ABSTRACT
In the writings of African-American radicals, the Spanish Civil War is often imagined as the locus for an international anti-colonial and anti-fascist struggle in which the African diaspora had vested interest. The anti-colonial call, which had been recently mobilised in the face of fascist aggression in Ethiopia, was seized upon in the context of Franco's Spain. By the late 1930s The Crisis could claim that in Harlem ‘Spanish Freedom and Negro freedom were made to be synonymous’ and nearly 100 African Americans joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight for the Spanish Republic. The links made between racism and fascism by black activists were informed by the lived experience of ‘race’ in the US and also by the ambitious and dynamic race/class politics of the black Left. This chapter traces the powerful, if complex, connections made between anti-fascism and anti-racism, which evidence an ambitious race-conscious radical politics. It argues that African American writers and activists saw fascism as a particular threat to racialised subjects. As victims of the ‘domestic fascism’ of Jim Crow many of these activists pointed to their vanguard role in fighting fascism at home and abroad and presented an anti-fascist vision which was dependent on anti-racist transnationalism.
