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Profiles---

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In 1934, she graduated Harlem Hospital Training School. Assigned to service in the hospital's obstetrical division, she came face to face with the desperate conditions in a Black community hospital. Overcrowdedness, understaffed. One nurse in charge of a 50 baby and maternity-nursery ward. One hundred and fifty feedings; one hundred and fifty changes and one nurse to do it.

Such conditions, together with the lynching of Afro-Americans, discrimination in education and on jobs, lack of hospital facilities, deteriorating housing-- all such conditions led her to associate with the progressive nurses, to attend lectures and discussions on civic affairs, local national and international and thus she learned to understand the relationship of Harlem's conditions to events in Europe, Africa, German fascism, Ethiopia and the fascist racist attacks on Blacks, Slavs and Jews.

When fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, she joined groups of Harlem nurses who gathered and sent tons of medical supplies to Ethiopia. She helped organize a 75-bed field hospital for Ethiopia's troops resisting Mussolini's fascist invaders.

When Hitler-Mussolini moved into Spain to support the Franco fascist assault on Republican Spain, she together with over 100 Afro-American anti-fascists joined with thousands of US white anti-fascists in support of Spanish democracy.

On March 27, 1937, she sailed from New York with the second American medical unit of 12 nurses and physicians. She was the only Afro-American nurse in this group, and in the 15th brigade.

Her name: SALARIA KEE.

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In October, 1937, during the attack by the ALB on Fuentes del Ebro in the Aragon front, he hid most of the day within three yards of the fascist army in trenches.

He had taken cover behind a Republican burned-out tank unable to go forward or retreat. 

In the Ebro offensive he was leading two sections of his company together with Jim Lardner escorting many captured fascist army prisoners across the Ebro river.

The heavy fighting of July, 1938 during the Ebro offensive on the Gandesa Villaba sector front this third company sargeant, a courageous fighter in every action, received a bullet through the shoulder. He has since died in New York City.

His name: SGT. JOE TAYLOR.

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He left for Spain in the summer of 1937. Became Commander of a machine gun section in the Makenzie-Papineau Battalion (Canadian) Machine Gun Company. He had fallen in action together with two-thirds of his gun crew on October 13, 1937, at Fuentes de Ebro leading his machine gun section during the Aragon offensive. He got killed while leaving his cover to aid a wounded soldier. A fascist bullet got him while moving the wounded man to safety. 

His name: MILTON HERNDON (brother of Angelo Herndon, a Young Communist League leader and top organizer in the Unemployed and Black People's Rights Movement in the early '30s in the South.)

He served with discipline, dignity and couraged. He was liked. He was respected. He was:
"A comrade whose qualities were deep and pervasive... A demonstration of this was given by him as witness for VALB in the prosecution before the late Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) 1954. 

"...was one of the most effective witnesses of that long era of the Unamerican Inquisition...

"[He] under cross-examination remained what he was and what he said flowed directly and lucidly from his life's experiences related simply and without sentimentality. This was anything but easy, especially for a Black man and in the supercharged political lynch-atmosphere of the era. The prosecuting attorneys were young, bright, alert, and prepared... [he] met and speared their well-planned attacks so cleanly that they hung limp.

"...[he] was cross-examined on arrests and/or convictions in California. His narration of what it meant to be unemployed, penniless and young in the Great Depression unrolled with such classic and telling simplicity that it became a veritable 'J'accuse,' the condemnation of his condemners and all they represented.

"The prosecutors spun out that [he] was fervently opposed to fascism and sought to extract the implication that in taking up arms against fascism he had thus acted against the interests of the U.S. His answer was that, on the contrary, defense of Republican Spain was defense of the American people. 

"It became clearer and clearer that the prosecutors were becoming less and less inclined to tangle further with him. In the end they were glad just to be rid of him. He was too much the exemplary 'premature anti-fascist' for them. He vindicated the Abraham Lincoln Battalion."

His name: CRAWFORD MORGAN.
He died in New York.

Volunteer, December, 1976.
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