April 16, 2025 • 53 mins
Jordan from The Dugout continues teaching Margaret about the long history of Black antifascism that brought people to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid
Salaria Kea, “Doing Christ’s Duty”
Canute Frankson’s letter from Spain (1937)
“The Good Fight” (Documentary)
Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
ALBA-Valb.org archives
Trussel.com, “The Peekskill Riots”
National Archives & Harlem Oral History Project
Kuykendall, Ronald A. "African Blood Brotherhood: Independent Marxism During the Harlem Renaissance." Western Journal of Black Studies 26 (Spring 2002):
African Blood Brotherhood. The Principles of the African Blood Brotherhood. New York: African Blood Brotherhood,
David Motadel, Islam and the European Empires (2014)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to cool People distract themselves from the
apocalypse by reading history. Your podcast for reading history instead
of thinking about the apocalypse. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and that's always what this show is called. And also
I have a guest, but the guest is sort of
the host, and that guest is Jordan.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Jordan, Hello, how's this totally different day? This is that
bit's kind of old. Everyone knows that we record on
the same day, and then I just find that amusing.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I like the little peak behind the curtain.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Yeah, I mean, I'm glad today I get to be
the time traveler instead of being time traveled on that's true.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, And I don't have to wait until today in
order to hear all these things.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
I get to hear them now.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
But the other person who is on the call is
Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi. Sophie's our producer. It's we also
have an audio engineer named Rory.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Rory him Rory, And.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Our theme music was written forced by on Woman. And
this is part two of a two parter about the
anti fascist black history of the going from resistance in
the slave nightmare world of the United States. Over to
I always hear people say the sands of Spain. I
haven't spent a lot of time in Spain. Maybe there's
(01:29):
a sands there.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
Yeah, I don't know too much about the topography of
Spain either, but I never really think sand, you know what.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
It's come up in a bunch of different things. So
we're gonna say the sands of Spain anyway, just out
of because it sounds romantic. This is part two, and
in part one, let's see, our heroes just crossed the
Pyrenees from uh, what was it, from Mississippi originally up
to harm.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
Yeah, a lot of them are from Mississippi, some from Midwest.
There's a lot of Ohio involvement in this story that
I was not expecting.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Makes sense, I know, right.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
I'm like when you did that episode on the I
can't even remember about Oberlin and all that stuff. It's
like Oberlin's takes a lot of game, but no one
here believes them, but maybe we should.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, it used to be Ohio, dude, come bring it back,
bring back that energy. And now they are crossing the
Pyrenees into Spain. What happens?
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Well, I kind of want to take it back again
to talk about some of the okay, yeah, yeah, not
just yet, not yet. So kind of the talk before
is like there is a lot of history around, like
the racial politics of the Communist Party at this time,
and like ways that they were taking a lot of dubs,
(02:50):
also a lot of ls. But one dub they did
in this too is I've inferred from context.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
When the dub is I'm old, but I figured it out,
it's short for w yes, I mean to win.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Okay, uh oh, magpie, So you're so pure, I'm good?
Speaker 4 (03:08):
Is there every time you have a pop culture reference
you don't get I feel you on that because I
don't either half the time.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
So I'm just like, okay, they're still solid.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, okay. So they've they've taken some wins and some losses.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
And one of their big wins was they did as
a lot of communists do. As soon as they heard
about the Republic needing people, they formed a committee. They
formed a committee and they had a volunteer drive that
was mainly through word of mouth and through ads. And
what I find really interesting is this use of media
in how they basically the way they got their ads
(03:41):
into newspapers through kind of like this embargo on any
American citizens having any involvement in Spanish Civil War was
they put in ads into newspapers that were asking for
workers for Spain. So they would say something along the
lines of Spain needs American workers, and they would like
(04:02):
ask for money to help send people across, and they'd
be like, your contribution help save Spain from fascism. Hard
pressed by the fascist invaders, the Spanish people call on
the American workers to take on They would claim that
they would take on like industrial or productive jobs in
Spain so that each worker from America would free up
a Spanish worker to join the military forces of his
(04:23):
own country. Like that was like the logic they were
using in the ads that would help them get through censorship,
which I think is really beautiful. It kind of reminds
me of the different ways that like through music and
song there was like literally pathways to freedom, like through
the underground railroad and through so many other different things.
It's like, if you know, you know, this may be
(04:43):
a poem to you, but it's getting me northwest, south
and east to the Ohio River.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Yeah, okay. I also I think it's productive labor to
shoot fascists in history. Only in history. It would be
morally and legally wrong now for some reason that I
can't quite determined.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
But yeah, in getting to Spain, a lot of volunteers,
and especially a lot of black volunteers, they had to
lie heavy. They lie their ass off. They were saying
we went to we were tourists or students. Some of
them like pretended to be archaeologists to the point that
they were scared of the FEDS watching them, or like
international police like talking. So they would like pick up
(05:25):
rocks outside of the train station and like look at
it to each other and be like, oh, isn't this
an interesting rock? And it was really a lot of
heavy organizing happening with the Communist Party as well. And
there's this one white communist his name is Steve Nelson
and he was from Pennsylvania. And one of their motivators
was they heard that the English were signing up, and
(05:46):
they were like, we can't let the English outorganize us,
so we have to send our own volunteers to Spain.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Yeah. For the main focus of this episode.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
I just wanted to highlight a lot of the black
anti fat that went over to Spain and really harp
on the point that fighting fascism is not just about
the combatant, and for every combatant, there's at least ten
to twenty other support roles or even just as important
roles that are happening. So to start, I want to
talk about Paul Robison born in Princeton, New Jersey. Robison
(06:21):
was an internationally rerounded singer, actor, activist, and he became
one of the most influential African American figures in the
twentieth century. Active throughout the nineteen thirties, Robison used his
celebrity and oratorical skills to champion the Republican cause in
Spain during the Civil War. Although he wasn't a combatant,
Robison's powerful speeches and writings, featured in outlets like The
(06:44):
Negro Worker at the time, provided a moral and cultural
impetus for anti fascist resistance, and it was a fight
between freedom and oppression, a fight that connected directly to
the struggles of black people in the United States and
across the world. Robison has famously said, and I grab
this quote from Martin Duberman's book Robson, which is a biography,
and he said quote, the artists must elect to fight
(07:06):
for freedom or slavery.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
I have made my choice.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
I have no alternative end quote, and Robison used his voice.
He traveled to Spain in nineteen thirty eight at the
height of the war, where he performed for the troops
and especially finding joy and singing and speaking with the
international volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He sang songs
in English Spanish, songs of hope, solidarity, resistance, and it
(07:31):
wasn't just a show.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Wait was that? Sorry?
Speaker 2 (07:33):
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was the American volunteers, Yes, And.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was the American volunteers. And specifically,
each brigade had like their own name for their volunteers
that were based on some progressive or radical person at
the time. There was a lot other countries had a
lot better names than the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. To be honest,
because I just fact check, hate linking, terrible, terrible person.
(07:57):
Right after that Emancipation Proclamation sixty four, li Cota is dead,
So yeah, fuck Lincoln on this podcast, but no critical support.
But Robertson was like, oh, the brigade, the brigades chill
and he believed his art was a weapon, and his
concerts were morale boosters for the exhausted soldiers risking everything
against Franco's fascist He also raised funds for Spanish refugees,
(08:21):
organized rallies back in the States, and worked to keep
up the international attention on the Spanish people's fights. When
he got home, he kept speaking out, drawing direct lines
between the fascism abroad and all the racism at home,
and he warned that if fascism succeeded in Spain, it
would threaten people everywhere, especially black people fighting Jim Crow
(08:41):
oppression in the US. The US and the FBI hated
him for it. His activism in Spain would later be
used against him during the McCarthy era when he was
blacklisted and then eventually had his passport revoked, which I
believe it wasn't until fifty eight I'll get into it later,
but until he got it back, and that was a
landmark case for a lot of American Spanish Civil War
(09:03):
vets that came back to get their passports back to
be able to have any sort of traveling. Another wonderful
person that came out of Ohio, Well, they're from Georgia.
But came out of Ohio. Was Salaria key. Actually, I
guess now they're salari a key O'Reilly because she married
an Irish dude born on July thirteenth, nineteen thirteen in Georgia,
(09:26):
and her father was a hospital gardener who was killed
by a patient when she was a baby, prompting the
family to relocate to Akron, and she was raised by
her older brothers fighting racist barriers in Ohio that had
denied her access to nursing school. She then moved to
New York in nineteen thirties, graduating from Harlem Hospital, a
school of nursing, in thirty four. While she was still
(09:49):
a student, she fought for racial justice, successfully helping desegregate
the hospital staff, dining room, and improve working conditions for
black nurses.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
So she's already doing good shit.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
And she was the person who I mentioned at the
beginning that during the Ethiopian invasion by Italy organized funding
for a seventy five bed hospital in Ethiopia at the.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Time, So I was doing a lot of that on
the groundwork. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
And after her graduation, she became one of the head
nurses at Seaview Hospital and then became really politically activated.
Some people claim she joined the party by the party,
I mean the Communist Party of the USA, but she
has formally denied any membership, really, claiming that her actions
were more motivated by her deep Catholic faith, in anti
(10:36):
racist convictions and in ideological alignment with the Republican Spain.
And around this time, she was also denied access to
work with the American Red Cross because of her race,
being quote like contentious in the field. Like the supervisor
was like, I'm not racist, but people on the ground
are really racists, so you can't have the job.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
One.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
That's the only time that anything like that's ever happened.
It's so obviously hypocritical. None would ever do that.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
Yeah no, and I mean that stopped after nineteen sixty five,
so writes out, I mean nothing, j Jimcrow ended and yeah,
actually we're kind of chilling America.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
We can end the podcast right here.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
Yeah. Key's political consciousness deepened after the Italian evasion in
nineteen thirty five, which became a catalyst for her and
her anti fascist activism. She denied opportunities to serve in Ethiopia,
but she also at that time was more dedicated of
doing local work in her community and trying to then
(11:35):
do solidarity work, which was the impetus for doing the
stuff that she knew well, which was working as a
medical worker and organizing folks around that to get support
that was needed on the ground in Ethiopia. Later, she
ended up vauling tearing for the Spanish Civil War through
the American Medical Bureau, joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in
nineteen thirty seven around March and she became the only
(11:58):
African American nurse in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, working at
a field hospital near Madrid called via Paz, where she
was appointed head surgical nurse. There she supervised white nurses,
an unprecedented opportunity for a black woman in the Jim
Crow era from the United States especially, and treated wounded
soldiers from a variety of countries, experiences she later described
(12:19):
as among the most fulfilling of her life. She was
also captured at one point by Nationalist forces and imprisoned
for six weeks before being freed. Also in the Spanish
Civil War is where she met her husband, John O'Reilly,
who was an injured Irish volunteer and I can only
imagine what that love story was, Like, I want a
movie on that.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
In thirty eight, she was also injured in a bombing raid,
forcing her to return to the US. That same year,
she published a pamphlet memoir called Salary a Key, a
Negro nurse in Republic in Spain, offering more of a
first hand account of her time in that war that
I highly recommend for folks.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
And I think it's interesting because we talk about all
the time, like, oh, well they weren't you know, the
nurses aren't the front line fighters, and like in a
war like this, you are a frontline fighter. She was captured,
she was bombed, Like she's a frontline fighter you have
to go through, I know. And it's also like a
nonsensical distinction anyway, but like, damn, I'm glad she survived.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And she's also mentioned in some documentaries
out there that folks can watch, I think one called
The Good Fight where she's interviewed in that directly. There's
also another person, Canut Frankson, who was a Jamaican born
auto mechanic and volunteer and one of the few black
members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade as well which overall
(13:43):
there was about ninety total black folks that went over
from the US that we can like count. And he
wrote a lot of letters. One quote from one is
quote the Negro of the United States must not be fools.
We must not forget the lynchings, the Scottsboro Boys, the
injustice in Harlem and in the South. Franco was not
(14:04):
only the enemy of the Spanish people, he is the
enemy of the Negro people of the entire world.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
And that comes from a letter he.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
Was writing, I believe, to his lover at the time
or friends back home in the States, when kind of
justifying why he went and came, because he was already
doing political work before. But like a lot of people,
you don't tell everyone where you're going. When you're going
to go fight in the anti fascist war halfway across
the world.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
People might stop you. Your mom might be like no.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
But he came to the United States and around nineteen seventeen,
initially settling around in Pennsylvania where he worked as a machinist,
and he eventually then moved on to Detroit, Michigan, where
he worked in the automobile industry and became deeply involved
in the labor organizing and black radical politics of the area.
He was a member of the United Automobile Workers of America,
(14:56):
the National Negro Congress INAACP, and joined the Immunist Party
USA in December nineteen thirty four, where he served as
a section organizer. Driven by his anti fascist convictions and
solidarity with oppressed people globally, he sailed over to Europe
on the Queen Mary and April nineteen thirty seven, arriving
in Spain and around May and he joined the International
(15:17):
Brigades and was assigned to the International Auto Park in
Albaset as a chief mechanic, a crucial position given the
shortage of trained machinists in Spain at the time.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
So he actually kind of was doing what the ads said,
you know what I mean, like more directly in a
military function. But yeah, that's cool because like Detroit is
like the center of automobiles, at least in the States
and probably on some level like one of the main
ones in the world. So you're like, yeah, I'm fucking
showing up from the fucking Detroit Union to come fix
(15:48):
the anti fascist cars. That's like, that's kind of cool.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
And then immediately became the head mechanic, and also part
of that was because he spoke fluent Spanish, which enabled
him to teach engine repair to young Spaniards, and his
off hours demanding a commitment to not just the war efforts,
but education and solidarity, so he was keeping it running.
He eventually got injured, as everyone in a war front
has the possibility of doing no matter where you are,
(16:14):
whether you have the gun in your hand or you
have the wrench in your hand. Also, he was transferred
around different hospitals, recommended for rest and reassignment to auxiliary services,
and then eventually moved to Barcelona and thirty eight and
requested repatriation for medical treatment, and then returned to the US.
I believe he eventually left again the US because shit
(16:38):
was hectic, But he is definitely a story of someone
who survived the war and went on to go and
still do so much more.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
And that's something.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
With all of these people, I am giving the loosest introductions.
And then another black anti fascist I want to talk
about is Edward Carter, who was born in nineteen sixteen
Los Angeles, but he grew up all over the world, India, Shanghai,
and the US. His parents were missionaries, and from early
(17:06):
on he saw colonialism and racism firsthand. He spoke four
different languages, Hindi, English, Mandarin, and German, and even as
a teenager, he knew his life would be about fighting injustice.
By the time he was a young man, he had
already joined the fight against fascism, not in Europe but
in Asia. He fought alongside Chinese forces resisting Japanese invasion
during the nineteen thirties. But Carter wasn't done. When fascism
(17:30):
rose in Europe. He knew he had to do more.
He was strong, smart, and seasoned in battle, and Spain
wasn't just another war for him. There was a global
fight in the fight for freedom and for black people,
working people, and oppressed people everywhere. He also ended up
going past Spain into World War Two, and despite his
experience in fighting against the Japanese and fighting in Spanish
(17:54):
Civil War, the US military tried to keep Carter out
because of one racism and two he had fought in Spain,
which was an issue for a lot of Spanish anti
fascist who then went to go fight in World War
Two was that they were seen as too radical.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Wait, have you have you heard the word that they
got called. No, they're called premature anti fascists, like you
were anti fascist too early, you can't be trusted.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
And it's it's so weird to me that that was
actually used as a pejorative, and it's yeah, it's yeah,
not as weird to me because I'm like, the US
was never really anti fascist, even when we joined World
War Two. It's because our territory got bombed and then
we decided to recognize Hawaii as a state, Like then afterwards.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
It became more of a big thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
He ended up going into the World War Two, though
still in a segregated unit, the twelfth Armored Division, and
fighting in Europe, and he became a legend. During the
battle in Germany, Carter crossed open ground under heavy enemy
fire and he was hit five times but kept moving.
He killed six German soldiers and captured two more. Were
almost single handedly. Always got to have solidarity, and his
(19:04):
commanders knew that he deserved the Medal of Honor, the
highest US military award, but because he was black, he
was denied. Instead, they gave him the Distinguished Service Cross
and pushed him out of the army after the war.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
Yeah, he died sixty three and was never recognizing this
time by the military.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Or any institution.
Speaker 4 (19:24):
But decades later, you know, first black President Bill Clinton
had to come up and be like ward him the
Medal of Honor and the America's highest military award, and
like made him the first black soldier, like I think
technically to receive it, but one of the first, which yeah,
(19:44):
it's one of those those crazy, crazy things.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
And I'm just like, okay, but do you know what
he didn't get where she probably was inundated by ads,
you know what he did get much like you, we
have something in common with that man. We too have
a chance to have a little taste of American freedom
by getting our choice of well, we actually don't have
(20:08):
our choice.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
In our ads. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
There's some ads gonna come now and they're going to
be there.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
And we're back.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
Hello, Yay, we're back, and we're still in Spain.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Back to Spain.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
And then there was James Yeates, who I used heavily
to quote and put a lot of context and emotional
context for this piece here. He came in and immediately
joined the Motor Corps. He transported food and medicine to
the front lines under fire. What was interesting about him
is he started doing food delivery under the Thalman Brigade,
(20:50):
which was the German Brigade at the time, and.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
The German Anti fascist Internationalist Brigade.
Speaker 4 (20:55):
Yeah, German anti fascist Brigade, and he was kind of
salty about it at first. He was like, I wanted
to be with Americans, mainly because I can't speak German
and this is really stressful in a war situation wherever
like go here, do this, and I'm like uh. But
then eventually he ended up also serving as a ambulance driver,
(21:17):
which was so vital, like they would drive into war
torn places as things were happening, get folks in and
bring them back to the medical station while bullets were
still flying around and all that stuff. Yates ended up
being injured in one of these runs when aerial bombing
and offenses were going on, and that led to them
(21:40):
going back to the US kind of near the end
of the Spanish Civil War. And then there was doctor
Arnold Donahah, which I could write his own introduction, but
I just think this little context from Yates' books introducing
him and about some of the doctor's experience on what
doing medicine in the Spanish Civil War was like is
(22:00):
great context for folks to keep in mind, so from
Mississippi to Madrid. James Yates writes about doctor Arnold Donohah
as such, quote a well known dental surgeon from Harlem
and a graduate of Howard University. He was one of
one hundred doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers from the American
Medical Bureau. Doctor Donihah left Albacet for a grilling period
(22:21):
of work at the front, and after that he was
given charge of the jaw surgery department at Valkyrae. Later,
doctor Donihah was to talk about some of the conditions
in Spain during the war. Quote we suffered above all
from a lack of instruments and supplies needed for adequate surgery.
Frequently we didn't have enough gauze and bandage to dress
the wounds of men. There was such a great scarcity
(22:42):
of the elementary medical supplies that we had to unwind
the bandage of one man had used, have it washed
and boiled, and then rewind it and use it again
on another patient. Sometimes it was hard to get the
old bloodstains entirely out, but we managed to sterilize the
old bandages and make it fit for use. We did
not have a dry of novacaine in the hospital, and
I thought we might be able to get some with
(23:03):
the move and I did, but not enough, only a
thousand amples. This, as well as many other indispensable drugs,
were almost unobtainable in Spain in those final days. There
were so many items things we had taken for granted
back at home, we lacked in Spain. To reduce jaw fractures,
for example, we need a special kind of very thin
stainless steel wire. If I had just a pound of it,
(23:24):
we could have relieved the crisis at a hospital for months.
But we didn't have it, nor do we have any
X ray films. We had to work by touch to
determine the number of fractures. End quote.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Damn.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Imagine getting your You're like wounded. I mean, I guess
you have bigger I guess if you're in a war.
Everything is bad. But imagine being like, ah, I'm wounded,
I'm going to the hospital. I'm finally at the hospital.
That bandage that has been wrapped around me is currently bloody,
like it's an old stain right, But there's.
Speaker 4 (23:52):
No peace of mind, no point of service of like
a piece of mine at all. According to James Yates,
after the war, he had returned to his dental practice
in Harlem and had donated his time to returning veterans
of the Spanish Civil War because it was also very hard.
I mean, we all know healthcare in America, imagine one
(24:12):
hundred years ago, imagine being black. So it was one
of those things that he still organized with and around
while he was back home. And in nineteen forty five
he was elected the president of the North Harlem Dental
Association and advocated for socialized medicine that would guarantee medical
protection for all Americans.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Which is ahead of its time and still not happened.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Yeah, honestly.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
And there were people that came in to do so
many different roles in the Spanish Civil War, Like there
was a lot more labor than just picking up a
gun for Spain. Pat Roosevelt was a pilot who joined
the brigade after being barred from flying in the US
due to racism, and he simply went over just because
he said, cool, I went to Spain because I want
(24:55):
to fly. And that's from a conversation they had in
Mississippi to Madrid with James Yeates.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Hell yeah, and even cooking like.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
Is extremely revolutionary, and like sustaining ourselves and having that
sort of ability to have an energy source just on
a basic material level, let alone breaking bread with people
is powerful in and of itself. But there was James
Robertson who was a black cook from the South in
(25:23):
the United States, and he would feed hundreds with not
only the rations that were provided by the war efforts,
but also by foraging whenever he could and teaching other
folks how to forage. And it was said that he
quote made the best olive pie and all of Spain.
So that's something right there. It is like they even
had dessert.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
I don't know if olive pie is dessert. I bet
it's a savory pie. I've never had olive pie. Maybe
I'm wrong.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
You know what, You're probably not wrong, because I make
an olive bread at work. It's pretty savory.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
I guess you're actually the cook here anyway.
Speaker 4 (25:58):
Yeah, but yeah, there were many different experiences that different
soldiers had to come through. And two and there was
Walter Cobbs who was a black driver in the Spanish
Civil War, and he was almost shot by Republican forces
because he had captured a fascist truck and tried to
(26:21):
drive it right up to the lines of the anti fascists,
and at first they thought he was a Moroccan soldier.
He had said, quote, if I didn't speak Spanish, I
would have been shot by my own side. It's something
in quote. It is something he told James Yats as well.
And this is kind of the moment that I have
to mention Rocan.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, the fact that there's like black people fighting on
the fascist side as well.
Speaker 4 (26:46):
Yeah, which kind of begs the point of like what
were Moroccans doing on the fascist side of the Civil
War that they were able to be confused with the
black folks from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which, if folks
didn't know, Franco needed had some serious help early on
in this war. I mean, he had support from Mussolini's Italy,
Hitler's Germany, and he had just practiced down in Ethiopia.
(27:09):
But what's less talked about is that Franco also brought
in thousands of Moroccan soldiers from Spain's colony in northern
Morocco called the Spanish Protectorate, and they had fought in
colonial wars before, and Franco had trusted them a bit
more than some of his own Spanish soldiers at the time,
because like they were colonial troops under Spanish war means
(27:30):
they pretty much couldn't say no if they wanted to.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
But right, and since they're not like Spaniards, they're like
it's less likely that they're going to switch and fight
for the republic or whatever because they're like more literally
invading another place because where they live was invaded.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
Yeah, and Franco himself was a general that was like
I think believe had a lot more influence over this
side of Spanish uh like military political realm and uh
say at the time. So I mean they operated a
lot as shock troops for the nationalists. They were colonial subjects,
so orders were orders disobeying mient prison, death, or even
(28:10):
punishment for their families back at home. And it's the
colonial and imperialist outposts that like modern policing as well
as like here and in the Philippines, with the US specifically,
is like a place where we a lot of our
like policing tactics come from and like the way to
do policing as well as like terroristic social control was
(28:31):
experimented with by colonizers. Leveraging economic desperation also played a
big role, because being a soldier was one of the
few ways that you can make a steady living, no
matter kind of where you are in the world. At
least allegedly, that's why a lot of soldiers revolt because
they don't get paid, and even if it meant fighting
a war that wasn't really theirs. As well as like
(28:53):
that faith solidarity that I talked into earlier, like faith
leaders that already had power within the set society were
more likely to support Franco because they also hated secularism,
or how they viewed secularism of the Spanish Republicans, and
many faith based groups around the world saw the Nationalists
as more respectful of faith and tradition, and after the
(29:17):
Spanish Civil War kind of came to its end in
thirty nine. In nineteen thirty nine, Franco's victory didn't kill
the spirit of a lot of these volunteers. It just
scattered them into new fights back into their home. Even
more hardened for many Black vets, the internationalism they had
just forged in the war, being able to have and
be an integrated units, being able to lead units for
(29:40):
the first time, like Oliver Law was a black anti
fascist who became one of the head commanders of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, but died very shortly into that. But
it is thought to be one of the first Black
Americans to lead as either segregated or mostly white unit.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
I find that fascinating, Like a into what you're saying
about the pilot too, right, is that like, well, we
don't have to fight and segregated units in Spain or
I'm allowed to fly a plane in Spain, and so, yeah,
it doesn't surprise me that the first black person to
lead like white soldiers, white American soldiers wasn't in the
US Army. It was Americans fighting and you know, a
(30:20):
Republican army.
Speaker 4 (30:22):
Yeah, and a lot of them. They came back with
like this new understanding of solidarity, maybe not even new,
but like a very material understanding of this of this
different racial context, and then came right back into Jim
Crow America.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
It was still in.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
Full legal effects until the mid nineteen sixties and then
de facto social until well everything's fixed now.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Yeah, we didn't have a whole uprising about it in
twenty twenty. I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Yeah, I mean get ready for the next when.
Speaker 4 (30:55):
Yeah, because they came home into the like full extreme
nationalism of white supremacists, country, state and local dictatorships due
to the lack of voting restrictions, racial labor exploitation and
lynching as social control and sport. So when veterans like
Yates came home, literally because of the US isolationalism, the
(31:15):
FBI was waiting for them. They would get off the
plane and the agents would Yeates said that the agents
looked like they would have been more comfortable with the
fascists that they were fighting if they had came home,
and probably true if you know how like were appened
after the World War Two. We're more than happy to
welcome in Nazis into our institutions of power. But they
(31:37):
took his pat support and lots of veterans of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigades passports because it was against the US
foreign policy to go to Spain at the time. So
once they were found out, they were restricted and it
wasn't restored until Kent v. Dulles in nineteen fifty eight
that ruled that the US government could not deny a
citacent of passport just because of their beliefs or affiliations
(31:59):
without process, which due process.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
In America is a whole other conversation of itself.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Yeah, everything's fine. That one's history podcast.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
And then most of the veterans themselves, of all races,
they struggled to find work the FBI, and eventually the
House of Unamerican Committees made sure of that. The FBI
would literally do like think of like some of the
co Intel pro type of psychological terror. They would do,
like you try to go get a job, you go
to the interview, you think it's all nice, You go home.
(32:33):
Your prospective future boss also just got to visit an
interview from the FBI directly about you. And it was
a big deterrent as well, especially in Jim Crow America,
where there was already so many deterrents.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
A lot of folks stayed politically active.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
A few, like those who had been aligned with the
Communist organizers and Communist Party, had felt betrayed during the
McCarthy era, and others built solidarity networks that endured where
where some of them were like the veterans of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade itself decided to create its own support group,
and some of them, like some folks were able to
(33:09):
find gigs through the Communist Party, like there was a
like section, organizer things and anything that the party could do,
but it wasn't really enough for all the veterans that
went to really be able to help them. But yeah,
support groups like Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade raised
money to support those coming home those int detention due
(33:30):
to breaking the non intervention policy and something totally not
related to now. Some of them were not being full
citizens or not having like the right paperwork because they
were born in the South, or they were born in
different places that didn't have like a lot of civil
registries up until that point. So when they came back
and their paperwork didn't look too nice, they got held
(33:51):
in immigration stuff and some of them even deported.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
God, imagine being born in this country, going and fighting
for or what this country ostensibly stands for, a democratic republic,
and then coming back and just being like, oh, no,
you don't uh, things don't line up, Get the fuck
out of here.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Do you even exist?
Speaker 4 (34:12):
Not? Yeah, and a lot of folks came back feeling
like they had lost the war.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Like, well, they kind of did.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
Well, they did, but they came back with them.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
They were also in radical spaces and they felt too
revered by the people around them, Like people were like, oh,
you're so cool, you did that, and that actually pushed
a lot of people out of like more politically active spaces,
and they were like, y'all are going too hard around me.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Yeah, like like no, this was a we fucking don't
call me a hero. I just suffered incredible loss.
Speaker 4 (34:48):
Yeah, we have no good way to talk about war.
Definitely not in the nineteen twenty, like.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
That's for sure.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
But do you know what we do have a good
way to talk about?
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Is it ads?
Speaker 2 (34:58):
We do. We have a lot of We've both done
a lot of work writing about the impacts of advertisements
and how we can use them to learn about goods
and services with which to enrich our lives.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Here's that and we're back. Welcome, Welcome.
Speaker 4 (35:24):
So to kind of get into some of the life
of folks after the war, a lot of folks were
very stringent, especially because of all the political reverence. They
got to keep their class ties even though they're like
there were even like lots of wealthy sympathizers that offered
to free them from the debt that they were in
and pay their way through schooling and enter like the
more professionalized class. And there was some folks who still
(35:48):
like denied that because they they saw it as like
class tradering, which I don't know, if someone's willing to
pay for my schooling, I'm like, please do it.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah, politics has moved on, but yeah, very great. I
see where they're coming from. But yeah, I would not
be mad at anyone who did that.
Speaker 4 (36:05):
Yeah. So there was another one of the support groups,
the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Like by the
end or like nearer the fifties, there was a decline
in how many veterans were actually still active in it,
and most folks still stayed friends because of like the
political and social commitments from war combined with the public
(36:25):
sentiment against communists and against them at the time being
viewed as communists, and a lot of them were. And
one thing that I find interesting series like they also
still built a lot of solidarity through a lot of
the legal battles that they had to continue to go
through because they were getting wrapped up in the red
Scare and the McCarthy era stuff as the scary communists
(36:47):
that actually picked up a gun to go do something
being premature anti fascist. Yeah, and a lot of them
were still doing like labor organizing or like they were
like the one veteran of the alb would get picked
up in Detroit or Arkansas and be detained for days,
and that would bring a network together to pull up
for each other. So there was still that consistent solidarity
(37:08):
even if folks weren't day to day members in the
support group as much.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
That makes sense. Also, they founded that whole city in
New York that's named after the alb Albany. I timed
this just as Jordan was drinking out of a glass
on purpose. This is my best joke of the episode.
I hope you all enjoyed it. It was the worst
(37:32):
joke anyway.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Uh huh.
Speaker 4 (37:35):
There's a city near me called New Albany that's definitely
was made by a fascist. So it's just like really
funny to me to think about the co optation of
anti fascism by fascist.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
In this hypothetical world where Albany is named after the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Uh oh, that's my head canon. I don't even know
who Albany is. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (37:55):
One thing I find interesting too is that after the
war they had this they were like X Party members.
They were anti Communist vets that didn't want to associate
with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade afterwards, especially when they came home.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
A lot of them just to keep their head down.
But there was.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
This very specific line around deserters and whether or not
when you came home to America you could be a
part of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade if
you deserted when you were on the ground in Spain.
And they really just had one line, which was like
they were allowed to participate if they had admitted honestly
(38:32):
to their regrets and shortcomings on the battlefield, and as
long as they didn't disavow the Republic, the Brigade or
the Communist Party. That was like their line within the
alb Yeah. And then yeah, one thing that kind of
end on is like years years later, James Yates himself
ended up going back to Spain. It's past nineteen fifty eight.
(38:54):
They're able to get their passport back now, and they're like,
I'm a free man where should I go. Obviously, I
should go to Spain. They wanted to travel Europe more broadly,
but they were like, I can't go to Europe and
not go to Spain, like I spent so much of
my formative years there. Even if it is just a couple,
I think they were only there for maybe a year
(39:14):
or two. But a year or two of war is
a lifetime, and it's, yeah, the end of life for
a lot of people. So to survive and to be
able to go back is a really beautiful experience.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
But they were terrified. Yeah, it's still Franco town.
Speaker 4 (39:28):
Franco still was in power till I believe the late
mid seventies.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
I can never remember the year that Franco died. This
has come up because I live a very normal life.
It has come up in conversation like four or five
times in the past month that I can't remember when
Franco died. But fortunately whoever I'm talking to also can't remember.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
November twentieth, nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Hell, yeah, Sophie knows, yep.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
I know, because I googled it.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
I don't know at the top of my head.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
No, no, no, in my mind, you know that you
celebrate every year. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
I mean it would be really fucking base if I
knew all the dictator's deaths by memory.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
But yeah, no, he's kept coming up on fifty years dead.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Didn't this year? We should have a party, Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (40:11):
We should be a good, good thing to do in November.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (40:17):
But they were terrified to go back, and they first
stopped in France. They were chilaxing. Then they went to
like a border town, so they were like, I'm still
gonna go. I'm still gonna go. They got off the
train right before the border and was able to talk
to like some Spanish refugees and French locals, and as
soon as he like decided it was safe to let
(40:38):
them know he was a veteran of the Civil War,
so many Polks flocked to him. He was like a
person he was talking to was like, really, where's salary
a key, where's Milton Wolf? Where's like how are people doing?
Have you heard of them? And he was just like whoa,
whoa Is it safe to go to Spain right now?
And they're like, if you keep your head down you
can get through it. Probably, Yeah, So he decided to
(41:01):
continue his journey in and the differences he felt were
immediate in Stark as soon as he entered the country
on the train. It was the same train he had
left that at the time was bombed out and had
no windows, so it was a cold train ride out,
a warmer traine ride in. There was no gunboats, no
Italian gunboats waiting to Sheldon the train. At this point
(41:24):
in his hotel he heard the sounds of torture that
it was the point that he had to leave hotels.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
Wait.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
So he went back and he heard people being tortured
while he was there, because it was still a fascist
regimes that we're.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
Saying yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
And then it was even in his head was like
I should leave this hotel and go to the next one.
But he's like, this is probably happening at the next
hotel too, so I should just stay.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Because otherwise you're like, well, you know, once the fascist
is in charge, hey, at least at least there's no
Italian gunboats.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
It really everything's fine now.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
And then you're like you get to the hotel and
you're like, oh no, this is a torture land. I'm
in hell land.
Speaker 4 (41:57):
Yeah, And he one thing he loved about Spain at
the beginning was the public life, the communal life of Spain.
People in the plaza, it was gone. People on the
street weren't willing to talk to her, and people weren't
outside communing with each other. He tried to have a
conversation with somebody at a park and no, no, no, no, that's.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
An important thing to think about about the day to
day life under a long term fascist regime instead of
like Germany in nineteen thirty seven, but like Spain in
the nineteen fifty is no more public life. That's heavy, okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
And then something happened.
Speaker 4 (42:34):
At the time, he was working with the NAACP in
the US and he was working on some stuff to
free Angela Davis, and he had requested packages to be
sent to France with a bunch of buttons to like
free Angela Davis. They had accidentally landed in Spain, where
he specifically requested them not to come, but still forwarded. Nonetheless,
(42:56):
he was a bit terrified about that, but he had
a plan. I'm gonna read from his book what he
did about that quote. My first thought was, oh lord,
what is this. I'm here in fascist Spain with Angela
Davis buttons. What if this gets reported to the authorities.
All the while walking back to the hotel, I wondered
what to do with the buttons. Then I pulled myself together.
(43:17):
I had faced Franco before the Civil War forty years ago.
I had spent the rest of my days sitting on
many benches and somehow leaving a button behind at each one.
By sundown, all the buttons were gone. End quote.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
And he just did a little bit of distribution.
Speaker 4 (43:32):
Like I love that story because I'm like, this is
the beauty of internationalism, media distribution, Like how many pigs
found those Like how many hardened or new radicals found
hope by being like what is this? And this like
just act of self preservation but also resistance.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
That's cool.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Yeah, And then I guess just kind of like a
lasting point about this is that something that I love
about reading about the Spanish Civil War is that they
remind us that fighting fascism isn't about the esthetics. It's
not about the flags slogans. Most of the times it's
the food delivery truck field hospital, the nurse that won't
(44:15):
be moved, the mechanic who teaches solidarity, and a garage
its community defense even decades later even at home. And
this history matters not to romanticize a war, but to
remember what was possible when ordinary people chose to risk everything,
not for nationalism, profit, but for dignity. Like affinity, groups, cadres, families,
(44:37):
and couples came into this fight together, sometimes staggered months
at a time, and some would have really sweet reunions
on the battlefields and in the real camps and in
the hospitals. Some came through that treacherous mountain range to
receive a heartbreak in finding their best friends murdered. Of
those that came in together, some left more alone than
ever and with a more diverse set of wounds. Many
(45:00):
came to join the resistance as people willing to do
anything to fight fascism, and in that people came out
commanders like Oliver Law, most likely the first Black American
man to lead a white or integrated unit. People united
in many, many forms of labor. The combatant wouldn't survive
and sustain aggression without their nurses and doctors. The medical
(45:21):
workers wouldn't get their patients if not for the wartime
ambulance drivers. The drivers go nowhere without their mechanics, and
no one was fighting without the cooks, and the world
wouldn't have our archives without our artists. Langston Hughes was
another artist that came alongside Ernest Hemingway to engage in
journalists in the region and with Robinson to uplift the
(45:42):
spirits and harden their own understanding by sharing their expression
with the soldiers in the International Brigades. This is one
thing I have as a call to action, is to
honor them by studying their choices, their losses, and their resilience,
telling the full story not just of the battlefield, but
of camaraderie, the protection, the cookouts, the poems, the organizing.
(46:05):
And then I just have one last quote from Yates
that I think really encapsulates the spirit, which is quote,
simply put, one's own life is, in reality, but an
unfolding paranorama of mutually developing relationships in a time and
place beyond an original personal choice.
Speaker 3 (46:23):
End quote.
Speaker 4 (46:24):
And Yeah, if any of this moved you, I really
encourage you to read James Yates Mississippi to Madrid, look
up Celaria Keys' writings, and learn about what the veterans
of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade did after Spain. Because there's
so much more. There's so much more research about anti
authoritarian militant action, and not all of them share the
same identifiers, but it takes a lot to do that research,
(46:46):
and in drawing a line to the revolt in the
passion that anti fascism isn't over and neither is our
capacity for solidarity. They did their part, and now it's
our turn. We were not handed a finished revolution.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
Hell yeah, okay, but you mentioned all the cooks and
the everyone, but you forgot to bring back the most
important character, the one who just wanted to fly a plane.
I find him fascinating because it's like, oh, America's so
racist that if he wants to be a pilot, he
(47:21):
has to go into a war in a foreign country.
Like and I okay, not to just keep going on
about the pilot, but one of the things I like
about the too Right is you're talking about all these
people who have a gradient of level of like political
understanding or how central politics is to who they are,
you know. And you have the people who are like, look,
(47:43):
I believe in this stuff, and I gotta If I
say I believe it, I gotta do it. And then
you have people who are like, well, people are getting
shot and I'm a medic, and so I'm going and
you have people who are like, I want to fly
a plane.
Speaker 1 (47:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Yeah, maybe he was like the most politic of all
of them, but like, I love this version of him
where it's just like Noah, I just I really want
to fly a plane.
Speaker 4 (48:07):
Fly so much we're to say about Garlands too. I
mean he ended up joining Langston Hughes and Harry Hayward
and Radio Broadcast when he got back to the United
States from Madrid. He did work with the American Medical
Bureau and other organizations to really like lobby because one
thing about the people who got sent back early, especially
for being injured, was they were there to test the
(48:30):
political climate of the United States to see what would
happen when the war ended, to see what they were
other folks were sending, like what the Spanish battalions and
brigades were sending their volunteers back to Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
So it was even like kind of an additional danger
they were taking for their comrades was to be the
one to go back first to figure out and test
the waters.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
Damn.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
I had a I had a friend whose grandfather, like
it was just like it was one of my friends,
like in a kind of like goth scene, wasn't particularly
political person. I was like, oh, yeah, my grandfather fought
in the Spanish Civil War, I think, and didn't know
like the first thing about it. And I'm like, that
means your grandfather was a hardcore leftist, Like we should
(49:14):
talk about that. Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 4 (49:18):
Yeah, And I think that's also something that like, especially
redoing these archives around war and history is so important
because especially in America, we don't talk about what happened
during the wars a lot unless it's over glorifying it
or any of this. Milton Wolf talked heavily after when
they came back, who was another a white volunteer in
the Communist Party, about how no one told me what
(49:40):
it was going to be like in the Foxtrot. Nobody
told me what it was going to be like in
No Man's Land. Nobody's going to tell me what it
was like to see bodies dead but still moving, terrifying.
Speaker 3 (49:52):
Lord.
Speaker 2 (49:53):
Well, that's a terribly on uplifting note to end on.
But the note that you chose to end on in
your script it was really good, which is that it's like, okay,
like We look at this history because we care about
the present, we care about the future, and this history
has been very much buried and I love getting to
(50:13):
see it. So thank you for telling me all this.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Well, is there anything you wanna you have a podcast?
Tell me about your podcast or anything else you'd like
to plug?
Speaker 3 (50:25):
Yeah, I mean, okay, yeah, I mean one.
Speaker 4 (50:27):
Definitely go check out the dug Out, especially if you're
interested in black folks in the doing anti fascism and
in the Spanish Civil War. Because I did so much research,
I'm gonna have so much content for the Dugout over
the next couple of months.
Speaker 3 (50:38):
H cool.
Speaker 4 (50:39):
But alongside that, I think it's really important for folks
to be tapped into the current abolitionist movement that is
going on in the United States. And one way that
media and media folks have tapped in and played that
role is through a couple of projects that I'm involved
with called In the Belly and In the Mix. And
In the Belly is an abolitionist magazine that is buy
(51:00):
and four currently incarcerated individuals. Our editorial steam and all
of our authors are currently incarcerated folks. With the support
of formally incarcerated folks on the outside and just getting
articles from people on the inside to other folks on
the inside. And then there's in the Mix, which is
a podcast with the same format hosted by folks that
(51:21):
are inside, questioning and interviewing sometimes academics or theorists or
even just other folks that are on the inside, if
when that's possible. So checking out those two projects I
feel like are real big hell yeah.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
And if you want to check out anything that I do,
you could listen to this show. You can also listen
to Love Like the World's Dying, an individual and community
preparedness podcast. And I write a newsletter on substack, and
I probably do other things, but that's enough things.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
Oh, just randomly.
Speaker 4 (51:52):
We also have if you go to patreon dot com
forward Slash Dugout Pod, we have a free newsletter that
comes out monthly about folks who want to stay up
day on some of the more contemporary stuff that's going
on and hitting our woes, but in a more tempered
and staggered format than the daily news cycle.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
Check us out over there.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
So for you guy thing, if I want to plug
one specific thing, I guess listen to Hood Politics with
the prop. He's been putting out some bangers lately and
I love that guy.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
They are good.
Speaker 3 (52:22):
Big props to listeners.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
Have heard me say this before, but it continues to
be true, so you should listen to that, and you
should listen to us next week when we have more
Cool People Who this is we always exit end this way,
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. A more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to cool People distract themselves from the
apocalypse by reading history. Your podcast for reading history instead
of thinking about the apocalypse. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and that's always what this show is called. And also
I have a guest, but the guest is sort of
the host, and that guest is Jordan.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Jordan, Hello, how's this totally different day? This is that
bit's kind of old. Everyone knows that we record on
the same day, and then I just find that amusing.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I like the little peak behind the curtain.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Yeah, I mean, I'm glad today I get to be
the time traveler instead of being time traveled on that's true.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, And I don't have to wait until today in
order to hear all these things.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
I get to hear them now.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
But the other person who is on the call is
Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi. Sophie's our producer. It's we also
have an audio engineer named Rory.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Rory him Rory, And.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Our theme music was written forced by on Woman. And
this is part two of a two parter about the
anti fascist black history of the going from resistance in
the slave nightmare world of the United States. Over to
I always hear people say the sands of Spain. I
haven't spent a lot of time in Spain. Maybe there's
(01:29):
a sands there.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
Yeah, I don't know too much about the topography of
Spain either, but I never really think sand, you know what.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
It's come up in a bunch of different things. So
we're gonna say the sands of Spain anyway, just out
of because it sounds romantic. This is part two, and
in part one, let's see, our heroes just crossed the
Pyrenees from uh, what was it, from Mississippi originally up
to harm.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
Yeah, a lot of them are from Mississippi, some from Midwest.
There's a lot of Ohio involvement in this story that
I was not expecting.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Makes sense, I know, right.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
I'm like when you did that episode on the I
can't even remember about Oberlin and all that stuff. It's
like Oberlin's takes a lot of game, but no one
here believes them, but maybe we should.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, it used to be Ohio, dude, come bring it back,
bring back that energy. And now they are crossing the
Pyrenees into Spain. What happens?
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Well, I kind of want to take it back again
to talk about some of the okay, yeah, yeah, not
just yet, not yet. So kind of the talk before
is like there is a lot of history around, like
the racial politics of the Communist Party at this time,
and like ways that they were taking a lot of dubs,
(02:50):
also a lot of ls. But one dub they did
in this too is I've inferred from context.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
When the dub is I'm old, but I figured it out,
it's short for w yes, I mean to win.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Okay, uh oh, magpie, So you're so pure, I'm good?
Speaker 4 (03:08):
Is there every time you have a pop culture reference
you don't get I feel you on that because I
don't either half the time.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
So I'm just like, okay, they're still solid.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, okay. So they've they've taken some wins and some losses.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
And one of their big wins was they did as
a lot of communists do. As soon as they heard
about the Republic needing people, they formed a committee. They
formed a committee and they had a volunteer drive that
was mainly through word of mouth and through ads. And
what I find really interesting is this use of media
in how they basically the way they got their ads
(03:41):
into newspapers through kind of like this embargo on any
American citizens having any involvement in Spanish Civil War was
they put in ads into newspapers that were asking for
workers for Spain. So they would say something along the
lines of Spain needs American workers, and they would like
(04:02):
ask for money to help send people across, and they'd
be like, your contribution help save Spain from fascism. Hard
pressed by the fascist invaders, the Spanish people call on
the American workers to take on They would claim that
they would take on like industrial or productive jobs in
Spain so that each worker from America would free up
a Spanish worker to join the military forces of his
(04:23):
own country. Like that was like the logic they were
using in the ads that would help them get through censorship,
which I think is really beautiful. It kind of reminds
me of the different ways that like through music and
song there was like literally pathways to freedom, like through
the underground railroad and through so many other different things.
It's like, if you know, you know, this may be
(04:43):
a poem to you, but it's getting me northwest, south
and east to the Ohio River.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Yeah, okay. I also I think it's productive labor to
shoot fascists in history. Only in history. It would be
morally and legally wrong now for some reason that I
can't quite determined.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
But yeah, in getting to Spain, a lot of volunteers,
and especially a lot of black volunteers, they had to
lie heavy. They lie their ass off. They were saying
we went to we were tourists or students. Some of
them like pretended to be archaeologists to the point that
they were scared of the FEDS watching them, or like
international police like talking. So they would like pick up
(05:25):
rocks outside of the train station and like look at
it to each other and be like, oh, isn't this
an interesting rock? And it was really a lot of
heavy organizing happening with the Communist Party as well. And
there's this one white communist his name is Steve Nelson
and he was from Pennsylvania. And one of their motivators
was they heard that the English were signing up, and
(05:46):
they were like, we can't let the English outorganize us,
so we have to send our own volunteers to Spain.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Yeah. For the main focus of this episode.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
I just wanted to highlight a lot of the black
anti fat that went over to Spain and really harp
on the point that fighting fascism is not just about
the combatant, and for every combatant, there's at least ten
to twenty other support roles or even just as important
roles that are happening. So to start, I want to
talk about Paul Robison born in Princeton, New Jersey. Robison
(06:21):
was an internationally rerounded singer, actor, activist, and he became
one of the most influential African American figures in the
twentieth century. Active throughout the nineteen thirties, Robison used his
celebrity and oratorical skills to champion the Republican cause in
Spain during the Civil War. Although he wasn't a combatant,
Robison's powerful speeches and writings, featured in outlets like The
(06:44):
Negro Worker at the time, provided a moral and cultural
impetus for anti fascist resistance, and it was a fight
between freedom and oppression, a fight that connected directly to
the struggles of black people in the United States and
across the world. Robison has famously said, and I grab
this quote from Martin Duberman's book Robson, which is a biography,
and he said quote, the artists must elect to fight
(07:06):
for freedom or slavery.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
I have made my choice.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
I have no alternative end quote, and Robison used his voice.
He traveled to Spain in nineteen thirty eight at the
height of the war, where he performed for the troops
and especially finding joy and singing and speaking with the
international volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He sang songs
in English Spanish, songs of hope, solidarity, resistance, and it
(07:31):
wasn't just a show.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Wait was that? Sorry?
Speaker 2 (07:33):
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was the American volunteers, Yes, And.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was the American volunteers. And specifically,
each brigade had like their own name for their volunteers
that were based on some progressive or radical person at
the time. There was a lot other countries had a
lot better names than the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. To be honest,
because I just fact check, hate linking, terrible, terrible person.
(07:57):
Right after that Emancipation Proclamation sixty four, li Cota is dead,
So yeah, fuck Lincoln on this podcast, but no critical support.
But Robertson was like, oh, the brigade, the brigades chill
and he believed his art was a weapon, and his
concerts were morale boosters for the exhausted soldiers risking everything
against Franco's fascist He also raised funds for Spanish refugees,
(08:21):
organized rallies back in the States, and worked to keep
up the international attention on the Spanish people's fights. When
he got home, he kept speaking out, drawing direct lines
between the fascism abroad and all the racism at home,
and he warned that if fascism succeeded in Spain, it
would threaten people everywhere, especially black people fighting Jim Crow
(08:41):
oppression in the US. The US and the FBI hated
him for it. His activism in Spain would later be
used against him during the McCarthy era when he was
blacklisted and then eventually had his passport revoked, which I
believe it wasn't until fifty eight I'll get into it later,
but until he got it back, and that was a
landmark case for a lot of American Spanish Civil War
(09:03):
vets that came back to get their passports back to
be able to have any sort of traveling. Another wonderful
person that came out of Ohio, Well, they're from Georgia.
But came out of Ohio. Was Salaria key. Actually, I
guess now they're salari a key O'Reilly because she married
an Irish dude born on July thirteenth, nineteen thirteen in Georgia,
(09:26):
and her father was a hospital gardener who was killed
by a patient when she was a baby, prompting the
family to relocate to Akron, and she was raised by
her older brothers fighting racist barriers in Ohio that had
denied her access to nursing school. She then moved to
New York in nineteen thirties, graduating from Harlem Hospital, a
school of nursing, in thirty four. While she was still
(09:49):
a student, she fought for racial justice, successfully helping desegregate
the hospital staff, dining room, and improve working conditions for
black nurses.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
So she's already doing good shit.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
And she was the person who I mentioned at the
beginning that during the Ethiopian invasion by Italy organized funding
for a seventy five bed hospital in Ethiopia at the.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Time, So I was doing a lot of that on
the groundwork. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
And after her graduation, she became one of the head
nurses at Seaview Hospital and then became really politically activated.
Some people claim she joined the party by the party,
I mean the Communist Party of the USA, but she
has formally denied any membership, really, claiming that her actions
were more motivated by her deep Catholic faith, in anti
(10:36):
racist convictions and in ideological alignment with the Republican Spain.
And around this time, she was also denied access to
work with the American Red Cross because of her race,
being quote like contentious in the field. Like the supervisor
was like, I'm not racist, but people on the ground
are really racists, so you can't have the job.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
One.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
That's the only time that anything like that's ever happened.
It's so obviously hypocritical. None would ever do that.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
Yeah no, and I mean that stopped after nineteen sixty five,
so writes out, I mean nothing, j Jimcrow ended and yeah,
actually we're kind of chilling America.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
We can end the podcast right here.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
Yeah. Key's political consciousness deepened after the Italian evasion in
nineteen thirty five, which became a catalyst for her and
her anti fascist activism. She denied opportunities to serve in Ethiopia,
but she also at that time was more dedicated of
doing local work in her community and trying to then
(11:35):
do solidarity work, which was the impetus for doing the
stuff that she knew well, which was working as a
medical worker and organizing folks around that to get support
that was needed on the ground in Ethiopia. Later, she
ended up vauling tearing for the Spanish Civil War through
the American Medical Bureau, joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in
nineteen thirty seven around March and she became the only
(11:58):
African American nurse in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, working at
a field hospital near Madrid called via Paz, where she
was appointed head surgical nurse. There she supervised white nurses,
an unprecedented opportunity for a black woman in the Jim
Crow era from the United States especially, and treated wounded
soldiers from a variety of countries, experiences she later described
(12:19):
as among the most fulfilling of her life. She was
also captured at one point by Nationalist forces and imprisoned
for six weeks before being freed. Also in the Spanish
Civil War is where she met her husband, John O'Reilly,
who was an injured Irish volunteer and I can only
imagine what that love story was, Like, I want a
movie on that.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
In thirty eight, she was also injured in a bombing raid,
forcing her to return to the US. That same year,
she published a pamphlet memoir called Salary a Key, a
Negro nurse in Republic in Spain, offering more of a
first hand account of her time in that war that
I highly recommend for folks.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
And I think it's interesting because we talk about all
the time, like, oh, well they weren't you know, the
nurses aren't the front line fighters, and like in a
war like this, you are a frontline fighter. She was captured,
she was bombed, Like she's a frontline fighter you have
to go through, I know. And it's also like a
nonsensical distinction anyway, but like, damn, I'm glad she survived.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And she's also mentioned in some documentaries
out there that folks can watch, I think one called
The Good Fight where she's interviewed in that directly. There's
also another person, Canut Frankson, who was a Jamaican born
auto mechanic and volunteer and one of the few black
members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade as well which overall
(13:43):
there was about ninety total black folks that went over
from the US that we can like count. And he
wrote a lot of letters. One quote from one is
quote the Negro of the United States must not be fools.
We must not forget the lynchings, the Scottsboro Boys, the
injustice in Harlem and in the South. Franco was not
(14:04):
only the enemy of the Spanish people, he is the
enemy of the Negro people of the entire world.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
And that comes from a letter he.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
Was writing, I believe, to his lover at the time
or friends back home in the States, when kind of
justifying why he went and came, because he was already
doing political work before. But like a lot of people,
you don't tell everyone where you're going. When you're going
to go fight in the anti fascist war halfway across
the world.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
People might stop you. Your mom might be like no.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
But he came to the United States and around nineteen seventeen,
initially settling around in Pennsylvania where he worked as a machinist,
and he eventually then moved on to Detroit, Michigan, where
he worked in the automobile industry and became deeply involved
in the labor organizing and black radical politics of the area.
He was a member of the United Automobile Workers of America,
(14:56):
the National Negro Congress INAACP, and joined the Immunist Party
USA in December nineteen thirty four, where he served as
a section organizer. Driven by his anti fascist convictions and
solidarity with oppressed people globally, he sailed over to Europe
on the Queen Mary and April nineteen thirty seven, arriving
in Spain and around May and he joined the International
(15:17):
Brigades and was assigned to the International Auto Park in
Albaset as a chief mechanic, a crucial position given the
shortage of trained machinists in Spain at the time.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
So he actually kind of was doing what the ads said,
you know what I mean, like more directly in a
military function. But yeah, that's cool because like Detroit is
like the center of automobiles, at least in the States
and probably on some level like one of the main
ones in the world. So you're like, yeah, I'm fucking
showing up from the fucking Detroit Union to come fix
(15:48):
the anti fascist cars. That's like, that's kind of cool.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
And then immediately became the head mechanic, and also part
of that was because he spoke fluent Spanish, which enabled
him to teach engine repair to young Spaniards, and his
off hours demanding a commitment to not just the war efforts,
but education and solidarity, so he was keeping it running.
He eventually got injured, as everyone in a war front
has the possibility of doing no matter where you are,
(16:14):
whether you have the gun in your hand or you
have the wrench in your hand. Also, he was transferred
around different hospitals, recommended for rest and reassignment to auxiliary services,
and then eventually moved to Barcelona and thirty eight and
requested repatriation for medical treatment, and then returned to the US.
I believe he eventually left again the US because shit
(16:38):
was hectic, But he is definitely a story of someone
who survived the war and went on to go and
still do so much more.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
And that's something.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
With all of these people, I am giving the loosest introductions.
And then another black anti fascist I want to talk
about is Edward Carter, who was born in nineteen sixteen
Los Angeles, but he grew up all over the world, India, Shanghai,
and the US. His parents were missionaries, and from early
(17:06):
on he saw colonialism and racism firsthand. He spoke four
different languages, Hindi, English, Mandarin, and German, and even as
a teenager, he knew his life would be about fighting injustice.
By the time he was a young man, he had
already joined the fight against fascism, not in Europe but
in Asia. He fought alongside Chinese forces resisting Japanese invasion
during the nineteen thirties. But Carter wasn't done. When fascism
(17:30):
rose in Europe. He knew he had to do more.
He was strong, smart, and seasoned in battle, and Spain
wasn't just another war for him. There was a global
fight in the fight for freedom and for black people,
working people, and oppressed people everywhere. He also ended up
going past Spain into World War Two, and despite his
experience in fighting against the Japanese and fighting in Spanish
(17:54):
Civil War, the US military tried to keep Carter out
because of one racism and two he had fought in Spain,
which was an issue for a lot of Spanish anti
fascist who then went to go fight in World War
Two was that they were seen as too radical.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Wait, have you have you heard the word that they
got called. No, they're called premature anti fascists, like you
were anti fascist too early, you can't be trusted.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
And it's it's so weird to me that that was
actually used as a pejorative, and it's yeah, it's yeah,
not as weird to me because I'm like, the US
was never really anti fascist, even when we joined World
War Two. It's because our territory got bombed and then
we decided to recognize Hawaii as a state, Like then afterwards.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
It became more of a big thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
He ended up going into the World War Two, though
still in a segregated unit, the twelfth Armored Division, and
fighting in Europe, and he became a legend. During the
battle in Germany, Carter crossed open ground under heavy enemy
fire and he was hit five times but kept moving.
He killed six German soldiers and captured two more. Were
almost single handedly. Always got to have solidarity, and his
(19:04):
commanders knew that he deserved the Medal of Honor, the
highest US military award, but because he was black, he
was denied. Instead, they gave him the Distinguished Service Cross
and pushed him out of the army after the war.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
Yeah, he died sixty three and was never recognizing this
time by the military.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Or any institution.
Speaker 4 (19:24):
But decades later, you know, first black President Bill Clinton
had to come up and be like ward him the
Medal of Honor and the America's highest military award, and
like made him the first black soldier, like I think
technically to receive it, but one of the first, which yeah,
(19:44):
it's one of those those crazy, crazy things.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
And I'm just like, okay, but do you know what
he didn't get where she probably was inundated by ads,
you know what he did get much like you, we
have something in common with that man. We too have
a chance to have a little taste of American freedom
by getting our choice of well, we actually don't have
(20:08):
our choice.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
In our ads. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
There's some ads gonna come now and they're going to
be there.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
And we're back.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
Hello, Yay, we're back, and we're still in Spain.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Back to Spain.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
And then there was James Yeates, who I used heavily
to quote and put a lot of context and emotional
context for this piece here. He came in and immediately
joined the Motor Corps. He transported food and medicine to
the front lines under fire. What was interesting about him
is he started doing food delivery under the Thalman Brigade,
(20:50):
which was the German Brigade at the time, and.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
The German Anti fascist Internationalist Brigade.
Speaker 4 (20:55):
Yeah, German anti fascist Brigade, and he was kind of
salty about it at first. He was like, I wanted
to be with Americans, mainly because I can't speak German
and this is really stressful in a war situation wherever
like go here, do this, and I'm like uh. But
then eventually he ended up also serving as a ambulance driver,
(21:17):
which was so vital, like they would drive into war
torn places as things were happening, get folks in and
bring them back to the medical station while bullets were
still flying around and all that stuff. Yates ended up
being injured in one of these runs when aerial bombing
and offenses were going on, and that led to them
(21:40):
going back to the US kind of near the end
of the Spanish Civil War. And then there was doctor
Arnold Donahah, which I could write his own introduction, but
I just think this little context from Yates' books introducing
him and about some of the doctor's experience on what
doing medicine in the Spanish Civil War was like is
(22:00):
great context for folks to keep in mind, so from
Mississippi to Madrid. James Yates writes about doctor Arnold Donohah
as such, quote a well known dental surgeon from Harlem
and a graduate of Howard University. He was one of
one hundred doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers from the American
Medical Bureau. Doctor Donihah left Albacet for a grilling period
(22:21):
of work at the front, and after that he was
given charge of the jaw surgery department at Valkyrae. Later,
doctor Donihah was to talk about some of the conditions
in Spain during the war. Quote we suffered above all
from a lack of instruments and supplies needed for adequate surgery.
Frequently we didn't have enough gauze and bandage to dress
the wounds of men. There was such a great scarcity
(22:42):
of the elementary medical supplies that we had to unwind
the bandage of one man had used, have it washed
and boiled, and then rewind it and use it again
on another patient. Sometimes it was hard to get the
old bloodstains entirely out, but we managed to sterilize the
old bandages and make it fit for use. We did
not have a dry of novacaine in the hospital, and
I thought we might be able to get some with
(23:03):
the move and I did, but not enough, only a
thousand amples. This, as well as many other indispensable drugs,
were almost unobtainable in Spain in those final days. There
were so many items things we had taken for granted
back at home, we lacked in Spain. To reduce jaw fractures,
for example, we need a special kind of very thin
stainless steel wire. If I had just a pound of it,
(23:24):
we could have relieved the crisis at a hospital for months.
But we didn't have it, nor do we have any
X ray films. We had to work by touch to
determine the number of fractures. End quote.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Damn.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Imagine getting your You're like wounded. I mean, I guess
you have bigger I guess if you're in a war.
Everything is bad. But imagine being like, ah, I'm wounded,
I'm going to the hospital. I'm finally at the hospital.
That bandage that has been wrapped around me is currently bloody,
like it's an old stain right, But there's.
Speaker 4 (23:52):
No peace of mind, no point of service of like
a piece of mine at all. According to James Yates,
after the war, he had returned to his dental practice
in Harlem and had donated his time to returning veterans
of the Spanish Civil War because it was also very hard.
I mean, we all know healthcare in America, imagine one
(24:12):
hundred years ago, imagine being black. So it was one
of those things that he still organized with and around
while he was back home. And in nineteen forty five
he was elected the president of the North Harlem Dental
Association and advocated for socialized medicine that would guarantee medical
protection for all Americans.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Which is ahead of its time and still not happened.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Yeah, honestly.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
And there were people that came in to do so
many different roles in the Spanish Civil War, Like there
was a lot more labor than just picking up a
gun for Spain. Pat Roosevelt was a pilot who joined
the brigade after being barred from flying in the US
due to racism, and he simply went over just because
he said, cool, I went to Spain because I want
(24:55):
to fly. And that's from a conversation they had in
Mississippi to Madrid with James Yeates.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Hell yeah, and even cooking like.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
Is extremely revolutionary, and like sustaining ourselves and having that
sort of ability to have an energy source just on
a basic material level, let alone breaking bread with people
is powerful in and of itself. But there was James
Robertson who was a black cook from the South in
(25:23):
the United States, and he would feed hundreds with not
only the rations that were provided by the war efforts,
but also by foraging whenever he could and teaching other
folks how to forage. And it was said that he
quote made the best olive pie and all of Spain.
So that's something right there. It is like they even
had dessert.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
I don't know if olive pie is dessert. I bet
it's a savory pie. I've never had olive pie. Maybe
I'm wrong.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
You know what, You're probably not wrong, because I make
an olive bread at work. It's pretty savory.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
I guess you're actually the cook here anyway.
Speaker 4 (25:58):
Yeah, but yeah, there were many different experiences that different
soldiers had to come through. And two and there was
Walter Cobbs who was a black driver in the Spanish
Civil War, and he was almost shot by Republican forces
because he had captured a fascist truck and tried to
(26:21):
drive it right up to the lines of the anti fascists,
and at first they thought he was a Moroccan soldier.
He had said, quote, if I didn't speak Spanish, I
would have been shot by my own side. It's something
in quote. It is something he told James Yats as well.
And this is kind of the moment that I have
to mention Rocan.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, the fact that there's like black people fighting on
the fascist side as well.
Speaker 4 (26:46):
Yeah, which kind of begs the point of like what
were Moroccans doing on the fascist side of the Civil
War that they were able to be confused with the
black folks from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which, if folks
didn't know, Franco needed had some serious help early on
in this war. I mean, he had support from Mussolini's Italy,
Hitler's Germany, and he had just practiced down in Ethiopia.
(27:09):
But what's less talked about is that Franco also brought
in thousands of Moroccan soldiers from Spain's colony in northern
Morocco called the Spanish Protectorate, and they had fought in
colonial wars before, and Franco had trusted them a bit
more than some of his own Spanish soldiers at the time,
because like they were colonial troops under Spanish war means
(27:30):
they pretty much couldn't say no if they wanted to.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
But right, and since they're not like Spaniards, they're like
it's less likely that they're going to switch and fight
for the republic or whatever because they're like more literally
invading another place because where they live was invaded.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
Yeah, and Franco himself was a general that was like
I think believe had a lot more influence over this
side of Spanish uh like military political realm and uh
say at the time. So I mean they operated a
lot as shock troops for the nationalists. They were colonial subjects,
so orders were orders disobeying mient prison, death, or even
(28:10):
punishment for their families back at home. And it's the
colonial and imperialist outposts that like modern policing as well
as like here and in the Philippines, with the US specifically,
is like a place where we a lot of our
like policing tactics come from and like the way to
do policing as well as like terroristic social control was
(28:31):
experimented with by colonizers. Leveraging economic desperation also played a
big role, because being a soldier was one of the
few ways that you can make a steady living, no
matter kind of where you are in the world. At
least allegedly, that's why a lot of soldiers revolt because
they don't get paid, and even if it meant fighting
a war that wasn't really theirs. As well as like
(28:53):
that faith solidarity that I talked into earlier, like faith
leaders that already had power within the set society were
more likely to support Franco because they also hated secularism,
or how they viewed secularism of the Spanish Republicans, and
many faith based groups around the world saw the Nationalists
as more respectful of faith and tradition, and after the
(29:17):
Spanish Civil War kind of came to its end in
thirty nine. In nineteen thirty nine, Franco's victory didn't kill
the spirit of a lot of these volunteers. It just
scattered them into new fights back into their home. Even
more hardened for many Black vets, the internationalism they had
just forged in the war, being able to have and
be an integrated units, being able to lead units for
(29:40):
the first time, like Oliver Law was a black anti
fascist who became one of the head commanders of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, but died very shortly into that. But
it is thought to be one of the first Black
Americans to lead as either segregated or mostly white unit.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
I find that fascinating, Like a into what you're saying
about the pilot too, right, is that like, well, we
don't have to fight and segregated units in Spain or
I'm allowed to fly a plane in Spain, and so, yeah,
it doesn't surprise me that the first black person to
lead like white soldiers, white American soldiers wasn't in the
US Army. It was Americans fighting and you know, a
(30:20):
Republican army.
Speaker 4 (30:22):
Yeah, and a lot of them. They came back with
like this new understanding of solidarity, maybe not even new,
but like a very material understanding of this of this
different racial context, and then came right back into Jim
Crow America.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
It was still in.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
Full legal effects until the mid nineteen sixties and then
de facto social until well everything's fixed now.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Yeah, we didn't have a whole uprising about it in
twenty twenty. I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Yeah, I mean get ready for the next when.
Speaker 4 (30:55):
Yeah, because they came home into the like full extreme
nationalism of white supremacists, country, state and local dictatorships due
to the lack of voting restrictions, racial labor exploitation and
lynching as social control and sport. So when veterans like
Yates came home, literally because of the US isolationalism, the
(31:15):
FBI was waiting for them. They would get off the
plane and the agents would Yeates said that the agents
looked like they would have been more comfortable with the
fascists that they were fighting if they had came home,
and probably true if you know how like were appened
after the World War Two. We're more than happy to
welcome in Nazis into our institutions of power. But they
(31:37):
took his pat support and lots of veterans of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigades passports because it was against the US
foreign policy to go to Spain at the time. So
once they were found out, they were restricted and it
wasn't restored until Kent v. Dulles in nineteen fifty eight
that ruled that the US government could not deny a
citacent of passport just because of their beliefs or affiliations
(31:59):
without process, which due process.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
In America is a whole other conversation of itself.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Yeah, everything's fine. That one's history podcast.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
And then most of the veterans themselves, of all races,
they struggled to find work the FBI, and eventually the
House of Unamerican Committees made sure of that. The FBI
would literally do like think of like some of the
co Intel pro type of psychological terror. They would do,
like you try to go get a job, you go
to the interview, you think it's all nice, You go home.
(32:33):
Your prospective future boss also just got to visit an
interview from the FBI directly about you. And it was
a big deterrent as well, especially in Jim Crow America,
where there was already so many deterrents.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
A lot of folks stayed politically active.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
A few, like those who had been aligned with the
Communist organizers and Communist Party, had felt betrayed during the
McCarthy era, and others built solidarity networks that endured where
where some of them were like the veterans of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade itself decided to create its own support group,
and some of them, like some folks were able to
(33:09):
find gigs through the Communist Party, like there was a
like section, organizer things and anything that the party could do,
but it wasn't really enough for all the veterans that
went to really be able to help them. But yeah,
support groups like Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade raised
money to support those coming home those int detention due
(33:30):
to breaking the non intervention policy and something totally not
related to now. Some of them were not being full
citizens or not having like the right paperwork because they
were born in the South, or they were born in
different places that didn't have like a lot of civil
registries up until that point. So when they came back
and their paperwork didn't look too nice, they got held
(33:51):
in immigration stuff and some of them even deported.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
God, imagine being born in this country, going and fighting
for or what this country ostensibly stands for, a democratic republic,
and then coming back and just being like, oh, no,
you don't uh, things don't line up, Get the fuck
out of here.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Do you even exist?
Speaker 4 (34:12):
Not? Yeah, and a lot of folks came back feeling
like they had lost the war.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Like, well, they kind of did.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
Well, they did, but they came back with them.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
They were also in radical spaces and they felt too
revered by the people around them, Like people were like, oh,
you're so cool, you did that, and that actually pushed
a lot of people out of like more politically active spaces,
and they were like, y'all are going too hard around me.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Yeah, like like no, this was a we fucking don't
call me a hero. I just suffered incredible loss.
Speaker 4 (34:48):
Yeah, we have no good way to talk about war.
Definitely not in the nineteen twenty, like.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
That's for sure.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
But do you know what we do have a good
way to talk about?
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Is it ads?
Speaker 2 (34:58):
We do. We have a lot of We've both done
a lot of work writing about the impacts of advertisements
and how we can use them to learn about goods
and services with which to enrich our lives.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Here's that and we're back. Welcome, Welcome.
Speaker 4 (35:24):
So to kind of get into some of the life
of folks after the war, a lot of folks were
very stringent, especially because of all the political reverence. They
got to keep their class ties even though they're like
there were even like lots of wealthy sympathizers that offered
to free them from the debt that they were in
and pay their way through schooling and enter like the
more professionalized class. And there was some folks who still
(35:48):
like denied that because they they saw it as like
class tradering, which I don't know, if someone's willing to
pay for my schooling, I'm like, please do it.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah, politics has moved on, but yeah, very great. I
see where they're coming from. But yeah, I would not
be mad at anyone who did that.
Speaker 4 (36:05):
Yeah. So there was another one of the support groups,
the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Like by the
end or like nearer the fifties, there was a decline
in how many veterans were actually still active in it,
and most folks still stayed friends because of like the
political and social commitments from war combined with the public
(36:25):
sentiment against communists and against them at the time being
viewed as communists, and a lot of them were. And
one thing that I find interesting series like they also
still built a lot of solidarity through a lot of
the legal battles that they had to continue to go
through because they were getting wrapped up in the red
Scare and the McCarthy era stuff as the scary communists
(36:47):
that actually picked up a gun to go do something
being premature anti fascist. Yeah, and a lot of them
were still doing like labor organizing or like they were
like the one veteran of the alb would get picked
up in Detroit or Arkansas and be detained for days,
and that would bring a network together to pull up
for each other. So there was still that consistent solidarity
(37:08):
even if folks weren't day to day members in the
support group as much.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
That makes sense. Also, they founded that whole city in
New York that's named after the alb Albany. I timed
this just as Jordan was drinking out of a glass
on purpose. This is my best joke of the episode.
I hope you all enjoyed it. It was the worst
(37:32):
joke anyway.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Uh huh.
Speaker 4 (37:35):
There's a city near me called New Albany that's definitely
was made by a fascist. So it's just like really
funny to me to think about the co optation of
anti fascism by fascist.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
In this hypothetical world where Albany is named after the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Uh oh, that's my head canon. I don't even know
who Albany is. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (37:55):
One thing I find interesting too is that after the
war they had this they were like X Party members.
They were anti Communist vets that didn't want to associate
with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade afterwards, especially when they came home.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
A lot of them just to keep their head down.
But there was.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
This very specific line around deserters and whether or not
when you came home to America you could be a
part of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade if
you deserted when you were on the ground in Spain.
And they really just had one line, which was like
they were allowed to participate if they had admitted honestly
(38:32):
to their regrets and shortcomings on the battlefield, and as
long as they didn't disavow the Republic, the Brigade or
the Communist Party. That was like their line within the
alb Yeah. And then yeah, one thing that kind of
end on is like years years later, James Yates himself
ended up going back to Spain. It's past nineteen fifty eight.
(38:54):
They're able to get their passport back now, and they're like,
I'm a free man where should I go. Obviously, I
should go to Spain. They wanted to travel Europe more broadly,
but they were like, I can't go to Europe and
not go to Spain, like I spent so much of
my formative years there. Even if it is just a couple,
I think they were only there for maybe a year
(39:14):
or two. But a year or two of war is
a lifetime, and it's, yeah, the end of life for
a lot of people. So to survive and to be
able to go back is a really beautiful experience.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
But they were terrified. Yeah, it's still Franco town.
Speaker 4 (39:28):
Franco still was in power till I believe the late
mid seventies.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
I can never remember the year that Franco died. This
has come up because I live a very normal life.
It has come up in conversation like four or five
times in the past month that I can't remember when
Franco died. But fortunately whoever I'm talking to also can't remember.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
November twentieth, nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Hell, yeah, Sophie knows, yep.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
I know, because I googled it.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
I don't know at the top of my head.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
No, no, no, in my mind, you know that you
celebrate every year. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
I mean it would be really fucking base if I
knew all the dictator's deaths by memory.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
But yeah, no, he's kept coming up on fifty years dead.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Didn't this year? We should have a party, Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (40:11):
We should be a good, good thing to do in November.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (40:17):
But they were terrified to go back, and they first
stopped in France. They were chilaxing. Then they went to
like a border town, so they were like, I'm still
gonna go. I'm still gonna go. They got off the
train right before the border and was able to talk
to like some Spanish refugees and French locals, and as
soon as he like decided it was safe to let
(40:38):
them know he was a veteran of the Civil War,
so many Polks flocked to him. He was like a
person he was talking to was like, really, where's salary
a key, where's Milton Wolf? Where's like how are people doing?
Have you heard of them? And he was just like whoa,
whoa Is it safe to go to Spain right now?
And they're like, if you keep your head down you
can get through it. Probably, Yeah, So he decided to
(41:01):
continue his journey in and the differences he felt were
immediate in Stark as soon as he entered the country
on the train. It was the same train he had
left that at the time was bombed out and had
no windows, so it was a cold train ride out,
a warmer traine ride in. There was no gunboats, no
Italian gunboats waiting to Sheldon the train. At this point
(41:24):
in his hotel he heard the sounds of torture that
it was the point that he had to leave hotels.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
Wait.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
So he went back and he heard people being tortured
while he was there, because it was still a fascist
regimes that we're.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
Saying yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
And then it was even in his head was like
I should leave this hotel and go to the next one.
But he's like, this is probably happening at the next
hotel too, so I should just stay.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Because otherwise you're like, well, you know, once the fascist
is in charge, hey, at least at least there's no
Italian gunboats.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
It really everything's fine now.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
And then you're like you get to the hotel and
you're like, oh no, this is a torture land. I'm
in hell land.
Speaker 4 (41:57):
Yeah, And he one thing he loved about Spain at
the beginning was the public life, the communal life of Spain.
People in the plaza, it was gone. People on the
street weren't willing to talk to her, and people weren't
outside communing with each other. He tried to have a
conversation with somebody at a park and no, no, no, no, that's.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
An important thing to think about about the day to
day life under a long term fascist regime instead of
like Germany in nineteen thirty seven, but like Spain in
the nineteen fifty is no more public life. That's heavy, okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
And then something happened.
Speaker 4 (42:34):
At the time, he was working with the NAACP in
the US and he was working on some stuff to
free Angela Davis, and he had requested packages to be
sent to France with a bunch of buttons to like
free Angela Davis. They had accidentally landed in Spain, where
he specifically requested them not to come, but still forwarded. Nonetheless,
(42:56):
he was a bit terrified about that, but he had
a plan. I'm gonna read from his book what he
did about that quote. My first thought was, oh lord,
what is this. I'm here in fascist Spain with Angela
Davis buttons. What if this gets reported to the authorities.
All the while walking back to the hotel, I wondered
what to do with the buttons. Then I pulled myself together.
(43:17):
I had faced Franco before the Civil War forty years ago.
I had spent the rest of my days sitting on
many benches and somehow leaving a button behind at each one.
By sundown, all the buttons were gone. End quote.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
And he just did a little bit of distribution.
Speaker 4 (43:32):
Like I love that story because I'm like, this is
the beauty of internationalism, media distribution, Like how many pigs
found those Like how many hardened or new radicals found
hope by being like what is this? And this like
just act of self preservation but also resistance.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
That's cool.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Yeah, And then I guess just kind of like a
lasting point about this is that something that I love
about reading about the Spanish Civil War is that they
remind us that fighting fascism isn't about the esthetics. It's
not about the flags slogans. Most of the times it's
the food delivery truck field hospital, the nurse that won't
(44:15):
be moved, the mechanic who teaches solidarity, and a garage
its community defense even decades later even at home. And
this history matters not to romanticize a war, but to
remember what was possible when ordinary people chose to risk everything,
not for nationalism, profit, but for dignity. Like affinity, groups, cadres, families,
(44:37):
and couples came into this fight together, sometimes staggered months
at a time, and some would have really sweet reunions
on the battlefields and in the real camps and in
the hospitals. Some came through that treacherous mountain range to
receive a heartbreak in finding their best friends murdered. Of
those that came in together, some left more alone than
ever and with a more diverse set of wounds. Many
(45:00):
came to join the resistance as people willing to do
anything to fight fascism, and in that people came out
commanders like Oliver Law, most likely the first Black American
man to lead a white or integrated unit. People united
in many, many forms of labor. The combatant wouldn't survive
and sustain aggression without their nurses and doctors. The medical
(45:21):
workers wouldn't get their patients if not for the wartime
ambulance drivers. The drivers go nowhere without their mechanics, and
no one was fighting without the cooks, and the world
wouldn't have our archives without our artists. Langston Hughes was
another artist that came alongside Ernest Hemingway to engage in
journalists in the region and with Robinson to uplift the
(45:42):
spirits and harden their own understanding by sharing their expression
with the soldiers in the International Brigades. This is one
thing I have as a call to action, is to
honor them by studying their choices, their losses, and their resilience,
telling the full story not just of the battlefield, but
of camaraderie, the protection, the cookouts, the poems, the organizing.
(46:05):
And then I just have one last quote from Yates
that I think really encapsulates the spirit, which is quote,
simply put, one's own life is, in reality, but an
unfolding paranorama of mutually developing relationships in a time and
place beyond an original personal choice.
Speaker 3 (46:23):
End quote.
Speaker 4 (46:24):
And Yeah, if any of this moved you, I really
encourage you to read James Yates Mississippi to Madrid, look
up Celaria Keys' writings, and learn about what the veterans
of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade did after Spain. Because there's
so much more. There's so much more research about anti
authoritarian militant action, and not all of them share the
same identifiers, but it takes a lot to do that research,
(46:46):
and in drawing a line to the revolt in the
passion that anti fascism isn't over and neither is our
capacity for solidarity. They did their part, and now it's
our turn. We were not handed a finished revolution.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
Hell yeah, okay, but you mentioned all the cooks and
the everyone, but you forgot to bring back the most
important character, the one who just wanted to fly a plane.
I find him fascinating because it's like, oh, America's so
racist that if he wants to be a pilot, he
(47:21):
has to go into a war in a foreign country.
Like and I okay, not to just keep going on
about the pilot, but one of the things I like
about the too Right is you're talking about all these
people who have a gradient of level of like political
understanding or how central politics is to who they are,
you know. And you have the people who are like, look,
(47:43):
I believe in this stuff, and I gotta If I
say I believe it, I gotta do it. And then
you have people who are like, well, people are getting
shot and I'm a medic, and so I'm going and
you have people who are like, I want to fly
a plane.
Speaker 1 (47:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Yeah, maybe he was like the most politic of all
of them, but like, I love this version of him
where it's just like Noah, I just I really want
to fly a plane.
Speaker 4 (48:07):
Fly so much we're to say about Garlands too. I
mean he ended up joining Langston Hughes and Harry Hayward
and Radio Broadcast when he got back to the United
States from Madrid. He did work with the American Medical
Bureau and other organizations to really like lobby because one
thing about the people who got sent back early, especially
for being injured, was they were there to test the
(48:30):
political climate of the United States to see what would
happen when the war ended, to see what they were
other folks were sending, like what the Spanish battalions and
brigades were sending their volunteers back to Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
So it was even like kind of an additional danger
they were taking for their comrades was to be the
one to go back first to figure out and test
the waters.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
Damn.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
I had a I had a friend whose grandfather, like
it was just like it was one of my friends,
like in a kind of like goth scene, wasn't particularly
political person. I was like, oh, yeah, my grandfather fought
in the Spanish Civil War, I think, and didn't know
like the first thing about it. And I'm like, that
means your grandfather was a hardcore leftist, Like we should
(49:14):
talk about that. Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 4 (49:18):
Yeah, And I think that's also something that like, especially
redoing these archives around war and history is so important
because especially in America, we don't talk about what happened
during the wars a lot unless it's over glorifying it
or any of this. Milton Wolf talked heavily after when
they came back, who was another a white volunteer in
the Communist Party, about how no one told me what
(49:40):
it was going to be like in the Foxtrot. Nobody
told me what it was going to be like in
No Man's Land. Nobody's going to tell me what it
was like to see bodies dead but still moving, terrifying.
Speaker 3 (49:52):
Lord.
Speaker 2 (49:53):
Well, that's a terribly on uplifting note to end on.
But the note that you chose to end on in
your script it was really good, which is that it's like, okay,
like We look at this history because we care about
the present, we care about the future, and this history
has been very much buried and I love getting to
(50:13):
see it. So thank you for telling me all this.
Speaker 3 (50:16):
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Well, is there anything you wanna you have a podcast?
Tell me about your podcast or anything else you'd like
to plug?
Speaker 3 (50:25):
Yeah, I mean, okay, yeah, I mean one.
Speaker 4 (50:27):
Definitely go check out the dug Out, especially if you're
interested in black folks in the doing anti fascism and
in the Spanish Civil War. Because I did so much research,
I'm gonna have so much content for the Dugout over
the next couple of months.
Speaker 3 (50:38):
H cool.
Speaker 4 (50:39):
But alongside that, I think it's really important for folks
to be tapped into the current abolitionist movement that is
going on in the United States. And one way that
media and media folks have tapped in and played that
role is through a couple of projects that I'm involved
with called In the Belly and In the Mix. And
In the Belly is an abolitionist magazine that is buy
(51:00):
and four currently incarcerated individuals. Our editorial steam and all
of our authors are currently incarcerated folks. With the support
of formally incarcerated folks on the outside and just getting
articles from people on the inside to other folks on
the inside. And then there's in the Mix, which is
a podcast with the same format hosted by folks that
(51:21):
are inside, questioning and interviewing sometimes academics or theorists or
even just other folks that are on the inside, if
when that's possible. So checking out those two projects I
feel like are real big hell yeah.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
And if you want to check out anything that I do,
you could listen to this show. You can also listen
to Love Like the World's Dying, an individual and community
preparedness podcast. And I write a newsletter on substack, and
I probably do other things, but that's enough things.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
Oh, just randomly.
Speaker 4 (51:52):
We also have if you go to patreon dot com
forward Slash Dugout Pod, we have a free newsletter that
comes out monthly about folks who want to stay up
day on some of the more contemporary stuff that's going
on and hitting our woes, but in a more tempered
and staggered format than the daily news cycle.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
Check us out over there.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
So for you guy thing, if I want to plug
one specific thing, I guess listen to Hood Politics with
the prop. He's been putting out some bangers lately and
I love that guy.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
They are good.
Speaker 3 (52:22):
Big props to listeners.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
Have heard me say this before, but it continues to
be true, so you should listen to that, and you
should listen to us next week when we have more
Cool People Who this is we always exit end this way,
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. A more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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