What Lincoln vet Len Olson taught his daughter Hannah. “Think of all the work that was done to this thing by someone’s hands.”
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Two months ago, our New York office received a unique gift from David Geltman of Boston. Geltman is the grandson of Israel Perlman, who was a New York City bookseller. In February 1939, the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) organized a fundraiser auction for anti-Nazi writers and the VALB Rehabilitation Fund. Sponsors...
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ALBA’s website at alba-valb.org has been redesigned from the ground up. The searchable online database of volunteers who left for Spain from the United States will be updated over the summer, along with a broad range of content for teachers and the general public. Check back in regularly! The online edition of The Volunteer...
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Due to the COVID-19 crisis, ALBA’s in-person institutes are being postponed until further notice. Instead, we will be offering a fully online workshop from June 30 through July 28 with our partners at the Collaborative for Educational Services in Northampton, MA. Titled “America and World Fascism: From the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and...
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“Why should one care about events taking place far away?” This is one of the “essential questions” that drive our work with teachers around the country. Together with the question “When do you stand up for what you believe in?” it captures the spirit of the internationalist commitment that drove the almost 40,000 volunteers...
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We speak with one of the No More Deaths volunteers who faced trial for helping save migrants’ lives. In August 2017, Madeline Huse and three other volunteers of the Tucson-based organization No More Deaths entered the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona to deposit jugs of water and cans of beans near various...
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Defying the devastating Covid-19 crisis, this past May 17 ALBA’s annual reunion and ALBA/Puffin Award ceremony—celebrated fully online (Facebook | YouTube)—brought together viewers from around the world. Hosted by ALBA’s María Hernández-Ojeda and Sebastiaan Faber, the celebration featured speeches by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, Neal Rosenstein, ALBA’s executive director Mark Wallem, and ALBA governors...
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Among the thousands of Spanish workers who arrived in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century were many with radical traditions rooted in their homeland, which at the time boasted one of the world’s most vibrant anarchist movements. They created scores of cultural and mutual aid societies in cities and rural...
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Marina Ginestà became world-famous late in life when a stunning photograph taken at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War surfaced in a Spanish archive. With the help of Marina’s son, the journalist Yvonne Scholten uncovers new details of Ginestà’s adventurous life.
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Abe & Jack, Milt, Moe, Dave…   They were not my family. They distrusted strangers. I could only approach them slowly, these Americans who had volunteered to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War.   They lost, bad guys won—they bore failure like primal sin or first love that comes and goes, never leaves....
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Guns, Culture and Moors: Racial Perceptions, Cultural Impact and the Moroccan Participation in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). By Ali Al Tuma (New York & London: Routledge, 2018).
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The Age of Disenchantments: The Epic Story of Spain’s Most Notorious Literary Family and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War, by Aaron Shulman. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers.
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A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father, by David Maraniss. New York, Simon and Schuster, 2019.
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Memorial Day is the day traditionally set aside to remember Americans who served in the military.  And yet Americans who went to Spain to fight fascism are rarely if ever included in the remembrances on this day. We would like to change this. Over the last two years, Canadian volunteers led by Pamela Vivian,...
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Twenty-five years ago, Len and Nancy Tsou made a ten-day trip to Spain tracing some of the battlefields where Chinese brigadistas had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Among other sites, they followed the trail of a Lincoln vet, Wen-Rao Chen of the XVth International Brigade, who lost his life in the battle of...
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In the spring of 1937, a group of English-speaking journalists and filmmakers launched a shortwave radio broadcast from Madrid to tell the world what was happening in Spain firsthand. It found an eager audience all across the United States and Canada.
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Ramon Sender Barayón is a pioneer of US counterculture and the son of Amparo Barayón, who was killed by fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and the novelist Ramón J. Sender. A new documentary by Luis Olano sheds light on his remarkable life.
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ALBA’s teaching resources are used in college and high-school classrooms throughout the United States. A testimonial from the University of Chicago.
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Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the pediatrician who gained national prominence by exposing the Flint, Michigan water crisis in 2015, presented ALBA’s annual Susman Lecture to a packed auditorium on the Wayne State campus in Detroit, Michigan on January 27.
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A decade after its inauguration on the San Francisco Embarcadero, the only government-supported monument to the Lincoln Brigade in the USA has been restored. The following article first appeared in Counterpunch on August 16, 2008, soon after the original dedication ceremonies.
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Dear Friends, We at ALBA would like to express solidarity with all those affected by the COVID crisis. When the brave men and women of the Lincoln Brigade departed on their odyssey for Spain, they were practicing the solidarity that has always been at the heart of our organization. If we wish to endure...
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The 2020 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism goes to No More Deaths in support of its humanitarian efforts to alleviate the suffering and end the fatalities of those crossing the southern border of the United States. The award will be presented at ALBA's Live Online Gala on May 17 at 5 pm EDT.
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What you leave to friends and loved ones—and the causes you champion—are ways of expressing your hopes and dreams for the future. As you make your plans, please consider joining the Jarama Society by including ALBA in your will or living trust, or naming us as a beneficiary of your estate. ALBA accepts legacy...
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Herbie (Herbert W.) Freeman, 95, died November 1, 2019 in Tucson, AZ, surrounded by family. Herbie was born in Brooklyn, on October 28, 1924, to Samuel and Vishe (Feigenblatt) Freeman. His older brother, Jack, was killed while fighting in Spain with the International Brigades for the Spanish Republic when Herbie was only 14. Herbie...
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Ascensión Mendieta, whose father Timoteo, a labor activist from Guadalajara, was killed by the Franco regime shortly after the end of the Spanish Civil War, in November 1939, passed away on September 16. She was 93 years old. In the last years of her life, Ms. Mendieta became a symbol of the quest for...
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In 1948, three young activists rescued two Spanish students from the Francoist labor camp at Cuelgamuros, outside of Madrid, where prisoners of war were building the monument that would later become known as the Valley of the Fallen. They were Paco Benet, the brother of the Spanish novelist Juan Benet; Barbara Mailer, the sister...
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Gabe Jackson, who served for many years on ALBA’s Board and Honorary Board of Governors, passed away this November 3, at the age of 98.
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One of ALBA co-chairs was interviewed on National Public Radio’s Here and Now to talk about the exhumation, on October 24, of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco from his tomb at the Valley of the Fallen.
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In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, the German writer Ernst Toller organized a multi-million-dollar international campaign to alleviate the hunger and misery of Spain’s civilian population. Although Toller’s herculean effort garnered broad support, it has been largely forgotten.
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Just Mercy, the bestselling memoir by ALBA/Puffin Award winner Bryan Stevenson, has inspired a film featuring Michael B. Jordan (who plays Stevenson), Jamie Foxx, Rob Morgan, Tim Blake Nelson, Rafe Spall, and Brie Larson. It tells the true story of Walter McMillian, an Alabama man on death row who appeals his murder conviction with...
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Robert Hale Merriman, the commander of the Lincoln Battalion who mysteriously disappeared during the Battle of Teruel in early April 1938, has been drawing attention. Milton Zerman, a history major at UC Berkeley, has been raising $1,000 to place a plaque commemorating Merriman and his wife, Marion, outside the Virginia Street apartment building where...
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A seasoned New York City reporter’s search for her family history leads her back to Civil War Spain.
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Why was the United States so reluctant to support the Spanish Republic? What prompted Roosevelt’s reactionary attitude to the struggle of Spanish democracy against fascism? Isolationism and FDR’s fear of losing the Catholic vote played a role—but they are not the whole story. President Franklin D. Roosevelt has long been an iconic figure for...
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Students from around the world once again applied to ALBA’s Watt Essay contest, which recognizes academic projects and essays about the Spanish Civil War. This year, five prizes were awarded.
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Spanish high schools often cover the Civil War and Francoism only sporadically and superficially. A new book with lesson plans based on graphic novels hopes to improve the situation. Was Francisco Franco a dictator? The question seems silly. Yet in the days following Franco’s exhumation from the Valley of the Fallen this fall, a...
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