DEBERRY, CLIFTON (18 September 1923–24 March 2006), American communist and two-time US presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party. He was the first African American in the twentieth century to be a political party’s nominee for president.
Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, DeBerry worked as a housepainter and trade unionist until he moved to Chicago in the 1940s during the Great Migration. While working at the International Harvester plant there he organized a walkout, laying the foundation for a lifetime of political activism. DeBerry joined the Farm Equipment Workers Union and the Communist Party, though he would renounce his membership in the latter in 1953 and join the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. In 1955 DeBerry led several protests in Chicago seeking justice for the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi and then returned to the South to join the Montgomery bus boycotts in Alabama.
DeBerry was frequently targeted by the FBI and thus unable to hold down a job. As he recalled, “The FBI would visit my boss and I would be fired.” Failing to find steady employment, DeBerry moved to New York City in 1960. Throughout the 1960s, he marched for civil rights in Selma, Alabama, Memphis, and Tennessee; became a friend of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.; and was a delegate to the founding conventions of both the Negro Labor Congress and the Negro American Labor Council.
DeBerry soon took an interest in running for elected office. In 1963 he ran for city council in Brooklyn, receiving 3,514 votes. He was also nominated by the Socialist Workers Party to be its presidential candidate in the 1964 general election. In his 1964 acceptance speech he said, “Now, once again, if we look back in historical terms, we see how a phenomenon comes into existence. It arises out of necessity, it arises out of a given need, struggles to maintain itself, reaches a peak, then it begins its decline. But in the process of reaching its peak, it creates those elements within it which will replace it. Now we see this within the civil rights movement.” He also ran for mayor of New York City in 1965 and for governor of New York State in 1970. His last bid for elected office was in 1980, when he once again ran in the presidential election on the Socialist Workers Party ticket.
DeBerry was an outspoken defender of the Cuban Revolution and African liberation struggles and demonstrated to end the Vietnam War. In 1969 he said, “The young people have been standing on their feet these days. Because the young people represent the future, they’re gonna make the future. And contrary to all the old fossils and the critics, I say the future is in good hands.”