Early years Lovett Huey Fort-Whiteman was born in
Dallas,
Texas on December 3, 1889. His father, Moses Whiteman, was born into
slavery in
South Carolina and relocated to Texas at some time prior to 1887, where he worked as a janitor and a small scale cattle rancher. At the age of 35, Moses Whiteman married the 15-year-old Elizabeth Fort. He became a committed adherent to the idea of radical transformation of society through trade unions,
syndicalism, as a member of an organization called
Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker, or COM). While at the Rand School Fort-Whiteman met others who would become prominent in the world radical movement in ensuing years, including Japanese émigré
Sen Katayama and
Otto Huiswoud, a recent transplant from
British Guiana. Picking up the pen as the new "Dramatic Editor" of
The Messenger in 1918, Fort-Whiteman was among those at the epicenter of the
Harlem Renaissance, a multi-faceted and dynamic black cultural movement dedicated to artistic and political development of the so-called "
New Negro". Minor visited
Soviet Russia in 1918 where he had seen the
Bolshevik Revolution at close quarters. Fort-Whiteman was charged with violation of the
Espionage Act for having explicitly advocated "resistance to the United States" — although Fort-Whiteman denied ever having used such a phrase in his St. Louis speech.
Black communist leader From 1920 to 1922, the American communist movement eked out a covert, underground existence, with Fort-Whiteman presumably retaining party membership through the succession of mergers and splits which ensued. He reemerged in the public eye in February 1923 as a member of the editorial staff of
The Messenger, although his affiliation with the
Workers Party of America (WPA), a legal communist organization established around the first day of 1922, seems to have remained an unpublicized fact. Fort-Whiteman served as speaker for the WPA/ABB caucus and forward the organization's program, calling for an end to racial segregation in housing, binding contracts to protect tenant farmers, an end to colonialism in Africa, and US government recognition of the Soviet Union. During the 1920s, a so-called "
Great Migration" of African Americans moving from the South to urban centers of the Northern United States took place. The American communist movement sought to capitalize upon the health and safety problems which ensued, initiating a short-lived
mass organization (front group) known as the Negro Tenants Protective League to agitate for rent strikes and other forms of activity as a means of spurring change. Fort-Whiteman, by then a top leader of the Communist Party in its "Negro work," addressed the founding convention of this group in Chicago on March 31, 1924 along with other top-level Workers Party officials, including
Robert Minor and
Otto Huiswoud. Established by the Communist Party as a successor organization to the now moribund
African Blood Brotherhood, the ANLC was founded by a convention of 500 men and women in Chicago late in October of that same year. In the words of one historian, the bulk of these founding delegates were "the sorts of blacks the Communists felt the
NAACP and
Urban League forgot." arguing that a new organization was essential in order to "present the cause of the Negro worker." His successful organizing effort gained national notoriety for Fort-Whiteman, with the conservative
Time magazine deeming Fort-Whiteman to be "the reddest of the blacks."
Move to Russia Fort-Whiteman moved to Russia in about 1927, joining the tiny African American community in Moscow. He lived with his wife Marina, a Jewish chemist, in a small apartment. He was a close friend of African American journalist
Homer Smith Jr. In 1928, Fort-Whiteman was a delegate to the
6th World Congress of the Communist International. In the Comintern debates of 1928, Fort-Whiteman supported the positions of Bukharin and American leader
Jay Lovestone, arguing against the need for the existence of the ANLC. He was later hired by the English-language
Moscow News as a contributor and worked as a teacher at an English-language school in Moscow. He was a consulting screenwriter on the 1932 production
Black and White. Three weeks later, Fort-Whiteman was denounced for having expressed "counterrevolutionary" sentiments and on July 1, 1937 was sentenced to five years internal exile. He was first sent to
Semipalatinsk,
Kazakhstan, where he worked for a time as a teacher. Lovett Fort-Whiteman was identified as a
Trotskyist in internal CPUSA documents. A report from the mid-1930s on support for Trotsky within the party stated that "Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a Negro Comrade, showed himself for Trotsky." The terror continued to escalate into 1938 and on May 8, 1938, Fort-Whiteman's sentence was reviewed under the stricter
article 58, specifically 58-2 and 58-6, of the criminal code of the
Russian SFSR (for armed insurrection and espionage) and his sentence was amended to five years of hard labor in the notorious
Gulag system of work camps. Fort-Whiteman was sent to
Kolyma in
Siberia, a particularly inhospitable part of the Soviet Far East. In Kolyma, Fort-Whiteman was imprisoned in one of the camps of the Camp Department of the Southern Mining and Industrial Administration, part of the
Sevvostlag camp system run by the
Dalstroy State Trust in the region surrounding
Magadan. The camp department and camps under its management were tasked with the extraction of gold and tin ore in freezing subarctic conditions. There the intentionally inadequate food supplied to the overworked camp inmates and savage winter weather sapped Fort-Whiteman's strength and the formerly robust man's health rapidly failed. According to an acquaintance of
Robert Robinson, who saw Fort-Whiteman, he was severely beaten for failure to fulfill the work norms in the camp, and was "a broken man, whose teeth had been knocked out". On January 13, 1939, Lovett Fort-Whiteman died of illness related to malnutrition. He was 49 years old. According to the death certificate filled out at the Southern Mining Administration's Gulag hospital in Ust-Taezhny, Fort-Whiteman was most likely working at the Taezhnik mine. Although Fort-Whiteman's death certificate was printed on letterhead belonging to the Camp Department of the Southern Mining and Industrial Administration, the need to increase production of tin led to reorganizations of the Sevvostlag organization structure in October 1938 that preceded Lovett's death and led to its reorganization into the Southwest Mining and Industrial Administration with its center in Ust-Utinaya. The Southwest Mining and Industrial Administration was responsible for the operation of a complex of camps, including Taezhnik in the village of Ust-Taezhny (Orotukan), where Lovett Fort-Whiteman died. ==See also==