In his life Debs was revered by the most militant of Black activists, with everyone from the African Blood Brotherhood’s Cyril V. Briggs to the Negro World’s Hubert H. Harrison praising ‘the Grand Old Man.’ While Debs’ positions obviously fell short of the needs of that time and this, he most certainly evolved over his life, and as was noted by Black writers like Du Bois below, was miles ahead of most of his white contemporaries.

‘The Passing of Debs’ by W.E.B. Du Bois from The Crisis. Vol. 33 No. 2. December, 1926.

EUGENE DEBS was one of the few leaders of organized labor in the United States who realized that a large part of the laboring force in this country is of Negro descent. Most labor leaders are either too ignorant or too prejudiced to acknowledge this. Debs knew that no real emancipation of laboring classes in the United States can come: as long as black laborers are in partial serfdom. He realized that that emancipation called for effort on the part of both black people and white; that black people must recognize that their future lies not on a foundation of wealth and luxury but with the people who work and save; that only by a united effort on the part of labor can organized wealth be kept from autocracy and the degradation of vast portions of mankind. On the other hand, unless white labor recognizes the brotherhood of man, it becomes the helpless tool of modern industrial imperialism.

The death of so great a mind and so brave a heart as that of Eugene Debs is a calamity to this poor nation.

The Crisis A Record of the Darker Races was founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910 as the magazine of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. By the end of the decade circulation had reached 100,000. The Crisis’s hosted writers such as William Stanley Braithwaite, Charles Chesnutt, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina W. Grimke, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Arthur Schomburg, Jean Toomer, and Walter White.

PDF of full issue: https://archive.org/download/sim_crisis_1926-12_33_2/sim_crisis_1926-12_33_2.pdf