John Pittman

John Pittman (1906-1993) was an African-American communist journalist and writer born in Atlanta. He graduated from Morehouse College and received an M.A. in Economics (1930) from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1931, he founded and served as editor of the San Francisco Spokesman, renamed The Spokesman. Pittman traveled to Europe as a correspondent for the Daily Worker, People's World, and the Chicago Defender. He married fellow communist Margrit Adler and together were Moscow correspondents for the press. In the late 1970s, Pittman went to Prague as the CPUSA representative on the editorial board of the World Marxist Review, returning to New York in 1987. In addition to his newspaper writings, Pittman contributed some two dozen articles to the CPUSA monthly journal Political Affairs and wrote "Africa Calling, Isolate the Racists: The Liberation Struggle in Southern Africa" (1973), and (with Margrit Pittman) "Sense and Nonsense About Berlin" (1962) and "Peaceful Coexistence: Its Theory and Practice in the Soviet Union" (1964).