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Declaration by the Central Executive Committee, Workers (Communist) Party of America

Declaration by the Central Executive Committee, Workers (Communist) Party of America
New York, April 25, 1925

Negro Workers of America!
White Workers of America!

Comrades! The Workers (Communist) Party of America calls your attention to the persecutions, which the United States government is inflicting upon a large mass organization of Negroes, the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
For four years the United States government has been persistently trying to destroy this Negro organization.

The persecution began in 1921 with a series of arrests and prosecutions of the organizers of the association. In 1923 the police agents of the government suppressed the annual convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association by methods of terrorization, including the arrest of the president of the organization, who was held in prison without bail during the period of the proposed convention.

Again in August 1924, the government tried to disrupt and disperse the "Congress of the Negro Peoples of the World" in New York City by means of arresting the president of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which had called the congress, and by direct efforts of federal officers to terrorize the delegates on the floor of the congress. An effort is now being made in the courts to take away from the organization its New York meeting place, "Liberty Hall," as a further inducement to it to disband.

The president of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Marcus Garvey, is in the federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Georgia, with a five-year sentence and the prospect of deportation as an "undesirable alien" at the end of that term. The federal court of appeals and the United States s[u]preme court dispensed with their usual custom of long-drawn-out delay and acted with unheard of speed in condemning this Negro leader where those courts would have been only too gentle in finding loop-holes for a big criminal of the ruling class and the so-called "superior race."

DEFEND NEGRO RIGHT TO ORGANIZE
The Workers (Communist) Party calls upon all class-conscious workers, both white workers and the Negro workers everywhere, to join together in protests and demonstrations against the persecution of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and against the imprisonment of Marcus Garvey. We demand Garvey's immediate release from the capitalist prison, and the stopping of all persecutions against the organization.

In fighting the imprisonment of Marcus Garvey, the Workers (Communist) Party does not endorse the leadership of Mr. Garvey. Many times we have directed the severest criticism against his leadership and we intend to continue to do so.
But the imprisonment of Marcus Garvey is a political question having nothing to do with the personal deficiencies of the man. The brutal manner in which this Negro leader was treated upon the occasion of his arrest, the flouting of his "legal" rights both while on trial and while under bond, as well as the fact of his imprisonment, are intended as an insult and injury to the 12 million Negro workers and farmers of America. This is a direct attack by a capitalist government against the Negro masses whom the government fears and hates. It must be made a lesson to the Negro people, that the capitalist government, which suppresses their efforts at organization, is the bitterest enemy of the Negro people and of the working class. A government which exists for the purpose of robbing the masses of the products of their toil, a government run by thieves for the benefit of a thieving class and even headed at present by the thieves of Teapot Dome, cannot persuade us that it has become the protector of the masses from robbery. If Garvey has swindled his people, it is for his people to judge, and not for the capitalist government, which is the enemy of the Negro people. The real reason for the arrest of the president of the Negro association is the crude belief that

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