Damned for organizing “Negroes against whites,” Covington Hall on the enormity of the interracial strike of lumber workers in Jim Crow Louisiana led by the I.W.W. in 1912 and 1913 creating the Brotherhood of Timber Workers. A legendary wobbly organizer and poet, Hall, a Southern-born white activist whose organizing of Louisiana’s timber workers forced him to confront race, in contradictory ways to be sure, but in ways few other white radicals of the time did, were willing, or dreamed of doing.

“Negroes Against Whites” by Covington Hall from International Socialist Review. Vol. 13 No. 4. October, 1912.

“THEY are trying to organize the negroes against the whites!” This has been one of the chief howls raised against the I.W.W. and the Brotherhood of Timber Workers by the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association and its hired thugs and assassins to justify the hyena-like deeds they are now committing against the white workingmen who must, perforce, take the lead in the struggle now raging for the overthrow of peonage in the South. “Organizing the negroes against the whites!”

This cry is raised for several purposes; first, to distract the attention of all the workers from the vital questions at issue, to turn their attention from such gross, material things as higher wages, shorter hours and better living conditions in the camps and mill towns to loftier ideas and ideals, such as the effect of the “spiritual significance of white supremacy” on the whisky-soaked, fossilized brain of a guntoting Democratic troglodyte, a human brute with whom no self-respecting negro would acknowledge his “social equality”; second, having failed to split it on craft, political, religious or other lines, to split the Brotherhood into warring factions on race lines, and thereby beat all the workers back into the old meek submission to peonage; third, an attempt on the part of the cave-men of capitalism to justify in the eyes of a world, that is already in revolution against their demoniac rule, the infamous and inhuman deeds that have been and are still being committed against the timber workers and their allies by the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association and its thugs and gunmen.

And, first, second, third, fourth, to “Divide and Conquer.”

That this is true is shown by the fact that right in the midst of the war, when the tom-toms of race prejudice were sounding their loudest and wildest alarms, John Henry Kirby and his gang have not hesitated to use black scabs against white men and white scabs against black men when they dared go on strike for human conditions in the peon pens of the association. They have also used black thugs against black union men and more than one rebellious white worker, it is whispered, has met his death in the darkness of the night at the hands of a black gunman and vice versa.

More than once the association has thrown an army of gunmen around the “quarters” where lived its black slaves and dared the white peons, on the penalty of their lives, to so much as try to speak one word with them, for it was hard pressed and hard set against the “organization of the negroes against the whites,” the only “whites,” in this instance, seeming to be the Lumber Kings, their troglodyte managers, superintendents, foremen, suckers, gunmen and thugs. There were according to these “high born” gentry, evidently no “white” men in the union, though hundreds of them had white skins and were southern born for generations on generations.

And they were not white because they had grown tired of the “white supremacy” and “social equality” flim-flam, and set out to organize One Big Union of all the workers and overthrow peonage forever in the mills and forests of the South.

They had lost, thanks to the Socialist propaganda, the hallucination that the Lumber Kings cared anything about a lumberjack’s color, race or nationality, and proceeded to organize as they were worked—all together against the boss, instead of all apart and for him as heretofore. This naturally sent the boss up in the air, and you can’t blame the boss, for, for the first time in a generation the southern oligarchs saw their sacred stealings menaced by a uniting working class, which could not be tolerated; so all the methods of “chivalry” were called into play and the furies of hell turned loose on the “insolent,” “upstart” workingmen and working farmers who dared to preach and were attempting to organize industrial democracy. Strange how those simple words, industrial democracy, sends the master and pimping classes into such hydrophobic anger!

But despite all the madness of the masters, all their murdering and slugging, the Union still pressed on its way, preaching and teaching the solidarity of labor, ever crying: “A man’s life for all the workers in the mills and forests! Don’t be a Peon! Be a Man.”

Far and wide that cry is sounding on through Dixie—the shriek of the association’s rifles at Grabow is echoing and reechoing that message through the swamps, over the plains and up the hills, back into corners where otherwise it would have taken years for it to go, and the workers, startled from their slumbers, are asking each other in whispers: “Can it be?” “Is the New South, the South of labor, off its knees and on the march to union and victory, at hand?” “Is the dawn really breaking through the blackness of the long, long night?” It is, and there is no power that can stop it if our brothers of the North, the East and West will only stand by us as we are trying to stand together, in the brotherhood of labor, regardless of color, nationality or race, in a stone wall of the toilers against the spoilers of the world.

Now is the time, not after the next election, for the negroes of the North to act. The boys in jail are there because they fought for all the peons, black as well as white. Now, and not tomorrow, is the time to save the lives and liberties of Emerson, Lehman, Helton, Burge and their associates. Now is the hour of vengeance and retribution in your hands; now is the chance and time for all the workers to rise against the southern oligarchy and through the might of the One Big Union, organize its cruel peon system off the earth forever. Clan of Toil, awaken; Rebels of the South, arise! Workers of the World, unite! You have nothing but your chains to lose! You have a world to gain!

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v13n04-oct-1912-ISR-gog-ocr.pdf