For instance,
the gap between our theological influence and
organizational results must be overcome. The
convention will have to take up and find out
the reason for this. Down here the workers
radicazed, they are prepared for struggle.
They listen to and agree without program
even the most backward white worker is will
ing to accept our program on Negro equality,
agree with us that the Negro and white work
must be organized together Yet our or
ganizational gains have not been commensurate
with this degree of rehabilitation.
Not An Experiment.
Let us analyze the situation and see if we
can find out some of the reasons for this. The
recent Plenum of our Party pointed out that
no longer must the South be regarder as a sort
of experimental laboratory but serious and
sustained attention must be given to the work
here. In many things the decision has been
put into effect The tour system (where
organizer would get into a town, get number
of workers together, call meeting and form
nucleus only to return in few weeks to find
that it had Disappeared. which greatly af-
fected organizational results, has been over
come. Our comrades are fast coming to real
ze that Southern workers with practically no
experience ins the labor movement and many
of them never before having heard of
lutionary Party, cannot be expected to carry
on long in the absence of competent leadership
1t will be sometime yet before we can form
nuclei after one of two meetings with workers
and COME back weeks later and find them
functioning I'm Atlanta, nucleus so formed,
wrote in later to ask the Party to reconsider
its stand on the Negro question. When this
was not done the organizer resigned and the
nucleus was practically dissolved)
Also the comrades in the North are over
coming what might we'll be termed geographic
cal attitude in regard to the South. They are
gradually, but by no means rapidly enough
coming to realize that the South is not an
isolated section of American capitalism and
that the semi-feuda repressive measures now
being utilized in Georgia (Powers-Carr case)
and other parts of the South Qynching and
burning of Negro and white workers. will, if
not severely resisted, rapidly spread to other
sections of the country.
Failures on May Day.
This geographcalness expressed itself in our
preparations for May Day. At time when
May Day meetings. because the existing repres-
sive measures, should have been held in every
city in the South, only two can be recorded,
one in Rome and one in Chattanooga. If the
Central Committee truly understood the situa-
ton, it should have drained itself of forces to
hold meetings in at least all of the big political
centers of the South, and particularly in At
lanta. This failure to hold meeting in the
city which is taking the lead in the effortto
drive our Party into illegality, where two and
by now probably six more). Of our comrades
are facing death In the electric chair and a
city which is incidentally the Wall ST. of the
South, was decided setback for our Party.
In this connection it should be pointed out
that organizers should at all times. give in ac-
curate reports on which the &C. may base
it's estimate of Party forces in district. For
no doubt in the case of Atlanta the &C., on