Otto Eduard Gerardus Majella Huiswoud (October 28, 1893 – February 20, 1961) was a Surinamese political activist who was a charter member of the Communist Party of America. Huiswoud is regarded as the first black member of the American communist movement. Huiswoud served briefly as the Communist Party's representative to the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1922 and was a leading black Comintern functionary during the decade of the 1920s.
Biography
Early years
Otto E. Huiswoud was born October 28, 1893, in Paramaribo, a South American coastal city in what was then the Dutch colony of Surinam and is today the capital of the independent country of Suriname. He was the son of Rudolf Huiswoud, a former slave who had gained his freedom as a boy of 11 and who learned the skills of a tailor, working at the trade until his death in 1920. His mother, Jacqueline Bernard Huiswoud, originally hailed from the island of Curaçao. Otto was the fifth child and the second son in a family of eight siblings.
As a boy Otto was educated in Roman Catholic schools, with the educational system of the day conducted in the Dutch language and compulsory for children aged 7 to 12. Otto remained in school for five years, gaining exposure during this time not only to Dutch, but also the French and German languages.
During his school years Huiswoud participated in the Roman Catholic Church on Sundays as an altar boy. After school he worked as an apprentice to a carpenter.
Following completion of his education, Otto began a second apprenticeship, this time working under a printer. Huiswoud was unhappy with his lot in life as a printer's apprentice, however, so in January 1910 the 16-year-old convinced his father to allow him to depart to see the world and he shipped out on a banana boat bound for the Netherlands.
Due to the abysmal working conditions on board, Huiswoud and two of his Surinamese mates decided to jump ship when it was docked in New York. He settled in Brooklyn, where he made ends meet by working at various jobs as a printer, cook, and janitor.
Early political career
In New York, Huiswoud was exposed to soapbox speakers in Union Square, where he was introduced to socialist arguments and literature for the first time. By 1916, he had become a member of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), participating actively in the Young People's Socialist League at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he studied agriculture. Huiswoud would later also become a member of the Socialist Propaganda League, a revolutionary socialist organization which included the influential socialist writer S. J. Rutgers, a Dutch civil engineer who had previously worked in the Dutch East Indies.
During the summer of 1918, Huiswoud took a job working on a pleasure boat that was part of the Fall River Line. Black crew members were not organized by the International Seamen's Union, so Huiswoud took it upon himself to lead a walkout that led the company to negotiate for better pay and improved working conditions for its minority workers. News of the young leader of this Boston strike reached Socialist Party leaders, who offered Huiswoud a one-year scholarship to attend the Rand School of Social Science, the SPA's training school for party activists and trade union workers. Huiswoud accepted this offer and did not return to Cornell.
Between his attendance of the Rand School and his participation in the 21st Assembly Branch of the SPA, located in Harlem, Huiswoud made the acquaintance of a number of influential figures in the history of American radicalism, including Japanese expatriate Sen Katayama—later a high-ranking functionary in the Communist International—trade unionist and newspaper editor A. Philip Randolph and his associate Chandler Owen, Richard B. Moore, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, Frank Crosswaith, and Edward Welsh.
Huiswoud found himself a supporter of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party during the acrimonious factional war of 1919. He was one of 94 delegates to the June 1919 National Conference of the Left Wing, which elected a governing Left Wing National Council and participated in the formation of the Communist Party of America on September 1 of that year. Although not a delegate to either founding convention, according to Comintern records Huiswoud's party membership dated to 1919, and he has been recognized by historians as the first black member of the American Communist Party.