White Communist union organizer Stephen Graham (Grahovac), arrested for “inciting the Negroes to insurrection” was born to Croatian peasants, emigrated as a child to Ohio, became homeless, went to jail, radicalized by Sacco and Vanzetti, joined the Communist Party, and went South. He remained active, dying three years after this article in a work accident at age 25.

‘Breaking Barriers’ by Sol Auerbach (James S. Allen) from Labor Defender. Vol. 5 No. 1. January, 1930.

“INCITING the Negro to rebellion.” That is the charge on which Stephan Graham was arrested in Norfolk, Virginia, and then released on $2,500 bail pending his trial. That is the charge brought against him by the Spring Manufacturing Company of Norfolk, 85 per cent of whose workers are Negroes, most of them young women.

You might think that this was taking place in the days of slavery before the Civil War. The charge itself–“Inciting the Negro to rebellion”–might have come from the lips of some Southern gentleman fighting to keep his slaves on his plantation.

But the South, and with it Norfolk, has changed. The Spring Manufacturing Company, a subsidiary of the Nachman Spring-filled Corporation of Chicago, Ill., which has other units scattered through both the South and North, has two plants in Norfolk. In Norfolk, too, and in its vicinity, are 29 fertilizer plants, large shipbuilding yards, saw mills–making up a smoke-stack skyline of an industrial center.

In these mills work many Negro workers–men, women and youngsters. In the Southern Spring Manufacturing Company, where Graham was employed, the young Negro workers make from $1.25 to $2.25 a day of up to 10 hours on piece work, the young girl workers in the sewing department are started at $1.00 per day.

Into this scene came the Communist, Stephan Graham. In the words of Graham: “After working and seeing these horrible working conditions, I talked to a number of workers, distributed literature in the plant, and told the workers that the only way to improve these conditions. is by organizing into truly militant industrial unions, under the leadership of the Trade Union Unity League.”

This much the bosses are agreed upon: white and Negro workers may have equality to work alike under slave conditions in their plants. But under no circumstances must they be permitted to stretch their equality further, as, for instance, equality translated into solidarity of the Negro and white workers in the fight against the new slavery of the South and the older one of the North.

This was the message brought to the South by the Communists and the National Textile Workers’ Union in Gastonia. This was the message, that by the logic of the events at Gastonia, blazed a trail through the South.

Walking on this trail and hewing it further came the white worker Stephan Graham. That is what he told his fellow Negro workers in the plant where he worked.

Graham called a meeting of the workers in his plant for October 15 to talk about organizing a union. In the meeting hall, to which most of the workers had walked more than two miles, were about 150 Negro workers, most of them from the Southern Spring Company.

“You have no right calling n***s to meetings,” said one of the detectives to Graham after the meeting. Graham said that the meetings would continue. He was arrested, told that “he wasn’t fit to associate even with n***rs,” and threatened with “being taken into an alley and used as a football.”

Graham’s room was raided, all literature found there confiscated, and then he was charged with “inciting the Negroes to rebellion.”

But a trail once blazed cannot be so easily buried. From the mouths of the present southern gentlemen in Norfolk again come the old familiar words: “inciting the Negroes to rebellion.” The inciting they themselves have done in their plants, with their wages, in the homes they have rented the Negro workers to live in, in the barriers of prejudice they have erected around them. There come leaders to show the way in breaking down these barriers.

Stephen Graham is one of these leaders. To set him free unconditionally is part and parcel of the whole fight to organize the South, part of the fight against jim- crowism and lynching, part of that great struggle against exploitation built on the solidarity of the workers of all races and nationalities.

Labor Defender was published monthly from 1926 until 1937 by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Workers Party of America, and later Communist Party-led, non-partisan defense organization founded by James Cannon and William Haywood while in Moscow, 1925 to support prisoners of the class war, victims of racism and imperialism, and the struggle against fascism. It included, poetry, letters from prisoners, and was heavily illustrated with photos, images, and cartoons. Labor Defender was the central organ of the Scottsboro and Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaigns. Editors included T. J. O’ Flaherty, Max Shactman, Karl Reeve, J. Louis Engdahl, William L. Patterson, Sasha Small, and Sender Garlin.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1930/v05n01-jan-1930-LD.pdf