Communist leaders, faithfully following Moscow’s instructions, promptly started a campaign of agitation. In nominating James W. Ford, a Negro, to run for Vice-President of the United States on the Communist Party ticket in 1932, with presidential candidate William Z. Foster, C. A. Hathaway, then a member of the Party’s Election Campaign National Committee, reiterated instructions received in a 1930 Comintern resolution: In the first place, our demand is that the land of the Southern white landlords ... be confiscated and turned over to the Negroes.... Secondly, we propose to break up the present artificial state boundaries ... and to establish the state unity of the territory known as the “Black Belt,” where the Negroes constitute the overwhelming majority of the population. Thirdly, in this territory, we demand that the Negroes be given the complete right of self-determination; _the right to set up their own government_ in this territory and the right to separate, if _they_ wish, from the United States. Hence, “equal rights” and “self-determination” in the Black Belt became the Party’s chief slogans for Negroes. By “self-determination” the Party meant what Stalin had said: “... the right of the oppressed peoples of the dependent countries and colonies to complete secession, as the right of nations to independent existence as states.” As for the “Black Belt,” or as one article termed it, the “new Negro Republic,” the communists have given various descriptions. In 1948 they described the Belt as extending through twelve Southern states: “Heading down from its eastern point in Virginia’s tidewater section, it cuts a strip through North Carolina, embraces nearly all of South Carolina, cuts into Florida, passes through lower and central Georgia and Alabama, engulfs Mississippi and the Louisiana Delta, wedges into eastern Texas and Southwest Tennessee, and has its western anchor in southern Arkansas.” By 1952 the communist concept of the Black Belt had been narrowed to “at least five Southeastern states, with port outlets at Charleston on the Atlantic and Mobile on the Gulf, encompassing the bulk of Mississippi, and a good section of South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama.”