Part 10: Black communists in Spanish Civil War Crawford: ‘I fought fascism with bullets’

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.

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Part 9 of Black communists in Spanish Civil War: Milton connects Scottsboro struggle to Spain

Milton Herndon was born on March 10, 1908, in Wyoming, Ohio to Paul Herndon, a coal miner, and Harriet Herndon, a maid. After completing two years of high school Herndon went to work as a steelworker. He also served 18 months in the National Guard. Herndon exemplified the internationalism of the communist movement and the importance of Black workers leading the class struggle, not just against the U.S, capitalists, but for the international working class.
He joined the Communist Party in 1934 and became an organizer in Chicago. In July, 1934, Herndon wrote of the struggles of the Black, single, jobless workers of Harlem in the magazine Hunger Fighter, published by the Communist-led United Action Conference on Work, Relief, and Unemployment (price 3 cents). Other articles exposed Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia’s cops who clubbed and jailed demonstrators on May 26, 1934.
On September 1, 1934, Herndon was arrested with three other Black and white workers while picketing the Empire Cafeteria on Lenox Avenue and 125thStreet, in Harlem. The demonstration was organized by the Young Liberators Club of Harlem, a Communist-led group. They protested the refusal of Empire Cafeteria’s bosses to hire Black workers in any other job except porter.

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Part 8 of Black communists in Spanish Civil War: Frank Alexander, a red leader for life

Frank Alexander was born of a white and indigenous mother and a Black father on the Omaha Sioux reservation on February 8, 1911. The indigenous people welcomed mixed marriages, which were illegal in most of the United States. He first moved in with his younger brother, Herschel, who was in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and lived in the home of the famous communist leader Mother Ella Reeves Bloor. 

A proud Black communist

Frank moved to Los Angeles, where he became active with the Communist Party, which he joined in 1931, at the age of 20. He said:

See, in those days, the Communist Party, and the YCL [Young Communist League], was a very popular body, especially in the Black communities. And so

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Love for the working class, lifelong communist

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.  

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Admiral Kilpatrick goes ‘all the way!’

Admiral Kilpatrick was born in Denver on February 20, 1898. His father worked first as a cowboy in Oklahoma and then as a miner in Colorado. When Admiral was six years old, his father got a job with a steel company and moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio. Kilpatrick’s father was a Socialist, and his son accompanied him to political meetings when he was as young as 12 years old.
He eventually joined the Socialist party and, when he was 19 years old, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). After high school he worked in mills, foundries, electrical shops, and lumber camps.  Kilpatrick joined the Army during World War I and served in France as a mechanic. Kilpatrick worked with the union in the 1919 Cleveland steel strike, in which the companies brought in thousands of Black workers to serve as strikebreakers.

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