Editorial from the Daily Worker calling for a campaign of mass violation of segregation laws in the aftermath of the Denver pool fight.

‘The Fight Against Jim Crow Practices’ from the Daily Worker. Vol. 9 No. 203. August 25, 1932.

THE workers of Denver, Colorado, under the leadership of the Young Communist League, passed from words to deeds when on August 18 they attempted to smash the hideous Jim Crow practices in the city parks and bathing beaches against the Negro masses. Workers throughout the country will hail the action of over two hundred Negro and white young workers who participated in this militant action which was severely attacked by the police.

The Jim Crow practices against the Negro workers, who are so sorely in need of health facilities, means the destruction of the physical health of the Negro masses already worn down by malnutrition, poverty and misery arising out of their meager pay when employed, from the extensive unemployment and from the general attacks of the capitalists of which they are especially victimized. The ruling class, in its national and state governments, are bent upon retaining these Jim Crow practices intact as part of their program of isolating the Negro masses for greater exploitation and more savage oppression. The Denver police attack on the anti-Jim Crow demonstration is but one of many examples of the increasing terror against the Negro masses.

In the eyes of the white ruling class the Negroes have “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” The manager of the Denver parks, Lowry, who while admitting that “there is no law to keep you citizens from using this beach,” directed the following threat against the Negro workers in the demonstration:

“You are here at the instigation of the Communists and no good can come of this. You never before tried to use this beach. You know the white people are not going to stand for this. If you go into the water you are asking for trouble and I fear you will get it.”

This is the language which these capitalist henchmen use against the Negro masses fighting for their rights.

The workers must not only violate these Jim-Crow practices in mass action in the struggle for Negro Rights, but must see that these mass actions involve large numbers of both, white and Negro workers. The idea imbued in the workers by the bosses that Jim Crow practices are fixed and permanent and cannot be broken down is one of the forces operating for their maintenance. The workers, Negro and white, must militantly challenge these practices, must smash into them with militant mass action in a fighting alliance of white and Negro workers in the struggle against national oppression, for liberation of the Negro people, including full rights in every part of the country and self-determination for the Negro in the “Black Belt.”

In this election struggle, the workers must take up the fight for unconditional equal rights for the Negro masses, including a relentless struggle against the denial of the franchise to the Negro masses in various Southern states.

The development of mass actions in the fight for Negro rights will be a tremendous force in smashing these Jim Crow practices.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1932/v09-n203-NY-aug-25-1932-DW-LOC.pdf