Part One: Black Antifascists In the Spanish Civil War

podcast idiot. Because the podcast expert this week who's gonna explain some stuff to me is my friend Jordan from the Dugout, a Black anarchist podcast. Hi Jordan, Hello, how's your week? Everything's fine, right.

for this. But the love of the game.

and of itself. And in doing a lot of research for this episode, there's just a lot of like black resistance that is so bold, very beautiful and brilliant, and a lot of it gets erased, especially anti fascist history, because fascism as we know it right now wasn't really named until like nineteen twenty twentieth century. European fascism is kind of where we get some of our understandings.

the world, they had to colonize themselves. And I think it's a really then truer like exposing like oppressive, violent institutions and in exposing like fascism or like othering and having that sort of out group to define your terror on and build fear around to kind of not sometimes control a population, but more control what they think is possible and what they think is a reason for certain downturns in the economy or certain downturns in social life and right.

body going forward. And typically also like capitalists and the old power structures, it could be it will see in Spain feudal structures alongside capitalist structures that are vuying to continue, like their sort of control over the economy, people's labor, and the international relations. And in doing a lot of this black anarchist research, I found a lot of anti authoritarian and communist histories, many that have lived lives of

resistance without calling themselves. And something in my work is that like, I'm not here to label any of these ancestors, but drawing a lineage an anti authoritarian thought that reminds us how and why folks have fought and why they've fought in certain ways because anti fascism and fascism isn't something abstract or academic. It's intensely real for a lot

of folks. And that violence comes through the history and legacy of imperialism and colonialism of when Europe especially Europeans, were like, well, let's go down to the continent of Africa and take over norther theft or even just like this whole history even back through the romans of taking over in like colonizing other places, and eventually the through line of what we see now is like these large settler colony societies in which the whole purpose of it,

the whole foundation of their societies is based on the violence of erasure and displacement and stolen labor and forced labor. And to keep that sort of control going, one has to not recognize it as a fault. And that's where we are in America is we've never recognized any of our faults or any of our contradictions and our foundations.

still better than eighteen fifty in America. Like, even though what we have now we could call fascist, it you know, derives from the fascist ideology, don't.

to use. And there's something that I talk about and I was like, it does look kind of nineteen thirties Germany and America, but it more looks like still eighteen nineties America. It looks like a post reconstruction America more than it does like we have like our Gilded Age or oligarchies, and we have the people. We feel like we're on the precipice of something and the ruling class is coming in very very hard to maintain its power structure, and they know how early they have to get on this.

This is the basis of like counterinsurgency work, as being so preemptive that you end up just creating a police state, which in America we've been kind of fine with that for the most part.

of them went on to work to protect one of the greatest culture icons of the twentieth century, Paula Robinson, my opinion, love the man. But one thing to kind of talk about before is like, for me, this episode and other things is a context episode. I'm not really going to start getting into the war until the second episode.

the mini war before it. This was the first showdown between fascist and you would say republican or leftist forces that happened in the World War II era from nineteen thirty six to nineteen thirty nine, and it started with Franco a fascist, a Catholic fascist, attempting a coup, and then that coup failed because people resisted it, and instead it turned into the Spanish Civil War. All of the other powers of the Western Powers, like sat aside while

the fascists basically Germany and Italy helped Franco win. And it was a long, bloody, drawn out fight and also one of the most fascinating periods and one of the most utopian periods in some ways that has ever happened with people experimenting with whole new ways of being, and so there's a reason everyone's obsessed with it. And if you want to know more about it, check out roughly a quarter of our episodes. And I'm sorry about that,

but this one's good. I've been wanting to hear more about this particular aspect of it for a long time.

military discipline. Like there's a lot of really good essays and articles about how anarchists in the time period experimented with different levels of military discipline and what that meant for them and how that was up versus a lot of the machismo that comes with anti fascism in the day and age. And one thing I think is also very interesting about the time period is I think it was only the USSR in Mexico that were supporting the republic.

There are Republican sides at the time, and Mexico even allowed near the end of the war folks to repatriate to the area. So a lot of Spanish ANDCI fascists went to Mexico, and a lot of people in the Internationalist forces as well went to Mexico after the war.

There was the violence in Harlem in the Deep South, and it was a long battle for black dignity and survival. And this is about people who refuse to just wait for justice, people who saw anti fascism as not just a political stance, but a moral one, a spiritual one, and a very very personal one. Hell yeah, yeah. The

paths to Spain didn't start in nineteen thirty six. To me, it kind of starts with World War One and how we understand some of the concepts and how black veterans came home after this quote war to end all wars and were still met with extreme racism, poverty, vigilante terror. There was in nineteen nineteen the Red Summer, which was a blood soaked welcome that sparked something deeper into a lot of folks. So when you say the Red Summer

of nineteen nineteen, what's that about? Is that the like like the bombing of Black Wall Street and stuff like that, Like, what's the what's the red Summer? You know, I actually can't remember if the Tulsa thing happened in the Red Summer, but it was a bunch of white supremacists terror and race riots that happened, and dozens of cities across the

US and some rural counties as well. There was a lot of civil rights activists that coined the term, and they had organized a lot of peaceful protests against racial violence in that summer, and they were attacked by racial terror by folks who were in their communities and did not want to stand for that sort of racial equity. In that kind of talk, there was a lot of

white on black violence. There was a lot of race riots in Chicago, Washington, d c. And then it was kind of related to the demobilization of folks coming back from World War One and kind of the economic downturn that the US was kind of starting to ben and folks were still coming through too on and there was a lot of labor unrest happening in that time and a lot of labor organizing that, especially in America, still had a lot of racial undertones. So there was a

lot of folks that came back from the war. They came back, they tried to get different jobs. Some of them started organizing, but black folks weren't let into the unions, they weren't let on shop floors. There was organizing against that with the long shore Men's and in the IWW.

I don't think it is is a majority blo space, and especially was in the twentieth and eighteenth century, which is one reason when I look when fascist dictators, look at how the US appropriated violence against black citizen injury, a majority citizen injury to have a white rule, a white minority rule, it's very influential to the foundations of a lot of internal fascist violence or internal violence. Okay, but yeah, the black anti fascism is in my opinion

also it goes back to colonialism. It goes this black anti authoritarian urge, goes back to indigenous Africans being stolen, propertied, sold into slavery and their descendants and those who immigrated here fighting back against that colonial violence and against that repatiation is older than the country itself, with the first

slaver volts, maroon societies, insurrections happening since we landed here. Yeah, kind of one of the first things I want to give some examples of that is in the Palmarras area of Brazil and around sixteen oh four, a republic of mainly free Africans and indigenous societies made villages, war camps, formed republics to fight off Portugal armies for decades, raiding plantations, maintaining agriculture using the forests and like guerrilla tactics and

knowledge of the land to survive and grow and oper in like indirect opposition to colonial slavery.

But they were very much against the sort of the sort of racial hierarchy and cast hierarchy that Portugal and the Dutch were trying to implement in that region, though they still at some points worked with the Dutch to fight off Portugal advancements. But that's what alliances are for. Yeah.

I wanted to put more information on in here. And then those Palmara's societies lasted about ninety years, and even after that, there was the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century that I think some people forget, like I think they had like over one hundred and forty revolts before they finally had a revolution, and that in and of itself, the consistent strikes and then the eventual overthrow struck the heart of enslavers across the Western hemisphere.

for rebels for generations to come. It is a struggle that I still really would love for people to study more of because it has so much, so much history and nuances and how things played out and how different

relationships were built through. But it inspired folks like Gabrielle Prosser, who was in enslaved literate blacksmiths from the plantations near Richmond, Virginia, and they organized a massive, massive slavery vault with one hundreds of enslaved folks and their goal was to seize control of Richmond and to take the governor hostage, negotiate the end of slavery, create a more egalitarian society, whole

nine yards. And they were very influenced, interestingly by American revolutionary libertarian language and equality, and they were like, well, why can't this be true? And one thing they wouldn't be inspired.

ground and set sale to Haiti for freedom. Deeply deeply religious, Vessi saw slavery as a sin against God, and Haiti's successful Black Revolutionaris heavily influenced this thinking, especially a lot of the voodoo that was going on at the time that it was like faith respects faith.

can just enjoy and learn from so deeply. Even more rebellions from black anti authoritarians is like Robert Smalls during the Civil War in like eighteen sixty two, hijacked a Confederate ship, the Planter, and disguised himself as the captain, picked up his family and other enslave folks along their way, and then surrendered the ship to Union forces. After the Civil War, Smalls built a small public education like he built and worked around public education, protecting black rights and

resisting the reimposition of white supremacy during Reconstruction. I believe he was elected to office at least five times during that like reconstruction period in which that was allowed in the early nineteenth century in America.

Negro Improvement Association. There was also this a little lesser known communist group called the African Blood Brotherhood founded by Cyril Briggs, a black journalist around lasted around nineteen nineteen to twenty twenty.

Republican Brotherhood at the time. Cyral Briggs was a Black journalist and socialists from the Caribbean islands around like the Nevies, and they were like a semi secret, super hierarchical but semi secret radical organization promoting black self determination, armed self defense, anti racism, and anti capitalism. They were heavily inspired by the Russian Revolution that had just happened in nineteen seventeen and the failures of American democracy to deliver any sort

of racial justice. They advocated for self defense, organized self defense classes against racial violence, especially after that Red Summer of nineteen nineteen when a bunch of white mobs attacked Black communities and they urged for the overthrow of white supremacist capitalism, solidarity with revolutionary movements globally like they were really big into like early Black internationalism outside of just doing like a Pan African kind of scheme, and they

leaned a lot of their roots in media and published the Crusader Magazine. They can be quoted in their pamphlets saying in like their Principles of the African Blood Brotherhood that was published in the Crusader Magazine saying quote we must offend ourselves with arms in hand whenever the lynchers or mobs invade our homes or threatens our life, with their founders going on to continue saying, quote without arms, there can be no power. Without power, there can be

no freedom. The African Blood Brotherhood stands for the organized might of the Negro worker end quote, which Briggs wrote. Kind of he did a lot of like the editorial and writing for The Crusader, and was like the point person for it, which is why folks like tend to

look back on it as super hierarchical. But they were like an explicit workers association trying to organize unions for people that would be normally excluded, which for them was also people who were not considered white at the time, and trying to build that bridge the gap between class conscious white people and Irish folks and people who were like newly immigrated and black folks, especially during the one

of the Great migrations when folks were going north. So they advocated a lot of alliances with communist movements and with the Party itself eventually dissolving into the party.

you know, leftism and black politics in America. I mean, obviously in the by the end of the twentieth century, we that's less seen as the case. But when people talk about the sort of early legacy of fighting against racism, I feel like the like class consciousness part of it is left out.

about it. But when it comes to being out in a very above ground organization. There's so many risks that come with that that, yeah, and also so many different variations. This is also how like after the nineteen sixties, they stopped killing black leaders because folks started keeping their really

radical politics insular. Again, can also shift to like the sort of black excellence that's like black without others, so like blackness but no solidarity, which still having some sort of principles there that don't really reach towards liberation in my humble opinion. And that's also something that the African Blood Brotherhood kind of had in their mode of organizing as well, because they had a big distaste for Garvy, especially at the time because he won. Actually I don't

know if they had the issue with his misogyny. I do, but they had an issue and I have an issue with this too, is because he I believe it was him that said Franco can't be a fascist. I coined the word fascism and quite literally worked with the KKK and would have meetings with people like legal Clerk of the Ku Klux Klan. Because it's kind of this mentality of all right, separate but equal, How do we really stay separate? What does that mean? How do you want

us over here, Fine, we want us over there. Y'all got to stay over there.

like y'all got to shut down. The ABB just become like an auxiliary council inside of us.

like the violent societies that they inhibit. I want to read Claude Mackay's poem If I Must Die, which has been reprinted an uncountable amount of times, and through doing this research, I have seen mentioned and cited like by almost every person that that I've read through, either whether they talk about Claude Mackay themselves as an anti fashion or antiasis writer, or people like James Yates and Salary a key that we'll talk about now or later on

adoring and using as a kind of mantra. So quote, if we must die, let it not be like dogs hunted and penned in an inglorious spot while round us bark the mad and hungry dogs making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, Oh, let us nobly die, so that our precious blood may not be shed in vain. Then even the monsters we defy shall

be constrained to honor us through dead. Oh, kensman, we must meet the common foe, though far outnumbered, let us show us brave and further thousand blows, deal one death blow. What though before us lies the open grave like men will face the murderous, cowardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back. End quote.

during his upbringing. Quote. There was a mass lynching near the town of Shibudah where the highway and railroad across the Chickasaio River. Some parts of the incident were written up in northern newspapers. No one ever is charged with the crime, although the local members of the klu Klux Klan were well known. Five men and four women were hung their feet dangling just inches above the river's muddy waters.

Such was Mississippi in those times. The only thing a black man or woman had to do to get lynched was not move off the side work for miss Ann or mister Charlie. A black must never be caught drinking from a white only fountain, or making the mistake of using the front door instead of the back door. Stealing a chicken or a pig was very dangerous. Being caught at this could get you twenty years on the chain gang. If you were black in Mississippi, lightning would surely strike

home sooner or later. Here's an example of how it struck equipment. Around nineteen eighteen. My uncle Willy, while working in the sawmill one day, accidentally hit a white man with a piece of lumber he was carrying. He managed to make it home before being chased away from the mill. The news spread like wildfire all throughout town, passing word lynching tonight. I can remember Grandma Lizzie pacing the floor all throughout the afternoon. Aunt Bell, my uncle's wife, was

almost speechless. He would die fighting rather than be hung by the clusters. The only problem now was a supply of ammunition. That day, the town merchants had stopped selling shells to black folks. Living almost next door to my uncle Willy was a white family, the Linens, a husband, a wife, and three daughters. We call the man mister gus. He had an unusual way of speak, teaking English, I could only catch one or two words out of ten. Mister gus knew more about lumber than anybody in the

sawmill equipment. Still, he was an outcast, quote white trash to most white people. It was said he came from up north, but I still often heard him talk about Ireland, a place I had never heard about before. Mister Guss was a small in structure but big in heart. He'd heard the news about the klu klutz Klan was coming to lynch my uncle. That night, Uncle Willy heard a voice, Willie Willie. Mister Guss wanted to make sure my uncle wouldn't start shouting. Mister Guss asked, my uncle, what can

I do to help you? Uncle Willy told him about how the white merchants even refused to sell rabbit shot to blacks. Mister Gus walked away without even saying a word. He made his way to equipment and bought ammunition and then returned to my uncle's house with it. Here he said, defend yourself. And then he went back to town and told the whites, some of y'all are going to get killed by those niggers if you try to lynch that

Willie end quote. And this is like a kind of like really long part of the text that I pull a lot from James Yate's memoir Mississippi to Madrid, which I highly recommend folks check out. It's really beautiful and hits a lot of the points that I really wanted to hit in this piece.

to prepare as soon as possible. And one thing I read from this text was like one like the intricacies of race even in Mississippi itself, with like this obviously outcast Irish man being like what can I do to

help you? As well as like folks their relationship being base on the shop floor in the lumber yard, and how they're also your neighbor, and like these are the spaces of organizing against racial terror, against patriarchal violence that organizers all around the world do a lot of brilliant work in that I wanted to highlight as well that there's a lot of life saving work that happens just on your shop floor and in your neighborhood that we could be extending and organizing so that we are more

prepared for the levels of increasing violence that Americans face.

in many communities. It's where like a lot of where snit comes from, Like when we think about like a lot of revolutionary stuff that came out of like the sixties and thirties. Ella Baker like these anti authoritarian traditions as well, and that black anti fascist urge to drive for communal institutions in which participants were valued and relied upon was not just the tools that they used, but it was like the motives for how they viewed leadership and of itself.

and cut that shit off. Hell yeah yeah, And so by around like the nineteen thirties, the Great Depression had deepened economic disparities. Black activists were organizing, and the beatings that they took for protesting unemployment, both in the South and the north, helped them see repression at home as part of a global authoritarian surge. Groups like the Unemployment Councils and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights began

tying local conditions to international fascism. The state's brutal crackdowns mirrored what was happening both at home and abroad. And then there was the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini in nineteen thirty five that really lit a fire under a lot of black activists and under a lot of internationalists as well. From about nineteen thirty five, the invasion of

Ethiopia began, ending in February of thirty six. There was still a lot more going on there, but italiand forces invaded with over two hundred thousand soldiers, utilizing tanks, firearms, aerial offenses including poison gas, mustard gas, and bombing civilian and military positions, both to deter resistance and also to just destroy and be able to use the land as

they needed. They were also, as they even claimed, practicing what they wanted to do, which is like this extension of this colonial imperial violence being the this for how they would do what we see now as colonialism.

as like Ethiopia was never colonized. It's like a really big phrasing. Whether that's what people consider true or not is a different thing in my head. But like there is a history and really long resistance because this is not the first time Italy had advances in the region at all, especially if you know about the history of Rome.

So with the rising authoritarianism led for like these strong man type leadership narratives to be built by people who were already had access to material into things that moved the political scenes. So they relied on like rising nationalism and like the same collapse of economic conditions that social justice advocates and revolutionaries built communal campaigns of economic emancipation on.

Authoritarians then went around and built nationalism through alleged quick and easy solutions just founded in fears, enophobia and terror and violence through.

And like somebody dreamed of this system that we're living in and they think it's hunky dory and it's actually not. But yeah, there were groups in different formations of communists, anarchists, and social reformers alike, that we're organizing to unite the working class away from capitalist based solutions and to look towards each other for even just figuring out new solutions.

your material conditions. So as this invasion of Ethiopia uful, it was a clear escalation for folks in the States about the escalation in world authoritarian violence, and across the nation of the US, people erupted on protests signs reading hands Off Ethiopia, and the organizing to expose the links of anti colonial resistance abroad to the anti lynching campaigns at home became even stronger, and it all kind of became part of the same struggles there is Salary a key.

Who is someone else I'm going to talk about a lot more. Who's a black nurse and anti fascist that went over to go lend aid to the Spanish Republic. They were at this time still in the south end of that, I believe at this point they were in the Midwest, and they were helping raise funds for an entire seventy five bed hospital to be built in Ethiopia. And Yates goes on to describe some of the organizing that they saw in their book Mississipia Madrid as quote.

As Mussolini's massive attacks against Ethiopia continued, we focus all of our energy in to stop the fascists. We roamed the cities collecting food clothing to be sent to the victims of the bombs. In addition to passing out leaflands denouncing the war, we gathered signatures and sent them to President Roosevelt and treating him to stop Mussolini end quote.

So it really like this beginning of these like people recognizing the global fascist and authoritarian threat and doing like the on the ground at home grassroots organizing to talk to your neighbors about it. See if we can talk to any of our politicians who have way more sway when it comes to other world leaders, unless well, I'm not gonna get into that. And then there were street demonstrations and riots over the invasion in most large cities.

There was like a minority of black folks looting a lot of Italian shops at the time, Like there's a lot of horizontal racial violence happening. Well horizontal weird to say for me, but yeah, groups ended up organizing and putting out statements that Italians themselves did not agree with Mussolini, which to a lot of folks that went over to fight, which they were about ninety black anti fascists from America

that went over to go fight. It became even clear to them with how many Italian soldiers ended up joining the internationalists brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

the times some consider fruitless, but it's not. There are many, many things to do, and this is a constant in US history that leads every generation of protesters to advance their tactics and develop and reimagine what goals they have, to reconsider what is a winning campaign, and for folks

in the early twentieth century, especially black people. Yeates talks about what it feels like or what it felt like to decide to start getting engaged, and a lot of that came when Republican Spain itself started to come under

attack after the invasion of Ethiopia. And read the decision that James Yates in their affinity group with were just like they were living with a bunch of artists in New York at this time, or maybe it was Chicago, just being around, organizing scenes, going to rallies, train hopping, just doing the thing.

boldly announced Mussolini pledges the support of his troops. The article concluded by saying that Spanish Republican government, democratically elected, was asking the entire worlds for volunteers to come to Spain and aid in his fight against Mussolini, Hitler and the fascist generals. Hermann shouted at no one in particular. Now you see what did I tell you? I've been saying for three years that Hitler would move. First he tightened his Nazi grip on Germany, and then he'd look

around the rest of Europe. Such a maniac cannot be appeased. I've said it over and over. But who will listen? Alonzo didn't look up. He stared silently at his paper, and then he said, in his typical quiet manner, I'm going. I'm volunteering. The time for talking is over. You've got to put your convictions where your mouth is. I was silent with the question pressed upon me, Am I ready to go to Spain with Alonzo? I had been more than ready to go to Ethiopia, but that was different. Ethiopia,

a black nation was part of me. I was just beginning to learn about the reality of Spain and Europe, but I knew what was at stake. There was the poor, the peasants, the workers, and the unions. The socialists and the communists together had won an election against the big landowners, the monarchy, and the right wingers in the military. It was the kind of victory that would have brought black people to the top levels of government if such an

election had been won in the US. The new government in Spain was dividing its wealth with the peasants, Unions were organizing in each factory, and social services were being introduced. Spain was the perfect example of the world I dreamed of.

lawmakers will be at everywhere. If they just give us the vote, we won't need to even hear from the white oppressors anymore. And I know, damn well, even as a black anarchist, if I had heard that one hundred years ago, I'd be in the back like, yeah, let's

get our thing on. And because it's one of those fundamental human urges that folks see something being denied them, something granted access to others, and they're like, well, why not us, And the imagination of being able to think, oh well, if we were able to, especially post reconstruction actually have a black republic outside of that that was like based on the majority and based on how things were going, they would be the government of the South would be a lot blacker than it is now and

has ever been post reconstruction.

It wouldn't just be like, oh, we had reached a quality sooner or whatever, but like just literally it would be a different country, and a almost certainly substantially more interesting and good one.

means neutrality usually means you're never fully neutral. Like they stopped people from getting passports to go over to Spain to go and try to actually participate. So a lot of folks had to go directly to France and cross the Pyrenees mountain range, and like all these different ways. It was not a straight shot for anyone to go straight to Spain unless you were already over there. There's like a combination of boat, train and hiking through these mountain ranges.

fucking munitions to the fascists. That's great, you know, and leaving you know, the overwhelming majority of international munitions came in through the USSR, which of course has its own mess because then they were like and now we're in charge of everything.

treacherous mountains. James Yates describes one of like the last moments of their climb as quote, Within minutes of beginning the second lap of the climb, we tossed away most of our possessions. Men threw away their knapsacks, coats, blankets, anything to lighten the load. They even took off their socks and flung them into the darkness. I kept my shoes, but threw away most everything else. When it came to my books, I tried to fit them into my pockets,

but they felt like pieces of lead. I fingered them regretfully, then pulled too out, letting them drop. They flittered down through the blackness. It was a part of me falling. Later I found the books I still had was the

one by Lynston Hughes end quote. And then when arriving I really love how Yates describes their first contact after these like the Pyrenees mountain range is like they went up one mountain, then down another steep, steep mountain, and then up another steep, steep mountain, and then down another steep, steep mountain, and then the second lap was up Another's like it was a lot of up and down And it's to me one of those convictions because a lot

of folks died just getting to Spain and specifically on that mountain range, and it kind of to me colors some of the approach of this is something that I didn't really mention it, but like Yates talk about, like it didn't really hit James what they were really going to do until they were on the boat to France and they were like, crap, I might die. Yeah, And I think that's also something that really shows how little society back then, even kind of now we have an

issue with it. But talked about war, the trauma of war, what it means to like engage in violent acts, but then also what it means to take those violent acts that are being disposed onto you and do something to dismantle the system that is making that systemic.

Spanish outposts, a monastery. It was midway down the mountain and served as a way station for those who have been forced to take this route into Spain. No monks were there. A few Spanish loyalists guarded the posts, receiving and dispatching volunteers. It struck me that this monastery was much like the places used by abolitionists who temporarily house slaves escaping the plantations of the South in America.

I think there's a lot of really dopeap like organizing, especially like black autonomous and cooperative organizing that happened post reconstruction that is rarely rarely talked about.