Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

224 // PAUL BUH1E AND ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
rhe Yiddish press as did the Scottsboro case." From summer of 1931 to spring 1935,
a total of 104 articles appeared in the Forward and MorgnJournal-Tageblatt. Diner, In
the Almost Promised Land, 42. On the Scottsboro case generally, see Dan T. Carter,
Scottsboro: A Tragedy in the American South, 1969; 2nd ed. (Baton Rouge, 1984); James
Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro: The Rape Case that Shocked 1930s America and Revived the
Struggle for Equality (New York, 1994).
31. David H. Pierce, "Fascism and the Negro," Crisis 42, no. 4 (April 1935), 107,
114; Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, "Parallel Between Hitlerism and the Persecution of
Negroes in America," Crisis 41, no. 5 (May 1934), 127—29; Norman Thomas, "Can
America Go Fascist?" Crisis 41, no. 1 (January 1934), 10—11; Harold Preece, "Fascism
and the Negro," Crisis 41, no. 12 (December 19.34), 355, 366; see also Lunabelle
Wedlock, The Reaction of Negro Publications and Organizations to German Anti-Semitism
(Washington, D. C., 1942). On African Americans and Jews in the Spanish Civil War,
see Danny Duncan Collum and Victor Berch, eds., African Americans and the Spanish
Civil War: "This Ain't Ethiopia, But It'll Do" (New York, 1992); Arthur Landis, The
Abraham Lincoln Brigade (New York, 1967); Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: The Story of
Americans in Spain (New York, 1939); Edwin Rolfe, The Lincoln Battalion: The Story of
the Americans Who Fought in Spain in the International Brigades (New York, 1974, orig.
1939); Robert R.osenstone, Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil
War (New York, 1969); James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American
in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Seattle, 1989); John Coverdale, Italian Intervention in
the Spanish Civil War (Princeton, 1975); Robert H. Whealey, Hitler and Spain: the Nazi
Role m the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (Lexington, 1989).
32. Naison, Communists in Harlem, 324—25; Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Communist
Councilman from Harlem (New York, 1969), 106—7; Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul
Robeson (New York, 1989). In 1954, Robeson gave a speech in which he compared the
Cold War attack on the Left to Nazism. Paul Robeson, "Bonds of Brotherhood,"
Jewish Life 9 (Nov. 1954), 13-14.
33. This is not to deny that non-communist groups which were substantially
Jewish in make-up sometimes provided a supportive milieu for individual Black
activists and intellectuals. Ella Josephine Baker, for instance, received a Marxist education
around the forums of the Communist (Opposition) Party and its publications
during the 1930s. The heavily Jewish Ttotskyist milieu greeted the appearance of
Trinidadian Pan Africanist C.L.R. James with enthusiasm in 1938 and swiftly made
him a political leader alongside E.R. McKinney. A small handful of Black Socialists
enjoyed political support and even patronage, spending their careers in the vicinity of
the needletrades' unions. But rarely was any explicit link of Jewishness and Blackness
made in these quarters; more usually both sides of the dyad were denied in the name
of a color-blind "internationalism."