Page:Meet the Communists (Flynn).djvu/17

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diers abroad nor their returned comrades nor their families want to see our armies shooting down oppressed people in India, Indonesia or China. Our occupation forces belong in Germany and Japan only. The military fighting is over. The soldiers' job, as fighters, is done. Our troops must not be used to police people who yesterday welcomed them as liberators and today are coming to regard them as agents of American imperialism. We want our soldiers back—as private citizens—in the shop, on the picket line, in the voting booth, and we welcome them into the ranks of the Communist Party, to continue the fight against fascism on the home front.

APPEAL TO NEGRO PEOPLE

We are especially inviting Negro Americans, men and women, who are deeply and justifiably stirred against segregation, discrimination, lynching and violence—North and South. They will find their efforts to wipe out Jim Crow and to attain full democracy shared by every Communist. The Communist Party is uncompromisingly opposed to all concepts of white supremacy as one of the same barbaric ideology which produced fascist Aryan supremacy and anti-Semitism. We are fighting for the full rights of Negro Americans and all our past activities demonstrate this. We first became known to the Negro people through the Scottsboro case and the fight to free Angelo Herndon. Any illusions that the winning of the war would automatically carry with it the complete equal rights of Negro Americans has proved to be a will-o'-the-wisp.

Negro soldiers fought and died gallantly. The record of the 92nd Division glows with their heroism. Negro women were nurses, WACS, Red Cross workers, and worked faithfully in every war industry. Negro seamen helped to "keep 'em sailing" and many were killed by submarine attacks. The names of Dorie Miller, Captain Mulzac, Mrs. Bethune, Ferdinand Smith, and countless others are identified with America's war effort. Capitalist America is now saying to our Negro citizens: "Go back to the kitchen, back to the porters' jobs, back to the mops and pails; back to the unskilled, underpaid, overworked, dirty, menial jobs; back to the plantations, back to

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