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BOOK REVIEW          OFARI

bottom of the ocean before he gets there."
  The knowledge of racism was not the only element that fueled black anti-war sentiment.  The growing labor movement with its large Socialist constituency had a major impact on black thought.  Black workers tended to support labor against the employers despite the attempts to use blacks as scabs and strikebreakers.
  A few blacks saw Henry George's single tax theories as a possible alternative to capitalist exploitation.  Many more talked about labor and consumer cooperatives; still others considered communal land development projects in the South and West.
  A small but active sector posed Socialism as the best solution to imperialism and war.  Charles G. Baylor, a black Socialist Labor Party organizer, in an analysis of the American occupation of Cuba in the Richmond Planet, July 30, 1898, noted:  "The central and important fact in this whole matter is that the revolution in Cuba was, from the beginning, an Afro-Cuban Socialist uprising against Spanish tyranny, capitalistic greed, and priestly rule...this was not to be tolerated by the Carnegies, Pullmans, Rockefellers of America any more than by the confederate white aristocracy of the South."
  In the next month's edition of the Richmond Planet, Baylor urged blacks to join either the SLP or, if possible, a labor union to secure economic emancipation.
  Much the same thinking went into black condemnation of the gold standard which was then being debated in corporate circles.  An editorial in the Chicago Broad Ax, July 21, 1900, reflected this:  "The Negro is not an investor of capital.  Those who insist that gold alone shall be the money of the land give no employment to the Negro, though employing thousands of laborers."
  The black opposition to monopoly capital was also incorporated into the platform of the National Afro-American Party outlined in Howard's American Magazine, June, 1900:  "We are opposed to all monopolies and trusts, and favor the ownership and control of the public highways by the general government, such as railroads, tele-graph and telephone."
  In 1899, the National Anti-Expansion, Anti-Imperialist, and Anti-Trust League was organized to unify the broad anti-monopoly, andti-imperialist elements among blacks.  Newspapers like the Washington Colored American, the Cleveland Gazette, and the Chicago Broad Ax were supportive of the League.  Editorials in other black papers like the Indianapolis Freeman called on blacks to chart an independent political course away from the Democratic and Republican parties.

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