Black internationalism, international communism and anti-fascist political trajectories: African American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

In his autobiography Black Bolshevik Harry Haywood writes of the importance to his political development of meeting Irish radicals at the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. Haywood, one of the leading African American fi gures in the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) in the inter-war period, was the author of infl uential texts such as Negro Liberation. He notes that: Th e Irish students came from the back ground of the 1916 Easter Rebellion and the revolutionary movement refl ected in the lives of men like Larkin and James Connolly. Among them were Sean Murray and James Larkin, Jr, (Big Jim’s son). All of them had been active in the post-war independence and labor struggles. I was closest to Murray, the oldest of the group, who was a roommate of mine. Th is was my fi rst encounter with Irish revolutionaries and their experiences excited me. As members of oppressed nations, we had a lot in common. I was impressed by their idealism, and revolutionary ardor and their implacable hatred of Britain’s imperialist rulers, as well as for their own traitors. But what impressed me most about them was their sense of national pride – not of the chauvinistic variety, but that of revolutionaries aware of the international importance of their independence struggle and the role of Irish workers. 1