The Life of Socialist George Woodbey Must Not Be Lost to History
This May Day, we’re celebrating the life of George Woodbey, a former slave who became a leading socialist. Though he’s often forgotten today, Woodbey’s life speaks to the crucial connection between labor struggles and fights against racial oppression.
George Woodbey (1854–1937) held that socialism would finish the work of emancipation by destroying wage slavery. (Wikimedia Commons)
In the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs’s era, members had a nickname for the indispensable organizers who did the thankless work that makes a political movement possible. They called such people “Jimmie Higgins,” after a character popularized by Ben Hanford, Debs’s running mate in the 1904 and 1908 presidential campaigns. Jimmie Higgins put up the flyers, rented the halls, made sure the speaker found the venue, and carried out all the other unglamorous, often unappreciated work crucial for the party’s success.
George Washington Woodbey was one of these socialist organizers whom history has largely forgotten. Though Woodbey wasn’t a Jimmie Higgins exactly — he was an intellectual and lecturer rather than an anonymous organizer — he also did essential work for the socialist movement. Woodbey was one of the pioneering black socialists in the United States, and a stalwart defender of radical principles. Like the Jimmie Higgins of his time, he deserves to be remembered.
From Slavery to Socialism
Woodbey was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1854, shortly before the Civil War. In 1874, he was ordained as a Baptist minister and jumped into politics. As with virtually all black political activists of the time, he was a Republican. After reading Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward, and reading some copies of the Appeal to Reason, he drifted toward socialism, with a brief stop in the Populist Party. Upon hearing Debs speak in the mid-1890s, Woodbey resigned from the pulpit and dedicated his life to the socialist cause.
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