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Of course, Mitchell was recalling an incident nearly fifty years earlier that may well
have been unconsciously reinterpreted in terms of subsequent Cold War
experiences. Nevertheless, the memory rings true, and the behavior described is
not out of line with some of the party's Third Period excesses.
Whatever the case with this incident, though, the CP did manage, in the
midst of the ami-lynching protests, to get itself embroiled in a disagreement with
the Afro, one of its staunchest friends in the Black community. In its November 4
issue, the Afro published an editorial claiming that, despite several promises to the
contrary, the CP's Daily Worker had again claimed that it had discovered and first
publicized the names of four of Armwood's murderers. According to ihzAfro, it,
not the CP paper, was responsible for this disclosure. With some disdain, the Afro
editorial remarked that any claims to the contrary were "not only misleading, but
downright dishonest. *
But, again, the disputes between the CP-related forces and other forces in
the ami-lynching movement should not be overstated, for beginning on November
12 (as promised from the day after Armwood's death) the ILD pulled off a two-day
regional conference that gave the Baltimore movement its greatest national
exposure to date, and which proved the ILD was quite capable of working in
concert with a variety of the more radical forces of the Black freedom movement,
nationally and locally. Perhaps as many as four hundred persons from a plethora of
organizations mainly located on the northeastern seaboard attended the
conference. Predictably, a number of well-known radical African Americans were
slated to participate, including James Ford, Robert Minor, William L. Patterson,
Benjamin Davis, Jr., and Richard B. Moore representing various organizations in
the communist-led movement. From militant, yet somewhat more moderate
sectors of the Black freedom movement came the N AACP's Charles Houston and a
number of Howard University and Washington, D.G-based activists including
representatives from the New Negro Alliance, an organization with close ties to the
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