Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 20, 1990 TAG: 9005170174
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE D'ORSO LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
So why is Maurice Jackson smiling?
Strange enough to find him still in business. Yet there he is, the 39-year-old chairman of the Communist Party of Virginia and the District of Columbia, manning his tiny third-floor office, across the street from the National Geographic Building in the downtown heart of the nation's capital.
There is no red flag outside, no hammer and sickle on the door, nothing but Jackson's name listed in the directory by the elevator. One step inside his cramped headquarters, however, and there is no doubt this must be the place.
Busts of Lenin and Marx are perched on a bookshelf. A framed photo of Gorbachev is mounted on one wall. Beside it hangs a collage - cutouts of Castro, Stalin and Ho Chi Minh peering down on their point man in these parts.
One look at Jackson, as well as a glance at the other items decorating his office - photos of jazz musicians Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman, of dancer Maurice Hines, of pool pro Willie Mosconi - indicates more than a mere dialectical materialist at work.
This is one cool commie.
He's got a quick answer for the Washington Redskins button pinned beneath a poster supporting striking shipyard workers: "Sure," he says, nodding at the football souvenir, "I'm an all-American guy."
He grins at a framed placard for a Soviet jazz concert, its script written in Russian: "No, I can't read it," he says. "Actually, I bought it at a bourgeois bookstore in New York."
He hoists a small chunk of cement from atop his desk - a piece of the Berlin Wall. "The wall," he muses, holding the rock up to the late afternoon light. "It should have come down. No doubt about it."
As for everything else that's been coming down lately - Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania - Jackson sighs. And he smiles.
"Nothing I can do about it," he says.
"Of course, not all of us feel the way I do. We have some comrades who are having a hard time accepting recent events in Europe. They think the party wasn't staunch enough, that it couldn't clamp the wheels on its own people. They're the ones who have the most trouble with Gorbachev.
"Personally, I think his party chose the right man for the right job.
"Personally, I think this is, in many ways, the second Bolshevik Revolution."
He shrugs, tossing the chunk of cement in the air.
"Personally, I'm not crying the blues about it."
Comrade. Bourgeois. Bolshevik.
Not exactly everyday lingo in the land of the free, especially in 1990. But according to its national headquarters in New York, the Communist Party of the United States of America currently has 20,000 card-carrying members. A 5 1 COMMIE Commie 1989 State Department report puts the number at no more than 5,000. Experts who study the American left say it is closer to 10,000.
In any case, Maurice Jackson is one of them. Has been for 20 years. He spent the first half of his communist career working his way through the ranks, traveling to the Soviet Union for congresses, going to Cuba with a work brigade, immersing himself in the mechanics of the party. In 1979 he was elected chairman of the D.C./Virginia district, inheriting a membership he hesitates to describe in detail. Most own the party's red membership card, stamped with a hammer and sickle for each month they pay dues. But few carry it, says Jackson.
"They have fears," he says.
And, he says, they have reason. The rout may be on in the East, but the F.B.I. remains tense in the West. At least according to Jackson.
"They follow you," he says. "Sometimes they stop you. I've been stopped. They just want you to know they know what you're doing."
The telephone on his desk, says Jackson, is tapped.
"I assume it is. But I don't say anything on the phone that's of such a nature that I'm concerned. I'm not doing anything illegal."
What he is doing is manning the battlements he helped build two decades ago.
"When I joined in 1971, there was nothing here," he says. "We pretty much started from scratch. Most of us were young - I was barely out of my teens. I've seen a lot of people come and go since then."
Precisely how many remain is something Jackson can't - or won't - say. He allows there are "maybe a couple hundred" active members in Virginia and D.C. And he will say they have expanded beyond the classic constituency of union laborers and left-wing academics.
"Many are professionals," says Jackson. "Bureaucrats, government workers, lawyers, writers, artists. They're people who have a hatred for oppression. They don't believe capitalism and greed are going to solve our problems.
"They aren't people who are necessarily struggling for themselves. We've got a lot of communists making $40,000 a year. I know many people giving money to the party making more than that."
They don't, however, give a lot. Jackson has no staff. He answers his own phone, types his own letters, even builds his own bookcases. Volunteers occasionally drop by to lend a hand.
"The party," he says, almost proudly, "is not rich."
Its money comes from donations and from monthly membership dues, which range from a maximum of $5 for people with annual salaries of $20,000 or more to a minimum of 50 cents for the unemployed "and those making minimum wage," says Jackson.
The income goes mostly to pumping out the office's paperwork, which ranges from newsletters and leaflets written by Jackson to stacks of the People's Daily World, published at the party's New York headquarters and distributed to anyone who's interested.
"We get strangers dropping in now and then," says Jackson. "Some are just curious. Others like our position on particular issues, like rent control in D.C. or right-to-work in Virginia. Some join simply because they see us out on the street struggling, and they respect that."
But there are nowhere near as many Leninists out there as Jackson once hoped. There was a time, he says, when he believed Communism would be the party of choice in America by the year 2000.
"When I first joined, I thought, `Jesus Christ, man, people gonna rise up,' you know?
"But I was a young guy."
Shooting pool
He's a 50-cent-a-month man now. He buys his clothes at thrift stores. Most days he walks two miles to work from the three-bedroom home he shares with his wife and two children.
"What would you want me to do?" he says of owning a house. "Live in a commune somewhere?"
He has collected "a couple thousand" jazz albums and teaches a jazz history class through the D.C. Public Schools. He runs marathons. Photos of his family cover an office cabinet. Dolls collected from his travels spill off his shelves. A box of toys is stored beneath his desk.
"My kids," says Jackson. "They're the joy of my life."
Their names don't matter, he says. Nor does his wife's.
"She's a worker, like you and me," he says. "Just refer to her as the love of my life."
He won't say if she is a communist.
"I wouldn't tell you if anyone was a member of the party," he says. "So I certainly wouldn't tell you if she is. I can tell you this. Most of my friends are not members of the Communist Party."
But they know he is. And that doesn't keep them away.
"I have friends over, I go out to shoot pool, I work out at the gym. I'm in a group of black men who discuss jazz. They aren't communists, but they respect me for fighting for my beliefs, even if they don't agree with everything I believe."
He is on the nine-person board of advisors of The Afro-American, a national newspaper. He is on the 22-member national Communist Party central committee. In 1981 he drew 25,000 votes as a delegate to the D.C. Statehood Convention, and he now chairs the Statehood Party. He has run twice for D.C. City Council. And he intends to run soon for the D.C. School Board. He regularly writes letters to the Washington Post. And he occasionally visits New York, where aging U.S. Communist Party chairman Gus Hall continues to present the party line from his Manhattan headquarters.
Jackson, however, says he is free to interpret that line in any way he wants.
"I don't look to the preacher to get the word about God," he says. "I can get the word myself."
\ Half Black Panther
He first got the word in Alabama, in a rural black schoolroom, in the 7th grade. He had lived in Alabama since he was 4, when his parents had separated and sent him from Newport News to stay with his grandmother.
"Pearl Dickinson was her name," he says. "She washed clothes for rich white people."
And he worked odd jobs with his older brother: "Picking pecans in the winter, cutting rich people's yards in the summer, throwing papers in the morning, cleaning up the rich white man's store in the evening."
His grandmother saw that he studied hard in school, "so I wouldn't have to scrub filthy floors with somebody on my back calling me names."
He read Martin Luther King's "Stride Toward Freedom" when he was 12. But a year later he read something that impressed him even more.
"We had this teacher who set up dialogues. One person had to read about and defend Nazi Germany, another had to read and defend the Communist Manifesto. And we were supposed to hate both of them."
Jackson knew no more about communism than any other boy in Alabama in 1963. "All I knew was Walter Cronkite's voice on the TV. All I knew was there was gonna be this war and we should be prepared to crawl up under our beds."
But the Manifesto struck a chord.
"The notion of from each according to his ability and to each according to his need, that made a great impression on me. That made a lot of sense."
Still, it wasn't until he had returned to Newport News, graduated third in his class at that city's Carver High and earned a scholarship to study political science at Nashville's Fisk University that Jackson really began reading. And it wasn't until he spent a winter working as a rigger at the Newport News Shipyard that he felt he fully understood Marx's message.
"I developed there a great appreciation for workers," he says. "You see a crew of black men making $2.60 an hour and this white man, he's the boss. The initial, simplistic notion would be that this is totally racist. But I saw enough poor whites in Alabama and in Virginia to know it's not that simple.
"There's a lot of racism in this country, but I've been lucky enough to be able to look beyond that to the class problems behind it."
Although he was "half Black Panther" when he arrived in Washington in 1971 as an intern in the office of California Congressman Augustus Hawkins, Jackson was ripe for a different sort of revolution.
By the end of that summer, he was a communist.
Guns and grenades
In the past 20 years, Jackson's jobs with the party have taken him to almost every country in Europe, five times to the Soviet Union, four to Cuba and once to Vietnam, where he addressed the 6th Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1986. His speech included an assurance about America:
"Comrades, we do not despair," he told his audience. "Our people have shown a new and increased willingness to fight for what is just and right."
But that fight, says Jackson, is no longer the sort he once envisioned.
"I don't have the belief I once had, that one day somebody would go to the barricades and seize the power."
The image of a Red Menace radical with a gun in one hand and a grenade in the other is off the mark, he says.
"I suppose if I lived in a country where I thought the gun and grenade would be helpful, I would have them."
Still, he remains a revolutionary.
"In every society there are revolutionaries. In every society there are people who have visions, who want their society to be equal and just. I think I'm fortunate to be one of those people."
The question arises - and he's faced it often - why, instead of trying to reshape this country, he doesn't simply move to a Marxist one.
"I've often been asked that," he says. "But I was born in this country. I've put a lot into it. I've raised my family here, and I have a right to be here.
"I've made my choice to make this country better because I love it. What I do is I think for its salvation."
He smiles when asked whose side he is ultimately on.
"I'm on the side of the American people."
And if it came down to a choice between the Soviets and America, if he had to choose one to stand and the other to fall?
"I can't think in those terms," he says. "That's like asking me if I had to lose one of my children, which would I choose. I just can't think in those terms."
What he does think is that communism remains the hope for America's future, even as he admits a red flag will never be hoisted over the White House.
"My vision is that eventually the communists will play a role with other progressive forces to one day create a government whose main interests are the health and well-being of the majority of people, black and white.
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by CNB