Harry Haywood was a pioneer of the U.S. communist movement and the Black liberation struggle from the 1920s to the 1980s. He was a lifelong revolutionary, first with the African Blood Brotherhood, then as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and finally with the October League / Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) during the New Communist Movement of the 1970s. As the principal theoretician of the African American national question, he fought all his life for a revolutionary position on Black liberation. He argued that African Americans in the Black Belt of the southern United States constituted an oppressed nation, with the right to self-determination, including the right to national independence.

This expanded, second edition of Selected Works of Harry Haywood, edited and introduced by J. Sykes, collects many of Haywood's most important works:

"Against Bourgeois-Liberal Distortions of Leninism on the Negro Question in the United States" (1930)
"The Struggle for a Leninist Position on the Negro Question in the United States" (1933)
"The Negro Nation" from Negro Liberation (1948)
For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question (1957)
"On the Negro Question" (1959)
"On the Degeneration of the CPUSA in the 1950s" (1976)
"Black Power and the Fight for Socialism" (1979)
"China and Its Supporters Were Wrong About the USSR" (1984)

As an appendix, the book also includes the 1928 and 1930 Comintern Resolutions on the African American national question, which Haywood helped to write.