A few years later, Huiswood returned to the Soviet Union as a student in the Lenin School, an elite institute for political training. Huiswoud also had a rare audience with Lenin, who was already mortally ill.

Both McKay and Huiswoud were elected honorary members of the Moscow City Council. Son of a former slave, Huiswoud is regarded as the first black member of the American communist movement. Huiswoud (1893 - 1961) visited the Soviet Union as a member of the American delegation for the same Congress. McKay wrote about his Soviet experiences in an essay entitled Soviet Russia and the Negro published in The Crisis magazine in December 1923 and January 1924.Īfter the Congress, Nikolai Chukovskii was appointed as McKay's interpreter, an experience that figures in Chukovskii’s memoirs Literaturnye vospominaniia (chapter Poet s ostrova Iamaika). His warm reception in the Soviet Unioin included introductions to Soviet leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin as well as the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and other prominent figures in the arts. McKay arrived just in time for the fifth anniversary of the Revolution and spoke as an unofficial representative of the “American Negro” at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow. Robinson lived in the Soviet Union for 44 years and returned to the United States only in 1978.

In the same year at the plant where Robinson was employed, a visiting Soviet delegation engaged in the study of Ford assembly-line production techniques invited Robinson to work in a tractor factory in Stalingrad, offering him various perquisites. #BlackOctober Reading List: The Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora By Jennifer Wilson and Jennifer Suchlandīorn in Jamaica, Robinson was trained in Cuba as a mechanical engineer before his emigration to the United States in 1930. The Russian Review Volume 75 Issue 3 (July 2016): African Americans in Early Soviet Culture (special issue)

Robert robinson black on red