Benjamin J. Davis

Benjamin J. Davis

The Daily Worker

Davis contributed to the Daily Worker, which later became People's World after several merges.

Arrested, Smith Act

Leading Communist Party USA members arrested under the Smith Act were;

• Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. – Chairman of the CPUSA's Legislative Committee and Council-member of New York City
• Eugene Dennis – CPUSA General Secretary
• William Z. Foster – CPUSA National Secretary (indicted; but not tried due to illness)
• John Gates – Leader of the Young Communist League
• Gil Green – Member of the National Board
• Gus Hall – Member of the CPUSA National Board
• Irving Potash – Furriers Union official
• Jack Stachel – Editor of the Daily Worker
• Robert G. Thompson – Lead of the New York branch of CPUSA
• John Williamson – Member of the CPUSA Central Committee
• Henry Winston – Member of the CPUSA National Board
• Carl Winter – Lead of the Michigan branch of CPUSA

Communist Party and POC

When the Communist Party USA, entered its period of crisis following the Khrushchev report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on the crimes of Stalin, there arose within the Party in the U.S. at least four different factions. The first of these was the right wing, led by Daily Worker editor John Gates, Fred Fine, and others. The second was the center grouping, led by Eugene Dennis, the Party’s general secretary. The third was the “left,” led by William Z. Foster, Bob Thompson, and Ben Davis. The fourth was the so-called “ultra-Left,” which called itself the Marxist-Leninist Caucus. It was this grouping, out of which grew the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, with which Noel Ignatin was associated.

Levison Group

One group of secret Communists in the United States was led by Arthur Kinoy, a radical lawyer who ended his long career as a distinguished professor at Rutgers Law School, and included Dr. Jeremiah Stamler, a pioneering cardiologist at Northwestern Medical School, whose lawsuit marked one of the first successful challenges to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). And Stanley Levison, a key aide and supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr..

Eugene Dennis told Morris Childs in 1958 that the Levison “group,” active in the NAACP and the American Jewish Congress, still provided money from party businesses it controlled to a New York functionary and activist, the African-American Communist leader Benjamin J. Davis.