“We’re CIOs From Alabama!”
The reminiscences of Sidney Rittenberg, a lifelong Communist activist, remind us what it meant to be on the Left in the 1940s.
Sidney Rittenberg as a G.I. in uniform at Stanford University.Sidney Rittenberg photos
Sidney Rittenberg has had an extraordinary life. After joining the US Communist Party (CPUSA) in 1940, he organized workers in the American South — not only to “get more pork chops,” as he puts its, but also to dismantle Jim Crow segregation.
World War II took him to India and China, where he served as an army translator. The poverty he saw in Asia deepened his commitment to communism, and he eventually joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Rittenberg stayed in China for thirty-five years, but as an American communist, he would always remain suspect in the party’s eyes. He was imprisoned by the government twice, for a total of sixteen years. Rittenberg recorded his experiences in China in The Man Who Stayed Behind.
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