Since we had this thread going earlier in the month, Eric Blanc recently posted this fascinating article that focuses primarily on Victor Berger's early 20th Century socialism combined with racism and how he evolved away from racist position to being a champion of Black civil rights:
https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/from-white-supremacy-to-anti-racism Abstract: Did you know Victor Berger, sewer socialism's founder and former white supremacist, voted against the 1924 Japanese exclusion Act in Congress and hosted Black radical Hubert Harrison on a speaking tour of WI that same year? Other unexpected things I learned through my recent research on Berger and sewer socialism's anti-racist evolution after WWI: — Black people were the ethnic/racial group that by far *most* consistently voted for the sewer socialists in Milwaukee. One local leader estimated that about 90 percent of Black people in the city voted Socialist. — Marx was, and remained, much more racist than I had previously thought and Debs wrote some extremely racist things as late as 1904. Socialists haven't grappled enough with that history. — Victor Berger and his comrades led a successful mass publicity campaign to free from prison (and possibly much worse) a Black reverend, Edward Thomas, who shot and killed a white man in Milwaukee in 1925. — Milwaukee's sewer socialist movement had some amazing Black socialist leaders, like William Bryant (pictured below), who fought to integrate Wisconsin trade unions in the 1920s. — The then-new research of Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas played an important role in convincing Berger and others than "race science" was completely bogus. —The Garveyite Universal Negro Improvement Association in Milwaukee not only had leaders join the Socialists, but the chapter as a whole generally campaigned for the Socialists. — Berger (even in his extremely racist period) was a consistent anti-imperialist, unlike Marx. But by the 1920s Berger was explicitly arguing against the idea that white or European "civilization" was superior to other cultures. — I re-learned that historical research in primary sources is very fun but also very time intensive. Hope you like the article below, spent a ton of time working on it! --ERIC BLANC -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39819): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39819 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116918009/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
