In response to the Tulsa Pogrom, the text of a telegram to Oklahoma’s Governor from Hubert H. Harrison for the Liberty League of Negro-Americans.

‘Negroes Will Rise Like Irish’ by Hubert H. Harrison Industrial Worker. Vol. 3 No. 9. June 18, 1921.

NEGROES DEMAND RIGHTS; WILL RISE LIKE THE IRISH UNLESS TREATED FAIRLY

Hubert H. Harrison, president of the Liberty League of Negro-Americans, announced recently that a meeting to protest against the Tulsa massacre and to elect a committee to go to Oklahoma to get the facts at first hand would be held at the public library, New York.

Harrison, who was for many years prominently connected with the Socialist and I.W.W. organizations, has sent a telegram tot Governor Robertson of Oklahoma, warning him that unless the authorities take drastic measures against the whites responsible for the riots at Tulsa that this condition will give an immense impetus to the movement among the Negroes for arming themselves against white aggression. Harrison, in his telegram, sent on behalf of his organization, said:

“Unless the state authorities repudiate and punish such lawlessness, Negroes will develop as militant a spirit as the Irish in Ireland.”

“The league is strongly behind the program of the advanced labor movement in this country,” Harrison said in a statement. “We are using every effort to line up all colored workers in unions composed of colored workers only, which will co-operate in every possible way with the white unions when we are allowed that right. This policy is being adopted not because we consider it the best, but because it is the most helpful. We would prefer to see workers of all colors and creeds working for emancipation in one union, but the white workers of America on the whole do not yet realize the need for lining the colored worker alongside of him and treating him as his social equal. As long as that condition exists the colored man must fight for his economic betterment independently of the white trade union movement.

“We will teach African ethnology along the lines as suggested by Dr. Frank Boas and others. The Negro must learn that he was not altogether a creature rescued from savagery by the white slave dealer. The Negro race in Africa has at different times in its history reached a high state of civilization. Civilization is not a specialty of the white race. The Negroes have made their contribution, which is only now being tentatively realized by some of the more liberal scientists.”

The Industrial Union Bulletin, and the Industrial Worker were newspapers published by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1907 until 1913. First printed in Joliet, Illinois, IUB incorporated The Voice of Labor, the newspaper of the American Labor Union which had joined the IWW, and another IWW affiliate, International Metal Worker.The Trautmann-DeLeon faction issued its weekly from March 1907. Soon after, De Leon would be expelled and Trautmann would continue IUB until March 1909. It was edited by A. S. Edwards. 1909, production moved to Spokane, Washington and became The Industrial Worker, “the voice of revolutionary industrial unionism.” A victim of finances and internal disputes, the IW ceased publication in 1913, only to be revived in 1916 and surviving as a weekly, sometimes more, until 1931. Easily among the most important working class newspapers in U.S. history and an essential resource on the wobbly, and larger radical labor experience.

PDF of full issue: https://washingtondigitalnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=IWW19210618