oppose Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. When eleven Communist leaders were tried under the Smith Act in 1949, Haywood was assigned the task of research for the defense. In the CPUSA, Haywood served on the Central Committee from 1927 to 1938 and on the Politburo from 1931 until 1938. He also participated in the major factional struggles internal to the CPUSA against Jay Lovestone and Earl Browder, regularly siding with William Z. Foster. The Comintern and the Black Belt nation During his four-and-half-year stay in the Soviet Union (1925–1930), Harry Haywood held dual membership in both the CPUSA and the CPSU. As a member of the CPSU, he traveled extensively in the Soviet Union's autonomous republics, and participated in the struggles against both the Left Opposition headed by Leon Trotsky and the Right Opposition led by Nikolai Bukharin. In these struggles and in others, Haywood was on the side of Joseph Stalin. While working as a delegate for the Comintern, he served on commissions dealing with the question of African Americans in the United States, as well as the development of the "Native Republic Thesis" for the South African Communist Party. Haywood worked to draft the "Comintern Resolutions on the Negro Question" of 1928 and 1930, which stated that African Americans in the Southern part of the United States made up an oppressed nation, with the right to self-determination up to and including secession. He would continue to fight for this position throughout his life. He believed that a distinct African-American nation had developed that satisfied the criteria laid out by Stalin in his Marxism and the National Question: a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture. Because African Americans in the South constituted such a nation, Haywood believed the correct response was a demand for self-determination, up to and including the right to separate from the United States. Their "national territory" was historically the South, and they deserved full equality everywhere else in the United States. Haywood believed that only with genuine political power, which from a Marxist point of view included control of the productive forces, such as land, could African Americans obtain genuine equality. Their gaining of equality was a prerequisite for broader working class unity. Most of those in the CPUSA who disagreed with Haywood considered the question of