Black Archives: Episode I. Radical Internationalism and Pan-Africanism in the context of the Spanish Civil War

In August 1920, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), founded in 1914 by journalist and businessman Marcus Mosiah Garvey in Kingston, Jamaica, held its First International Convention in New York. After debates chaired by Garvey himself, with the participation of thousands of delegates from numerous countries, the ‘Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World’ was adopted. This defended human rights relating to freedom and equal treatment before the law. The declaration concludes that Ethiopia is the ‘land of our fathers’, and ascribes to it a prophetic destiny by divine election. Thus, the ‘Universal Ethiopian Anthem’ (composed in 1918) became, with some modifications, the ‘Anthem of the Negro Race’11.Originally compiled by Arnold J. Ford. For more on the successive versions of the anthem, see ‘L’Hymne éthiopien universal (1918): Un héritage national et musical, de l’Atlantique noir à l’Éthiopie contemporaine’, Cahiers d’Etudes africaines, no. 216, ‘Musique dans l’«Atlantique Noir»’ (2014), Giulia Bonacci: pp. 1055–82, journals.openedition.org.:

Ethiopia, thou land of our fathers,
Thou land where the gods loved to be:
As storm cloud at night suddenly gathers
Our armies come rushing to thee.
We must in the fight be victorious
When swords are thrust outward to gleam;
For us will the vict’ry be glorious
When led by the red, black and green.
Advance, advance to victory,
Let Africa be free;
Advance to meet the foe
With the might
Of the red, the black and the green.
Shall aliens continue to spoil us?
Shall despots continue their greed?
Refrain
Will nations in mock’ry revile us?
Then our keen swords intercede!

The song denotes Ethiopia, and Africa, as a national entity and its children are compared to those of the Jewish people, scattered in lands across the seas. The anthem reflects the Ethiopian nation as it was established under the UNIA’s motto: ‘One God, One Aim, One Destiny’. It was at this time that Garvey prophesied: ‘Look to Africa, when a black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is at hand.’ Ten years later, in 1930, the prophecy was fulfilled with the coronation of Ras Tafari Makonnen, known as Haile Selassie I. Bearing the titles of ‘Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah’, ‘King of Kings’ and ‘Lord of Lords’, he would be the last emperor of Ethiopia.22.Tania Safura Adam, Voces negras: Una historia oral de las músicas populares africanas, Barcelona: Malpaso, 2024 .

However, the King of Kings had little time to enjoy his throne because, in 1935, a thousand Italian soldiers – led by the dictator Benito Mussolini, leader of the National Fascist Party – invaded Ethiopia without first declaring war. A few months earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic, in a New York City suffering from the effects of the Great Depression, three thousand people attended the first meeting of the Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. It was announced at that meeting that hundreds of volunteers from various political affiliations were ready to enlist in the Ethiopian army to defend the Black nation, which was increasingly under siege by Mussolini. These volunteers included Black nationalists recruited by the Communist Party after the arrest of Marcus Garvey in 1923 for alleged fraud, socialists and Pan-Africanists.

In her introduction to the Spanish edition of Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade by international brigadista (brigade fighter) and civil rights activist James Yates,33.See James Yates, De Misisipi a Madrid: Memorias de un afroamericano en la Brigada Lincoln (trans. Didac P. Lagarriga), Madrid: BAAM, 2011. Published in English as Mississippi to Madrid: Memoirs of a Black American in The Spanish Civil War 1936–1938, New York: Shamal Books, 1986. journalist Mireia Sentís observes that many African Americans wanted to enlist to defend Ethiopia after the League of Nations decided not to intervene.44.Mireia Sentís, ‘Los brigadistas ocultos’, La Vanguardia, 11 October 2009, lavanguardia.com. The Abyssinian Baptist Church itself collected funds and supplies for Ethiopia and later for Spain. Fundraising and support campaigns also included benefit concerts by musicians such as Fats Waller, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Eubie Blake and Paul Robeson. However, the aid never arrived, as Selassie had warned: ‘Today it’s us, tomorrow it will be you.’ This discouraged African Americans from participating for fear of possible US reprisals.

Harlem anti-fascists saw Mussolini’s attacks as an attack against Black people everywhere. Even speakers on Harlem street corners warned passers-by of the need for global Black unity to oppose fascist militarism. Pan-Africanists argued that the security and wellbeing of African Americans were tied to Africa’s fate. Anti-imperialists insisted that the only country that had maintained its independence in a continent dominated by the onslaught of colonization must be defended. African American writer and poet Langston Hughes, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance and an active fundraiser for Ethiopia, wrote the poem ‘Call of Ethiopia’ in 1935:

Ethiopia
Lift your night-dark face,
Abyssinian
Son of Sheba’s race!
Your palm trees tall
And your mountains high
Are shade and shelter
To men who die
For freedom’s sake —
But in the wake of your sacrifice
May all Africa arise
With blazing eyes and night-dark face
In answer to the call of Sheba’s race:

Ethiopia’s free!
Be like me,
All of Africa,
Arise and be free!
All you black peoples,
Be free! Be free!

The West’s refusal to support Ethiopia intensified Pan-Africanist solidarity and reinforced the growing sense of radical internationalism in the face of the 1936 fascist uprising against the Second Spanish Republic. After the frustrated efforts to help the former Abyssinia, Black Americans likened this new situation to that one, and rallied behind the Republican cause.

Salaria Kea, one of the nurses who accompanied the American contingent of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, explains the relationship between Ethiopia and Spain in A Black Nurse in Republican Spain (1938), a pamphlet published in New York by the Negro Committee to Aid Spain with the Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy.55.Salaria Kea, A Black Nurse in Republican Spain, New York: The Negro Committee to Aid Spain with the Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, 1938. See also The Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War, vscw.ca.  Kea stresses that intervening in the Spanish conflict is a way of supporting the Black cause. She states: ‘Italy invaded and overpowered Ethiopia. This was a terrible blow to Negroes throughout the world.’ She argues in the booklet that Spain represents the battlefield on which Italian fascism must be defeated. According to the members of the Negro Committee, the only hope of regaining Ethiopia lay in defeating Italy. In other words, it was through Spain that Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany had to be defeated, because of their open pronouncements against all non-Aryans.

The advance of fascism in Europe concerned African Americans to such an extent that, even though the United States had threatened to revoke the citizenship of anyone who enlisted in a foreign army, they joined the International Brigades through the Communist International (the Comintern). The Brigades were a coalition in defence of the Republic of Spain, bringing together multiethnic and multinational volunteer troops from fifty-three countries. Many of these Black Americans were members of the Communist Party. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade (ALB) was created as the first nonsegregated fighting force, with 3,000 Americans and at least ninety African Americans, who entered Spain illegally and fought against Franco’s regime alongside other volunteers from Djibouti, South Africa, Cuba, Senegal, Haiti, Cameroon and elsewhere.

In ‘Not Valid for Spain: Pan-Africanism, Sanctuary, and the Spanish Civil War’, published in Black USA and Spain: Shared Memories in the 20th Century, Karen W. Martin also refers

to the impulse to fight fascism abroad as a means of combating racism – described by many brigadistas as domestic fascism – in the United States; and to the awareness of the shared fate of Jews and Blacks as two populations targeted for genocide by Hitler’s mythical white German race.66.Karen Martin, ‘Not Valid for Spain: Pan-Africanism, Sanctuary, and the Spanish Civil War’, in Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego (ed.), Black USA and Spain: Shared Memories in the 20th Century, New York: Routledge, 2019. 

The post-war period and the economic and social malaise of the 1920s in the United States were the driving forces behind this Pan-African community building. Prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Claude McKay and W.E.B. Du Bois, worked to build a sense of community identity in a situation where they were once again confronted by the forces of white supremacy and a revitalized Ku Klux Klan, as D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation aptly reflects. Black Americans had already experienced fascism at home, from slavery through to Jim Crow laws and policies, and sensed that if European fascism spread across the Atlantic, they would be hardest hit.

Pan-African engagement in the struggle against the advance of Italian fascism in Ethiopia, and the conviction that the spread of American fascism would intensify violence and racial discrimination are also evident in Robert F. Reid-Pharr’s Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (2016), which points to the intellectual engagement between Black America and Republican Spain.77.Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique, New York University Press, 2016. It also accuses key institutions of Western humanism – such as colleges and universities – of developing an intimate relationship with slavery, colonization and white supremacy.

In the same vein, at the close of the last century, in 1990, the historian and theorist Robin D.G. Kelley developed the idea of building ‘radical internationalism’ rooted in Pan-Africanism in the preface to the book African-Americans and the Spanish Civil War: ‘This Ain’t Ethiopia, But It’ll Do’, commissioned by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA).88.Robin D.G. Kelley, preface to African-Americans and the Spanish Civil War: “This Ain’t Ethiopia, But It’ll Do” (ed. Danny Duncan Collum), New York: ALBA, 1992. In an interview also published on ALBA’s website, he points out:

Even before Franco’s troops invaded Spain, [Communist Party members like Angelo] Herndon and his comrades were calling on workers to fight Fascism at home … In one of his speeches, [Herndon] said: ‘Today, when the world is in danger of being pushed into another blood-bath, when Negroes are being shot down and lynched wholesale, when every sort of outrage is taking place against the masses of people – today is the time to act.’ Black radicals heeded Herndon’s plea ‘to act’, mobilizing in defence of Ethiopia, resisting lynch law in the South, organizing a global anti-colonial movement, and defending Republican Spain from the Fascists.99.Robin D.G. Kelley in Aaron B. Retish, ‘“Black radicals not only anticipated the rise of fascism; they resisted before it was considered a crisis.” An Interview with Robin D.G. Kelley’, The Volunteer, 14 November 2020, albavolunteer.org. 

The writer Langston Hughes was a war correspondent in Spain for the Baltimore Afro-American and the Cleveland Call & Post. In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, he participated in the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture, which took place between 4 and 17 July 1937 in three cities in Republican Spain (Valencia, Madrid and Barcelona) and in Paris, with the support of the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals.1010.Corpus Barga, ‘El II Congreso Internacional de Escritores. Su significación’, Hora de España, August 1937, pp. 5–10, filosofia.org. Hughes delivered a speech at the conference that helped set the precedent in linking the fight against Spain’s Francoists to the battle against Mussolini and, like Salaria Kea, identified Spain as an indirect battleground in the Ethiopian conflict.

Hughes’s prose from his time in Spain gives voice to the victims, for whom he felt immeasurable empathy, and his poetry rises up against those who brought the war to Spain. In his 1937 poem ‘Love Letter from Spain’, he points out the connection between European fascism and Jim Crow laws – domestic fascism.

… Just now I’m goin’
to take a fascist town.
Fascists is like Jim Crow peoples, honey —
And here we shoot ‘em down.

The singer and actor Paul Robeson, who had also raised funds for Ethiopia along with Kea and many others, became the voice of the anti-fascist resistance. Towards the end of 1937, after taking part in the demonstrations to ‘save Spain’, he announced to his wife Eslanda that he wanted to go to Spain. She urged him not to go, arguing that it was too dangerous, and he replied: ‘Spain’s our fight, my fight.’1111.See Pepe Gutíerrez-Álvarez, ‘Paul Robeson antifascista en la guerra española’, Kaosenlared, 7 June 2023, kaosenlared.net.

So, in January 1938, Paul and Eslanda Robeson arrived in Barcelona, from where they went on a tour of trenches, hospitals and camps to give concerts and boost the morale of wounded men, women and children.1212.See Lindsey Swindall, ‘Racial Justice, Then and Now: Paul Robeson’s Antifascist Legacy’, The Volunteer, 27 August 2020, albavolunteer.org; see also ‘Paul Robeson, Spain, 1938 – “The Artist Cannot Hold Himself Aloof”’, [audio excerpt], youtube.com.  Wherever he appeared, volunteer soldiers from fifty-three nations would recognize him and greet him with a raised fist – the anti-fascist salute – and a powerful ‘¡Salud!’. Robeson said:

I have never seen a more courageous people. I went to Spain in 1938 and that was a major turning point in my life. There I saw it was the working men and women of Spain who were heroically giving ‘their last full measure of devotion’ to the cause of democracy in that bloody conflict, and that it was the upper class—the landed gentry, the bankers and industrialists—who had unleashed the fascist beast against their own people. From the ranks of the workers of other lands volunteers had come to help in the epic defence of Madrid, and in Spain I sang with my whole heart and soul for these gallant fighters of the International Brigade.1313.See Pepe Gutíerrez-Álvarez, ‘Paul Robeson antifascista en la guerra española’.

Salaria Kea argued for revolutionary causes in speech and writing after the war, reinforcing the sense of solidarity that she, like many others in the International Brigades, had developed over the time she spent in Spain. She said: ‘Divisions of race and creed and religion and nationality lost significance when they met in Spain in a united effort to make Spain the tomb of fascism.’ However, Reid-Pharr shows some scepticism about the unified nature of the racial narrative of such oral testimonies. He notes that ‘they were extremely effective emblems of the leftist propaganda machine’, fitting in perfectly with the purposes of 1930s racial politics and the construction of the ‘New Negro.’ This is the ‘cosmopolitan Negro’ who rejects Jim Crow politics, as Committee member Alain Locke points out in his 1925 anthology of fiction, poetry and essays The New Negro.1414.Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro: An Interpretation, New York: Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., 1925, babel.hathitrust.org.  If indeed an illusion, it is a laudable one in the face of a reality in which Blacks were lynched, discriminated against in education and jobs, and denied access to hospital facilities in most cities in America.

The reality in Spain was also harsh, and although there was a sense of freedom outside the chains of the Jim Crow restrictions, Hughes himself expressed it in his Spanish poems narrated by ‘Johnny’, a fictional soldier serving in the Lincoln Battalion. Johnny, as well as taking a Pan-African view, describes the raw reality of war. For example, he portrays the shock of the Black soldiers when they capture a ‘wounded Moor’ fighting on Franco’s side, in the poem ‘Letter from Spain’:

Dear brother at home:

We captured a wounded Moor today.
He was just as dark as me.
I said, Boy, what you been doin’ here
Fightin’ against the free?
He answered something in a language
I couldn’t understand.
But somebody told me he was sayin’
They nabbed him in his land
And made him join the fascist army
And come across to Spain.
And he said he had a feelin’
He’d never get back home again.
He said he had a feelin’
This whole thing wasn’t right.
He said he didn’t know
The folks he had to fight.
And as he lay there dying
In a village we had taken,
I looked across to Africa
And seed foundations shakin’.
Cause if a free Spain wins this war,
The colonies, too, are free —
Then something wonderful’ll happen
To them Moors as dark as me.
I said, I guess that’s why old England
And I reckon Italy, too,
Is afraid to let a workers’ Spain
Be too good to me and you —

Cause they got slaves in Africa —
And they don’t want ’em to be free.
Listen, Moorish prisoner, hell!
Here, shake hands with me!
I knelt down there beside him,
And I took his hand —
But the wounded Moor was dyin’
And he didn’t understand.

Salud,

Johnny1515.Langston Hughes’s ‘Johnny’, in Ava Gabrielle, ‘Moors and Negroes in Spain: Langston Hughes Lessons from His 1937 Trip to Spain’, Diaspora Today, 13 July 2018, indigenousanddiaspora.wordpress.com.

The dying soldier manages to explain that he was taken from his home, supposedly Morocco, and forced to join a war he did not understand against an unknown enemy. The poem, as well as combining the three pillars of the Black brigadistas’ involvement in Spain – Pan-Africanism, the global struggle against fascism, and the racist oppression of Blacks both at home and abroad – highlights the cultural and geographical proximity between Spain and Africa. Indeed, Africa, rather than being portrayed as a distant ‘dark continent’, is connected to Spain through centuries of Arab history on the peninsula. Johnny’s poetic voice explicitly links fascism to colonialism in Africa. He realizes that other European nations oppose the Republic because empowering workers in Spain threatens the continuation of slavery and exploitation of Africans in European colonies. This is why Hughes perceived the victory of the Republic to be analogous to the liberation of the African colonies.

Unfortunately, the Republicans were defeated by the pro-fascist dictator General Francisco Franco, who announced the end of the war on 1 April 1939.

At the end of the war, the American survivors named Paul Robeson an honorary member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Veterans. A decade later, aiming to ensure that his time in Spain would not be forgotten, they began compiling his memoirs.1616.See Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes. Escritos sobre España (trans. J Lucini), Madrid: BAAM, 2011. To this end, they wrote a letter to the sociologist, historian and Pan-Africanist W.E.B. Du Bois, in which they set out their intention to create an archive that would tell this story, and asked to meet to discuss their plans.

In addition to James Yates, Salaria Kea, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson himself, other brigade volunteers shared their experiences with the public. These included the soldier Harry Haywood, author of his autobiography Black Bolshevik.1717.See Harry Haywood, Bolchevique negro. Autobiografía de un comunista afroamericano y otros textos (ed. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, trans. Pablo Sánchez León), Barcelona: Bellaterra Edicions, 2022. Others were brought to the fore, such as Oliver Law, the first Black man to command a battalion in the history of the United States Armed Forces, killed in the 1937 Battle of Brunete.1818.See Eslanda Goode Robeson, ‘Eslanda Goode Robeson’s Diary excerpt of Oliver Law’s story, as told by “K”’, ALBA Archives, alba-valb.org.  However, despite all the literature, their memories have been diluted. This is because of a lack of comprehensive documentation anywhere beyond the recollections and the dozens of archives, books, photographs and pamphlets that ALBA has been compiling and publishing. Even in the 1950s, when the writer, poet and member of the Negro Committee to Aid Spain Richard Wright travelled to Spain on Gertrude Stein’s recommendation, there were no memorials, just a country devastated by the war. Stein, who visited Spain on several occasions between 1911 and 1915, had told him:

You’ll see the past there. You’ll see what the Western world is made of. Spain is primitive, but lovely. And the people! There are no people such as the Spanish anywhere. I’ve spent days in Spain that I’ll never forget.

Wright, who, having been a member of the Negro Committee to Aid Spain, already had some knowledge of the reality of the situation there, listened to her. His book Pagan Spain (1957) is the result of that trip and portrays a strange country, laden with stereotypes, and economically rundown. A controversial text that the New York Times called ‘provocative and disturbing’, it begins:

In torrid August, 1954, I was under the blue skies of the Midi, just a few hours from the Spanish frontier. To my right stretched the flat, green fields of southern France; to my left lay a sweep of sand beyond which the Mediterranean heaved and sparkled. I was alone. I had no commitments. Seated in my car, I held the steering wheel in my hands. I wanted to go to Spain, but something was holding me back. The only thing that stood between me and a Spain that beckoned as much as it repelled was a state of mind. God knows, totalitarian governments and ways of life were no mystery to me. I had been born under an absolutistic racist regime in Mississippi; I had lived and worked for twelve years under the political dictatorship of the Communist party of the United States; and I had spent a year of my life under the police terror Perón in Buenos Aires. So why avoid the reality of life under Franco? What was I scared of?1919.Richard Wright, Espana Pagana, Madrid: Tratados de Testimonio Collection, 1989. First published in English as Pagan, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957.