W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in 1913, famously called the race question “the great test of the American socialist.” Later generations of socialists tended to agree with him, elevating the antiracist struggle to a place of centrality in left strategy. From the 1930s to the present day, American leftists have seen the struggle against racial oppression, most centrally of black Americans, as one of the key questions radicals face in the movement to remake American society.

At the same time, it is something of a consensus judgment on the Left that before the 1930s, when the Communist Party (CP) threw itself into organizing the struggle against black oppression, American radicals largely failed Du Bois’s test. The record of the pre-Depression left is often summed up with Socialist Party (SP) leader Eugene Debs’s statement: “We [the Socialist Party] have nothing special to offer the Negro.” The SP, which was the largest organization of the American left until the growth of the CP in the 1930s, and the Left more broadly, are judged guilty of class reductionism and general neglect of the problems of black Americans.

The truth is considerably more interesting. Take Debs, for example. In the same essay from which his infamous statement is drawn, he also declares, “The whole world is under obligation to the Negro, and that the white heel is still upon the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized.” When an SP member wrote back to Debs, warning him, “you will jeopardize the best interests of the Socialist Party if you insist on political equality of the Negro,” Debs replied with scorn that the party would “be false to its historic mission, violate the fundamental principles of Socialism, deny its philosophy and repudiate its own teachings” if it failed to stand strong for black equality. These were hardly the words of a man who thought his movement should simply ignore black oppression.