A major figure in Harlem community politics and the Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s, Benjamin Davis, Jr. was born into a prominent African American family in Atlanta, Georgia in 1903. He migrated north to Massachusetts to attend college at Amherst, where he was an all-American football player, and in 1932 graduated from Harvard Law School.

Born into slavery on a plantation in Tennessee, George Washington Woodbey was largely self-educated and as young man supported himself as a miner and factory worker before becoming an ordained minister in 1874 and pastoring churches in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.

James W. Ford was Special Organizer of the Communist Party's Harlem section and the most prominent black Communist in the nation during the 1930s and early 1940s. Perhaps more than any other figure, Ford symbolized the Party's efforts to build a united front between African Americans and the white working class.

Ford was born into a middle-class home in Chicago in 1903. He attended Fisk University, where he was a star athlete and active in the campus politics. After graduation, he served in France during World War I. In many ways an unlikely candidate for future leadership in the Communist Party, Ford's radicalization began after the war when his efforts to find a job commensurate with his education were frustrated by racial discrimination. He settled for a position at the Chicago Post Office, joined the Postal Workers Union, and shortly thereafter the Communist Party.

Ford rose quickly in Party ranks during a period when the CP was placing increased emphasis on promoting black leaders. He joined the American Negro Labor Congress in 1926 and sojourned in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. In 1929, he was chosen to head the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers and a year later became head of the Negro Department of the Trade Union Unity League. In 1932 he joined William Z. Foster on the CP's presidential ticket, becoming the first African American to be nominated for Vice President of the United States. He would run alongside CP presidential nominee Earl Browder in 1936 and again in 1940.

Spanish Civil War veteran and militant poet Ramón Durem was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1915 of mixed heritage.  Leaving home at fourteen, he briefly served in the U.S.

Veteran of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, Walter Garland was born in New York City on 27 November 1913.  After serving in the U.S. Army for two years, he enrolled at Brooklyn College where he studied mathematics.  Garland joined the Communist Party in 1935 and became active in the National Negro Congress.  When the International Brigades formed to fight for Republican Spain, Garland volunteered , sailing for France in January 1937.

Angela Davis was born in the “Dynamite Hill” area of Birmingham, Alabama. The area was called dynamite hill because so many homes had been bombed by the KKK. Angela’s mother was active in the NAACP, when it was dangerous to be openly active.  As a teenager Angela moved to New York City with her mother, who was pursuing a Master’s degree at NYU. Angela studied several years in Germany and France and returned to the U.S.

A journalist, radical activist, and theoretician, George Padmore did more than perhaps any other single individual to shape the theory and discourse of Pan-African anti-imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Born Malcolm Nurse in Trinidad in 1901, Padmore moved to the United States in 1925 to study at Fisk and Howard Universities. In 1928 he dropped out of Howard's law school and joined the American Communist Party. Quickly rising in Party ranks as an expert on race and imperialism, Padmore moved to Moscow in 1929 to head the Comintern's International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers and to edit the Negro Worker. In 1931 he published the influential pamphlet, The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers. In 1933 the Comintern suspended publication of the Negro Worker and disbanded the Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, prompting Padmore to split acrimoniously with the Party. In subsequent years Padmore would become a fervent anti-Communist, denouncing the Comintern's alleged manipulation of black freedom struggles in his 1956 book Pan-Africanism or Communism? However, throughout his life he continued to unite with activists and trade unionists on the radical left around the issue of anti-colonialism.

A radical theoretician, anti-colonialist, labor organizer, and civil rights activist, Harry Haywood was one of the most prominent and influential African American Communists of the twentieth century.  Haywood, the son of former slaves, was born in South Omaha, Nebraska in 1898. He migrated to Chicago after serving in World War I and organized community defense during the 1919 Chicago race riot. In 1922 he joined the African Blood Brotherhood and in 1925 became an official member of the CPUSA.

The League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR) was the primary civil rights organization of the American Communist Party (CP) during the early to mid 1930s. Founded in St. Louis in1930 after the dissolution of the American Negro Labor Congress, the group established regional branches throughout the nation, but was most active in Harlem and Chicago. B.D. Amis was the LSNR's first General Secretary, followed by Harry Haywood. In 1934, Langston Hughes was appointed as honorary president and served in that capacity until the organization disbanded in 1936.

The LSNR ostensibly worked toward the realization of the Communist International's radical 1928 "Resolution on the Negro Question," which argued for land redistribution in the South and for African Americans' right to self-determination through the creation of a sovereign nation-state in the Black Belt. In practice, however, the LSNR focused less on the theoretical right of self-determination and more on militantly agitating for social and civil equality through its newspaper, The Liberator, and through direct action protests against lynching, tenant evictions, Jim Crow segregation, legal frame-ups including the infamous Scottsboro rape trials and other manifestations of racial injustice. Reflecting the sectarian nature of the American CP in the early 1930s, the LSNR carried on a contentious feud with mainstream civil rights organizations like the NAACP and Urban League, whom it branded "Negro misleaders," although on a local level LSNR branches demonstrated more willingness to engage in coalition politics.

Oliver Law was the first African American in history to lead an integrated American military army. Born in west Texas on October 23, 1900, from 1919 to 1925 he was a private in the U.S. 24th Infantry. He moved to Chicago where he became a cabbie, a stevedore, and worked for the Works Project Administration.

Best-selling author, social critic and influential literary figure Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, to Nathan Wright and Ella Wilson, both children of slaves, on a plantation near Roxie, Mississippi. His father was an illiterate sharecropper and his mother was a schoolteacher. Finding farm life unprofitable, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where Wright encountered violence, racism and eventual poverty when his father abandoned the family.

After his mother fell ill in 1915, Wright and his brother were sent to an orphanage, then back to Mississippi to live with their grandparents. Wright felt isolated as a non-religious member of the strict Seventh Day Adventist household. He published his first short story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre,” in 1924 in The Southern Register and held a series of jobs before moving to Chicago in 1927.

The Jamaican born Wilfred A. Domingo was part of an influential community of West Indian radicals active in Harlem's New Negro movement in the early 20th century. A member of the Socialist Party and a journalist by trade, Domingo contributed to Cyril Briggs' Crusader and A. Philip Randolph's Messenger, along with a host of other community publications. He became the first editor of Marcus Garvey's New World and played a key role in shaping Garvey's race-conscious, nationalist ideology. However, as a class-conscious member of the Socialist Party, Domingo clashed with Garvey's capitalist orientation and ultimately broke with the UNIA. At the same time, Domingo was frustrated with the Socialist Party's failure to make African American rights a priority and drifted toward Briggs' more militant African Blood Brotherhood, which was closely aligned with the Communist Party in the early 1920s.

In the 1930s Domingo became increasingly focused on his homeland and the issue of Jamaican independence. In 1936 he cofounded the Jamaica Progressive League in Harlem, which agitated for Jamaican self-rule, universal suffrage, unionization, and the organization of consumer cooperatives. Domingo returned to Jamaica in 1938 to join Norman Manley's People's National Party and served as vice-chair of the Trades Union Advisory Council. After returning to New York in 1947, Domingo broke with the PNP. Wilfred A. Domingo died in Harlem in 1968.