This is part six of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States.
This movement was the most advanced political movement at the time. They were building a movement they hoped would lead to communist revolution around the world. They succeeded in organizing millions around communist ideas and practices. But the movement believed that uniting with liberal bosses to defend the Republic in Spain would further the fight for communism. This was part of the united front against fascism, where communists united with so-called liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists. This ended up not working but the struggles they led inspire us today both in practice and in the political lessons learned.
In the Progressive Labor Party we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership is essential. Our class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism—without their leadership. The following continues that story:
Mack Coad was born in 1894 in Blackstock, South Carolina to a Black working class family. As a young adult, he worked as a railroad firefighter and crane operator. He lost his railroad position at the onset of the Great Depression. In 1929, after attending a meeting of a Communist led unemployed group, Coad joined the Communist Party. Because of his leadership capabilities, Coad was selected to be a student at the Lenin School in the Soviet Union. In 1931, after his return to the United States, Coad was assigned as a union organizer in the South. He worked with steelworkers in Birmingham and was an organizer of the Alabama Sharecropper's Union.
When local farmers asked the Communist Party to send organizers to help them build a union,the Party sent several people, among them Mack Coad, who at the time was working as a steelworker.
In March 1931, he was sent to Tallapoosa County, Alabama, to organize the Communist-led Share Croppers' Union (SCU). In the abandoned houses of rural Alabama, Coad discovered local militants who were quite comfortable combining communist and folk cultures. These grass-roots leaders had established a tradition of singing before and after gatherings, which grew out of the rural church services after which they had patterned their meetings. In addition to adopting standards such as the ‘Internationale’ and ‘Solidarity Forever,’ rural Black workers in and around the Party transformed popular spirituals into political songs with new messages. ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ and the ever-popular ‘Give Me That Old-Time Religion’ were stock musical forms used to create new Party songs. In the latter, the verse was changed to ‘Give Me That Old Communist Spirit,’ and Party members closed each stanza with ‘It was good enough for Lenin, and it's good enough for me.’
The Black and white sharecroppers involved in organizing the union were under constant threat of attack from the police who organized local racists to attack the union. At one point Coad was part of a group defending the home of a Black leader of the movement and as the racists closed in, workers in the union decided to get Coad out of the area, secretly getting him to Atlanta. Coad played an important role in Southern U.S. communist history in the 1930s as he worked in Chattanooga, Birmingham, and was involved in a 1934 attempt to organize a Memphis Communist Party unit. The Communist Party called Coad “our best southern organizer.” Coad was also active in Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina. In Chattanooga, he was jailed at least twice for organizing unemployment demonstrations and running for judge.
Coad went to fight in Spain in October 1937, where he proved himself an exemplary communist and soldier. He was severely wounded in the right eye in an attack near Gandesa on August 1, 1938, during the Ebro Offensive and spent the rest of the war in the hospital. In an interview in the Daily Worker of February 11, 1939, Coad recalled that he volunteered ‘to help wake the Negro up on the international field.’ Coad died in May 1967, still working as a coal miner at the age of 69.
Mack Coad was a leader of the international communist movement that grew out of battles like the struggle against racism in the South and the fight against fascism in Europe. Coad, like millions of workers worldwide, built the old communist movement while leading the class struggle. They put building the Party in the midst of the struggle for reforms into practice and helped shape our movement and set examples that led to the formation of Progressive Labor Party and the building of a communist movement with Black workers in the lead.
Sources: Lisa A Kirschenbaum: International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suscpicion. Harry Haywood: Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Robin D.G. Kelley: Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.