Part One: Black Antifascists In the Spanish Civil War
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Toyota, let's go places. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, there's good things happening too. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and this week is different. Well, every week's different. Every week is a completely different thing. That's the great thing about having this podcast is that it's different every week. But this week is even a different format because instead of me being the podcast expert, I'm

I'm gonna be the podcast idiot because the podcast expert this week who's gonna explain some stuff to me is my friend Jordan from The Dugout, a black anarchist podcast. Hi Jordan. Hello. How's your week? Everything's fine, right? Um, yeah, I mean it's been about the same. I think I've been on this earth around 23 years and not honestly not much has changed, you know.

Patriotic baby, but you know, other than that, we're still out here. Yeah. The other voice you're hearing is Sophie, our producer. Hi, Sophie. Hello. Hi, MacPie. Hi, Jordan. Sophie, I'm glad to have you back. Missed you. I think everyone else is too. And if they're not, they can stop listening right now. This is a podcast for Sophie fans only. But don't, because this is a really good topic. That's true. Very important. So what happened was...

I was like, there's this stuff I want to know about. And Jordan was like, I've been reading an awful lot about that stuff. And I was like, you should tell me. That's what happened. But Jordan, who are you? And what are you an expert that you're going to explain to me? Yeah, I'm Jordan. I am a archivist and queer organizer in the Midwest. And

Yeah, I'm going to talk today about black antifascists and the Spanish Civil War. This is something that I've been researching for, honestly, a couple years loosely, but I've been really trying to get the fire in my belly for it. And having this conversation with you is able to actually help me and my ADHD brain sit down and actually finish a book, which I possibly finished too many books for this, but it's the love of the game. Love of the game. Yeah.

We were talking earlier about like Jordan was like, how do you stop with each topic? And the answer is that time deadlines are the only reason I stop each topic. Why do you think there's always like an entire context episode? Yeah. But before we talk about all of that, we should talk about the fact that our audio engineer is named Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory.

I've been waiting to do that for so long. I know. I'm excited that you get to. And also, dear listener, you get to say hi to Rory wherever you are. It's always fun to do that in public. And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. Okay, so we're going to talk about black anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Yeah, absolutely. This is my takeover of cool people. I finally get to be the person who tells you who's cool. Yeah.

Yeah, I do a lot of researching a lot of black history, a lot of black anarchist or black liberation history. And in doing that, I have found that there's so much like bottom up approaches to fighting against oppressive institutions that don't get called anarchist throughout history. And I actually love it. It's part of what drives me to my politic in and of itself. And in doing a lot of research for this episode, I,

There's just a lot of...

black resistance that is so bold, very beautiful, and brilliant. And a lot of it gets erased, especially anti-fascist history. Because fascism as we know it right now wasn't really named until like 1920, 20th century European fascism is kind of where we get some of our understandings. Yeah, that's a Europe problem, right? Like only Europe had fascism and therefore that only affected other Europeans. I think Europe historically only affects Europe, isn't it?

Yeah, they never left the continent. You know, every bloody, terrible war was totally, absolutely insular, which was great for something we might call internal colonizing. I think there's this one phrase I love that's like, before Europe colonized the world, they had to colonize themselves. And I think it's a really then truer, like, exposing, like, oppressive, violent institutions to,

And in exposing like fascism or like othering and having that sort of out group to define your terror on and build fear around to kind of.

not sometimes control a population, but more control what they think is possible and what they think is a reason for certain downturns in the economy or certain downturns in a social life. And right. So like they have to blame the other in order to build the authoritarian state.

Yeah, absolutely. And that kind of displacement of fear and displacement of responsibility, then to then put all of our problems on to typically like strong man authoritarian type leadership to be like, well, I will solve it. I will give you quick and easy solutions, quote unquote, quick and easy solutions, which are typically just disappearances and the

the status quo governing body going forward and typically also like capitalists and the old power structures it could be it will see in Spain feudal structures alongside capitalist structures that are vying to continue like their sort of control over the economy people's labor and the international relations um okay and in doing a lot of this black anarchist research I found a lot of anti-authoritarian and communist histories many that have lived

lives of resistance without calling themselves anarchists. And something in my work is that I'm not here to label any of these ancestors, but I'm drawing a lineage, an anti-authoritarian thought that reminds us how and why folks have fought and why they fought in certain ways. Because anti-fascism and fascism isn't something abstract or academic. It's intensely real for a lot of folks.

And that violence comes through the history and legacy of imperialism and colonialism of when Europe, especially Europeans, were like, well, let's go down to the continent of Africa and take over North Africa. Or even just like this whole history, even back through the Romans of Europe.

taking over and like colonizing other places and eventually the through line of what we see now is like these large settler colony societies in which the whole purpose of it, the whole foundation of their societies is based on the violence of erasure and displacement and stolen labor and forced labor. And to keep that sort of control going one,

has to not recognize it as a fault. And that's where we are in America, is we've never recognized any of our faults or any of our contradictions in our foundations. Right. So it's like we can end up fascist in part because we don't acknowledge the fact that we started. Let's go with real bad. Fascism is obviously like a unique political ideology and we can't just apply it to everything in the past. But obviously like the horror mess we're dealing with now with the rise of fascism is obviously like...

I was like talking to my friend about this the other day where I was like, well, it's like we're dealing with something really, really horrible right now. It's still better than 1850 in America. Like, even though what we have now, we could call fascist. It derives from the fascist ideology. And the fascists that we use to coin the name like Hitler and Mussolini and Franco. These are people who quoted fascism.

The U.S. quoted and cited Jim Crow laws and our use of gas chambers and their reasoning and using it as like, well, if the U.S. did it, and actually if you make people second-class citizens, it's so much easier to actually just erase them and do a genocide that...

This is the model that then Germany tries to use. And there's something that I talk about and I was like, it does look kind of 1930s Germany in America, but it more looks like still 1890s America. It looks like a post reconstruction America. Yeah.

more than it does. Like we have like our Gilded Age or oligarchies and we have the people we feel like we're on the precipice of something. And the ruling class is coming in very, very hard to maintain its power structure. And they know how early they have to get on this. This is the basis of like counterinsurgency work as being so preemptive that you end up just creating a police state, which in America, we've been kind of fine with that. Yeah.

for the most part. Okay, when I derailed us, we should talk about the history part. Sorry about that. No, you're good. It's a good little conversation.

Today, I'm going to talk a lot about going into the lives of black anti-fascists, especially from America, who volunteered to participate in the Spanish Civil War, and especially those who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, those that came to see fascism as a threat to their lives, freedoms, how they got to Spain, and what they experienced there, kind of what happened after the war, and including how some of them

went on to work to protect one of the greatest cultural icons of the 20th century, Paula Robinson, in my opinion. Love the man.

One thing to kind of talk about before is like, for me, this episode and other things is a context episode. I'm not really going to start getting into the war until the second episode. And for folks who haven't heard more about this before, we've done a fair number of episodes on this, possibly too many episodes about it. But why not always talk about the Spanish Civil War? Because it's the war that started World War II in a way, you know, it's the mini war before it.

This was the first showdown between fascist and, you would say, Republican or leftist forces that happened in the World War II era from 1936 to 1939. And it started with Franco, a fascist, a Catholic fascist, attempting a coup against

And then that coup failed because people resisted it. And instead it turned into the Spanish Civil War. All of the other powers, the Western powers, like sat aside while the fascists basically, Germany and Italy helped Franco win. And it was a long, bloody, drawn out fight. And also one of the most fascinating periods and one of the most utopian periods in some ways that has ever happened with people experimenting with whole new ways of being. And so...

There's a reason everyone's obsessed with it. And if you want to know more about it, check out roughly a quarter of our episodes. And I'm sorry about that, but this one's good. I've been wanting to hear more about this particular aspect of it for a long time. Yeah, and this, I think, is a very beautiful time in history for anti-authoritarians, especially now. But any folks that are organizing against fascism, against authoritarianism, against patriarchal violence, and are understanding their relationship to violence, their relationship to...

what different roles in organizing against authoritarian structures look like, I feel like this little time capsule in history

lets folks know that there are ways to move through even like military discipline. Like there's a lot of really good, um, essays and articles about how anarchists in the time period, um, experimented with different levels of military discipline and what that meant for them and how that was up versus a lot of the machismo that comes with anti-fascism in the day and age. Um,

And one thing I think is also very interesting about the time period is that I think it was only the USSR and Mexico that were supporting the Republic, the Republican sides at the time. And Mexico even allowed near the end of the war folks to repatriate to the area. So a lot of Spanish anti-fascists went to Mexico and a lot of people in the internationalist forces as well went to Mexico after the war. Yeah.

And when we talk about internationalist forces, again, for folks who are listening, while the governments besides Mexico and the USSR sat aside and didn't help the left in the Spanish Civil War, a lot of individuals from the United States, from France, from England, from other places, Italy, went to Spain and fought. And that's what we're going to be talking about. Yeah, I believe there were 52 different nationalities and countries represented in the internationalist brigades. And it really shows like...

People showed up. The attack started happening, and I get into this a little bit more, but there were very interesting ways in which they used newspapers and media to call for people to come and support their struggle, but people came. But before there was Spain, there was Ethiopia, there was the violence in Harlem and the Deep South, and it was a long battle for black dignity and survival, and

And this is about people who refuse to just wait for justice, people who saw anti-fascism as not just a political stance, but a moral one, a spiritual one, and a very, very personal one.

Yeah, the path to Spain didn't start in 1936. To me, it kind of starts with World War I and how we understand some of the concepts and how black veterans came home after this, quote, war to end all wars and were still met with extreme racism, poverty, vigilante terror, and

There was, in 1919, the Red Summer, which was a blood-soaked welcome that sparked something deeper into a lot of folks. So when you say the Red Summer of 1919, what's that about? Is that like the bombing of Black Wall Street and stuff like that? Like, what's the Red Summer? You know, I actually can't remember if the Tulsa thing happened in the Red Summer. But it was a bunch of white supremacist terror and race riots that happened in...

in dozens of cities across the U.S. and some rural counties as well. There was a lot of civil rights activists that coined the term, and they had organized a lot of peaceful protests against racial violence in that summer, and they were attacked by racial terror by folks who were in their communities and did not want to stand for that sort of

racial equity and that kind of talks. There was a lot of white on black violence. There was a lot of race riots in Chicago, Washington, D.C. And then it was kind of related to the demobilization of folks coming back from World War I and kind of the economic downturn that the U.S. was kind of starting to be in and folks were still coming through to on. And there was a lot of labor unrest happening in that time and a lot of labor organizing that

especially in America, still had a lot of racial undertones. So there was a lot of folks that came back from the war. They came back. They tried to get different jobs. Some of them start organizing, but...

black folks weren't let into the unions. They weren't let on shop floors. There was organizing against that with the longshoremen and in the IWW. When you're saying that, when you're saying organizing against that, you mean not organizing against black people joining, but rather organizing against the racism that was preventing black people from joining? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. Um,

And this is sort of one of the motivators for what was called the Great Migration, which is when around half a million African Americans left the southern United States and started going north and west and south.

This is also a time like to recognize that like the South wasn't, I don't know if it still is. I don't think it is, is a majority black space and especially was in the 20th and 18th century, which is one reason when I look, when fascist dictators look at how the U S appropriated violence against black citizenry, a majority citizenry to have a white rule, a white minority rule, uh,

It's very influential to like the foundations of a lot of like internal fascist violence or internal violence. Okay. But yeah, the black anti-fascism is in my opinion, also it goes back to colonialism. It goes, this black anti-authoritarian urge goes back to indigenous Africans being stolen, property sold into slavery and their descendants and those who immigrated here and

fighting back against that colonial violence and against that repatriation is older than the country itself with the first slave revolts maroon societies insurrections happening since we landed here yeah

One of the first things I want to give some examples of that is in the Palmares area of Brazil in around 1604, a republic of mainly free Africans and indigenous societies made villages, war camps, formed republics to fight off Portugal armies for decades.

raiding plantations, maintaining agriculture, using the forest and like guerrilla tactics and knowledge of the land to survive and grow in like indirect opposition to colonial slavery. Yeah, they like literally had their own basically country going on, right? Yeah, absolutely. It was like the name itself for the...

I think it's... Columbus. Columbus. It means, like, I think it means, like, war camp and village. And so they were, like, a bunch of federated war camps and villages that were there as both defensive outposts to, like, very purposely maintain a society outside of colonial violence. And also, I would love to do more research into the race relations, but they were very much against the sort of...

the sort of racial hierarchy and caste hierarchy that Portugal and the Dutch were trying to implement in that region. Though they still, at some points, worked with the Dutch to fight off Portugal advancements. But that's what alliances are for. Yeah, no, it's like some of that stuff is so interesting because even some of the Maroon societies, like I don't know about specifically about the Columbos, but some of them even like had slavery within them, but they were still...

They were just separate societies that were on... I don't know. They're fascinating. I always want to know more about them. I know. That's one of those things I found right before, like a couple days ago, and was like, this, I wanted to put more information on in here. And then those Palomares societies lasted about 90 years. And even after that, there was the Haitian Revolution in the late 18th century that...

I think some people forget, like, I think they had like over 140 revolts before they finally had a revolution. Yeah. And that in and of itself, the consistent strikes and then the eventual overthrow struck the heart of enslavers across Europe.

the Western hemisphere. Yeah. It scared the shit out of them. It was so good. Yeah. They were terrified. They were terrified for so many reasons and so many good reasons because it also, they were scared of it, inspiring folks in like the American South. And, and I believe also in around Brazil because it's a, one of the still like the second largest slave society outside of the U S at the time. And, and,

It did. It kept the flame of freedom strong in the heart for rebels for generations to come. It is a struggle that I still really would love for people to study more of because it has so much history and nuances in how things played out and how different relationships were built through. But it inspired folks like Gabriel Prosser, who was an enslaved literate blacksmith from the plantations near Richmond, Virginia, who

And they organized a massive, massive slave revolt with hundreds of enslaved folks. And their goal was to seize control of Richmond and to take the governor hostage, negotiate the end of slavery, create a more egalitarian society, whole nine yards. And they were very influenced, interestingly, by American revolutionary libertarian language and equality. And they were like, well, why can't this be true? And one thing they wouldn't be inspired by...

You did it before I got to do it. This is a takeover. You took away my only joy in life. No, go ahead. What is inspired by these things? I don't know. Well, Gabriel was inspired by the American Revolution. And you know who else was inspired by the American Revolution? Probably our advertisers. That's right. All of them. Sorry, I just got really excited as a producer. Yeah.

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So there was also so many more rebellions that were directly influenced by the Haitian Revolution itself. Like Denmark Vessi. After buying his freedom, after winning a lottery, he plotted one of the most sophisticated and well-organized slave revolts in the U.S. history. In Charleston, South Carolina, he mobilized thousands of black people, including both enslaved and free, to seize weapons, kill slaveholders, and burn Charleston to the ground and set sail to Haiti for freedom.

Deeply, deeply religious. Bessie saw slavery as a sin against God, and Haiti's successful black revolutionaries heavily influenced his thinking, especially a lot of the voodoo that was going on at the time. It was like, faith respects faith. Yeah.

The sad part about it, though, is that some of the co-conspirators, I believe they got rained out on the day of their action, and two people snitched and told their slave masters. And Vessi and I believe at least over 30 other people were executed. You know what I think about that sometimes? One, it's really sad how many of these got shut down by snitches, right?

But also how many more we never heard about, because like in some ways we hear about them almost because they got caught, you know, I mean, obviously if they'd been super successful and burned down all of Charleston, we would have heard of it, but it's like so many people plotted these things and probably were even kind of punished, but in like a low key way. I don't know. It's just like, the more I read about this history, the more I'm like,

there's so many we're never going to learn about and they, there's still so many that we can learn about and they're all so fucking cool. Yeah. Yeah. That makes me think about like my whole history of like Roanoke and it was a lost city, lost people when it was like, okay, actually folks just left the colony. Like historians now are just like, okay, yeah, no. Um, but then there's still so many different things that we can just enjoy. Um,

and learn from so deeply. Even more rebellions from black anti-authoritarians is like Robert Smalls during the Civil War in like 1862, hijacked a Confederate ship, the Planter, and disguised himself as the captain, picked up his family and other enslaved folks along the way, and then surrendered the ship to Union forces.

After the Civil War, Smalls built a small public education like he built and worked around public education, protecting black rights and resisting the reimposition of white supremacy during Reconstruction. I believe he was elected to office at least five times during that like Reconstruction period in which that was allowed in the early 19th century in America. Yeah.

He was fucking cool. We covered him a little bit on the Civil Civil War War, maybe like the second episode we ever did of this show. Okay, because I knew I had heard that story before when I had found it. Yeah, yeah.

And then there was like even more organized efforts to fight against the sort of racialized violence that was happening in the States with Marcus Garvey being a big inspiration for Pan-Africanism, the Back to Africa movement, and establishing the UNIA, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. But there was also this little lesser known communist group called the African Blood Brotherhood.

Founded by Cyril Briggs, a black journalist, lasted around 1919 to 2025. Which is a sick name, I'm just going to say. Cyril Briggs? No, no, well, that too, but no, the...

the blood blood brotherhood what was it yeah the african blood brotherhood they were inspired by a lot of like uh traditional african blood brotherhood uh rituals that are kind of like a coming of age sort of thing and then also they were heavily inspired by the irish republican brotherhood at the time um

Cyril Briggs was a black journalist and socialist from the Caribbean islands around like the Nevis. And they were like a semi-secret, super hierarchical, but semi-secret radical organization promoting black self-determination, armed self-defense, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism. They were heavily inspired by the Russian revolution that had just happened in 1917 and the failures of American democracy to deliver any sort of racial justice to

They advocated for self-defense, organized self-defense classes against racial violence, especially after that red summer of 1919 when a bunch of white mobs attacked black communities. And they urged for the overthrow of white supremacist capitalism and

solidarity with revolutionary movements globally. Like they're really big into like early black internationalism outside of just doing like a pan-African kind of scheme. And they leaned a lot of their roots in media and published the Crusader magazine. They can be quoted in their pamphlets saying in like their principles of the African blood brotherhood that was published in the Crusader magazine saying, quote, we must defend ourselves with arms and hand whenever the lynchers or mobs invade our homes or threatens our life.

With their founders going on to continue saying, quote, without arms, there can be no power. Without power, there can be no freedom. The African blood brotherhood stands for the organized might of the Negro worker, end quote. Which Briggs wrote kind of, he did a lot of like the editorial and writing for the Crusader and was like the point person for it, which is why books like tend to look back on it as super hierarchical.

But they were like an explicit workers association trying to organize unions for people that would be normally excluded, which for them was also people who were not considered white at the time. And trying to build that and bridge the gap between class conscious white people and Irish folks and people who were like newly immigrated and black folks, especially during the one of the great migrations when folks were going north.

So they advocated a lot of alliances with communist movements and with the party itself, eventually dissolving into the party. And I think one of the things that's so fascinating to me about this, I hadn't heard as much about this, and I'm really excited about it, is that I think we get presented this idea that like,

black American radical history and then like the labor movement and, you know, sort of named ideological positions are just completely separate things. And it like ignores this incredible amount of overlap between, you know, leftism and black politics in America. Um,

I mean, obviously, by the end of the 20th century, that's less seen as the case. But when people talk about the sort of early legacy of fighting against racism, I feel like the class consciousness part of it is left out.

Yeah, I've always loved telling people that Lucy Persons was a part of founding the IWW here in America. Like, this has been something very integral to black autonomous politics and scenes for a really long time. And something we see a lot in black communities is like,

Some of the stuff for the sense of safety is still kept insular. Your politics is kept insular. You will tell your family, your kid, people at the cookout, we know what to talk about and how to talk about it. But when it comes to being out in a very above-ground organization...

There's so many risks that come with that, and also so many different variations. This is also how, like, after the 1960s, they stopped killing black leaders because folks started keeping their really radical politics insular again. It can also shift to, like, the sort of black excellence that's, like, black without other. So, like, blackness but no solidarity, which is still having some sort of principles there that...

don't really reach towards liberation, in my humble opinion. And that's also something that the African Blood Brotherhood kind of had in their mode of organizing as well, because they had a big distaste

for Garvey, especially at the time because he won. Actually, I don't know if they had the issue with his misogyny. I do. But they had an issue, and I have an issue with this too, is because he, I believe it was him that said, Franco can't be a fascist. I coined the word fascism and quite literally worked with the KKK and would have meetings with people like Legal Clark of the Ku Klux Klan because it's kind of this mentality of, all right,

separate but equal, how do we really stay separate? What does that mean? How do we, you want us over here? Fine. We want us over there. Y'all got to stay over there then. Yeah. Nationalism is a thing. Yeah. It's one, it's one hell of a drug. Um, and the beef got so heated that Garvey and their meetings actually just instructed people to disrupt the, uh, the African blood brotherhood meetings and activities and,

But then, like, by, like, the mid-1920s, many of the, like, African Blood Brotherhood were already members of the Communist Party. And I want to look more into this history, but it's kind of, like, seems like, like, the central committee inside of the Communist Party absorbed and was like, y'all got to shut down the ABB, just become, like, an auxiliary council inside of us, which... There was a lot of that going on with the American Communist Party around that time. They tried to do it to a bunch of unions and stuff, too. I'm sure they succeeded with some.

Yeah. And then kind of to put a chef's kiss on the history of black resistance and oppressive institutions and like the violent societies that they inhibit, I want to read Claude McKay's poem, If I Must Die, which has been reprinted an uncountable amount of times. And through doing this research, I have seen mentioned and cited like by almost every person that reads.

that I've read through, either whether they talk about Claude McKay themselves as an anti-fascist writer or an anti-racist writer, or people like James Yates and Salera Key that we'll talk about now or later on, adoring and using as a kind of mantra. So, quote, If we must die, let it not be like dogs, hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, while round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die, so that our precious blood may not be shed in vain, then even the monsters we defy shall be constrained to honor us through dead. O kinsmen, we must meet the common foe, though far outnumbered, let us show us brave, and further thousand blows deal one death blow.

What though before us lies the open grave, like men will face the murderous, cowardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back."

That's fucking metal. Yeah, it really is. I'm like, oh, I could put that through a little DIY punk song real quick. Yeah. Yeah, and many people, many of the people we will talk about in the future know the levels of fascism and what resisting sort of violent colonial and racial violence and terror means. James Yates, who I will be quoting heavily in this episode, describes kind of the conditions of Mississippi during his upbringing. Mm-hmm. Quote,

There was a mass lynching near the town of Shibuta, where the highway and railroad across the Chickasaw River. Some parts of the incident were written up in northern newspapers. No one ever is charged with the crime, although the local members of the Ku Klux Klan were well known. Five men and four women were hung, their feet dangling just inches above the river's muddy waters. Such was Mississippi in those times. The only thing a black man or woman had to do to get lynched was not move off the sidewalk for Miss Ann or Mr. Charlie.

A black must never be caught drinking from a white-only fountain, or making the mistake of using the front door instead of the back door. Stealing a chicken or a pig was very dangerous. Being caught at this could get you 20 years on the chain gang. If you were black in Mississippi, lightning would surely strike home sooner or later. Here's an example of how it struck in Quitman. Around 1918, my uncle Willie, while working in the sawmill one day, accidentally hit a white man with a piece of lumber he was carrying. He managed to make it home before being chased away from the mill.

The news spread like wildfire all throughout town, passing word, lynching tonight. I can remember Grandma Lizzie pacing the floor all throughout the afternoon. Aunt Belle, my uncle's wife, was almost speechless. He would die fighting rather than be hung by the kluxers.

The only problem now was the supply of ammunition. That day, the town merchants had stopped selling shells to black folks. Living almost next door to my uncle Willie was a white family, the Linnens, a husband, a wife, and three daughters. We called the man Mr. Gus. He had an unusual way of speaking English. I could only catch one or two words out of ten. Mr. Gus knew more about lumber than anybody in the sawmill and equipment. Still, he was an outcast. Quote, "'White trash to most white people.'"

It was said he came from up north, but I still often heard him talk about Ireland, a place I had never heard about before. Mr. Gus was a small in structure, but big in heart. He'd heard the news about the Ku Klux Klan was coming to lynch my uncle that night. Uncle Willie heard a voice. Willie! Willie! Mr. Gus wanted to make sure my uncle wouldn't start shouting. Mr. Gus asked my uncle, what can I do to help you? Uncle Willie told him about how the white merchants even refused to sell rabbit shot to blacks.

Mr. Gus walked away without even saying a word. He made his way to equipment and bought ammunition and then returned to my uncle's house with it. Here, he said, defend yourself. And then he went back to town and told the whites, some of y'all are going to get killed by those niggers if you try to lynch that Willie, end quote.

And this is like a kind of like really long part of the text that I pull a lot from James Yates memoir, Mississippi to Madrid, which I highly recommend folks check out. It's really beautiful and hits a lot of the points that I really wanted to hit in this piece. But okay. So this person who's quote this is from is one of the people who later went and fought in Spain. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. Okay. And this is kind of his,

kind of understanding of like, this is what racial terror and what living in Mississippi kind of was at the time. And to me, one of the big lessons around this is like, you never know who your neighbor may be or those, like those with conviction around you will let themselves be known. And the answer isn't always to react immediately, but always to prepare as soon as possible. And one thing I read from this text was like,

like the intricacies of race, even in Mississippi itself with like this obviously outcast Irish man being like, what can I do to help you? Um, as well as like folks, their relationship being based on the shop floor and the lumber yard and how they're also your neighbor. And like, these are the spaces of organizing against racial terror, against patriarchal violence that, um,

organizers all around the world do a lot of brilliant work in that I wanted to highlight as well, that there's a lot of life-saving work that happens just on your shop floor and in your neighborhood that we could be extending and organizing so that we are more prepared for the levels of increasing violence that Americans face. No, that makes sense. It's like just literally finding ways to make sure that

Well, we have class solidarity with each other, you know, like realizing like, all right, we're all dealing with a bunch of different shit. But like at the end of the day, here we are on the like fucking shop floor. No, that that's cool. Yeah.

But you know what else is on the shop floor? I'm coming in before Jordan has a chance to do it, but now I'm messing it up because it's not the best transition I've ever done. I was going to say, you know what's not on the shop floor? Solidarity. Wait, solidarity is actually, I don't remember what I was going to say anymore. Well, there's usually ads on that because you can listen to the radio while you're working and stuff. Maybe you're listening to this while working right now. And if so, well, even if you're not working, here's ads. I don't know. Here they are.

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And we're back. You can stop skipping. Unless you're a Cool Zone Premium member, whatever that means. I don't know if that's still a thing. Cooler Zone Media. Cooler Zone Media. Then you didn't have to listen to ads. Is that available on Android yet? Nope. Yeah, I was going to say, I wouldn't know. I'm purely an Android user. Yeah, fair. I have no excuse. I'm on an iPhone and I still end up...

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So in this time in America, around like 1910s, 1920s, even with the Great Migration happening and before then, especially during like James Yates' upbringing, it's important for me to remind folks that the South was a majority black and that the apartheid progressiveness of American liberty was in full force towards its black residents with both secret and open organizing collectives for liberalism.

economic stability and education forming in many communities. Uh, it's where like a lot of where SNCC comes from. Like when we think about like a lot of revolutionary, uh, stuff that came out of like the sixties and thirties, Ella Baker, like these anti-authoritarian traditions as well. And that black anti-fascist urge to drive for communal institutions and which participants were valued and relied upon was not just the tools that they use, but it was like the motives for how they viewed leadership in and of itself. Um,

That makes sense to me. I've read a lot about black cooperative stuff, and especially there's a lot of black cooperative farming that came out of the South and stuff. That's cool. That tracks. That's interesting to me. Yeah, Ella Baker, who came up during this period and in this area down South, was very much a...

They were big on doing leadership training so that everybody could see leadership, call out terrible leadership, and be able to take it upon themselves to have the reins to feel their own power to make decisions and have those decisions be valued and to see bad decisions and authoritarian leadership and cut that shit off. Hell yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And so by around like the 1930s, the Great Depression had deepened economic disparities. Black activists were organizing and the beatings that they took for protesting unemployment, both in the South and the North, helped them see repression at home as a part of like a global authoritarian surge. Groups like the Unemployment Councils and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights began tying local conditions to international fascism. The state's brutal crackdowns mirrored what was happening both at home and abroad. Okay.

And then there was the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini in 1935 that really lit a fire under a lot of black activists and under a lot of internationalists as well.

From about 1935, the invasion of Ethiopia began, ending in February of 36. There was still a lot more going on there, but Italian forces invaded with over 200,000 soldiers utilizing tanks, firearms, aerial offenses, including poison gas, mustard gas, and bombing civilian and military positions.

Both to deter resistance and also to just destroy and be able to use the land as they needed. They were also, as they even claimed, practicing what they wanted to do, which is like this extension of this colonial imperial violence being the practice for how they would do what we see now as colonialism. Okay, so we're going to go practice on these people who don't have any kind of munitions to fight us back as equals or whatever? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, and they also just like something we see now in Gaza as well, like international medical units were bombed, killed discriminately, even though there was no way to not know they were medical units, but they didn't really care. That was kind of their point. Cool.

Yeah, because for many black folks at the time, Ethiopia represented hope, pride, in resisting all sort of colonial advances. It's still kind of known as this place in the black community as like Ethiopia was never colonized. It's like a really big phrasing. Whether that's what people consider true or not is a different thing in my head, but there is a history and really long resistance. Because this is not the first time Italy had advances in the region at all, especially if you know about the history of Rome.

Well, okay, so this is really fascinating to me because I hadn't... This means that these are, like, literally the first anti-fascists. The first people fighting a war against fascism. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think Italy invaded anyone prior to that, right? I mean, you have anti-fascists in terms of people fighting within Italy and within Germany, but the first, like, war against fascism is in Ethiopia, then. Yeah, like, by the fascists who want to name themselves, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Shit. So like black folks are literally the original anti-fascist in this context. I know. That's cool. We do it good. We do it best. Well, best. We do it first. I don't know if we do it best. Whatever. Yeah. Fuck it. But it was very much like Ethiopia, especially at the time was seen as a place where European domination was not taking its reign on the affinate continent. And with the rising authoritarianism after a bunch of tumultuous years of the first world war, uh,

a lot of world leaders and especially America into like their isolationist kind of vibe. It also, with the rising authoritarianism, led for like these strong man type leadership narratives to be built by people who were already had access to material and to things that moved the political scenes. So they relied on like rising nationalism and like the same kind of

collapse of economic conditions that social justice advocates and revolutionaries face

built communal campaigns of economic emancipation on. Authoritarians then went around and built nationalism through alleged quick and easy solutions just founded in fear, xenophobia, and terror and violence through... Okay, so the same shit. Nothing changes is what you're getting at. Yeah, no. And then they used technological advances that become very accessible at the period, like radio and film, to kind of bolster this imagery of strong leadership and of...

their imagination being worked through. And it's kind of like the saying that we're living in somebody else's dream. It's just our nightmare. So we should be able to build our dream reality right now as well. And like somebody dreamed of this system that we're living in and they think it's hunky dory and it's actually not.

But yeah, there were groups in different formations of communists, anarchists, and social reformers alike that were organizing to unite the working class away from capitalist-based solutions and to look towards each other for even just figuring out new solutions.

What are you talking about now? Are you just talking about globally or is this related? Yeah, kind of globally, like around the 1930s and with this rise of fascism. And I don't know who coined this phrase, but there's this real idea that fascism is always writing the tales of a failed revolution. Yeah, that makes sense. It gives that aesthetic of dealing with social and economic problems and it can sell that aesthetic to you without selling you material conditions.

or actually changing your material conditions. So as this invasion of Ethiopia unfolded, it was a clear escalation for folks in the States about the escalation in world authoritarian violence.

And across the nation of the U.S., people erupted in protest. Signs reading, hands off Ethiopia, and the organizing to expose the links of anti-colonial resistance abroad to the anti-lynching campaigns at home became even stronger. And it all kind of became part of the same struggles, um...

There is Salaria Key, who is someone else I'm going to talk about a lot more, who's a black nurse and anti-fascist that went over to go lend aid to the Spanish Republic. They were at this time still in the South, and I believe at this point they were in the Midwest, and they were helping raise funds for an entire 75-bed hospital to be built in Ethiopia. And Yates goes on to describe some of the organizing that they saw in their book, Mississippi to Madrid, as, quote,

So it really, like, this beginning of these, like,

people recognizing the global fascist and authoritarian threat and doing like the on the ground at home grassroots organizing to talk to your neighbors about it see if we can talk to any of our politicians who have way more sway when it comes to other world leaders unless well I'm not gonna get into that and then um

there were street demonstrations and riots over the invasion in most large cities. Uh, there was like a minority of black folks looting a lot of Italian shops at the time. Like there was a lot of like horizontal racial violence happening. Well, horizontal is a weird way to say it for me. Um,

But yeah, but groups ended up organizing and putting out statements that Italians themselves did not agree with Mussolini, which to a lot of folks that went over to go fight, which there were about 90 black anti-fascists from America that went over to go fight. It became even clearer to them with how many Italian soldiers ended up joining the internationalist brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

Yeah, it's a kind of a good moment to be like, oh yeah, right. There's, there's internationalists and anti-fascists in every fucking place is like all going over there together. That's, that's, that's beautiful.

Yeah, and as most people listening now may know, protesting and urging your state to change foreign policy decision on an ongoing war that the state has already deemed its response to is very hard, tiring, and a lot of times some consider fruitless. But it's not. There are many, many things to do. And this is a constant in U.S. history that leads every generation of protesters to advance their tactics and develop and reimagine what goals they have to reconsider what is a winning campaign.

And for folks in the early 20th century, especially black people, Yates talks about what it feels like or what it felt like to decide to start getting engaged. And a lot of that came when Republican Spain itself started to come under attack after the invasion of Ethiopia.

gonna read the decision that kind of that james yates and their like affinity group with were just like they were living with a bunch of artists in new york at this time or maybe it was chicago just being around organizing scenes going to rallies train hopping um just doing the thing yeah same yeah uh-huh um he said quote the loft had become a very gloomy place

Then one day, Herman rushed in with an armful of groceries and newspapers. He held five different papers in his hands, and all of them read in effect, Republican Spain under attack. The headlines screamed out at us, and the fascist collaboration in Spain seemed to jump off the pages. One paper boldly announced, Mussolini pledges the support of his troops.

The article concluded by saying that Spanish Republican government, democratically elected, was asking the entire world for volunteers to come to Spain and aid in its fight against Mussolini, Hitler, and the fascist generals. Herman shouted at no one in particular, "'Now you see? What did I tell you? I've been saying for three years that Hitler would move. First he'd tighten his Nazi grip on Germany, and then he'd look around the rest of Europe. Such a maniac cannot be appeased. I've said it over and over, but who will listen?'

Alonzo didn't look up. He stared silently at his paper, and then he said in his typical quiet manner, "'I'm going. I'm volunteering. The time for talking is over. You've got to put your convictions where your mouth is.' I was silent, with the question pressed upon me, "'Am I ready to go to Spain with Alonzo?'

I'd been more than ready to go to Ethiopia, but that was different. Ethiopia, a black nation, was part of me. I was just beginning to learn about the reality of Spain and Europe, but I knew what was at stake. There was the poor, the peasants, the workers, and the unions, the socialists, and the communists. Together, had won an election against the big landowners, the monarchy, and the right-wingers in the military. It was the kind of victory that would have brought black people to the top levels of government if such an election had been won in the U.S.,

The new government in Spain was dividing its wealth with the peasants. Unions were organizing in each factory and social services were being introduced. Spain was the perfect example of the world I dreamed of. End quote. That's fucking cool. I'm just gonna... Like, that moment... I don't know. I know that's most of my response to this script so far is that's fucking cool. But, like, that moment of, like, no, we just gotta do it. Yeah. And being like, oh, shit, yeah, you're right. This is the same struggle in a different place. Like...

I don't know. It's cool. Yeah. And I think it's a lot of, to me, something in the beauty of this that I see is it's kind of also some of the beauty I see in SNCC. Oh, what is their actual name? Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Yeah. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and with Martin Luther King Jr. My co-host and I, Prince Shakur, talk about,

a lot, especially during the election around like what voting means to us. Um, and what like, especially as black anarchists and what voting that's respected by the state means. And there's these beautiful speeches of Martin Luther King, um,

very early on being like, we will have our black judges, our black cops, our black lawmakers will be at everywhere. If they just give us the vote, we won't need to even hear from the white oppressors anymore. And I know damn well, even as a black anarchist, if I had heard that 100 years ago, I'd be in the back like, yeah, let's get our thing on. Because it's one of those fundamental human urges that folks see something being denied them, something granted access to others. And they're like, well, why not?

Yeah. And the imagination of being able to think, oh, well, if we were able to, especially post-Reconstruction, actually have a black republic outside of that, that was like...

based on the majority and based on how things were going they would be the government of the south would be a lot blacker than it is now and has ever been post-reconstruction i think about this constantly as soon as i learned about how terribly you know the ku klux klan came in and was like we're gonna fuck this up through random non-legal violence but then instead they just came in with jim crow and were like actually we're gonna put this down legally and like

Yeah, how completely fundamentally different the United States would be without Jim Crow. It wouldn't just be like, oh, we had reached equality sooner or whatever. But like, just literally, it would be a different country and a almost certainly substantially more interesting and good one.

Yeah, and extremely interesting. And that's something that even now urges, there's efforts for the Republic of New Africa, which is the combination of the Deep South states into being formed a republic. And even through to the Black Panther parties kind of held this political line that I still love, which is we still haven't got to decide whether we wanted to be U.S. citizens or not, and we should have a referendum on that. Because...

I mean, yeah, like, all right, we got, we, we get to choose and we're going to try and choose. Yeah, no, it's interesting. Yeah. And with that conviction, they had decided they were going to travel to Spain. Um, and that is a kind of conversation that happened with a lot of folks with,

Some folks lying to their family about where they were going. And one thing before I end this off, I'd like to talk about how isolationist the U.S. was at this point and how they very much, I think as you said earlier, they were like, we're not picking a side, which usually means, neutrality usually means you're never fully neutral. Like they stopped people from getting passports to go over to Spain to go and try to...

actually participate so a lot of folks had to go directly to France and cross the Pyrenees mountain range and like all these different ways it was not a straight shot for anyone to go straight to Spain unless you were already over there there was like a combination of boat train and hiking through these mountain ranges yeah

Yeah, the whole isolation just means you're siding with the oppressor. The US, France, and England were like, oh, we're staying out of it. And by that, I mean, we're putting an embargo on arms for either side to Spain. Whereas Germany and Italy are like, sweet, we're going to send fucking munitions to the fascists. That's great. And leaving the overwhelming majority of international munitions came in through the USSR, which of course is its own mess because then they were like, and now we're in charge of everything.

Yes, absolutely. And I think there's a lot of stuff written about the Communist Party and how the USSR engaged in the Spanish Civil War, which is not something I get too into in these next couple episodes. But it is a very interesting way to see international relations be played out and how the USSR took that mantle up when it came to other revolutionary causes. Something even Che Guevara had issues with.

Oh shit. I need to one day I'll read more about that whole thing. There's the infinite onion of history. Yeah. Fun fact, Shay went and fought in the democratic Republic of Congo after he yelled at the USSR for having terrible revolutionary politics with other international brigades and went over there to go try to help them before he went over to more South and Central America. Yeah. Yeah. It's very, very interesting. Um,

And yeah, travel wasn't a straight shot. It was a combination of boat, train, and hiking through treacherous mountains. James Yates describes one of the last moments of their climb as, quote, "...within minutes of beginning the second lap of the climb, we tossed away most of our possessions. Men threw away their knapsacks, coats, blankets, anything to lighten the load. They even took off their socks and flung them into the darkness. I kept my shoes but threw away most everything else."

And then when arriving, I really love how Yates describes their first contact after these like

The Pyrenees mountain range is like they went up one mountain, then down another steep, steep mountain, and then up another steep, steep mountain, and then down another steep, steep mountain. And then the second lap was up another... It was a lot of up and down, and it's, to me, one of those convictions because a lot of folks died just getting to Spain, and specifically on that mountain range. And it kind of, to me, colors some of the approach of...

This is something that I didn't really mention it, but like Yates talk about, like, it didn't really hit James what they were really going to do until they were on the boat to France. And they were like, crap, I might die.

yeah um and i think that's also something that really shows how little society back then even kind of now we have an issue with it but talked about war the trauma of war what it means to like engage in violent acts but then also what it means to take those violent acts that are being disposed onto you and do something to dismantle the system that is making that systemic yeah

But yeah, and then the kind of through lines that in also highly recommended, like folks read this Mississippi to Madrid because they bring so many beautiful comparisons between Spanish culture and black American culture. That kind of struck me, which I guess I'll just end some of this off by saying another quote from James Yates book is quote around five in the morning. We arrived at our first Spanish outpost, a monastery, which,

It was midway down the mountain and served as a way station for those who had been forced to take this route into Spain. No monks were there. A few Spanish loyalists guarded the post, receiving and dispatching volunteers. It struck me that this monastery was much like the places used by abolitionists who temporarily housed slaves escaping the plantations of the South in America. End quote. That's cool. I mean, sorry, I keep fucking saying that. But like, this idea of the through line that they don't see this as a separate thing and

I don't know. Sometimes it's interesting. Yeah, and this was only the beginning of their journey and one that was mirrored by many anti-fascists and black anti-fascists alike that had to go through these long, long treks. Yeah. And there's even more to come. And I hopefully am going to tell you even more about the specific anti-fascists that came through next episode.

Hell yeah. I am impressed that you managed in true cool people who did cool stuff style. One half of the podcast is to get you to where the thing happens. That's what we do. Yep. I'm making fun of myself when I say this, but it's like, it makes so much sense with this because it's like, yeah, the whole point is that this connection between these two struggles is so often ignored. And so showing the connection directly. Fuck yeah. Yeah.

I'm excited to find out what happens. Yeah, and there's so much more history for folks to delve into in context of anti-racist and anti-oppressive organizing that drove...

52 different nationalities to come to Spain and fight some fascists. And yeah, I think it's a really beautiful context for folks to look into or like point of history for folks to look into. I think there's a lot of really dope like organizing, especially like black autonomous and cooperative organizing that happened post reconstruction that is rarely, rarely talked about.

Well, we're going to hear more about what happened in Spain with it on Wednesday. But in the meantime, what if people are like, wow, I sure liked hearing Jordan talk about a thing. If only there was another podcast where I could hear Jordan talking about a thing. What could they do?

Well, they could hop over to anywhere that they listen to podcasts and look up The Dugout, a Black Anarchist podcast. Or you can go to our Instagram at dugoutpodcast and check out the link in our bio to get us on Spotify or any of those major platforms because sometimes it's still a little hard to reach out to us because we did a podcast called The Dugout in America. So it's very baseball-heavy things. It's kind of hard to find our show. Yeah.

So whenever you're listening to this podcast, just go over, listen to The Dugout, a Black Anarchist podcast, or just start getting into baseball. That's another thing you could do if you want. Sophie, are you into baseball? Basketball. I know you're into basketball, but I was wondering if you're multi-sportist, sportacus. I don't dislike baseball, but it's not a passion.

Okay. Fair enough. Yeah, I only ever played in the outfield and my parents would always get mad at me because I just did like gymnastics in the outfield and was never there when the ball was coming my way. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

All right. We will see you all on Wednesday. See ya. Bye. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, "Hey, we came to play"? Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially? Step up like a boss and save the day? Or see what life's like under the tree of life? Did you? If you could, would you? When we come through, it's true magic, 'cause we came to play. Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. This episode, Lizzo opens up like never before about self-love, transformation, and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore. Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me. And that disconnect is depressing. The Grammy goes to Lizzo. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.