Haywood served on the Central Committee. He published his autobiography Black Bolshevik although some of his important writings and political life during the 1960s were edited out. For example, the manuscript he wrote with the acknowledged collaboration with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and was dedicated to Robert F. Williams was not mentioned. This work, circulated in mimeographed form from early 1964 throughout California and the Deep South, deeply influenced the armed self-defense movement against the Ku Klux Klan during 1964 and 1965 and projected a slogan widely picked up throughout the Deep South that we must pose our own challenge to order and stability to counter the challenge posed by "massive resistance" by Southern politicians and racist terrorists. Black Bolshevik became an important book widely cited by scholars and read by the wider public as well. Through it and his other writings, Haywood provided ideological leadership far beyond the New Communist Movement. Haywood's theoretical contributions had a substantial impact on the major, and numerous warring factions of the New Communist Movement well beyond his own CP(M-L), including, for example, the League of Revolutionary Struggle (Marxist-Leninist), the early Revolutionary Communist Party, the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters and the Communist Workers Party. Nonetheless, lack of experience, sectarianism, and voluntarism played a major role in keeping the young Maoist groups from taking a strong leading role. In his last published article, Haywood wrote that the New Communist movement spent too much time and energy seeking the "franchise" of governments and parties outside the United States without validating itself among the people of our own country. Haywood's theoretical contributions to questions of African-American national oppression and national liberation remain highly valued by the Ray O. Light Group, which developed out of an anti-revisionist split from the Communist Party USA in 1961, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which was originally formed from the mergers of several New Communist Movement groups in the 1980s, and the Maoist Internationalist Movement as well as by many black revolutionaries and activists today. Haywood's role in the black protest movements during the 1960s through the 1980s can be studied at the Harry Haywood Papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City and Harry Haywood Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Haywood's theoretical innovations have been influential in a range of scholarship including historical materialism, geography, Marxist education, and social movement