More following on from this. Trying to work out what I want to try and argue.
A great many African Americans paid attention to the Spanish situation. Basically everyone did who was a radical or progressive at the time. I want to argue that some African Americans had a unique view on the situation, as expressed in their attention to the Moorish troops deployed by the fascist General Franco.
African Americans who served as volunteers in Spain and who supported the Spanish cause outside of Spain regularly said that part of why Spain mattered was because it was imperative that fascism be stopped. In this they were not unique, many people were anti-fascist at the time. African Americans involved with Spain argued, however, that they already had experience with fascism. They decried the segregation and violence in the United States as fascist in nature. Having experienced fascism, African Americans in the Spanish cause claimed a special knowledge and special commitment to winning the war. Arguably, Spain served as a sort of proxy battlefield. Unable to take up arms against fascists at home, African Americans could do so abroad.
African Americans who served in Spain did not got to Spain as a proxy for fighting fascism at home. Rather, they saw it as way to strike back at an enemy who attacked the African diaspora. Black volunteers routinely cited Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia as part of their motivation for fighting. The volunteers saw Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia as an attack on black people around the world. Unable to fight Italy in Ethiopia, black radicals rushed to fight Italy in Spain.
Commentators on African Americans in Spain, including African American volunteers themselves, frequently pointed to a lack of racism in Spain. This speaks to the black volunteers’ experience of racial equality in Spain. This experience and the degree of difference from the United States should not be discounted. African Americans in the International Brigades experienced an integrated military composed of people from all over the world. The first African Americans to command integrated military units were commanders in the International Brigades. As volunteers against Franco’s forces, African American brigaders found the Spanish people enthusiastic at their presence, a far cry from the color line they had known at home.
Still, descriptions of Spain as free from racism were simply not true. Spain had a long standing history of oppressing ethnic minorities such as the Basque, as well as racism against Moors. Anti-Franco propaganda sometimes had a racial cast. Drawings portrayed Moorish troops in exaggerated and dehumanizing ways. Loyalist propaganda made allegations of Moorish troops raping Spanish women. While soldiers serving under Franco no doubt committed atrocities including sexual assault, highlighting Moors as particularly sexually predatory spoke to anxieties about inter-racial sex as well as racial stereotypes of the Moors as dark savages. All of this would have been familiar to African Americans who lived under Jim Crow. Anti-fascism could contain an element of racism.
Anti-fascism could sometimes include an element of colonialism as well, or at least be insufficiently anti-colonial. Spain’s government rebuffed a request from Moroccan nationalists to give independence to Morocco. This might have undermined the willingness of Moroccan troops to fight under Franco.
The explanation for these insufficiencies on race and colonialism may have their explanation in the popular front. Spain had a popular front government. The Communist Party in the United States and the Communist International also pursued a popular front strategy. The popular front stemmed from the view that fascism presented a grave threat and one which the radical left alone could not defeat. According to this view, radicals were to set up coalitions including the more progressive capitalists and small business owners, and the political parties which represented their interests. This approach led radicals to avoid rocking the boat too much so as not to alienate coalition partners. In the United States, the popular front vision resulted in part in limits to the Communist Party’s external opposition to racism. In France and in Spain the popular front governments never achieved an adequate colonial policy.
In this context, Amany African Americans had a different view, one which expressed itself via attention to Moorish soldiers. Attention to the Moors and to the need for the liberation of Morocco opposed prevailing Spanish views on two counts. On the one hand, against Spanish racism, African American commentators expressed solidarity with the Moors as part of a global black community. On the other hand, against the popular front inattention to national liberation, African American commentators wrote of the need to liberate Morocco, which meant the liberation of Morocco from occupation by Spain, and by extension meant self-determination for everyone across Africa.
At the same time, African Americans involved in the Spanish cause retained no small measure of the popular front strategy, or at least aspects thereof. One such aspect included the use of propaganda messages appealing to the interest of a given constituency in the attempt to knit that constituency into the popular front coalition. I have already discussed the claims to the total lack of racism in Spain. Even if African Americans really thought this, which is doubtful, expressions of this sort served three valuable propaganda purposes. They could be used to attempt to embarrass the United States, by showing that the United States was behind other parts of the world in terms of race relations. These claims could be used to bolster the credibility of the Communist Party among African Americans. If Loyalist Spain were truly free of racism, and the Communist Party was a chief defender of Spain, then the Party could be credibly held to be an important anti-racist organization. These claims could also be used in the attempt to marshal more support for Spain within African American communities, as a source of volunteers and donations.
African Americans in the Spanish cause displayed a second aspect of the popular front, it’s do not rock the boat sensibility.
Attention to the Moors as members of a diasporic community with African Americans and attention to the needs for Moroccan self-determination differed from the prevailing views. At the same time, this difference never came to a head and the implicit criticisms of the Spanish and Communist International leadership remained just that, implicit.
crashcourse666 
Interesting. I have a tiny and probably meaningless tidbit to add. The mainstream 2002 Spanish film Libertarias, which focuses on anarchist women in the Mujeres Libres, actually ends with heavily racialized Morrocan soldiers raping Spanish women, and Fascist Spanish officers stopping them. So these depictions haven’t necessarily gone anywhere, even in depictions by left-sympathetic film.
Hi Brendan,
That’s not meaningless at all, that’s really interesting and I may use that anecdote in the finished version of the paper. Thanks for that.
It’s tough I think, in that I have no doubt that troops under the fascists did commit atrocities like this, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were organized and systematic – as opposed to the occasional bad egg or individual initiative (that’s how this film excerpt sounds to me) – but the coding of the assault as particularly likely or particularly objectionable because the attacker is black, that’s really a problem.
I think there’s also a resonance here with the United States – rumors of sexual violence were often part of lynchings. The allegation that the man was a rapist was used to legitimate lynchings and stoke white men into (or make an acceptable social space for the expression of) violent anger. In reality there were actual charges – as opposed to rumors – like this in only a fraction of lynchings, but the story circulated as part of lynchings as defense of white femininity (and masculinity). I expect there’s an analog in this scenario with Moroccan troops, though I don’t know enough to prove that.
take care,
Nate
Another iteration.
Black Anti-Fascism and the Popular Front During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
Overview
People around the world within what I call the anti-fascist and pro-Spanish milieu saw Spain as a key site in the struggle against the threatening rise of fascism worldwide. I aim to show that black anti-fascists had a distinctive vision within this larger anti-fascist milieu.
The dominant perspective within anti-fascist circles in the mid- to late 1930s including within the Spanish government was called the Popular Front. The Popular Front, the anchor for which was the Communist International, amounted primarily to two views, that stopping fascism mattered more than anything else and that communists, socialists, and the working class were not going to be able to stop fascism on their own. The Popular Front aimed at cross-class political alliances to stop the rise of fascism and at no other goals.
Black anti-fascists, most of whom belonged to the Communist Party, shared elements of the popular front perspective, but still held distinctive views. Black anti-fascists understood racial oppression in the United States as fascist in nature. According to this understanding, opposing fascism in Spain offered an opportunity and an urgent challenge. In terms of Spain as opportunity, black anti-fascists saw Spain as a place to strike back against the forces of racial oppression faced by African descended people. In terms of Spain as urgent challenge, black anti-fascists saw the growth of fascism as a particular threat to black people. Thus, they saw the Spanish Civil War as an urgent issue for black people.
These perspectives listed so far made black anti-fascists distinctive but did not conflict with the dominant perspective within the anti-fascist milieu. In many ways, the black anti-fascist perspective fit with the Popular Front strategy of building as wide of support for anti-fascism as possible, because black anti-fascists appealed to other black people to defend Spanish democracy. One key piece of this appeal involved repeated reports of black anti-fascists encountering no racial prejudice in Spain, in order to paint the Spanish Civil War as a conflict between anti-racists and racists.
While black anti-fascists were often quite compatible with the Popular Front, their views on colonialism contradicted the larger anti-fascist milieu. The Popular Front did not want to alienate people who opposed fascism but supported colonialism. National liberationists urged the Spanish government to declare Morocco independent from Spain. They argued that this would cause Moroccan soldiers under the fascist generals to revolt and cause unrest in Morocco, thereby opening another front on which the fascists would have to fight. Spain’s popular front government rejected entreaties.
Black anti-fascists, in contrast, saw colonialism particularly with regard to Africa as central to the global order that produced the emergency in Spain. Furthermore, they emphasized national liberation in a way that did not fit with the lowest-common-denominator approach taken by the Popular Front. Black anti-fascists repeated cited Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 as a key part of their motivation to fight in Spain, in particular because Italy provided much military aid to Spanish fascists. Noncombatant black anti-fascists also showed a great deal of concern with Spain’s colony in Morocco and with black Moroccan soldiers fighting under fascist generals in Spain.
“While soldiers serving under Franco no doubt committed atrocities including sexual assault, highlighting Moors as particularly sexually predatory spoke to anxieties about inter-racial sex as well as racial stereotypes of the Moors as dark savages. All of this would have been familiar to African Americans who lived under Jim Crow. Anti-fascism could contain an element of racism.”
You’re completely missing the context of the Moor in Spain. How many centuries was it that the Moors enslaved the Spanish? Was that 800 years? Feelings about that kind of oppression don’t dissipate very readily. You’re seeing that whole business through American filters that are not appropriate. I’ve been listening to black men’s stories about their reception in Europe, and I do see a trend that they are treated enthusiastically in countries with a strong history of being colonized or abused by a harsh hierarchical caste system comparable to slavery. And those African American men will usually think it’s because those European people don’t ever see anyone like them, like they’re exotic or something, when, in fact, those people are very aware of who African Americans are, have followed the story with great interest for several centuries, and admire the way the situation has been handled over here.