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tion. We're Jim-Crowed in public places and conveyances. Plantation slavery with all its evils-sharecropping, debt slavery, chain-gang-still persist. The overseer's lash still strikes out against our bend backs-symbol of our continued slavery. it is estimated that twenty "quiet" lynchings occurred in Mississippi in 1939. The K.K.K. rides again in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina. All over the country we're denied the treatment of equals.

In industry we're the first fired and last hired - and we're paid the lowest wages. The majority of us are on relief and dependent on relief jobs. In short, we are the outcasts of modern, enlightened American democracy. The old Dred Scott decision is still the law of the land in the South - the Negro "has no rights that a white man is bound to respect." And we are supposed to forget 5,000 lynched, tortured, burned to death since 1886?

They talk about civilization! Sure, we want to defend it: and we're not beginners in this game. The silent Sphinx, looking down for 5,000 years on the affairs of mortal man, could tell a lot about what we've done for civilization. Ancient Egypt! Ethiopia! Africa! ... Yes, and we don't have to go back that far. Right here in America our sweat, labor and blood helped to make this country what it is today.

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We've got to do everything we can-they say-short of war ... to protect the things we hold dear from this rising tide of savagery that's flooding its way up to our doors. We've got to give, our support in every way - but "short of war," remember - to those who fight this menace.

Short of war! What a farce! Why, we're half-way in already. All you have to do is to pick up a newspaper, turn on the radio, or go to a movie to see that the old war spirit is being whipped up again. Maybe you think that's all right because Mr. Roosevelt has told us that there will be no blackout of peace on our shores.

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But take a good look at our President. That's what he [[italics]] says [[/italics]], but what is he [[italics]] doing? [[/italics]] First he lifts the embargo, placing our resources at the disposal of England and France. This makes us a unit of the Allied war machine. Then, he calls for a "moral blockade" against the Soviet Union. Then, he advances a ten million dollar loan to the Mannerheim Government in Finland. But his "sympathy" for the plight of ten million unemployed and starving Americans is strikingly revealed in his war and hunger budget which lopped off more than a billion and a quarter dollars from the needy but added more than half a billion for cannons and warships.

It's all right to talk about democracy and self-government. But how about those who are lunched, robbed of the vote, in the Black Belt of the South? But how about Cuba? How about Haiti, whose impoverished peons are toiling for the Wall Street banks? How about a little self-government for Puerto Rico, colony of American financial interests?

Yes, we say that democracy, like charity, should begin at home. And because those who froth at the mouth about so-called threats from abroad are such poor defenders of democracy at home, we much cast doubts upon their sincerity.

Who are these self-styled champions of the democratic way of life and the rights of small nations, anyway? They are the greatest colonial oppressors on earth. They are the enslavers of 500,000,000 colored peoples-a third of mankind. Just as Jawaharlal Nehru, of the Indian National Congress, says about British "democratic" rule:

"They have spurned the hand that we stretched out.... They made it clear that they fight to preserve and entrench the Empire and Imperialism. If this be the war aim, India can be no party to keep herself and others in bondage."

Let the betrayed Ethiopians speak. It certainly looks like the restoration of their independence is not an aim of this war. They're still fighting for their liberty, sacrificed through British trickery to the banditry of Mussolini, And now Cham-