On this day, 15 September 1954, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade – American volunteers in the Spanish civil war – were brought before the Subversive Activities Control Board to respond to attempts to classify them as a subversive organisation.
This is some of what Crawford Morgan, one of its members, said: “Being a Negro, and all of the stuff that I have had to take in this country, I had a pretty good idea of what fascism was and I didn’t want no part of it. I got a chance to fight it there with bullets and I went there and fought it with bullets. If I get a chance to fight it with bullets again, I will fight it with bullets again… I felt that if we didn’t lick Franco and stop fascism there, it would spread over lots of the world. And it is bad enough for white people to live under fascism, those of the white people that like freedom and democracy. But Negroes couldn’t live under it. They would be wiped out… From the time I arrived in Spain I felt like a human being, like a man. People didn’t look at me with hatred in their eyes because I was Black, and I wasn’t refused this or refused that because I was Black. I was treated like all the rest of the people were treated, and when you have been in the world for quite a long time and have been treated worse than people treat their dogs, it is quite a nice feeling to go someplace and feel like a human being.”
Learn more about the civil war in our podcast: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/06/17/e39-the-spanish-civil-war-an-introduction/ https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1528858003966011/?type=3