Viewing page 18 of 19

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

For me, no more the great migration to the North
Instead: Migration into forge and power - 
Tuskegee3 with a red flag of the tower!
On every lunching tree, a poster crying FREE
Because, O poor white workers, 
You have linked your hands with me.

We did not know that we were brothers.
Now we know!
Out of that brotherhood
Let power grow!
We did not know
That we were strong.
Now we see
In union lies our strength.
Let union be
The force that breaks the time-clock,
Smashes misery,
Takes land,
Takes factories,
Takes office towers,
Takes tools and banks and mines, 
Railroad, ships, and dams,
Until the forces of the world are ours!

White worker, 
Here is my hand.

Today, 
We're Man to Man.

(3) Tuskegee, - a Negro college in Alabama, founded by Booker T. Washington, where th Negro youth is taught submission to white imperialist rule. The present principal is R. R. Morton, a disciple of Booker T. Washington and one of the greatest misleaders of the Negro masses in America.

If We Must Die
By Claude McKay.*

If we must die - let it not be like hogs, 
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, 
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die - oh, let us nobly die, 
So that our precious blood may no be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honour us though dead.
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe; 
Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying-but fighting back!

* A Jamaican poet, who has also written novels describing Negro working class life.

32



What is the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers?

The Negro Workers Committee was formed in July 1930 at an international conference of Negro toilers held in Hamburg, Germany. The Committee is not a race, but a class organization, organizing and leading the fight in the interests of Negro workers in Africa, the West Indies and other colonies.

The aims of the Committee are as follows:

1. Abolition of Forced Labour, Peonage and Slavery.

2. Equal Pay for Equal Work - Irrespective of Race, Colour or Sex.

3. Eight Hour Day.

4. Government Relief for Unemployed, - free rent, no taxes.

5. Freedom to organize trade unions, unemployed councils and peasant committees, - right to strike.

6. Against racial barriers in trade unions and colour bar in industry.
 
7. Against capitalist terror - lynching, police and soldier terrorism, arrest and deportation of foreign workers.

8. Against confiscation of peasant and communal lands, against taxation of the Negro workers and peasants.

9. To promote and develop the spirit of international solidarity between the workers of all colours and nationalities. 

10. To agitate and organize the Negro workers against the imperialist war in China and the intervention in Soviet Russia, in which the white capitalist exploiters intend to use black workers as cannon-fodder as they did in the last war.

11. To defend the independence of Liberia, Haiti and other Negro States and to fight for the full independence of the Negro toilers in Africa and the West Indies, and their right of self-determination in the Black Belt of U.S.A.

12. The Committeee also fights against white chauvinism, (race prejudice) social-reformism and the reformist programmes of the Negro capitalist misleaders, and the missionaries, preachers and other agents of imperialism.

These misleaders, instead of organizing the Negro masses to fight for their freedom are the very ones who help the capitalists by preaching obedience, and loyalty to imperialist rule:

Negro Workers, Organize The Fight Against Imperialism!
Support The Revolutionary Trade Union Movement!
Fight For The Freedom Of The Working Class!