The African American veterans of the Lincoln Brigade who joined the US armed forces during World War II were demoralized and embittered by the gross inequalities and color lines they experienced daily. The purported stakes of World War II—crushing fascism and saving democracy—intensified their outrage, which turned into militancy.
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Dear Friends, “There will be Brigades forming again,” John Garfield’s character says at the end of The Fallen Sparrow, the 1943 spy thriller in which he plays Kit McKittrick, a traumatized Lincoln vet who singlehandedly foils a Nazi plot. Although the phrase is easy to miss, it is key to understanding the story’s political...
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ALBA Chair Aaron Retish sent a letter to Provincetown officials to protest a threat to the resting place of Douglas Roach, one of the 90 African Americans in the Lincoln Brigade. A proposed new housing development would disturb the graves of Roach and his extended family, whose burial plot falls slightly outside the town...
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On August 3 in San Francisco, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, in collaboration with Veterans for Peace, hosted a powerful event featuring the documentary The Truth Be Told: Irving Norman and the Human Predicament. Produced and directed by Ray Day, the film explores the haunting social surrealist paintings of Lincoln Brigade veteran Irving Norman...
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ALBA’s popular series of Spanish Civil War movie discussions continued with sessions covering For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Fallen Sparrow, both from 1943, led by Prof. Alex Vernon (Hendrix College) and Prof. Sebastiaan Faber (Oberlin College), respectively. On August 21, Prof. Gina Herrmann (University of Oregon) will lead a conversation on Alain...
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Save the Date: ALBA’s End-Of-Year Gathering On December 7, in the afternoon, ALBA will hold its annual end-of-year gathering at La Nacional on West 14th Street. More details to follow! ALBA at Socialism 2025 In July, ALBA Executive Assistant Dennis Meaney attended the Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago to connect ALBA’s work with the...
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A quarter century after being commissioned, a plaque dedicated to the New Hampshire Volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade was finally unveiled in a joyous celebration on Sunday, July 13 in Albany, NH. Initially commissioned in 2000 to be displayed in the New Hampshire statehouse, its unveiling was blocked by backlash from rightwing legislators. Thanks to...
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This year the commemoration of the Battle at Jarama--a key battle in the development of the Spanish War--was dedicated to the volunteers of the Lincoln Battalion of the XV International Brigade. They took place during four days, between February 20 and 23.
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I'm hoping the Volunteer's readers can help me with a research project.
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Eddie Barsky was a close friend of my father, Dr. Benjamin Segal, an OB-GYN who delivered many of the “red diaper babies” in New York City and worked with Dr. Barsky on various medical and political projects.
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Finding Ruby: The Bright and Dark Sides of a Family’s Fervent Idealism, by Richard Rothman London: Whitefox Publishing, 2024, 297pp.
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From June 12 to 29, Brooklyn’s MITU580 will premiere At the Barricades, a new play by James Clements and Sam Hood Adrain set among the international Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Directed by Federica Borlenghi and supported by script supervisor Skye Pallo Ross, the project was developed through a residency at NYU's Espacio...
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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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The February, AABI’s annual Jarama march followed in the footsteps of the Lincoln Battalion. Nancy Wallach was part of the extensive US delegation. “One of the most inspiring aspects of the trip is the opportunity to make connections with our counterparts from other countries.”
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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“The courage and fortitude the Lincoln Brigade exemplified is desperately needed today. They saw the writing on the wall and didn't wait until the powers that be caught up with them to take what J. Edgar Hoover preposterously described as premature anti-fascist action.” Audrey Sasson, the Executive Director of Jews for Racial and Economic...
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New additions to ALBA's Board, Honorary Board, and staff.
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On March 9, one of several memorial gatherings for Peter N. Carroll, ALBA’s chair emeritus, was held in New York City, in the presence of his partner Jeannette Ferrary and his children, Natasha and Matthew. The event included fragments of a long biographical interview with Peter by Sebastiaan Faber that was filmed in the...
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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The Spanish Senator Carla Antonelli will discuss the role of the LGBTQ movement in the anti-fascist movement. ALBA’s film series continues on June 5.
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On May 3, the nonprofit Jews for Racial & Economic Justice received the 2025 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism at a ceremony in New York City. Jews For Racial & Economic Justice Community (JFREJ) is a 6,000-member grassroots organization, widely considered to be the home of New York’s Jewish Left.
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Thank you to all those involved in the preparation of the Barsky issue, including Nancy Phillips for her financial support. I always read the magazine with interest, but this issue was of personal importance to me.
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Shirley Mangini, a professor emerita of Spanish at California State University, Long Beach, who served as ALBA Board member and Volunteer book review editor, passed away on October 11, 2024. Born near Pittsburgh, she lived in Madrid in the early 1970s before earning her graduate degrees at the University of New Mexico. After teaching...
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When Barbara Dane accepted the Clara Lemlich award for social activism in 2021, she drew a distinction between singer-activists whose songs deal with injustice, and activist-singers, who are out there on the picket lines fighting injustice themselves. She was definitely one of the latter. Barbara, who died at her home in Oakland, California, on...
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Keefer Street, by David Spaner. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2024. 307pp.
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Journey Through the Spanish Civil War, by S. L. Shneiderman. Translated from the Yiddish by Deborah A. Green. Amherst, MA.: White Goat Press, 2024. 139 pp.
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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
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My grandfather (Nana), Suresh, moved to the United States in 1959 as a young man on a student visa pursuing his master’s degree. His parents, my great grandparents, sought value in being ‘foreign educated’ and bringing his education home – to Mumbai, India to run their family business. 2 years after my Nana moved...
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Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
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LA RÉPUBLIQUE -QUOTIDINEN DE COMBAT RADICAL ET SOCIALISTE, February 5, 1938 Foreign Volunteer Arrested On March 27 last, 29 North Americans were arrested on board the boat Sans-Pareil while they were attempting to reach the Spanish Coast. They were sentenced to a prison term for violating the decree of February 18, 1937 on the...
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The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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Peter Verburgh’s translation from the French Newpaper Le Journal about a group of 29 Americans arrested in France. “29 American Volunteers Arrested in Muret” Le Journal, 5 April 1937 Toulouse, 4 April- The Control services of the Non-Intervention Committee do not remain inactive, especially with the help of the French Police and Gendarmerie. Thus...
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ALBA Board Member Steve Birnbaum made the trek on Memorial Day to the Home of Eternity Cemetary in Oakland, California to pay tribute to ALB veteran Hans Joachim. Joachim was born in Berlin, Germany in 1906 and moved to the US in 1924. He served in Spain with the George Washington Battalion and later...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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