This is part seven of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States. They were building a movement they hoped would lead to communist revolution around the world. They succeeded in organizing millions around communist ideas and practices. But the movement believed that uniting with liberal bosses to defend the Republic in Spain would further the fight for communism. This was part of the united front against fascism, which resulted in only fortifying the bosses’ system and laid the basis for the corruption of the old communist movement.
In the Progressive Labor Party, we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers’ leadership is essential. That is the only way our class can destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism. The following is a story of one such leader, Vaughn Costine Love.
Vaughn Costine Love was born in Dayton, TN in 1907. After three years of college on a football scholarship, he was injured and moved to New York.
Moving to New York led Love on a path toward political struggle. There he became involved with the Federal Theater Project, the International Labor Defense, which provided legal defense for Black struggles in the South, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, the Southern Labor Committee, and the International Workers Order.
All of these groups were antiracist organizations with many Communist Party (CP) members. These struggles led to Love joining the Communist Party in 1934.
About this period, Love said:
From the time I was a child there was a movement on the part of Black Americans for full recognition of their rights, for full opportunity to advance themselves … When I came to New York in 1929 I found large numbers of Blacks searching for opportunities in art, music, and many other fields.
Love later recalled:
When Hitler came along with his Nuremberg laws, we knew that this meant death to us of the darker races. Anti-fascism had a very wide appeal.
When civil war broke out in Spain, Love remembered,
We didn't know too much about the
Spaniards, but we knew that they were fighting against fascism, and that fascism was the enemy of all black aspirations.
From Barcelona Love and others went to Albacete and formed the first squads of the George Washington Battalion.
We thought, “We have to get to the front and kill these Fascists!” But the most revolutionary of all were the seamen; they had just come from a strike. Most of the kids had some background in Marxist education or in the trade union movement. My background in the movement in Harlem gave me a certain outlook. I was through with the system. I knew it didn’t work, and I was thinking in terms of changing society – to change the world.
In Spain, Love was assigned to the first company of the Washington Battalion and served as his section's political leader. He fought through the Brunete campaign and remained with the first company after the Lincoln and Washington battalions were merged.
Once, in Spain, Love encountered a Spanish peasant. Unfamiliar with Black people, the peasant tried to wipe the dirt off Love’s face. When Love explained that he was a Negro from North America, the peasant hugged him and exclaimed, “Oh, los esclavos! Si! Si!"
About this Love later said: "they knew there was Black slavery in America, 'los esclavos,' and that they were only one little step away from us, los esclavos."
After Brunete, Love was sent to Officers Training School and then rejoined the Lincoln-Washington Battalion, where he assumed leadership of a section of his former unit, Company One. On January 5, 1938, four days after the XVth Brigade entered the lines at Teruel, Love was wounded in action. He was still hospitalized at the time of the Retreats in March and April 1938 and his hospital group was among the last to cross the bridge at Tortosa before the bridge was destroyed in the face of the advancing Nationalists.
After the Retreats Love rejoined the decimated Lincoln-Washington Battalion as a section leader and helped train the young Spanish conscripts who were brought in to bring the unit up to strength.
During the Ebro Offensive (July – November, 1938), Love was again wounded. After a short hospitalization, he returned to the Battalion and was appointed Chief of the Headquarters Section. Love remained with the Battalion through the fighting in the Sierra Cabals and until the Internationals were withdrawn on September 24, 1938. His final rank was Acting Lieutenant.
Wounded three times, Love said proudly:
Every individual soldier had the personal integrity and ability to do whatever had to be done. We never had a good meal and we had the worst conditions. But we had the solidarity of all the progressive forces.
In the United States Love resumed his work with the Communist Party. When the United States entered World War II, he joined the Army. He said: “It wasn’t a different war; we were fighting the same enemy.”
The Abraham Lincoln Battalion volunteered as a group to fight fascism in World War II. “Of course, it was an interracial outfit,” Love said later, “and the government turned it down.”
When they refused our volunteer unit, each one of us, Black and white volunteered for the Jim Crow army individually.
Love served in the Quartermaster Corps, advancing to the rank of Sergeant. He was wounded in France and repatriated.
After the war, Love married and lived in New York balancing political activities with earning a living. Like many other communists, he was persecuted by the U.S. government. He later said: “A Lincoln vet was considered a hard-core subversive.”
The ruling class in this country has never forgiven the world communist movement for the leading role it played, for having the foresight and understanding to bring things into focus and lead them in the right direction at the right time.
He died on October 27, 1990. He was a communist till the end.
Sources: ALBA volunteers database; Brandt, Joe Black Americans in the Spanish People’s War Against Fascism 1936-1939; Collum, Berch, eds,
African Americans in the Spanish Civil War.