This is part 11 of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930’s 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, James Yates.
Yates antiracist in the making
James Yates was born in 1906 in Quitman, Mississippi, nourished on stories of how African Americans enjoyed democracy during Reconstruction; was taught by a schoolteacher who insisted that one day America would have a Black president; was touched by the vision of his Garveyite uncle, who eventually moved to the all-Black town of Boley, Oklahoma; and was told over and over again about his other uncle, who had armed himself to defend his family from the Klan, and of the Irish immigrant neighbor who had assisted him by providing ammunition. In the small town of Quitman, Mississippi, the young Yates witnessed not only countless episodes of racism and violence but also stark examples of internationalism, Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and interracial solidarity.
The building of the KKK in the South by the U.S. ruling class during this period is well known. What is less well known is the history of multiracial unity and fight back among the working class, led by Black workers unwilling to peacefully submit to forced segregation and the advent of Jim Crow laws. James Yates came out of this tradition of fighting back against racism. Escaping the South in 1923 Yates “rode the rails” to Chicago where he worked in the stockyards.
During his first mass demonstration - a march to Springfield, Illinois, that had been organized by the Party-he came to realize the international significance of the Communist Party's struggle for jobs, relief, and equality:
"I was a part of their hopes, their dreams, and they were a part of mine. And we were a part of an even larger world of marching poor people. By now I understood that the Depression was world-wide and that the unemployed and the poor were demonstrating and agitating for jobs and food all over the globe. We were millions."
Yates becomes member of communist party
Moving to New York City, he became a founding member of the railroad Dining Car Waiter's Union and became active in the unemployment councils, the Scottsboro defense campaign, and the movement to free Angelo Herndon, a young communist organizer jailed in Alabama for trying to form a union. In 1936 he joined the Communist Party, becoming secretary of his branch. All of the mentioned organizations and movements were led to a large degree by the Communist Party and were centers of the class struggle against racism, struggles that brought many thousands of workers into the communist movement.
Yates set sail for France in March, 1937, arriving in Spain after a dangerous crossing by climbing the Pyrenees mountains. He served as a truck driver, then was transferred to the Thaelmann Battalion of German volunteers. Wounded in a bombing raid, he was hospitalized. When told he was being sent home, he protested: “But the war’s not over!”
Communist fighter returns to Jim Crow U.S.
Yates returned to the U.S. in February, 1938 to a war hero's welcome from the American Left, followed by a slap in the face by American racists. On his first night home in New York, buoyed by the kisses and handshakes he received at the docks, Yates was denied a room at the hotel his comrades had planned to stay in. Although the white veterans checked in without a problem, when Yates stood before the registrar, the clerk simply looked at him and said “No Vacancy”:
"Inwardly I winced. So soon? I had hardly left the boat and here it was. After having experienced being welcomed in cafes and hotels in Spain and France, I was doubly shocked to be hit so quickly. The pain went as deeply as any bullet could have done [sic). I had the dizzy feeling I was back in the trenches again. But this was another front. I was home.” Needless to say, his comrades promptly gave up their accommodations and moved on."
Yates memoralizes communist struggle
During World War II Yates joined the Army Signal Corps but, like many U.S. veterans of the Spanish Civil War, he was not permitted to serve overseas. After the war he studied electronics and had a radio repair shop. He was active in the International Brotherhood of Railroad Porters and head of the Chelsea-Village NAACP branch in New York City.
In 1986 Yates published Mississippi to Madrid. It is the only autobiography of a Black American communist who served in the Spanish Civil War. It is full of detail about Yates’ life in Mississippi, his political activities, what he experienced and saw in the Spanish Civil War, his comrades in arms – many of whom were killed there – and the people he met, including Langston Hughes.
In 1987 Yates was invited to be writer in residence at a writers’ retreat in Maine, where he stayed until 1992. He died in 1993.
Sources: ALBA database; African-Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Hall, 1991); Brandt, Joe, ed.. Black Americans in the Spanish People’s War Against Fascism 1936-1939 James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid (two editions, 1986 and 1988).