Hutchen R. Hutchins, born on June 30, 1903, was part of a small but active cadre of African American Communists operating in the Pacific Northwest during the 1930's. Originally from the East Coast, Hutchins attended the Lenin School in Moscow in the late 1920's. In 1932 he was sent to Seattle by the Communist Party USA's Central Committee in New York to serve on a three-member District Executive Committee. That same year he helped organize one of the largest demonstrations of unemployed workers in the state's history. Hutchins reportedly clashed with Party members in the Northwest who, considered him overbearing and doctrinaire. In 1933 he was replaced, along with the other two members of the Executive Committee, by a new Executive Secretary. Hutchins stayed in Seattle and retained a Marxist political orientation, although it is unclear whether he remained an official member of the Communist Party. Throughout the latter half of the 1930s he served as president of ...