This is part 10 of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini's Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States. They were building a movement they hoped would lead to communist revolution around the world. They succeeded in organizing millions around communist ideas and practices. But the movement believed that uniting with liberal bosses to defend the Republic in Spain would further the fight for communism. This was part of the united front against fascism, which resulted in only fortifying the bosses’ system and laid the basis for the corruption of the old communist movement.
In the Progressive Labor Party, we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that's communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers’ leadership is essential. That is the only way our class can destroy racism, the lifeblood of capitalism. The following is a story of one such leader, Crawford Morgan.

Crawford Morgan was born in 1910 in Rockingham, North Carolina. After high school, he became an apprentice printer. He moved first to Norfolk Virginia, then to New York City. During the Depression, he became involved in organizations of the unemployed in New York City and was arrested in a demonstration at the Home Relief Bureau.
Morgan joined the Young Communist League (YCL) in 1932. The YCL was the vibrant youth wing of the Communist Party, which he joined four years later. Despite anticommunist lies in the bosses’ media, communism was held in high regard among masses of Black working women, men, and youth.
From ‘runner’ to driver
 Morgan sailed for Spain in March, 1937. He was assigned to the infantry attached to the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion (mainly Canadian, but also U.S. volunteers). He was later transferred to the Lincoln-Washington Battalion, serving at brigade headquarters as a communications “runner,” radio communication being insecure.
In August 1937, on the Aragon front, Morgan received a leg wound storming the town of Quinto. After recovery, he returned to his unit. But complications from his leg wound led to his becoming a truck driver in the Transport Unit for the remainder of the war.
In World War II, Morgan served in all-Black units in the segregated U.S. Army from 1942 until 1946, including two years in Europe. After the war, he again worked as a truck driver, then as an offset printer.
Defends his role as a communist
In September 1954, Morgan testified on behalf of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) in hearings before the red-baiting (i.e. anticommunist) Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) of the U.S. Department of Justice. The committee was seeking to declare the VALB a “subversive organization” – the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was led by communists and at least 80 percent of the Brigade were Communist Party members.
Asked why he had fought as a communist in Spain, Morgan had answered:
Being a Negro, and all of the stuff that I have had to take in this country, I had a pretty good idea of what fascism was. I got a chance there [in Spain] to fight it with bullets and I went there and fought it with bullets. If I get a chance to fight it with bullets again, I will fight it with bullets again.
While the U.S. ruling class government exposed itself as the custodians of brutal racist injustice, Morgan publicly displayed his confidence in his role as a communist. He has also used this as a space to denounce the capitalist system (see below).
Morgan died in 1976. In that year an article in The Volunteer, the journal of the VALB, wrote:
He served with discipline, dignity and courage. He was liked. He was respected. He was
 a comrade whose qualities were deep and pervasive … A demonstration of this was given by him as witness for VALB in the prosecution before the late Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) 1954.
[Called as a defense witness, Morgan] was one of the most effective witnesses of that long era of the “Un-American” Inquisition…
… under cross-examination [he] remained what he was and what he said flowed directly and lucidly from his life's experiences related simply and without sentimentality. This was anything but easy, especially for a Black man and in the supercharged political lynch-atmosphere of the era. The prosecuting attorneys were young, bright, alert, and prepared ... [he] met and speared their well-planned attacks so cleanly that they hung limp.
 ... [He] was cross-examined on arrests and/or convictions in California. His narration of what it meant to be unemployed, penniless and young in the Great Depression unrolled with such classic and telling simplicity that it became a veritable “J’accuse,” the condemnation of his condemners and all they represented.
The prosecutors spun out that [he] was fervently opposed to fascism and sought to extract the implication that in taking up arms against fascism he had thus acted against the interests of the U.S. His answer was that, on the contrary, the defense of Republican Spain was the defense of the American people.
It became clearer and clearer that the prosecutors were becoming less and less inclined to tangle further with him. In the end, they were glad just to be rid of him. He was too much the exemplary 'premature anti-fascist' for them. He vindicated the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.
Later on in the early 1970s, Morgan worked with the VALB's Historical Commission to gather information on other Black volunteers.
Crawford Morgan was one of many Black workers who joined the Communist Party to fight against racism and for communism. He took the lead in fighting against fascism in Spain and for internationalism. Today, as then, Black workers’ leadership  is key to the fight against racism and for communist revolution.

Sources: The Volunteer, December 1976; Joseph Brandt, Black Americans in the Spanish Civil War Against Fascism; Cullum & Berch, African-Americans in the Spanish Civil War; The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

That white workers are hurt by racism is a key principle of communist analysis. The standard liberal rant is that white people—regardless of class—all benefit from “white supremacy.” The only basis for white people to engage in antiracist fightback is thus missionary sympathy or guilt; they can be at best “allies” in struggles in which, so to speak, they have “no skin in the game.” The reality is much different.
The truth is that all members of the working class worldwide are hurt by the racist super-exploitation and division of Black and nonwhite workers. While workers with darker skin experience greater levels of poverty and state-sponsored violence, many working-class people designated as “white” suffer from low wages, lousy housing, inadequate medical care, unemployment, and hunger. To the extent that racial divisions depress wages for all workers—and keep workers of all skin colors and nationalities from uniting in their shared class interest—the bosses laugh all the way to the bank.
Legacy of multiracial unity
But such divisions have also been fought and overcome. In the U.S., there is a rich legacy of white-authored proletarian literature that attests to an often obscured history of militant multiracial unity. The novels of Myra Page—The Gathering Storm (1932), Daughter of the Hills (1950)—feature white and Black organizers among sharecroppers and miners. Her 1935 novel Moscow Yankee—set among unemployed U.S. auto workers finding employment in the early 1930s USSR—features antiracist class consciousness as a key measure of whether or not white workers embrace Soviet-era socialism. That a Black expatriate worker takes the lead in saving a tractor factory from anticommunist sabotage testifies to the integral connection between multiracial unity and communist internationalism.
Especially significant is a cluster of novels–all authored by white working class women–focused on the 1929 textile workers strike in Gastonia, North Carolina: Mary Heaton Vorse’s Strike! (1929); Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread (1932) and A Sign for Cain (1935); Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart (1932) and A Stone Came Rolling (1935). While ultimately brutally crushed by the arm of the state, the strike taught many lessons: about the key role of women in the class struggle, about the need for multiracial solidarity.
Fictionalized versions of Ella Mae Wiggins—an inspiring singer-songwriter-strike leader who was murdered by bosses’ vigilantes—are featured in several novels. According to Vera Buch, a communist organizer, Wiggins was singled out because of her commitment to racial equality (Kristina Horton, Martyr of Loray Mill: Ella May and the 1929 Textile Workers’ Strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, McFarland, 2015). In To Make My Bread, Wiggins
is featured as Bonnie McClure, a mountain woman turned millworker  whose close friendship with a Black co-worker sets a model for other white workers at first hesitant to abandon their racist socialization. In  A Sign for Cain, multiracial relationships are solidified, conjoining the struggles of sharecroppers and millworkers facing intensified state violence in the face of labor militancy.
By no means is multiracial solidarity always portrayed in utopian terms in this body of literature. In Call Home the Heart, Burke honestly confronts the intense emotional battle experienced internally by her white protagonist upon being embraced by a Black woman whose husband has just been saved from lynching.
Although the 1935 sequel shows that the two women have become good friends, their bond is clearly the personal fruit of the broader class struggle.
Now as then, it is those inhabiting the “big houses” (and big banks!) who profit from racist division—whether their representatives are the bigger-danger flash liberal smiles and preach “inclusion” (for war) or are the smaller fascist Proud Boy muscle shirts and preach “replacement theory.
It is no accident that almost all the writers associated with the proletarian literary movement of the 1930s and 1940s were communist or pro-communist. Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party—as well as the multiracial crowds of millions who are standing up against racism—have a red legacy of which we are justly proud. The working class fighters are all comrades—not allies—in the struggle for a better antiracist world.

Camacho’s legacy will live on
The Delano giant is gone. It is with deep sorrow in my heart that I received the news that one of the Farmworker Leaders from Delano, California died yesterday. Epifanio Camacho dedicated his life to fighting against the injustices of the ranchers to the undocumented farm workers. His non-pacifist struggle found an echo in the immigrants who suffered beatings and mistreatment at the hands of the police and immigration. Such was the importance of this charismatic fighter that his home became known as "The Sanctuary of Immigrants.”
Camacho will never die because his legacy will live on forever. There is not enough space to write about the fights he led, the attacks he received and his fascinating life. That is why I only say that from the lands of Sandino, we say goodbye to you with great respect, admiration, deep affection and sadness.
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Solidarity needed to smash the sexism
One of the most important issues today is a woman’s right to an abortion.In June, the Supreme Court made abortion in the U.S. illegal unless allowed by state law. This decision threw out the 50 year old Roe vs. Wade decision making abortions legal throughout the U.S. Before and since this change in federal law thousands of women and men have been protesting this anti-working class decision.
On Saturday, July 2 a friend and members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) attended a Women’s Pro-Choice rally in Easton, Pennsylvania. People were demanding the right  to an abortion for women and equal rights for women and men.
We thought less than a hundred people would show up. We were very happy when we saw almost 500 very angry and determined women and men fill the street. Next was a march through the center of Easton ending at another rally. Here several women provided strong leadership. Each spoke loud and sharply. They said that for women’s rights and gender equality we must reject the Democratic Party and build an alternative movement.
This rally was the first for our friend. He found this event incredibly eye opening. The rally, to him, was a clear demonstration of the power we wield as a single concentrated movement. It is the exact kind of solidarity that we need to smash the racist, sexist capitalist system forced on us everyday.
Here’s where PLP enters the scene. We are the best, only real, alternative to capitalism because we organize and fight for communist revolution. The working class can and will win and build a society based on total equality or egalitarianism.
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East Africa: Comrades say only PLP can lead the way
On International Workers Day, while the government carried out its customary brainwashing rallies, we organized a discussion among teachers and students about why workers celebrate May Day and the way forward for building our movement. Our slogan was “Fighting together we can unite the workers of the world, smash borders, and build one world.” A teacher made a presentation about why workers celebrate May Day. Our discussion focused on the failure of the government to represent our interests and the betrayal of the trade union leaders to lead the working class to fight back against their bosses’ false promises. Here, the unions that represent government workers, like teachers, are formed by the government itself. Government agents operate inside them to keep the unions focused on their own narrow self-interests, so they don’t unite with other workers. Also, they offer different wage increases to workers as a weapon to divide and weaken the class struggle. We discussed our way forward—meeting and introducing our ideas to friends in various workplaces. One participant asked when our movement will take over, a question that comes up often in our discussions. It shows that most people here like the idea of communism, but they need the science of dialectical materialism and the Progressive Labor Party to know how to make it a reality.
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Haiti: analyzing news with a communist lens
On May 20, the New York Times began a major series on Haiti in an effort to explain why the masses of workers within Haiti  are facing such a dire situation. The “exposé” was a revelation to many. It detailed the roots of the poverty that most Haitians have been facing for over two centuries. Our PLP club studied and discussed the articles and wanted to try to figure out why the New York Times, the mouthpiece for the Big Fascist wing of the U.S. ruling class, went to such lengths to put this information—damning both French and U.S. imperialism—out there.
Here is a brief summary of the Times article:
Haiti ended slavery and won independence from France in a bloody battle from 1791-1804. For about 20 years, the new Haitian ruling class, made up of mixed race landowners and Black former military leaders, tried to restore the economy (the richest slave colony producing sugar, coffee, cotton and more) by forcing the former slaves back onto the plantations.
In 1825, the former French slave masters demanded reparations for their lost property—human and otherwise. The French government backed their claims by sending a flotilla of warships into the harbor of Port-au-Prince. The message was clear: “Pay up or be conquered again!” The Haitian bourgeoisie could not fight or pay the ransom—the first time the winners had to pay the losers!—estimated by the Times at $560 million in today’s dollars. But the French had a solution: French banks would “loan” the Haitian government the money to pay this now “double debt,” taking their cut off the top. Of course, the Haitian ruling class was not saddled with this debt: it was paid completely on the backs of the rural Haitian workers who paid taxes on every pound of agricultural goods that came from their labor.
Then in 1915, under the guise of protecting U.S. citizens and their financial interests in Haiti, the Marines invaded, led by Smedley Butler, the self-proclaimed “racketeer for imperialism.” They marched directly into the Haitian national bank and marched out with $500,000 worth of gold bullion, which they put on a ship that moved it directly to the coffers of National City Bank (now Citibank) in New York City. The Marines then began a brutal 19-year occupation of Haiti, making it safe for U.S. financial interests and charging the cost of the occupation to the Haitian government.
The Times ended by asking: what could Haiti have been like today if as much as $120 billion dollars had not been stolen by French and U.S. business interests?
Our club wondered why the Times would publish, in such detail, the inner workings of capitalism and imperialism. How did this serve the interests of the U.S. ruling class (which committed similar crimes around the world, to make the history of Haiti pale in comparison)? Some thought that it was an attempt to win over Black workers and the middle class to the side of the Big Fascists in preparation for the next great imperialist war. Essentially, “See, we did bad things in the past—like an invasion and mass murder and even organizing a coup against a Haitian president (twice), but we can own up to them and now you can trust us.”
Others thought that there were greater geopolitical interests at play. The articles appeared on the eve of the so-called Summit of the Americas, where the U.S. was being rebuffed by many of its “allies” in the hemisphere. They thought that the articles were a nod to the global south (Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia) where China, the U.S. bosses’ main imperialist rivals, are making huge inroads in investments and military cooperation.
If you have read these articles, please let us know how you analyze the Times’ and the ruling class’ motives in making this information public.

 The U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and demolishing the right to abortion is a brutally sexist attack on women workers, and particularly on Black, Latin and immigrant workers. Backed by gutter sexist Republicans and the domestically oriented faction of the capitalist ruling class, the Small Fascists, the Court is poised to escalate its attacks on workers and erase decades of hard-won reforms within the limits of the profit system.
Meanwhile, the rulers’ long-dominant imperialist wing, the Big Fascist liberals of finance capital, are losing one fight after the next: on abortion and guns, on voting rights and climate action—not to mention the growing debacle in Ukraine. As U.S. capitalism spirals into decline, and the split within the bosses’ ranks deepens, we have entered a period of extreme instability. The Big Fascists will stop at nothing—including full-blown fascism—to hold on to their power and their profits. They will try to use the backlash against the Supreme Court’s decision to mobilize workers and to defend their empire from imperialist rivals China and Russia. They know they can’t fight an imperialist war without women workers committed to their murderous system.
After the reversal of Roe v. Wade, tens of thousands of workers took to the streets in rage. Like the upsurge after George Floyd’s murder, these protests show the potential of an angry and militant working class. These workers and millions like them must break the bounds of reformism to smash the blood-sucking bosses and create a new society run by and for our class—that’s communism! PLP calls for a mass, multiracial, working-class movement to fight for a communist world that will end sexism and racism once and for all.
Chickens come home to roost
Donald Trump and the other hack politicians backed by the Small Fascists are openly sexist and racist; they’re Klanspeople in business suits. But beware of the Democratic Party liberals who swear their commitment to workers’ rights—and then stab us in the back time after time. The liberals’ longtime strategy is to pacify workers by masking the real ugliness of capitalism, which makes them the main danger to the international working class. No less treacherous are the pro-capitalist leaders of the historically racist and segregated feminist movement, led by the likes of admitted CIA agent Gloria Steinem, who pushed the idea that Black men are the enemies of Black women (Moguldom Nation, 6/29/21). The same goes for the “pro-choice” movement, whose founding icon Margaret Sanger was an open advocate of eugenics, a racist ideology (later adopted by the Nazis) that has led to the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of Black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and immigrant women (pbs.org, 1/29/16). The legal foundation for this barbaric practice was laid by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 in Buck v. Bell (npr.org, 3/27/16).
The Big Fascists’ lack of unity and discipline has come back to haunt them. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, Jim Crow Joe Biden dismissed Anita Hill’s testimony of blatant sexual harassment and cleared the way for arch-sexist Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. More recently, liberal hero Ruth Bader Ginsburg selfishly refused to retire during Barack Obama’s presidency, when the Democrats could have confirmed a pro-choice successor. (In 2019, a year before she died at 87, Ginsburg praised anti-abortion colleagues Brett Kavanaugh—another sexual predator—and Neil Gorsuch as “very decent and very smart” (cnn.com, 7/26/19), and singled out Kavanaugh for praise for hiring women as his law clerks.)
At this point, the bosses’ state apparatus seems up for grabs. The Small Fascists have a death grip on the Supreme Court and have paralyzed Congress. They have mobilized their base in “red” states to control most of the state legislatures, which are now passing reams of anti-abortion laws while refusing to expand Medicaid or any reform that might benefit working women’s health. The overturning of Roe—despite a large majority of workers who favor abortion rights—is a watershed moment in a volatile time. It undermines the legitimacy of the bosses’ capitalist dictatorship, aka liberal demoracy. It throws a wrench into the Big Fascists’ plans to win women workers to fight in the next world war. The liberal rulers will do their best to use the pro-choice movement to keep women workers inside their dead-end system by voting for Democrats in this fall’s 2022 elections. Communists must be in that movement as well—to steer workers toward the fight for communism, the only way to abort this sexist, racist system.
Capitalist healthcare racist & sexist to the core
Like racism, sexism is essential to capitalism. The bosses use it both to divide workers and to super-exploit them. Internationally, women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, even less if they have children (UN Women). The Big Fascist liars, constantly promoting the U.S. as the “greatest country in the world,” preside over a sexist, racist health care system that is exceptional only for its inability to serve workers’ needs or protect their lives. The U.S. ranks behind 55 other countries for maternal mortality; its rate is four times as high as Japan's and ten times as high as Italy's. Because of racist inequalities, the rate is three times as high for Black women as for white women. Infant mortality rates in the U.S. show similar patterns–so much for the "right to life!” (CDC & CIA World Factbook) A capitalist system that cannot provide decent health care to the working class does not deserve to exist. It must be destroyed by communist revolution.
Communism will liberate all women workers
Over a century ago, a communist-led revolution in Russia revealed the power of the working class to break their chains and remake the history of humanity (see box). While PLP supports abortion on demand under capitalism, the true liberation of working-class women can only be achieved by the violent overthrow of the sexist capitalist ruling class. Under communism, as part of a fundamental commitment to women’s health care, women would have access to abortion. But the conditions that make abortion necessary for so many women workers today—from poverty to a lack of decent child care–will no longer exist. With the elimination of money and wage slavery, free health care will be available to all. Free and collectivized child care will be the norm. That’s the world that all workers need to fight for!