In the rich collections of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives are many stories still waiting to be unveiled or that have received very little to no attention. This blog article, based on my MA thesis research and using sources from the New York University‘s ALB archive, uncovers the unpublished autobiography of Vaughn Love, one of the 85 African Americans to fight in the Spanish Civil War. This article is dedicated to his life, memory and to his unpublished work called A Closer Look which was written between the late 70s and his passing in 1990.
Vaughn Love was born in Dayton, Tennessee on 5 December, 1907. In spite of the harsh Jim Crow south in which Love was raised, he wrote about his childhood as if being free of racism and oppression. But in the end, segregation created a lack of educational opportunities that forced him to move to West Virginia. It was there that he discovered his talent for American football and got accepted at Bluefield University for a sports scholarship. Love combined his education with summer work in the strawberry picking fields, the coal mines of West Virginia and eventually in the railroad industry. In 1928 after winning the football season, Love received a scholarship at West Virginia State College.
Shortly after arriving to the new campus Love suffered an injury that forced him to abandon college and move to New York City. The early 1930s are very briefly described in Love’s autobiography. Perhaps still fearing political persecution he omitted any relationship with the Communist Party USA or with their ideology. However, thanks to documents that Love wrote during the Spanish Civil War and some later interviews, it became evident that shortly after his arrival in the Big Apple, Love joined the Harlem Communist Party chapter. In Harlem Love met international celebrities such as Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, both of whom would also travel to Spain during the civil war. From his engagement with the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR), the National Negro Congress (NNC) and Roosevelt’s Federal Theatre Project (FTP), it’s clear that Love was a highly politicized activist by the time Franco waged a coup d’etat against the Spanish Republic on 20 February, 1937.
Machine-gunner crew with Vaughn Love kneeling (left), June 1938. ©Tamiment Library
Shortly after, Love embarked on his journey to Spain. In his autobiography he declared that he volunteered because he “could not tolerate the prospect of living in a world dominated by Hitler” and he was certain “that Negro rights, civil rights and civilization itself were all at stake in Spain.” Once he arrived he was assigned to the newly created Washington Battalion, whose headquarters were located in the little town of Madrigueras. It was there that Love had an encounter with a group of local women that moved him profoundly:
“They surrounded me and gave me a good examination. They rubbed my face to see if the color would come off; and they finally decided that I had been in the sun too much. I told them that I was a Negro from the United States of North America, which caused one of the women to embrace me and say, “Los esclavos” (the slaves). It was a touching ceremony in the little village square, when all the women at the fountain embraced me to show their sympathy. None of them had ever been more than a few miles from their village, but they knew about Negro slavery in the United States.”
Love stayed in Spain from March 1937 to September 1938 when the International Brigades were decommissioned by the UN. He fought in the Battle of Brunete and in the Battle of Teruel, where he was wounded for the first time. After a two month recovery period, the republican troops had advanced to the Aragon front, where he rejoined the XV Brigade. However, after just one day of combat in the infamous Battle of the Ebro on Hill 666, Love was injured again and was forced to spend the last weeks of his time in the International Brigades in a hospital. Because of his bravery, he was appointed to the rank of sergeant. He also got invited to the farewell dinner for the International Brigades in Barcelona where anti-fascist icon Dolores Ibarruri, known as “La Pasionaria” held her famous farewell speech (see part 1 of this series).
What Love did during the interwar years up to 1941 is a mystery. His autobiography doesn’t say, but other documents seem to indicate that he remained politically active, particularly in the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB). The attack on Pearl Harbor made him enlist in the U.S. army where his experience in Spain was both valued and feared in light of its connections to communism. Although by this time the FBI and the House of Un-American Activities Committee had started to investigate him, Love fought overseas in the U.K and on D-Day at Utah Beach. At his return to the U.S., accelerated by a back injury, Love faced the harsh persecution of his communist ideals under McCarthyism.
Newspaper article about veterans of the war featuring Vaughn Love (top, middle)
Not much is said in A Closer Look about what Vaughn Love did after fighting in World War II. From interviews and personal correspondence it’s clear that he continued to work in the VALB organization, helping historians and fellow veterans to research and publish different works about the brigade. Sometime in the late 70s Love would start writing his autobiography A Closer Look, that for the next decade up until his death in 1990 he, unsuccessfully, tried to get published.
Love’s autobiography reveals the complex story of an individual in the midst of the anti-fascist internationalist struggle of the 1930s and the liberal backlash of the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, Love remained a committed activist who opposed war, fascism and defended a world where all humans could live in harmony. That’s why there is no better way to end this blog series and to commemorate his life by quoting a poem he wrote for the last page of his book:
“For the world to survive
We must have peace.
For peace to endure
We must have justice.
But justice means sharing
With all the world
All the benefits and comforts
And the burdens as well.”
Dario Graziano from Spain is a student in Transatlantic Studies at Radboud University. He has previously completed a master in American Studies in the University of Amsterdam and bachelor in History at the University of Zaragoza. During his bachelor years, he also had the chance to study abroad in countries such as the U.S., Italy or Romania, which have made him specially interested in transnational movements and perspectives. His main research interest are the African Americans who fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Recently, he published a blog about this topic on lavozdelbrigadista.com (in Spanish). To contact Dario about this thesis or research materials send an email to: dariofg007@gmail.com.
