Oscar Berland Papers

Oscar Morris Berland (1927- ) is a political activist and writer who was raised in the United Workers Cooperative Colony during the Great Depression. The United Workers Co-Op, better known as "The Coops," was a commune located in the Allerton neighborhood of the East Bronx. It was built in 1927 primarily by first-generation Americans from a number of trades and became, at its time of construction, the largest co-op in the United States. The residents, which included immigrant and African American families, enjoyed a variety of amenities, including landscaped gardens, a library, gym, and classroom. These ideals inspired Berland's interest in American labor movements – more specifically Communism's agenda towards advancing the working-class – and his interest in equality during the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1948, after attending the City College of New York (CCNY), Berland went underground as a Communist labor organizer in Birmingham, Alabama. He was arrested numerous times, once for distributing pamphlets that identified a policeman as the bomber of a black family's home. Berland eventually moved to a Communist underground in the textile mills of North Carolina, where he resided until 1967. His work there as one of the three key "colonizers" prompted his being outed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Berland remained under the FBI's radar even after moving to California.

In California, Berland aspired to write a history of the Kaweah Colony, an experimental socialist colony that was located in what is now Sequoia National Park. Although his Kaweah Colony project was never realized, Berland is the author of several scholarly publications, most notably Aborted Revolution: A Study in the Formative Years of the American Labor Movement, 1877-1886, with Special Reference to the International Workmen's Association of San Francisco (1966) and "The Emergence of the Communist Perspective on the 'Negro Question' in America: 1919-1931" (1999-2000).