Here, Dunne rejects the old Socialist Party notion of the “negro question as a class question”, saying Black workers were oppressed by class, and by ‘race.’ Under the impact of a rising Black freedom movement, the Russian and colonial revolutions, and the insistence of the new Communist International, the overwhelmingly white revolutionary workers’ movement in the U.S. was forced to reassess its past and reorient itself to the growing the Black proletariat and its demands. An important series of articles in that shift were these by William F. Dunne, among the most authoritative labor and union voices in the Communist Party, of which he was a top leader.

‘The Negroes as an Oppressed People’ by William F. Dunne from Workers Monthly. Vol. 4 No. 9. July, 1925.

A FEDERATED PRESS dispatch under date of June 10, says: Lynchings of Negroes for the first five months of 1925, show an increase over lynchings for the corresponding period last year.

Eight persons have been lynched up to June 1, 1925, while ONLY five were lynched in that period last year.

The emphasis on “only” is mine.

The amount of freedom from outrages mot usually perpetrated on members of the ruling race possessed by a colonial people or a national minority is a good measure of their social status. Judged by this standard the 10,000,000 Negroes in the United States and particularly the overwhelming majority of the Negro population which lives in the southern states are immeasurably lower in capitalism’s social scale than the most oppressed section of the white working class—the foreign-born workers in steel, coal copper and textile towns where their homes are on company property.

In the north the Negroes, having acquired industrial experience in an environment which, while far from being free from racial prejudice and hatred, is nevertheless far superior to that of the semi-feudal south, are demanding and forcing treatment equal at least to that of the white workers.

Even the officialdom of the American Federation of Labor has been moved at last to make an organization campaign among the Negro workers part of its program.

But in the south the lynching of Negroes as a community enterprise, and the murder of Negroes by whites without punishment of the offenders continue unabated.

Moved by what I am willing for lack of proof to the contrary to call a sincere desire to shame the United States lato stamping out this horrible practice and of advancing the cause of the black race, a number of Negro and white intellectuals, publicists and middle class elements from time to time point out that in European countries Negroes are not discriminated against either socially, politically or economically,

They never tire of recounting the equal rights enjoyed by the Negroes in la belle France, or democratic England or fascist Italy. If they can discover a person of Negro blood upon whom some of these countries have conferred honors, they are deliriously happy in having found further proof that the attitude of the American ruling class and its dupes in America is an arbitrary one.

Such uncritical acceptance of superficial facts as evidence that the example of other capitalist nations on the Negro question is one we should follow here is proof of a monstrous ignorance of one fact:

That the Negroes are oppressed as a RACE and not as individuals.

It is not the purpose of this article to deal with the further oppression of the majority of the Negro race as workers and peasants, but to prove that whatever the Negro suffers in the United States, it differs only in degree but not in kind from the indignities inflicted on him in other spheres of capitalism—is part of the world system which decrees that certain peoples, mostly of the darkerskinned races, are the legitimate prey of the dominant white majority, wherever they are found in sufficient numbers to make suppression necessary because profitable.

What is the colonial policy of America, France, Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and Holland but the enforcement of this decree?

And what is the attitude of the white ruling class in the United States but the expression of this universal (outside of Soviet Russia) doctrine, with the changes made necessary by the historical conditions here?

Every attempt to make the struggles of the Negro masses in the United States a purely national question, to isolate it from the struggles of the Negro race in all of imperialism’s colonies and spheres of influence, or even to isolate it from the struggles of ALL the darker-skinned peoples is to play into the hands of the ruling class. Equally true is it to say that any misunderstanding of the common interest in, or attempt to draw a line of separation between, the world proletarian revolutionary struggle and the liberation movements of the colonial peoples and racial minorities, leads straight to disaster.

How otherwise well-informed and intelligent persons can have been taken in by the friendly attitude of officialdom to individual members of the dark-skinned peoples residing in the European imperialist nations to the extent of believing this attitude genuine and indicative of a desire for racial equality is a mystery unless we realize the inevitable tendency of the class mentioned to seek always an easy way of escape from problems that can be solved only by struggle.

There is a wealth of testimony at hand, of which the facts set forth are not disputed, showing that wherever white capitalism has established itself the code of ethics that governs social contacts between its members is discarded the very moment it encounters in considerable numbers any “backward” people whose subjection it desires.

The history of imperialism in India, in Africa, in China, in the Philippines, is filled with bloody incidents, in proof of this contention. The record has many gaps in it for obvious reasons, but what has been written would fill a goodsized building.

Some day (and the rising of the Chinese against imperialism shows that the day is not far distant) the black, brown and yellow-skinned races will deliver their indictment against the white race and it will be well for that race if the accumulated wrongs of centuries have been atoned for in some measure by a proletarian dictatorship acknowledging these wrongs and righting them, when that day comes.

But here I want only to show that to the Negro, whether in Africa or forcibly torn from his continent and brought to America, the white ruling class of all countries has given him race nothing but blows, bullets, bayonets—and chains to the accompaniment of psalms and prayers.

For every true Nordic (and even the lowlier Alpine) knows that God is white and on the side of the white race. So it was that the first successful foray on the Negro race was the occasion for profuse thanks being given to the white god of battle.

The Portuguese were the first to discover that black slaves were handy things to have. The armored knights were soon systematically descending on African settlements of naked natives and carrying away the Negroes who escaped their swords. An old Portuguese chronicle gives the following description of one of these noble exploits:

“Then you might see mothers forsaking their children and husbands their wives, each striving to escape as best they could. Some drowned themselves in the water, others sought to escape by hiding under their huts; others stowed their children among the sea-weed, where our men found them afterwards, hoping they would thus escape notice…And at last our Lord God, who giveth a reward for every good deed, willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service they should that day obtain victory over their enemies, as well as a guerdon and a payment for all their labor and expense; for they took captive of those Moors, what with men, women and children, 165, besides those that perished and were killed. And when the battle was over, all praised God for the great mercy He had shown them, in that he had willed to give them such a victory with so little damage to themselves. They were all very joyful, praising loudly the Lord God for that he had deigned to give such help to such a handful of His Christian people.”

The sanctimonious slaughter of Negroes begun by the Christian Portuguese continues to this day in all the colonies of imperialism. The lynching of Negroes with the added spice of bestial tortures is only the American method of this international process which Yankee ingenuity has improved upon.

The triumphant religious note can still be heard in the southern jungles.

Let us leap four centuries and see if those altruistic up holders of democracy and the rights of small nations, the British ruling class, show in their attitude towards Negro colonials anything that would warrant the assumption that British capitalism differs from American capitalism in this respect. Speaking of the attitude of the whites towards the Africans in British colonies, Lord Grey, who can hardly be accused of partiality, said in 1880:

“Throughout this part of the British dominions the colored people are generally looked upon by the whites as an inferior race, whose interests ought to be systematically disregarded when they come into competition with their own, and who ought to be governed mainly with a view to the advantage of the superior race. And for this advantage two things are considered to be especially necessary: First, that facilities should be afforded to the white colonists for obtaining possession of land heretofore occupied by the native tribes; and secondly, that the Kaffir population should be made to furnish as large and as cheap a supply of labor as possible.”

Could the policy of imperialism be stated more frankly and concisely?

What is the effect of the application of this policy:

Let one, a member of the Matabele—one of the African tribes under British rule, speak for the natives. Testifying before a Royal Commission he said:

“Our country is gone, our cattle have gone, our people are scattered, we have nothing to live for, our women are deserting us; the white man does as he likes with them; we are the slaves of the white man, we are nobody and have no rights or laws of any kind.”

The natives were herded into “labor camps” and forced to work for the conquerors. Says E.D. Morel, the famous English liberal, in his “The Black Man’s Burden”:

“Some hundreds of native police were raised and armed, and, as happens EVERYWHERE in Africa where the supervision is not strict, committed many brutal acts. Their principal duty appears to have been “assisting” to procure the needed supply of labor, and hunting down deserters.” (Emphasis mine).

The Matabele Times spoke brutally:

“The theory of shooting a n***r on sight is too suggestive of the rule of Donnybrook Fair to be other than a diversion rather than a satisfactory principle. We have been doing it up to now, burning kraals simply because they were native kraals, and firing upon fleeing natives simply because they were black.”

In 1920 the family of Lobengula, the former native rule of a large section of British South Africa signed a petition to his Royal British Majesty which says: The members of the late King Lobengula’s family, your petitioners, and several members of the tribe are now scattered about on farms parcelled out to white settlers, and are practically created a nomadic people living in this scattered condition, under a veiled form of slavery; they are not allowed individually to cross from one farm to another, or from place to place except under a system of permit or pass and are practically forced to do labor on these private farms as a condition of their occupying land in Matabeleland.

Instead of getting better the conditions of the Negroes in the colonies of British imperialism become worse as the remnants of land left are taken from them. In the South African mining districts is almost an exact replica of the conditions suffered by the Negroes in the southern states.

We will deal with Germany more briefly because she is no longer a ruler of colonies. But the record established by her rulers before her empire was divided among her foes shows little difference from the incidents already cited.

Speaking in the Reichstag in 1904 on the Colonial Budget, Herr Schlettwein delivered himself of the following, which I ask you to compare with the statement of white policy by Lord Grey:

“The Hereros (a West African tribe) must be compelled to work, and to work without compensation and in return for their food only. Forced labor for years is only a just punishment, and at the same time it is the best method of training men. The feelings of Christianity and the philanthropy with which missionaries work, must for the present be repudiated with all energy.”

The Germans killed the Hereros who refused to work. It was very simple. It was a slaughter on a wholesale scale of poorly armed natives by troops equipped with the most modern weapons of death. A German writer records a conversation between some settlers arriving after the crushing of the natives, and one of the soldiers:

“Children, how could it be otherwise? They (the Hereros) were ranchmen and landowners, and we were there to make them landless workingmen…”

It seems hardly necessary to mention Belgium when the record of her atrocities on the Negroes of the Congo was heralded to the world, but perhaps the world war and the flood of sympathy that went out to her because she suffered one-millionth part of what her rulers inflicted on the Negroes, may have dimmed the memory. To keep the record straight we give two quotations describing the methods by which rubber was obtained:

“There is not an inhabited village left in four days steaming through a country formerly so rich; today entirely ruined…The villages are compelled to furnish so many kilos of rubber every week…The soldiers sent out to get rubber and ivory are depopulating the country. They find that the quickest and cheapest method is to raid villages, seize prisoners, and have them redeemed afterwards for ivory…It is blood-curdling to see them (the soldiers) returning with the hands of the slain, and to find the hands of young children amongst the bigger ones evidencing their bravery…The rubber from this district has cost hundreds of lives, and the scenes | have witnessed, while unable to help the oppressed, have been almost enough to make me wish | was dead…The rubber traffic is steeped in blood, and if the natives were to rise and sweep every white person on the upper Congo into eternity, there would still be a fearful balance to their credit.” (Letter of an American missionary named Clark, quoted by E.D. Morel in the work already cited.)

In 20 years the population of the Belgian Congo was reduced by these methods from more than 30,000,000 to less than 9,000,000.

“Bleeding Belgium,” indeed, but the blood of Negroes, not her own.

And now for a glance at the colonial policy of France wherein is located that dear Paris where the Negro is allowed all the privileges accoded the whites—or was until it was filled first with American soldiers and then with American tourists who come to see the graves of those who died to save that dear France and incidentally “make the world safe for democracy.”

France is the second great European colonial power. Her African holdings are immense, inferior in size only to those of Great Britain. She recruited hundreds of thousands of Negro troops during the world war and she still enforces conscription in her African colonies. These troops have Negro officers who meet French officers on equal terms and who are dined and feted when they come to Paris.

Does this mean that French policy toward “backward” peoples is a model for the world? Hardly, as we shall see.

Sending in long and detailed reports is one of the best things that the colonial bureaucrats do. Unfortunately for the admirers of France, some of these reports have seen the light of day and show—

That France conducts the same bloody, brutal and ruthless policy among the Africans that we have already seen in operation in British, German and Belgian Africa. That is to say:

“Soon, if this policy is persisted in, if the incendiarism and devastation of villages does not stop…f the concessionaires are always to enjoy…the right of imposing such and such a “corvee” (Forced labor levy—W.F.D.) upon the inhabitants, and to place an embargo upon all the latter possesses, the banks of the Congo, the Ubanghi, and the Bangha will be completely deserted.”

Another French official wrote:

“The dead, we no longer count them. The villages, horrible charnel-houses, disappear in this yawning gulf. A thousand diseases follow in our footsteps…We white men must shut our eyes not to see the hideous dead, the dying who curse us, and the wounded who implore, the weeping women and starving children.”

In one typical region 20,000 out of a total of 40,000 Negroes were killed off in two years.

We have now had a brief glimpse of imperialism in action against the Negroes in America, British, German and Belgian colonies and we find it as similar as two drops of water—or shall we say blood?

The conclusion can be drawn that when in the imperialist nations a Negro is treated as an equal by the ruling class it is for only two reasons:

First: He has betrayed or is betraying his fellows—is a tool of the imperialists.

Second: Because the imperialist nation does not wish to cause itself unnecessary trouble among the colonials by bad treatment of individuals when good treatment costs nothing.

Let the Negro in France or England or Belgium try to take the privileges in the colonies that he is accorded in the imperialist nation proper and there is a different story.

The social reformists of Europe have accepted the doctrine of racial equality and they are much concerned to see that the black man is not ill-treated in Europe. They have no wish however, to link up the struggles of the colonial peoples with those of the working class at home. They may realize the revolutionary role of the dark-skinned peoples in the world struggle against capitalism, but they are not for it any more than are the liberal intellectuals.

E.D. Morel comments upon this as follows:

“And curiously enough there is a type of European socialist mind that…reinforces these tendencies (of capitalism). This type of mind visualizes the mass of African humanity in terms of a dogmatic economic theory. It would stand aside from capitalistic exploitation, which it regards as a necessary and inevitable episode in human development. It would do nothing to safeguard native institutions which it looks upon as archaic and reactionary. It would apply the same processes to all races (it refuses, apparently, to recognize any other form of civilization other than the European socialized state) at whatever stage of cultural development…It would cheerfully assist at the destruction of African institutions…assent to the conversion of African cultivators and farmers into wage-slaves. The only comment I would venture to make upon the contentions of this school, is that the form of socialism which Russia has evolved, and which, I suppose, is the most advanced form of European socialism now available to study, approximates closely to the social conditions of an advanced tropical African community…the spinal column of both is a system of land tenure which ensures to the population a large measure of economic independence…”

Lenin once called Morel “an honest liberal.” It is evident from the above quotation that Morel was not only honest in his attitude towards the Negroes, but that he understood the revolutionary part landless races are destined to play.

And now we come back to America and the 12,000,000 Negroes in the United States and its colonies, 90 per cent of whom are workers and farmers. Oppressed as a race and as a class they have two allies—the white working class of the United States and their African kindred.

The two can be separated only at the cost of seriously hampering both. There must be no illusions in the minds of the American Negro masses that in some other capitalist nation there is freedom to be found. They are all alike and the Negro workers and peasants will have to fight the white ruling class wherever they are located.

More than that, the American Negroes will have to take the lead in uniting their race internationally, as a race, and then bringing it into line with the world struggle of the working class.

The same slogan to which the workers and peasants of Russia rallied, behind the Communists in 1917, can be used to stir the oppressed Negroes into action.

Peace, Bread and LAND—what racial or social group needs these three things more than the 120,000,000 beaten, bullied and landless African Negroes?

In the United States these same demands can be expressed in the slogan of full social, political and economic equality.

The Workers Monthly began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Party publication. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and the Communist Party began publishing The Communist as its theoretical magazine. Editors included Earl Browder and Max Bedacht as the magazine continued the Liberator’s use of graphics and art.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/wm/1925/v4n09-jul-1925.pdf