Announcing the ‘Southern Worker,’ weekly paper of the Communist Party in the South. The paper began in August of that year, later becoming a monthly in 1933, continuing until 1937.

‘Why A Southern Communist Weekly?’ by S. Gerson from the Daily Worker. Vol. 6 No. 312. March 7, 1930.

A Communist newspaper for the South is of the greatest importance at the present time. Why? some will ask. Why is not the Daily Worker sufficient? For a number of reasons our national paper is not enough.

The South has been undergoing–and still is–a process of change from a farm country to a land of great mills, factories, shops and mines. As a matter of fact, certain sections are still almost wholly agricultural. This process has been effecting deep changes in the lives of the Southern toiling population. The invasion of Northern capital in the last ten years speeded up this process of change so that the changes that have taken place in the South in the last ten years are equal to those that took place in the North in the fifty years preceding. Hundreds of thousands have been lured off the barren mountain farms to the mills in the valleys below; thousands of framers have been pauperized by the cotton speculators and the so-called tobacco trust (really Wall Street finance capital) and forced to go to the mills. Negro and white workers have been brought together to slave side by side in huge factories. A “new working class” has been created. A working class of native-American workers, both Negro and white, the whites of old Anglo-Saxon stock. Off the mountains they came, their individualistic habits still strong, knowing more of hunting and trapping than of spindles and looms. Cities and small mill villages sprung up, like Topsy,–“just growed.” Intense speed-up and stretchout came, increased, and could be borne no longer. Fierce class struggles took place–Gastonia, Marion, dozens of places witnessed clashes between the workers on the one hand and the bosses and the bosses’ city and state government on the other.

All this is having its effect on the whole industrial and political life of the South. Splits in the democratic party; invasion of the republican party; overnight changes by capitalist senators and congressmen on the question of tariff, etc., etc. And all the time the organization of the workers going on under the leadership of the Communist Party and the T.U.U.L. against the most bitter opposition of the capitalist class, the capitalist government, the A. F. of L. and their Muste wing in the U.T.W.

In short, everything in the South bears the stamp of the phenomenally rapid process of change from an agrarian to an industrial section–with the added new and active factor of the presence of the Communist Party and the T.U.U.L.

To interpret all these changes minutely is not an easy task for our national Daily. It must, by its very nature, be a national organ of our Party, to interpret to the workers of the whole country their tasks in a Communist light. To demand, then, of the central organ of our Party that it accomplishes what is the task of a sectional organ is wrong. It is with this in mind that our Central Committee correctly decided upon a Southern Communist Weekly.

It will be the duty of the Southern weekly to interpret all these changes to the workers of the South from a class viewpoint; to point out the tasks and needs of the workers that flow from this process of change; to be the collective organizer and agitator of the Southern workers in their widely extended struggles; to carry on more sharply than ever before the struggle against racial oppression and for the unity of Negro and white workers; to help internationalize the struggles of the Southern workers; to carry on the fight against imperialist war and for the defense of the Soviet Union.

Our Southern weekly will carry on some of the best traditions of the revolutionary literature in the United States and other countries. In some ways it will resemble the “Iskra.” Just as the “Iskra” was taboo in the Russia of the czars, so our Southern Communist weekly will be banned by the bosses from the mill villages of the Carolinas and the steel towns of Alabama. But it will get to the workers. It will reach the textile workers of the Carolinas, the Negro stevedores of New Orleans the steel workers of Birmingham. It will penetrate to the bayous and lumber camps of Louisiana. It will come to the tobacco, cotton, and sugar plantations. It will reach America’s “dark masses” in plain, simple, working class language.

The establishment of the Southern weekly will definitely mark the emergence of the Southern workers as an active political force in the revolutionary movement of the whole world and as such, the establishment of the Southern Worker, has not only a native but an international significance.

Certainly the “Southern Worker” must be given the fullest support of the class-conscious workers of the U.S. Especially must the foreign-born workers, any of whom have gone thru the school of revolutionary training in the countries of their birth, see the necessity for creating and helping a weekly of this sort, one that will lead the Southern masses of American workers and farmers, both white and Negro, along the path to power and freedom.

“Iskra” means “Spark.” It was the paper of the Russian Bolsheviks at the beginning of the 20th Century. It was at one time edited by Lenin. It was a tremendous factor in the building of the present Russian Communist Party which led the workers of Russia to victory and freedom over the capitalists in the revolution of November, 1917-18. S.G.

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/1930/v06-n312-NY-mar-07-1930-DW-LOC.pdf