Lovett Fort-Whiteman was considered the first American-born Black Communist and first African American to receive training at Communist International in Moscow.

Communist International (also known as Comintern) was an international organization founded in 1919 that advocated global communism. Despite his devotion to communism, Fort-Whiteman, a political and civil rights activist, spent the end of his life at the Gulag.

The Gulag was a system of Russian forced labor camps established during Joseph Stalin’s long reign as dictator of the Soviet Union. Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from 1924 until he died in 1953. The notorious prisons of the Gulag incarcerated about 18 million people during their existence. Conditions at the Gulag were considered brutal, with prisoners possibly being required to do hard labor up to 14 hours a day, according to History.com.

Here are five things to know about Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the Black communist who was taken to the Gulag in Russia.

1. About Fort-Whiteman

He was born in Dallas, Texas, in December 1889 to Moses Whiteman, an ex-slave, and Elizabeth Fort. The couple had two children, Lovett and his younger sister, Hazel. Fort-Whiteman attended Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas, Black Past reported.

When Fort-Whiteman was around sixteen, started his studies at Tuskegee Institute, the historically Black university in Alabama, then led by Booker T. Washington. He went on to study medicine at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, but did not complete his studies. When his father died, his family moved to Harlem. Fort-Whiteman later joined them, taking work as a bellhop and moonlighting as an actor in a Black theater troupe, The New Yorker magazine reported.

2. Becoming political

Not long after moving to Harlem, Fort-Whiteman relocated again. This time to the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico. There, he worked as an accounting clerk. He also became inspired by the Mexican Revolution and joined the anarcho-syndicalist Casa del Obrero Mudial (House of the World Worker or COM). When COM was abolished, Fort-Whiteman headed to Montreal, Canada, and from there he made his way back to New York City, Black Past reported.

Back in New York, Fort-Whiteman became affiliated with famed Black socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. Fort-Whiteman enrolled at the Rand School of Social Science operated by the Socialist Party of America and joined the socialist party. By 1919, he had joined the Communist Labor Party of America. This led to his being jailed for explicitly advocating “resistance to the United States,” a violation of the Espionage Act.

A member of the Workers Party of America (WPA), in 1924 he was one of 250 delegates to the “Negro Sanhedrin,” a convention focused on the needs of the Black working class in Chicago. He next traveled to Moscow to attend the Third International.

3. ‘Reddest of Blacks’

While in Moscow, Fort-Whiteman attended the Communist University of Toilers of the East. He also met and married a Russian woman. When he returned to the U.S. in 1925, Fort-Whiteman established the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), replacing the African Blood Brotherhood as the official Black communist organization in the US.

These actions led him to be labeled by Time magazine as “the reddest of the Blacks.”

4. Conflict with Communist policy

Back in Moscow, in 1928, he had very public philosophical differences over Communist policy for recruiting African Americans in the South. And, Fort-Whiteman lost his ANLC leadership position. He was ordered to remain in Moscow. When in 1933 Fort-Whiteman requested to return to the U.S., he was denied. An investigation on Fort-Whiteman’s was launched by the Comitern, the global leadership organization for Communist Parties. He was accused of “misleading some of the Negro comrades,” Black Past reported.

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5. Fort-Whiteman sent to The Gulag

By the last ’30s, Fort-Whiteman had become a polarizing figure. “Increasingly, Fort-Whiteman came to argue that the Communist Party, to win more support among African Americans, must acknowledge that racism, as much as social class, fuelled their plight. For Marxist ideologues, this was heresy,” The New Yorker reported.

On July 1, 1937, the Soviet government tried him and sentenced Fort-Whiteman to five years in internal exile for “anti-Soviet agitation.” Fort-Whiteman was transferred to Sevostlag Prison Labor Camp in northeastern Siberia, part of the notorious Gulag prison system. He died there on January 13, 1939, at the age of 49.

Photo Credit:IgorIgorevich / istock Credit:FotoMaximum istock