Part 12: Black communists in the Spanish Civil War Thyra Edwards: antifascist thinker and fighter

​​This is part 12 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 and fighting for “freedom and democracy” 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, Thyra Edwards.

Black, woman worker,  organizer, and communist
Born in Texas in 1897, Thyra Edwards trained as a social worker, then as a labor organizer at Brookwood Labor College. In the early 1930s Edwards traveled to the Soviet Union. She declared:

The Soviet [Union] has made women free economically by giving them access to all types of employment. It has extended that freedom by freeing them from bearing children against their wishes.
It is necessary that [Black workers] in America give more attention to the Soviet solution of the race problem. The one thing is certain: that only in a Socialist society can [Black, Latin and Asian workers of the world hope for salvation and equality.

Sometime during the early 1930s Edwards secretly joined the Communist Party.
For Edwards, the Spanish Civil War represented the central battleground in the war against fascism. She went to Spain in early October 1937 to report on the conditions of Spanish children who had been evacuated from bombarded areas after their parents were killed.

Black women leadership builds internationalism
Before going, she declared:

“No force in the world today so threatens the position and security of women as does the rising force of fascism. Fascism degrades women.”: we are not on an inter-racial, save the Negro crusade but rather on an inter-national commission concerned with freedom and democracy for all kinds of people. Just now the Spanish people happen to be symbolic of all the rest of us. And certainly there isn't going to be any freedom and equality for Negroes until and unless there is a free world."

On October 20, 1937 she attended a convention of the National Assembly of Spanish Women against War and Fascism. When she rose to speak, about 3,000 women and children gave her a lengthy standing ovation as they shouted, with clenched fists raised, “Viva la Raza Negra!” Leading the ovation was Dolores Ibarurri Gomez, “La Pasionaria”, a communist whose impassioned speeches helped to rally Loyalist forces. Edwards wrote:

It was an overwhelming and tremendous expression of solidarity with [Black] people and with all peoples struggling for freedom and full emancipation and education and progressive development. ... For in truth Spain is the battlefield on which all our destinies are being fought just now, and fought with such relentless courage and such clarity of direction.

In Spain, Edwards discovered the limits of liberal capitalism when she asked whether the Republic would grant Morocco self-rule. Many Black Africans, called Moors: fought on the fascist side in the civil war. Franco, the fascist leader, was commander of the Spanish colonial army. A representative of the Spanish Republican government told her that they wanted help from France [they never got it], and France feared that if the Republic gave self-rule to the Moors, the same anti-imperialist demands would be made in the French colonies of North Africa. Capitalism, whether liberal or fascist, leads to nationalism and neither benefits the working class. Today the Progressive Labor Party fights for communism. No deals with capitalists!

After returning to the U.S. Edwards and nurse Salaria Kea (see CHALLENGE, 3/30) went on a tour of twenty-one cities to raise money for an ambulance to send to the Spanish Republic. Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright contributed to the fund-raising campaign, Robeson making the first contribution of $250.

The publicity centered on Salaria Kea: A brave young Harlem Hospital nurse who went to Spain last year to do her bit in the world struggle against Fascism, returned on the S.S. Normandie of the French Line Monday, the rumble of guns still roaring in her ears and the stench of blood still in her nostrils.

Edwards wrote the booklet “A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain” about Kea.

A pamphlet titled “The Negro Ambulance Fund” connected the war in Spain to women’s rights: “Fascism stands for the subordination of women. Mussolini and Hitler have established that women have one exclusive function: To bear children for soldiers for the State … Under Fascist government not only trade unions are liquidated but fraternities, women’s federations, lodges, cooperatives, and peace organizations.”

The ambulance was inscribed, “From the Negro People of America to the People of Republican Spain.” On the speaking tour her lecture stressed the common interests of Black and white workers in their struggles to satisfy these needs.”

Black boss, white boss, same rotten nationalism
Edwards spoke to many CIO union groups. She was red-baited by Black “company union” boss C.W. Rice. The organizers targeted local nurses and doctors. They received much support from the Association of Colored Graduate Nurses but got almost none from the conservative National Medical Association, the “Black AMA.”Edwards had a strong class analysis:

 In a message that touted housing as a “social right' and health insurance as a “state responsibility,” Edwards praised the role of ladies' auxiliaries in recent sit-down strikes led by the CIO, and she noted that women had been shot down on the picket line a few months earlier in the Memorial Day Massacre outside Republic Steel's plant on the South Side of Chicago.

“… We had the fallacious idea that a black boss would be superior to a white boss when what we want is a democratic order with no boss with his heel on our necks.”

In organizing for a conference of Black groups Edwards stressed a class, rather than a nationalist, emphasis:

… disagree[ing] with the decision to … ignore the issues faced by the black working class. “… [S]tressing police brutality against Negroes in Washington is narrowing the basic issue of police brutality and ignoring their attacks of workers on picket lines, in strike zones, hunger marches and unemployment demonstrations.”

Struggle in later years
During World War II Edwards taught about the Soviet Union. In 1948 she and her husband moved to Italy, where she helped organized the first Jewish childcare program in Rome to assist child Holocaust victims.

Edwards died of breast cancer in 1953. Thyra Edwards' life and contribution to the communist internationalism demonstrates that Black women’s leadership is key to smashing racist capitalism and sexism to liberate the entire working class. Even the FBI, who monitored her work until her death, understood this and feared and attacked her and other Black communists like Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson. Now more than ever we must reject the twin dangers of Black nationalism and feminism, and carry the torch for communism as she once proudly did.

Sources: Gregg Andrews, Thyra J. Edwards; A. Donlon. “Thyra Edwards’ Spanish Notebook”; Erik McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom; Salaria Kea: A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain. (pamphlet) - https://alba-valb.org/resource/salaria-kea-a-negro-nurse-in-republican-spain/  Wikipedia article on Thyra J. Edwards