The threats that Il Duce leveled at one of only two independent black African nations in early 1935 rallied militants to Ethiopia’s defense. The Harlem Workers’ Center invited “Negro and White, Workers and Professionals, Gar-vey followers, etc.” to hear James Ford, African American member of the CP’s Central Committee, discuss “The Communist Position on National Minorities.” As at the later IWO Seminars in Negro History, it was promised that Ford’s talk would link “the Negro as the oppressed Minority Nationality
in the U.S.A.; Abyssinia as an oppressed Nation threatened by Italian Fascist terror.” As the Harlem Workers’ Center was only six blocks north of IWO Solidarity Lodge, it is likely Order members turned out to hear Ford’s thoughts on the threat to Abyssinia/Ethiopia; the attempt by the IWO to recruit followers of UNIA was a long-standing one.27
It is not surprising that Ford twinned oppression at home and colonial depredations in Ethiopia, especially when attempting to reach out to Gar-veyites. Within the IWO, however, even Italian and other white members prioritized defending Ethiopia. In an appeal to Browder, Candela, president of the IWO’s Italian Section, urged that the focus of an upcoming Italian congress should not be social insurance but rather a program “against the war adventure of Italian Fascism in Ethiopia as part of our general struggle against war and fascism in America.” Focusing on opposition to Mussolini’s war plans in Ethiopia would be a means to “strengthen our united front of Italian and Negro workers in this country.” Candela proposed expanding interracial demonstrations of blacks and Italians to protest Mussolini’s mili-tarism “as soon and where the situation ripens,” suggesting “more agita-tional work, demonstrations in front of Italian Consulates, in front of Italian papers, institutions and prominent personalities which are for war against Abyssinia.” By August 1935 lodges of the IWO in Syracuse and Rochester were organizing “Hands Off Ethiopia committees” and “laying special em-phasis on the Italian and Negro organizations.”28
By the fall of 1935, Syracuse lodges could have joined an ongoing IWO campaign to support Addis Ababa. Rebecca Grecht replied to her Party com-rades answering a Daily Worker editorial that appealed for medical aid to Ethiopia. Grecht wrote that the Medical Departments of the Order “in what-ever cities they are established” would be enrolled in this campaign; she listed departments in New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. The IWO’s New York Committee, she noted, was also soon to enlist all the doctors and dentists in its Medical Department in
“setting up a committee to cooperate with the American Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia and to get pledges of financial contributions from them.”
The druggists cooperating with the Medical Department were to form a committee to acquire drugs to ship to Ethiopia. Individual IWO members, too, were asked “to approach their neighborhood druggists for contributions of supplies.” Doctors in various cities were approached and asked for dona-tions to the cause. Thompson similarly reported on the Ethiopian campaign Harlem members were orchestrating in September 1935, a campaign that Ford remarked was enabling the IWO to become “a unifying force in the community.”29
As Grecht noted, the IWO was responding to appeals from the Daily Worker. The support shown to the besieged African nation in the Communist press, and through organizations such as the IWO’s Medical Department,
might be contrasted with condescending coverage in mainstream newspa-pers. The New York Sun assured readers, “Harlem Quiet in African Crisis.”
“The Italian-Ethiopian dispute is being reflected in Harlem these days,” the reporter noted, “but the observer who would study the reaction must have his eyes skinned and his ear to the ground. There are no tom-toms beating on Lenox Avenue and New York’s Negro population is not advancing with shield and assegai upon the unoffending residents of nearby Little Italy.” Instead, the reporter found only small groups of men asking what the “rest of the civi-lized world” would do if Mussolini declared war. For the Sun, by implication, the civilized world did not include Ethiopia, and maybe not even Harlem. Of course, the paper said, “the Harlem Communists . . . are raising the usual rumpus.” The paper also noted that UNIA was calling for a thousand African American recruits to fight for the defense of Ethiopia.30
Only the Left raised much of a “rumpus” on behalf of fascism’s victims.
The week before Grecht wrote of the IWO’s medical campaign, the Party issued a call to a September 7th Union Square rally defending Ethiopia.
“Mussolini Hurls a Burning Torch into the World!” posters proclaimed, urg-ing New Yorkers to defend “the only independent Negro nation,” which was
“about to be ravaged by fascist imperialist Italy!” warning, “Ethiopia threat-ens to become the Sarajevo of the new world slaughter!” Left-wing militants saw war clouds gathering over Union Square in the fall of 1935.31
Even in smaller locales the invasion of Ethiopia spurred left-wing activ-ism. From Norfolk, Virginia, organizer Alexander Wright wrote, “The Ethi-opian situation is also hot. The I.W.O. campaign is on.” As Kelley has noted, the war in Ethiopia, and the fact Communists were some of the few people vocally protesting the fascist attack, led many Southern African Americans to give the Party a positive reception. In Virginia, the IWO participated in a newly created Richmond Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia. While else-where in the country pro-Ethiopia demonstrators demanded all Italian-owned stores be boycotted and cried, “Let’s Run the Italians Out of Harlem,”
in Richmond the committee kept the focus on “the barbaric war of Italian Fascism” and avoided ethnic animus. A bit overoptimistically, the Richmond committee asserted, “The Italian people . . . are not deceived by the adventur-ist spouting of Mussolini and his Fascadventur-ist hirelings. The Italian people are against this war of rapine, from which they have nothing to gain. In numer-ous actions, they have demonstrated their opposition to this war which is pregnant with the spark of a new world conflagration.” In Birmingham, Communist organizer Bill Moseley similarly worked to defuse black people’s enmity toward Italians. He reported of “a growing sentiment among the Negroes for the boycott of the small Italian-American grocers who do busi-ness in the Negro neighborhoods.” To counter this tension, Moseley and comrades distributed flyers “To the Negro People of Birmingham” urging,
“Boycott Italy, not the Italian Storekeepers.” Arguing that Italian immigrants
had come to the United States to escape persecution, the flyers said, “They are treated with contempt and called ‘dagoes’ by the same ruling class which calls Negroes ‘niggers’ and oppresses them.” The flyers urged people to boycott products from Mussolini’s Italy but not to stigmatize fellow workers who happened to be Italian.32
IWO organizers certainly had a difficult task maintaining black-Italian unity on the fraught issue of the war in Ethiopia. In issuing his call for the founding of the NNC, John P. Davis linked international fascist depreda-tions to domestic oppression, parallels especially evident to African Ameri-can militants. Thompson served as well on the board of the NNC, which consistently made the connection between domestic segregation and colo-nialism and fascist war overseas. Robeson later recalled as chairman of the left-wing CAA, “Yes, all Africa remembers that it was [Soviet Foreign Affairs minister] Litvinov who stood alone beside Hailie Selassie in Geneva, when Mussolini’s sons flew with the blessings of the Pope to drop bombs on Ethio-pian women and children. Africa remembers that it was the Soviet Union which fought the attempt of Smuts to annex Southwest Africa to the slave reservations of the Union of South Africa.” In such contexts of abandonment by Western colonial powers, it was perhaps understandable that leftist Afri-can AmeriAfri-cans remembered the Soviet Union with gratitude.33
For leftists the fascist war against Spain quickly overshadowed the defeat of Haile Selassie. The IWO would periodically recall its long-standing sup-port for Ethiopia, as when during World War II an IWO FLFF rally publi-cized its $500 contribution to the Ethiopian World Federation among the other money it had raised for Russian War Relief and other funds as part of its campaign to “Give ’Til It Hurts Hitler!”34 Still, the war in Spain soon preoccupied and involved members of the IWO to a greater extent than the African crisis.