Lynching, the most brutal of America’s racial atrocities, was an issue on which the IWO consistently lobbied, demanding federal measures to punish mur-derers of black people. In this the IWO followed the direction of the Party’s antilynching activism. As early as November 1933 Browder telegrammed Ge-bert of the IWO’s Polish Society and other Communist officials that “the in-creasing lynch wave signalizing fascist development demands the broadest mass mobilization among Negro and white workers and the broadest united front approach to all working-class organizations.” Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Party condemned “the Lynch Terror in the United States.”33
As an interracial society, the IWO avidly contributed to the campaign to suppress the lynch terror. Fraternal Outlook frequently ran articles con-demning racial atrocities in America and demanding national mobilizations to enact measures to end the lynching scourge. In March 1939 readers learned of another defeat of a federal antilynching bill by “a handful of pro-lynch and anti-New Deal Senators,” whose filibuster killed the bill and “in-terfered with our whole democratic process.” The article, “Strange Fruit on Southern Trees” by Emanuel Levin, employed the antilynching blues dirge that bitterly told of “Blood on the leaves and / Blood at the root, / Black bod-ies swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” Levin warned his readers, “This strange fruit is a gruesome warning of the poison that is eating at the very root of American democracy itself.”
He recounted the atrocities black people had faced during and after World War I in the East Saint Louis, Tulsa, and Chicago race riots in addition to
“the Scottsboro boys’ narrow escape from legal lynching” and Herndon’s ordeal as “things which will always be remembered by the Negro people, as well as by progressive white people.”34
Levin conceived of the fight for the Anti-Lynching Bill as “a basic part of the campaign to preserve and extend the democratic process of America”
and preserve the rights of black and white sharecroppers and workers alike.
In order to defeat Southern filibusters, he urged every IWO member to write to congressmen and senators enclosing the damning poem “Strange Fruit in Southern Trees” and demanding passage of the Anti-Lynching Bill “so that we will in some measure be free from the constant dread of a noose, a burnt tree, a dangling body filled with the bullets of a raging mob.” Only united action by the “forces of progress and peace” such as the IWO could destroy the power of lynching’s Senate protectors.35
The article’s lumping together of blacks’ lynching and the suppression of whites’ collective bargaining rights as part of a united campaign by the boss
class “to keep the living standards [of the South] at a pellagra level” suggests that many militant white ethnics still foregrounded class analyses and had trouble recognizing racial oppression as sui generis and abhorrent in its own right. Erstwhile black Communists such as author Richard Wright grew frustrated with this sometimes tin-eared, white-worker-centered materialist reading of black exploitation and pointed to such racial blind spots as lead-ing to their partlead-ing with the Party.36
Nevertheless, even if its analysis was sometimes not as nuanced as could be hoped, the IWO was one of the few organizations in which mid-twentieth-century white ethnics consistently denounced lynching and other forms of black oppression. The militant stance of IWO publications stands in contrast to the complacency, if not outright acceptance of America’s racialized status quo, exhibited by nonleftist ethnic newspapers such as the Slovaks’ Jednota, New Yorkský denník, and Slovák v Amerike. In the pages of such publica-tions, immigrants learned to naturalize their place in America’s hierarchy as deserving white people. Militants reading Fraternal Outlook, on the other hand, recognized lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and racial oppression as key ways bosses used race in “the production of difference” (to borrow Roediger and Esch’s important concept) to fracture and weaken the work-ing class.37
The IWO’s insistence on linking racial oppression to a class analysis fo-cusing on broader issues of economic exploitation was at variance, too, to the approach of more mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, which was much more accepting of the tenets of American capitalism. As Beth Tompkins Bates and Mary Helen Washington contend, the mainstream civil rights movement exemplified by the NAACP argued for integration into existing socioeconomic and political institutions, not transformation of these capitalist structures to address working-class grievances. While the IWO often foregrounded class, its stridency on racial issues such as anti-lynching, anti-poll tax, and an end to segregation campaigns arguably dem-onstrated true intersectionality, blending racial and class struggles.
Washington notes that African American writers with Communist affilia-tions in the 1950s continued to swim against the inclusionist tide, seeking a broader transformation of the American economic and political landscape.
So, too, for the IWO, opening a few slots in the middle class for black people was welcome, but only a piece of the struggle.38
The Fraternal Outlook also ran periodic exposés of the menace of the poll tax, although sometimes the racial aspect to disfranchisement was down-played, with the poll tax instead derided as a threat to “the nation’s war effort and unity.” Other articles denouncing the poll tax, though, foregrounded the race issue, featuring vignettes of African American steelworkers, wives of soldiers, and female farmworkers who “contribute to the nation’s food bas-ket,” but still were barred from the ballot box in the seven Southern states
that maintained the poll tax. IWO organizers knew firsthand of the impedi-ments the poll tax placed in the way of battlers for working-class justice. In 1932 Florida lodges of the IWO had pledged to pay the poll taxes of the men selected as that state’s CP electors.39
Other Fraternal Outlook articles more explicitly demanded an end to segregation, with an article by General Secretary Milgrom shining a “Spot-light on Jim Crow” or demands that “The New Negro” be given justice after World War II. Milgrom’s “spotlight,” one of a series of articles, also shone on the IWO itself, where lamentable cases such as a Hungarian lodge shunning a potential black member mirrored the kind of “separate but equal” policies in the wider nation that the Order frequently condemned.40
For all their blind spots, militant white ethnics developed a sensitivity to racial oppression at odds with the consciousness of nonideological white ethnics. Leftist Slavs advocated an end to black oppression, which they char-acterized as a particularly pernicious manifestation of “the dictatorship of capitalism.” In the late 1930s, the IWO was one of the few places in which a Slavic immigrant would hear defenses of black people’s rights. The SWS’s Robotnícky kalendár (Workers’ Calendar) for 1937 ran a woodcut illustration of a lynching with the condemnatory caption, “‘Democracy’ in the South.
Black citizens in the southern states of the U.S.A. until now have been vul-nerable to white lynchers, because they haven’t united with white workers.”
As in English-language publications of the CP, this equation gave little con-sideration to the racism of white workers, which may have stood in the way of class solidarity. Even this illustration showed not top-hatted millionaires, but overall-clad white workers rushing to the lynching tree. Still, such an unequivocal denunciation of lynch law was found only in leftist Slovak pub-lications. The calendar also ran an exposé of “the treacherous Ku Klux Klan [KKK], which secretly organizes throughout the United States against the workers.” In 1942, Ľudový denník, a Slovak version of the Daily Worker, published a cartoon of a soldier destroying a scarecrow labeled “poll tax.”
“The defeat of the poll tax is the triumph of democracy,” ran the caption.
That same day, Ľudový denník published an editorial, “The evil consequences of discrimination.”41
After reading such condemnations, the IWO responded with various resolutions demanding antilynching legislation and other measures. The 1940 national convention passed a resolution branding “lynching . . . an in-strument of reaction used to keep the Negro people in bondage and to check the progressive forces of labor.” The delegates further resolved, “As long as lynching continues . . . the civil liberties of all the American people are jeopardized.” All lodges were urged to petition their senators to support enactment of the Wagner-Capper-Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill. The Geyer Bill banning poll taxes was also backed by the convention, which pledged its support for the NAACP and NNC on these legislative campaigns. An
identical resolution regarding the antilynching bill was passed seven months later at the IWO Anthracite District Convention.42
A year later, when the IWO’s General Executive Board (GEB) pledged sup-port for Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program and offered wholehearted supsup-port to the effort to defeat Hitler’s forces, it nevertheless felt compelled to put forward a further resolution noting its “opposition to discrimination against the Negro people in the armed forces and defense industries of the land” as well as com-mitting to the abolition of the poll tax “and other discriminatory laws.” To be sure, the IWO sometimes dropped the ball, as when the Order, like other CP-affiliated organizations, absented itself from the March on Washington move-ment, partly perhaps out of enmity toward its Socialist leadership. Yet while critics of the Left argue that the CP and its affiliates suspended activism on behalf of African Americans “for the duration” as they devoted all their ener-gies toward winning the war to save the embattled Soviets, the IWO never let up on its commitment to racial equality. In September 1941 it was demanding integration of the armed forces. The following year the IWO again denounced segregation in the armed forces and in defense work and called “upon the proper governmental agencies to prosecute as active traitors those responsible for such reprehensible acts as the terror against Negro soldiers and citizens,”
going further than Roosevelt was prepared to with his lukewarm issuance of the executive order creating the FEPC. It would be seven years before his suc-cessor began the armed forces’ integration.43
Commitment to such race activism continued throughout the war. In February 1943 Bedacht reminded the board, “There are still many problems of conquering democratic rights for some sections of the American people, there is still the problem of defeating and ending discrimination, disfran-chisement and lynch law against the Negro people in America. There is still the problem of enfranchising the poor working people in the South by put-ting an end to the poll tax.” The board agreed but expanded the list of racial-ized oppressions that it committed the IWO to ending. All lodges and editors of Fraternal Outlook were instructed to do everything they could “to see that President Roosevelt’s order #8802 is put into practice; to eliminate the poll tax, wipe out the blot of lynching, and the slanders against the Negro people in the movies, press and radio, and end Jim Crow policies in the armed forces.” Local branches took this admonition seriously. The Bronx District Committee of the Jewish American Section of the IWO committed itself to
“the struggle against the poll tax.”44