Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

The support movement took many forms. Clearly
the leading group in the mass mobilization was the Garvey
Movement's United Negro Improvement Association
(U.N.I.A.). This was, we should recall, the same nationalist
organization that prominent academic historians
now assure us was abandoned and unimportant at that
time.
Captain A.L. King, head of the U.N.I.A. in New
York, was the chairman of the united Afrikan support
committee. J.A. Rogers, the leading intellectual of the
Garvey movement in the U.S., was the main propagandist
and educator for the support movement. The Afrikan
united front committee involved not only the UNIA and
other nationalist organizations, but the CPUSA, church
leaders, Afrikan college groupings, and so on. Within
several months after the invasion the Friends of Ethiopia
had 106 local branches both North and South. There were
mass church meetings, rallies, marches of thousands and
picket lines outside Italian government offices.
The national character of the movement was
underlined by the fact that virtually to the last person
Afrikans boycotted the well-funded and Euro-Amerikanrun
international relief efforts. The American Red Cross
admitted that Afrikans refused to join its Ethiopian aid
campaign; Afrikans insisted on their own all-Afrikan campaign
that was highly political. The political counterattack
by U.S. imperialism struck at this point. Somehow the
rumor kept spreading that the Ethiopians thought of
themselves as "Caucasian" and that they allegedly viewed
Afrikans (most especially in the U.S. Empire) with contempt.
There was a demoralizing confusion from this
rumor.
The "Volunteer Movement" arose spontaneously
throughout the Nation. Thousands upon thousands of
Afrikans volunteered to go fight in Ethiopia. The Black
Legion established a military training camp in rural New
York, and its leaders urged Afrikans to prepare to renounce
U.S. citizenship. While the "Volunteer
Movement" was blocked by U.S. imperialism, its popular
nature shows how powerful were the potential forces being
expressed through the Ethiopian support issue. The
two Afrikans from the U.S. Empire who did fight in
Ethiopia (both fighter pilots) were heroes back home,
whose adventures were widely followed by the Afrikan
press.
The conflict was fought out in miniature on the
streets of Jersey City, Brooklyn and Harlem between
Afrikans and pro-fascist Italian immigrants. The night of
August 11, 1935 over a thousand Afrikans and Italians
fought with baseball bats and rocks on the streets of Jersey
City. On October 4, 1935 (the day after the main invasion
began) thousands of Afrikans attacked Italian shops in
Harlem and Brooklyn. On the streets the masses of ordinary
Afrikans viewed their fight and the fight in Ethiopia
as very close.
It's indicative that in 1936 a late-night street corner
rally of the African Patriotic League, called to protest
Italian mass executions of Ethiopian patriots, rapidly turned
into an attack on the police. Smashing Italian store windows,
the crowd of 400 Afrikans marched down I.enox
Ave. in Harlem looking for a particular policeman who
made a point of arresting nationalists.) In the mass
fighting with police that followed, the New York police
started shooting after the determined crowd charged them
to successfully free one of their number who had been arrested.
(29) Ethiopia was close to home.
To expose this lie representatives of the Ethiopian
came to the U.S. At a packed Harlem meeting
The great outpouring of nationalist sentiment that
Of 3'000 at Rev. Adam Jr.'s
accompanied the Ethiopian war was, we must emphasize,
Baptist Church, Ethiopian envoy Tasfaye widespread throughout the U.S. Empire. One
invoked the "lidarity
Afrikan
New orleans resident wrote to the Courier that the Ethiopeoples:
"It ,is said that we despise Negroes. In [he first pian crisis proved that 'I.. . the time is here for the Negro to
place, You are not Negroes. Who told you that you were begin to look for the higher things in life - a flag 0 ~- his
Negroes? You are the sons and daughters of Africa, your own, a government of his own and complete liberty. " This
motherland, which calls YOU now to aid her /as/ surviving was the developing consciousness that so threatened U.S.
free black people. "
imperialism.
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