In response to the rise of fascism in Europe and its genocidal violence, Black activists and writers often drew upon language (“holocaust,” “pogrom”) that would help tie the conditions unfolding in Europe to anti-Black violence (race riots, Jim Crow laws, redlining, disenfranchisement, lynchings, etc.) across the South and in urban areas. Black women like Thyra J. Edwards and Salaria Kea, working within the tradition of Black internationalism, traveled to Spain and Italy to fight fascism on Europe’s frontlines. In a 1938 pamphlet entitled “A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain,” Kea details her experience providing medical care during the Spanish Civil War. She urges her readers to support the anti-fascist cause: “Surely Negro people will just as willingly give of their means to relieve the suffering of a people attacked by the enemy of all racial minorities — fascism — and its most aggressive exponents — Italy and Germany.”
Edwards, an educator, social worker, journalist, and union organizer, traveled across Italy and Germany from 1933 to 1934 to report on the rise of fascism. Edwards leveraged her network of anti-imperialist, socialist, and labor organizations — including the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, France’s Social Workers’ Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, and the National Negro Congress — to sound the alarm on the dangers of fascism to women and Black people across the African diaspora. Edwards was keenly aware of how patriarchy, natalism, and gender violence were foundational to the fascist project: “No force in the world today so threatens the position and security of women as does the rising force of fascism,” she wrote. “Fascism degrades women.” Upon her return to the U.S., Edwards traveled across the country, fundraising for the anti-fascist cause back in Europe. Indeed, one of her most successful fundraising campaigns took place at the historically Black Hampton Institute — students at the college organized a committee and donated 1,000 cans of milk that would be shipped to Spain along with an ambulance, for which Edwards and Kea helped procure funding. Following World War II, Edwards returned to Europe and settled in Italy. Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime had installed a nationalist and military curriculum, mandated loyalty oaths for teachers, and expelled Jewish teachers and children from schools. Edwards, who previously taught in segregated schools in the U.S., understood that education and social work were essential to healing young victims of fascism. In 1953, she established a child care program in Rome for Jewish child victims of the Holocaust.