From its founding the IWO was committed to combating America’s racial caste system. Beyond accident and death policies the IWO envisioned itself as a militant lobbying group preparing the proletariat for a coming social-democratic workers’ state. As such the Order lobbied for Social Security, enacted in 1935, and universal health care, among other programs, as we have seen.6
Yet the IWO did not privilege class issues over its work combating rac-ism, for both causes were central to the Order’s mission. Along with this early proletarian militancy went a 1932 declaration, “The International Workers Order condemns segregation as a vicious anti-working class policy of the bourgeoisie. It follows the leadership of the Communist Party in its struggle against this practice. To make this struggle ever more effective, the I.W.O. must carry on a continuous campaign within its own ranks, combat-ting the principle and ideology of segregation.” The Order vowed that “con-tinuous efforts must be made everywhere . . . to permeate all our white branches with Negro members and all our Negro branches with white mem-bers. This, and the mobilization of our branches to participate in the strug-gles led by the Communist Party, against lynching, against Jim Crowism, etc., must be the measures to transform backward workers that join the I.W.O. into advanced workers.” The Order also warned, “Care must be exer-cised that infiltration of white members into Negro branches will not lead to the usurpation of the leadership of these branches by the white members.”
The Order orchestrated a fine balancing act between black members’ au-tonomy and integration.7
Such commitment to fight against white supremacy was, not surpris-ingly, endemic to the IWO, for among radical immigrants, commitment to antiracism predated the Order. During the 1920s the SWS had already de-nounced lynching in its newspaper, Rovnosť ľudu, as well as running exposés on “American imperialism,” calling it “a history that has scandalized half the world.” The Marines in Latin America and the Philippines were said to be “at the beck and call of Wall Street.” Such leftist journals were some of the few places immigrants heard critiques of America’s racialized new world order.
John Bodnar and June Granatir Alexander have rightly identified immigrant newspapers as agents of acculturation to America, but in nonradical news-papers articles often exerted a racial tutelage on who was and was not fit for self-governance. Articles frequently derided nonwhite peoples’ national as-pirations, as when Slovák v Amerike applauded “a strict interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine” toward Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela, and dismissed West
Africans as “ceaselessly restless savages” who did not appreciate the civiliz-ing blessciviliz-ings of colonial rule. Conversely, in 1924 the Communist-affiliated Rovnosť ľudu sniped, “We heard a lot about German imperialism from the recently departed Woodrow Wilson, but not a peep about American impe-rialism in the Philippines, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Mexico and elsewhere.”8
In the 1920s white ethnics and African Americans in Party affiliates such as the All-American Anti-Imperialist League and the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) made the cognitive and agitational connections between fights against Jim Crow at home and imperialism abroad. ANLC officers also worked within UNIA, seeking to wean left-wingers away from a solely “Back to Africa” focus and cooperate with Party members as they worked to end racialized oppression in both the United States and colonized Africa. As Steven Hahn notes, many in UNIA saw the movement as “preach-ing preparedness” and said Marcus Mosiah Garvey “never did advocate for all Negroes to go back to Africa.” As such many in UNIA may have agreed with the message the Party chairman sent them: “The rights of the Negro in Africa are not free for the taking. They have to be fought for, no less than the rights of the Negro in America.” The ANLC’s national organizer likewise made the connection between fighting for black civil rights in America and struggling against oppression in South Africa. It was grassroots American initiatives, not Kremlin directives, that pushed for forceful action, in this case looking to strangle apartheid in its cradle.9
Not only high-ranking Party officials sought to reach out to progressive UNIA members. In November 1926 B. Borisoff of Gary, Indiana, wrote to General Secretary Ruthenberg on the work he was doing to win over UNIA members “to the view-point of class struggle in America.” Borisoff said in Gary and elsewhere the opposition group resisting Garvey’s hegemony “is closer to us in its willingness to fight for the interests of the negro in America and to view this struggle as a class struggle.” In Gary, he said, UNIA mem-bers “form a considerable part of the steel workers.” Borisoff thanked Ru-thenberg for names of black and Mexican workers, with whom he was beginning to organize. What is striking is to find a correspondent named Borisoff reaching out to black and Mexican fellow workers, to organize, not terrorize them. Many other Slavic, Irish, and Italian steelworkers in the af-termath of the failed 1919 steel strike scapegoated black people as impermis-sible intruders on whites-only job sites and neighborhoods, fire-bombing the homes of blacks who did not honor the color line. Here a “red” Slav looked to enlist black allies in the class struggle.10
Borisoff’s efforts were not always appreciated by Gary comrades, but not because they resented a Slav reaching out to black people in UNIA. Rather, in 1927 the Party was contacted by Lake County, Indiana, Communists who complained that Borisoff had failed to publicize a “Negro” meeting in East
Chicago, among other derelictions. While many Slavs by the 1920s were joining other white Americans in resisting black people’s advances at job sites or neighborhoods, radical immigrants faulted Borisoff for not doing enough for black fellow workers.11
Other comrades worked to organize non-Europeans. William Schnei-derman had his hands full countering the AFL’s denunciations of his Los Angeles comrades’ work organizing black workers in unions as the establish-ment of “dual unions.” The AFL opposed any attempt to organize this group, Schneiderman said, charging that “the Negroes were imported as scabs.” Of course, many AFL craft unions exercised a strictly Jim Crow membership policy during the 1920s, and only a few militants such as Schneiderman sought to bring black members into the House of Labor. A few years later Thompson would similarly break New Orleans unionists’ “whites only”
clause on a mission from the IWO.12
In 1926 the Organization Department informed the ANLC that the Hungarian American Brotherhood’s newspaper, Új Előre, had written, “One of our very good comrades, Joseph Szabo” of East Saint Louis was “working among Negroes in a machine shop” and, acting on his own, was “trying to propagate radicalism” among them. However, since Szabo was “not very flu-ent in English,” his success was limited, and the departmflu-ent suggested that the ANLC send some copies of the Negro Champion to aid Szabo in his inter-racial organizing. Szabo’s work “among Negroes” came just nine years after the infamous East Saint Louis white-on-black riot, in which other Southeast European immigrants had joined fellow whites with very different attitudes toward black people living in their city. The fellowship exhibited by Szabo, a member of the Hungarian fraternal society that would soon amalgamate with the IWO, and other members of the Left milieu stands in contrast to the actions of other white ethnics. As a veteran of the Industrial Workers of the World acknowledged in a 1924 letter, “The Negro and South European immigrant in the cities mix cutthroat competition.”13
As the IWO would later affirm, racial barriers to self-determination or immigration had to fall. Fourteen years after Szabo’s campaign, the IWO’s African American vice president, Thompson, reported that the “Negro peo-ple” were united in their anticolonialism and were watching with great inter-est the campaigns of “the Indian National Congress which is leading the 350 millions of India to freedom from British imperialism.” She noted that Afri-can AmeriAfri-can comrades in particular had “more than casual interest” in this struggle, as black people experienced imperialism as “a living issue” in Af-rica and the West Indies.14 The IWO consistently linked civil rights activism at home to anticolonialism abroad.
Linkages between anticolonialism and advocacy of black civil rights per-sisted in the IWO. The Order included the Frederick Douglass–Abraham Lincoln Society for African Americans and the Cervantes Fraternal Lodge
for Puerto Ricans as well as interracial English-language lodges. Although many lodges were ethnically defined, as Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian mem-bers testified, interracial socializing and political activism was frequent.
Moreover, by 1932 the IWO was working to recruit and enroll black people and second-generation white ethnics into integrated English branches, and such integrated branches continued until the Order’s demise. As early as January 1931, leadership regarded it as essential that the organization “start to build English speaking branches of the IWO among the millions of white and Negro workers together.” At the same time other ethnic insurance soci-eties explicitly barred nonwhite membership, a policy in force as late as 1948.
Conversely, the IWO’s 1934 constitution and by-laws vowed to “organize agitation and cultural activities among its members with a view to creating . . . an understanding of the needs of these struggles to break down . . . the il-lusory barriers of race, creed and color, to establish among them the prac-tices of class solidarity.” While later versions of the constitution downplayed the Marxist class struggle, the commitment to interracial membership and black equality remained.15
As Chapter 1 notes, other races were actively recruited into the IWO, as when a Los Angeles organizer established Japanese and “Spanish” (likely Mexican) branches. Cape Verdean branches were created in New England after IWO organizers Jesús Colón and Sol Vail contacted Portuguese-speaking men in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. Cubans orga-nized lodges in Tampa, while Arabic workers in Detroit and its vicinity established branches for their communities. The Cervantes Fraternal Lodge was established within the IWO for Hispanic members, and, as a Brooklyn member attested, instilled pride in Puerto Rican culture at a time when this community was denigrated by most white Americans.16
From its inception the IWO stressed the need to enroll black people in English-speaking lodges, where activists such as Thompson and Edward Nelson quickly exercised great autonomy. This is perhaps not surprising, for the Order was founded shortly after the CP promulgated its controversial Black Belt Thesis, arguing that as an oppressed national minority, African Americans had the right to self-determination up to and including creating a separate nation in the majority-black counties of the South. Critics derided the Party’s thesis as having little purchase among black people themselves, and opponents such as Max Shachtman argued that the plans for a separate black nation ignored the hundreds of thousands of black people who had already migrated to northern industrial centers such as Detroit.17 A careful reading of the CP’s resolutions on the Black Belt Thesis suggests that the creation of a separate black nation was not an ironclad demand but rather a tactic, one option to be explored as part of “an intensive struggle [for]
social and political equality.” The Party continued to demand full equality for black people, even as it recognized “the right of Negroes for national
self-determination in the South, where Negroes comprise a majority of the population.” However, only where “the Negro masses put forward such na-tional demands of their own accord” would the Party support such efforts.
Racial equality was the larger goal. Moreover, counter to Shachtman’s asser-tions, the Party recognized that many black people lived in the industrial North, where the “Negro question” could not be avoided. In the North, though, it was argued that black people should be recruited into the Party’s existing organizations, where they could be trained as proletarian leaders.18
With such aims in mind, the IWO made organizing black members a priority. Party leaders such as B. D. Amis and James Ford worked with the Order to recruit black members in Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, Newark’s Third Ward, and elsewhere. In Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1935, Alex-ander Wright established IWO branches consisting of black and Jewish small businessmen, while the IWO also established a toehold in Birming-ham, Alabama, where members assisted in the Party assault on Jim Crow documented by Kelley.19 A black IWO member named John Jefferson re-cruited with Thompson among black and white workers in New Orleans, which he saw as “an excellent field for the I.W.O.” However, the promise of interracial harmony was not always so easy to achieve, even in the IWO or the Party. Two months after his efforts, Jefferson wrote to Clarence Hatha-way, editor of the Daily Worker, charging that “white chauvinism, lily whit-eism and Lovestonites” existed within New Orleans. “Comrades, there is a revolt brewing within the Party among the Negro comrades,” Jefferson omi-nously warned, “whose rumblings you soon shall hear.”20
The CP and the IWO certainly both exhibited “white chauvinism,” as is addressed more fully in a later section. But even if Jefferson and other Afri-can AmeriAfri-can radicals sometimes grew disenchanted with the Order’s com-mitment to interracial organizing, such activism—imperfectly implemented or not—was rare in 1935 America. Few other organizations enrolled Jewish, Slavic, Italian, and Hungarian members alongside African Americans, Arabs, and Hispanics, as was the practice in the Order. Thompson was grati-fied to see among members on her organizing tours “not only willingness but eagerness to accept leadership from a Negro woman.” In Detroit local IWO officials worried that Scotch autoworkers would not take direction from a black woman, but Thompson reassured them and indeed won white workers’
loyalty. In 1935 she became the Order’s national secretary and in 1938 was elected a vice president. During the Order’s reorganization in World War II, a black Douglass-Lincoln Society was founded to join the organization’s eth-nic societies such as the SWS and Cervantes Fraternal Society for Hispaeth-nic members. The interracial tent of the IWO was capacious and attractive enough to enfold Black Muslims in places such as Cleveland and New Haven.
These members expressed their appreciation for the organization’s racial equality and low-cost insurance policies available without discrimination.21
Beyond a multiracial membership—as important and unique as that was in 1930s America—the IWO was committed to substantive programs for advancing racial equality. Even as the IWO faced government prosecu-tion, the Order’s progressive stance on racial equality and black rights made it into the record. Cross-examination of state’s witness George Powers brought out that “the IWO made a special appeal to Negro membership and supported . . . Negroes in Major League Baseball, the Anti-Poll Tax Amend-ment, anti-lynch legislation, and the Civil Rights Program.” Powers also noted that when he was an IWO member in 1934, he collaborated with Trea-surer Shipka in defense of the Scottsboro Boys, black Alabama teens sen-tenced to death for alleged rape of white women. During his cross-examination it came out that “even before Powers received his directive [from the Party] . . . the Scottsboro case was on the agenda of the IWO,” suggesting that the group’s members were genuinely concerned about injustices to Southern black people, not cynically using the issue for Communist advan-tage. Still, at the height of the red scare, vocal advocacy of black civil rights was regarded by many conservatives as subversive in and of itself. Powers admitted that some of what the IWO advocated may have had merit but saw the IWO’s Scottsboro program as proof Moscow had been directing the Order to foment racial trouble.22