Forerunners The W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America was a national
mass organization conceived and sponsored by the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and directed at young people. It bears mentioning that the Du Bois Clubs were not the youth section of the CPUSA per se, but were rather designed as a separate party-sponsored and controlled organization which would help bring unaffiliated students and young workers into the CPUSA's orbit through their participation in a broader and less orthodox organization. The direct forerunner of the Du Bois Clubs was the
Progressive Youth Organizing Committee (PYOC), established in April 1959, and
Advance, the New York City-based youth organization from which the PYOC had sprung. Under the aegis of the PYOC, in 1961 a small group of radicals in
San Francisco established themselves as the "W.E.B. Du Bois Club." This small group proved the inspiration for sister Du Bois Clubs across the bay in
Berkeley and at
San Francisco State College. By the fall of 1963, the Communist Party had clearly decided to proceed with the formation of a new mass organization of youth, with national secretary
Gus Hall announcing in October the intention of the party to create "a Marxist-oriented youth organization to attract non-Communists as the first step toward their eventual recruitment into the party." While the precise form of this new organization was as yet undetermined, this group would ultimately emerge as the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America. A publication was launched in preparation for the new organization, a newsletter called
The Convener, edited by
Carl Bloice.
Formation Prior to the formal establishment of a national organization known as the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America, a Conference of Socialist Youth was held in San Francisco over the weekend of March 21–22, 1964. This gathering was sponsored by the four California Du Bois Clubs (San Francisco, USF, Berkeley, and Los Angeles) and by a
Marxist group called the
Youth Action Union. This gathering included a number of workshops on such topics as Automation and the Labor Movement, Civil Rights, Peace and Disarmament, and The Ultra Right. A final determination was apparently made by the CPUSA in April or May 1964 to make the California Du Bois Clubs the model for the new national organization. A founding convention was called for June 19–21, 1964 for
Chicago, but this location was quickly shifted to San Francisco, the place from whence the pioneer California groups had sprung. The gathering was called to order by Marvin Treiger and quickly divided itself into work groups on Organization, Civil Rights, Puerto Rico, Black issues, Farm Worker issues, Unemployment, Peace, Education and Culture, Political Action, Vietnam, and Socialist Youth Unity. Acrimony erupted during the discussion of the group's constitution, specifically over a proposal that no person would be eligible for membership in the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America who was a member of another socialist organization. This section, specifically aimed to exclude members of the
Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance and the neo-
Stalinist Progressive Labor Party, inflamed members of those groups.
Development In 1966 the headquarters of the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America was moved from San Francisco to Chicago. It was there that the 1966 convention of the organization was held, with speakers including Donna Allen of
Women Strike for Peace, communist historian
Herbert Aptheker, and radical attorney
William Kunstler. The Du Bois Clubs were active in demonstrations against
military conscription and the
free speech movement throughout the latter half of the 1960s, high profile activity which led the federal government to take action against the organization. In March 1966
U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach petitioned the
Subversive Activities Control Board to issue an order to the Du Bois Clubs ordering them to register with federal authorities as a so-called "
communist front." This action led to a 1967 attempt at a legal challenge of the constitutionality of the Subversive Activities Control Board, a case which was lost in the
United States Court of Appeals. However according to
COINTELPRO papers, the Counter Intelligence Program claims to have been instrumental in the disbanding of the Du Bois Clubs. In March 1969, the CPUSA sponsored a West Coast Youth Conference which attempted to restructure the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America into a formal Young Communist adjunct of the adult party. This transformed organization originally intended to retain the "Du Bois Club" moniker, but in February 1970, the CPUSA decided to dissolve the Du Bois organization altogether in favor of an entirely new group. This new organization was known variously as the
Young Workers Liberation League or the Young Communist Liberation League, with state affiliates of the new organization adopting either name as local conditions warranted.
Jarvis Tyner, the last national chairman of the Du Bois Clubs and a member of the National Committee of the adult CPUSA, was selected as the first national chairman of the new organization. ==See also==