This is part 10 of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini's Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States. They were building a movement they hoped would lead to communist revolution around the world. They succeeded in organizing millions around communist ideas and practices. But the movement believed that uniting with liberal bosses to defend the Republic in Spain would further the fight for communism. This was part of the united front against fascism, which resulted in only fortifying the bosses’ system and laid the basis for the corruption of the old communist movement.
In the Progressive Labor Party, we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that's communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers’ leadership is essential. That is the only way our class can destroy racism, the lifeblood of capitalism. The following is a story of one such leader, Crawford Morgan.
Crawford Morgan was born in 1910 in Rockingham, North Carolina. After high school, he became an apprentice printer. He moved first to Norfolk Virginia, then to New York City. During the Depression, he became involved in organizations of the unemployed in New York City and was arrested in a demonstration at the Home Relief Bureau.
Morgan joined the Young Communist League (YCL) in 1932. The YCL was the vibrant youth wing of the Communist Party, which he joined four years later. Despite anticommunist lies in the bosses’ media, communism was held in high regard among masses of Black working women, men, and youth.
From ‘runner’ to driver
Morgan sailed for Spain in March, 1937. He was assigned to the infantry attached to the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion (mainly Canadian, but also U.S. volunteers). He was later transferred to the Lincoln-Washington Battalion, serving at brigade headquarters as a communications “runner,” radio communication being insecure.
In August 1937, on the Aragon front, Morgan received a leg wound storming the town of Quinto. After recovery, he returned to his unit. But complications from his leg wound led to his becoming a truck driver in the Transport Unit for the remainder of the war.
In World War II, Morgan served in all-Black units in the segregated U.S. Army from 1942 until 1946, including two years in Europe. After the war, he again worked as a truck driver, then as an offset printer.
Defends his role as a communist
In September 1954, Morgan testified on behalf of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) in hearings before the red-baiting (i.e. anticommunist) Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) of the U.S. Department of Justice. The committee was seeking to declare the VALB a “subversive organization” – the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was led by communists and at least 80 percent of the Brigade were Communist Party members.
Asked why he had fought as a communist in Spain, Morgan had answered:
Being a Negro, and all of the stuff that I have had to take in this country, I had a pretty good idea of what fascism was. I got a chance there [in Spain] to fight it with bullets and I went there and fought it with bullets. If I get a chance to fight it with bullets again, I will fight it with bullets again.
While the U.S. ruling class government exposed itself as the custodians of brutal racist injustice, Morgan publicly displayed his confidence in his role as a communist. He has also used this as a space to denounce the capitalist system (see below).
Morgan died in 1976. In that year an article in The Volunteer, the journal of the VALB, wrote:
He served with discipline, dignity and courage. He was liked. He was respected. He was
a comrade whose qualities were deep and pervasive … A demonstration of this was given by him as witness for VALB in the prosecution before the late Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) 1954.
[Called as a defense witness, Morgan] was one of the most effective witnesses of that long era of the “Un-American” Inquisition…
… under cross-examination [he] remained what he was and what he said flowed directly and lucidly from his life's experiences related simply and without sentimentality. This was anything but easy, especially for a Black man and in the supercharged political lynch-atmosphere of the era. The prosecuting attorneys were young, bright, alert, and prepared ... [he] met and speared their well-planned attacks so cleanly that they hung limp.
... [He] was cross-examined on arrests and/or convictions in California. His narration of what it meant to be unemployed, penniless and young in the Great Depression unrolled with such classic and telling simplicity that it became a veritable “J’accuse,” the condemnation of his condemners and all they represented.
The prosecutors spun out that [he] was fervently opposed to fascism and sought to extract the implication that in taking up arms against fascism he had thus acted against the interests of the U.S. His answer was that, on the contrary, the defense of Republican Spain was the defense of the American people.
It became clearer and clearer that the prosecutors were becoming less and less inclined to tangle further with him. In the end, they were glad just to be rid of him. He was too much the exemplary 'premature anti-fascist' for them. He vindicated the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.
Later on in the early 1970s, Morgan worked with the VALB's Historical Commission to gather information on other Black volunteers.
Crawford Morgan was one of many Black workers who joined the Communist Party to fight against racism and for communism. He took the lead in fighting against fascism in Spain and for internationalism. Today, as then, Black workers’ leadership is key to the fight against racism and for communist revolution.
Sources: The Volunteer, December 1976; Joseph Brandt, Black Americans in the Spanish Civil War Against Fascism; Cullum & Berch, African-Americans in the Spanish Civil War; The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.