Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

John and Lillian Gates represented the liberals, who wanted to break loose from subservience to the Soviet Union and “Americanize” the party, taking Communist principles into mainstream politics. Ben Davis represented the hard-liners, who scorned such proposals as reformist surrender. Against the evils he had known, Davis could imagine no cure less cataclysmic than another Russian Revolution, and, having given up everything to follow the Kremlin, he snarled at the suggestion that he retreat to Atlanta and join a timid little NAACP picket line. Albert “Doc” Blumberg represented a middle faction loyal to Communist Party leader Eugene Dennis. Blumberg, a former philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins, also functioned as the party’s expert on relations with sympathetic or cooperating external groups, and in that capacity he brought Stanley Levison to the caucus.