Black communists stayed loyal despite Soviet aid to fascist Italy

Evidence

Geiss maintains that “most coloured communists or fellow-travellers left the movement” at this time. He cites Padmore, Kouyaute, and Kenyatta as examples, Geiss, op. cit., p. 338. My own research suggests otherwise. Discussions with Afro-American veterans of the Spanish Civil War have indicated that even the revelation of Soviet aid to Italy during the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia (William Nolan in his Communism Versus the Negro, op. cit., pp. 135, 245 n. 90, cites articles in the New York Times, 8 and 10 September 1935), did not deter them. James Yates told me: “We didn’t get a chance to go to Ethiopia much as many of us would have liked to gone. But when Ethiopia was invaded and Italy overran it, those same troops left there and went to Spain. This was a time and a chance for especially the Blacks to volunteer and get back at the fascists that had invaded Ethiopia.” Interview, 26 April 1978, Binghamton. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2377

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bears on the reader’s ‘height and downfall’ question — Robinson is revising the timing and causes of the tradition’s international collapse.
• QUESTION: Robinson’s evidence is oral-history interviews with Spanish Civil War Afro-American vets — worth checking how this revisionist claim has been contested.