Communists and black culture
During the Popular Front era the party attracted support from a number of the brightest lights in African-American literature, including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, some of whom joined the party. Paul Robeson, a vocal defender of the Soviet Union, apparently never joined the party, but was loyal to at least a few of its members including Ben Davis who was jailed under The Smith Act.
World War II (1939 1945)
The signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact damaged the party significantly in the black community. A. Philip Randolph resigned from the Negro National Congress in protest and black newspapers throughout the North condemned the party for its rapid volte face. The CPUSA attacked its opponents as warmongers. When Adolf Hitler’s forces invaded the Soviet Union, the party switched to an all-out support for the war effort. It denounced Randolph’s proposed March on Washington against employment discrimination in war industries, arguing that it might harm production. But the CPUSA still demanded that defense contractors integrate and took steps to combat “hate strikes” and white-led race riots in Detroit.
The post World War II era
The party had hopes of remaining in the mainstream of American politics in the postwar era. Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. ran for and won a seat on the City Council in New York City in 1945, advertising his membership in the Communist Party and drawing on both black and white support. Davis lost the next race in 1949 by a landslide to an anti-communist candidate. He was under indictment for advocating the overthrow of the United States government, and this did not help his candidacy.
The CRC, represented by William Patterson and Paul Robeson, attempted to file a petition entitled “We Charge Genocide” with the United Nations in 1949 that condemned the treatment of black citizens in the United States. Patterson was convicted a year later of violating the Smith Act; in 1954 the Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr. declared the CRC to be a subversive organization.
In the grim days of 1949 and 1950, as the CP was about to be driven out of the CIO and much of the U.S. labor movement, many CPUSA leaders began to view their work among the white working class as a failure and the black working class as the “vanguard of the revolution”.
The Party advocated “superseniority” for black workers, an early version of the type of measures that came to be known as “affirmative action” twenty years later.
The Communist Party continued efforts to establish itself among students through the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, named after one of the original founders of the NAACP, who joined the CPUSA in 1961.
In the late 1960s, party members such as Angela Davis became associated with the most militant wing of the Black Power movement.
The party maintained some standing in the black community through its former allies, including Coleman Young of Detroit and Gus Newport in Berkeley, California, who were elected to office in the 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Party_USA_and_African_Americans
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Bernie Sanders met with the Reverend Al Sharpton for breakfast on Wednesday morning at Sylvia's in Harlem He then went on The View where he talked to the panel about his plans for criminal justice reform
In New York City this morning, just hours after he clobbered Hillary Clinton, gaining 60 percent of the Democratic vote in New Hampshire, he met with a possible new ally, powerful civil right activist Al Sharpton.
'When a police officer breaks the law, like any other public official, that officer must he held accountable,' Sanders added, referring to the officer shootings of unarmed black men that have inspired the protest movement 'Black Lives Matter.'
Sanders has always had the support of thinker Cornell West, who's been making passionate pleas for the Vermonter in early contest states. The senator also pointed to former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and Rep. Keith Ellison, a Minnesota congressman who is one of only two members of Congress who are Muslim. Sanders also added to his roster last week Ben Jealous, the former head of the NAACP.