A White Mans Nation? The Irish Revolution & Black Radicals

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The Irish Revolution and War of Independence is often remembered as a struggle shaped by

nationalism and republicanism. However, it also unfolds in a time of soaring racial tension

and violence around the world. While 1919 saw the War of Independence escalate in Ireland,

the United States was in the grip of what became known as the Red Summer,

as white mobs attacked African-Americans in numerous towns and cities.

In this time of rising racial violence and political upheaval,

black communities demanded equality, and in Ireland, they saw a struggle that inspired hope.

Famous black leaders like Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay sent messages of solidarity and

encouraged their supporters to attend rallies, protests, and strikes in support of Ireland's struggle

for freedom. However, the relationship between Irish and black radicals was far from straight

forward. In the United States, many Irish-Americans had a reputation for racism,

while Aiman De Valera, who toured the U.S. during the War of Independence to enlist political

and financial support, did not express solidarity with black communities, particularly as he toured

the southern states. This episode explores the complicated history of solidarity and betrayal

between Irish and black radicals during the War of Independence and Irish Revolution,

and how the racial politics of the age influenced Ireland's revolution more than we might imagine.

Hello and welcome to the Irish History Podcast. My name is Finn Duyer. This is the fourth

episode in Brothers and Pain, a special series hosted by Dr. Brian Hanley that looks at the

global history of Ireland's War of Independence, and this episode is particularly gripping,

but it's also at times uncomfortable and challenging. Brian, as you'll know by this stage,

is an assistant professor of history in Trinity College Dublin and has several acclaimed

publications to his name on the Irish Republican movement and our Revolutionary History,

more broadly, I've linked to these below. Now, it goes without saying that this podcast

tackles a complicated part of our history, and Brian starts by laying out the situation around

the world and how racial tensions were rising as the War of Independence began in Ireland,

and how in this racialized world, many opponents of Irish independence used rhetoric

often directed against people of color against the Irish. However, he then goes on to explore

the way Irish people responded to this, and this reveals what is a complicated and often

contradictory part of our Revolutionary History. Now, just before we dive in, I want to flag that

the next episode on the main show is with Dr. Nicholas Wolf. That podcast explores the history

of the Irish language and basically the story of how Ireland went from a largely Irish-speaking

country to a predominantly English-speaking one. That history is not quite what you might imagine

it to be. Sound on this episode is by Kate Dunley.

In May 1921, a French journalist, Ludovic Nadu, asked Cana White Race, intellectually equal

to the most civilised nations, and which has produced many great men,

be treated in the manner of a savage tribe. Cana White Race, even one of the greatest,

hold under its dominion in Europe, and another White Race, physically less strong, but Marley,

are equal. And the question that Nadu was posing referred to Ireland and to Britain,

and it was a question that troubled many Europeans and many Americans. Because while people were

familiar with the idea of a white colonial power ruling over dark skinned people,

Britain was ruling Ireland, and most Europeans and Americans quite clearly saw the Irish

as a white people. And this was in a period in which the question of race was again becoming central

to discourse and to controversy. The post-war period saw a new awareness of race as people

of color across the globe saw change, in part inspired by their wartime service,

the service of colonial peoples in the French army, for example, or in the British army,

and also by the promises of self-determination promoted by President Woodrow Wilson and others.

In fact, many African-Americans assumed that the self-determination that Wilson talked about

might apply to them as well. The post-war period also saw a new pride in black literature,

art, and music. But this new conference among African-Americans and among people of color

in Europe and elsewhere provoked a ferocious racist backlash with lynching's riots and

workplace expulsions directed at black people in the United States, Britain, and in Europe.

Woodblacks also resisted this backlash. They're moved in the United States,

summed up by Claude McKay in his poem, If We Must Die, where he said, let it not be like hogs

hunted and penned in an inglorious spot. If we must die, let us nobly die, like men will face

the murderous cardly pack, pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back. And a feature of the

race riots in the United States during 1919, and also those that occurred in places like Liverpool,

and Cardiff, was that black people fought back. And news of these events was well known in Ireland.

In Ireland, people were well aware of this new discussion about rights for black people,

and also about the backlash against it. Indeed, it became a common part of discussion through

its featuring in novels like The Great Gatsby. In The Great Gatsby at one point, character Tom Buchanan

argues, civilization's going to pieces. I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things.

The idea is if we don't look out, the white race will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific

stuff. It's been proved. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out, or these other

races will have control of things. And Buchanan courts a book called The Rising Tide of the

Colored Empires. Now this was a fictional book, but it was based on a book The Rising Tide of

Colour against white world supremacy, written by Lottrop Stottart, an American who was also as it

happens an opponent of Irish self-determination. And he had written that the frightful weakening

of the white world during the war has opened up revolutionary even cataclysmic possibilities,

in other words, the white America and white Europe had been badly weakened by their sacrifice

in the Great War, and now peoples of colour were beginning to take advantage. Someone who worried

that Woodrow Wilson's promises about self-determination would cause major problems was his secretary of state

Robert Lansing, and this too was relevant to Ireland. During 1919, Lansing argued that Woodrow Wilson

had made a huge mistake in talking about self-determination in the way he had. Lansing wrote,

it is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the peace congress and create trouble

in many lands. What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptian, and the

Nationalists among the Boris? Will it not breed discontent disorder and rebellion? The phrase is

simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realised. Obviously there is

huge relevance there to the Irish case, but it was also the case that Lansing was clear that

self-determination should not apply to certain racist peoples or communities, who in his view

were in a state of barbarism or ignorance, and this deprived them of the capacity to choose

intelligently their political affiliations. Now what's important, of course, is that these debates

were not just taking place in America or in Britain. People in Ireland were well aware of them,

and Ireland, of course, had a great awareness anyway of developments in the United States.

In October 1921, the Anglo-Selt which is published in Cavern noted that the Negro people

are beginning to realise their powers. They are becoming race conscious, and it said,

is it any wonder that they resent the fact that they've been 36 lynchings in America since

January last? Is it surprising that they are beginning to manned the abolition of Jim Crow

and all the other forms of segregation and discrimination? Is it not natural that they protest

against forced labour in Kenya, in Georgia, and trade union discrimination on the land?

And if a local newspaper in Ireland could understand this, you can imagine about how it would

seep into the popular consciousness everywhere, particularly again when Irish people had so many

connections with the United States. But there was also a pervasive racism. This strongly featured

in reports of outbreaks of trouble in the United States and Britain and so on. The Irish Times

in June 1919, which was at the time very much a unionist newspaper reported on riots in Liverpool.

And it asserted that the Negroes have since the outbreak of the war enjoyed every privilege

of equality with white men and have become arrogant and insolent, and in many cases have been guilty

of deliberate provocation. The effects of four years of war have not yet begun to disappear,

and human life is still held lightly by many of those who themselves have smiled in the face of death.

While every effort should be made to discourage the intermingling of the races,

occurrences such as those at Liverpool and Cardiff are strongly to be deprecated.

The secular feud between white and black will last as long as human nature. But the great

difference between the two races is that the white man is capable of self-control by the angry Negro

frequently runs amok. And again, I'll stress this was the Irish Times, and this was a view that

would have been held across classes and across religions and other groups in Ireland and in elsewhere.

So there was, of course, a pervasive racism. While it was true that Ireland at the time was very

much a country population by white people, it was not true that people of color were unknown.

Sean O'Neill from Tum, who would ultimately become involved in the Republican movement,

first came to Dublin in 1914 from County Galway. And he described it as an awe-inspiring sight,

a strange big world of noise, a place where the whole world seemed to congregate.

Here too we saw coloured men and men from China and Japan, people crowded together like wasps in a

hive. Ireland was an island, but also part of the United Kingdom. Ports like Dublin and Belfast

and Colve saw international trade and therefore sailors from across the world visited Ireland

and sometimes travelled across it. We also have examples from that period of other experiences

of people of color in Ireland. In 1919, a local newspaper and carc reported that a Mrs. Mary

Xi had applied to have her 10-year-old daughter admitted to an industrial school. This child was

described as an Irish Negro or a milletto would be born in America. We can only wonder what happened

to the poor girl. 1921 there's a report in the Limerick leader of Eli Dorgon who's described as

a coloured seaman on a steamship called the West Cape, who's being jailed for the murder of a

Negro shipmate James Goodby after a row in Limerick Port. In October 1921, the American

soldier and centricopted orchestra were performing at Dublin's La Scala for three weeks.

And jazz clubs had opened in Dublin from 1919, opened in fact by veterans of the British Army

and the Great War. But these clubs soon drew much criticism for playing what was described as

Negro music or actually in which more racist terms. A further complicating factor of course

is that the Irish were often viewed in racial terms themselves, particularly by the British

or by unionists.

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25. After having to relocate following the Irish revolution, wrote a book called Western

Togs, our Ireland and the English-speaking world. And he described the Catholic Irish as essentially

Negroed, an inferior breed of men and more given to crime and superstition than pure white men.

Lord Alfred Douglas, who published the journal plain speech, argued that the Irish were inferior

in race to the Negroes. And he said that no peace, and we say it calmly, could become an

Ireland, until every weapon of modern warfare is used to burn, slay and exterminate the vermin,

who have devoured the south of that country. So again, Douglas sees the Irish problem in very,

very racial terms. An important right-wing newspaper at the time was The Morning Post,

Daily Paper in Britain. Its Irish car responded with Cyril Brisserton. He eventually wrote a book

entitled The Real Ireland, which was published in 1925. And there he argued again that the problem

in Ireland was that the Catholic Irish were a matriarchal race. The vigor of the race bought

physical and mental and a strength and constitution of its character was carried from one generation

till next by the women, and not as among the Aryan races by the men. This explains, for example,

the devotion of the Irish that Roman Catholic Church, which for its own purposes has borrowed

largely and intelligently from the matriarchal cults. The hibernian proper has the slave mentality.

He is a mixture of childishness and ferocity. He is basically superstitious,

callous to suffering, credulous, excitable, triffless, untruthful, dirty,

petally dishonest, destructive, conning, chartous, devoid of moral courage, and intensely vain.

Most of the Catholic Irish were assembled more of the Iberians in blood than they did

the British. Now, Brisserton again is somebody within the British elite who sees the problem in Ireland

very much in racial terms. These views were not universal in Britain, many British people would have

been shocked by them or certainly wouldn't have held them, but nevertheless it did show that there

was a racist element very often to how the Irish were depicted and also to how their rebellion

was seen. To counter that, of course, the friends of the Irish in Britain often stressed that the

Irish were indeed a white race, and in fact not that different from the British at all.

The Peace with Ireland Council, for example, argued in late 1920 that the worst crime of

British government policy in Ireland had been that the British cabinet has deliberately set out to

terrorize a whole people, a white people of three and a half millions with a distinct infusion

of British blood in their veins. In other words, the Irish should not be oppressed because they

were, in fact, like the British and that the Ucoe existed alongside racism in contemporary Britain.

Any association between the Irish and peoples of color in America and elsewhere was seized upon

by the right-wing press in Britain and indeed in Ireland. In August 1921, a huge Congress took place

in New York of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association. This was reported in

the Belfast newsletter a unionist paper under the headline N of the Black Belt. The racist term

for people of color was used to describe those who'd rallied and sent greetings to Ireland

from the streets of New York. That event was significant and was not the only occasion in those

years when black American or West Indian radicals had identified explicitly with the Irish cause.

Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association saw the Irish cause as central

to the cause that they were fighting for. Garvey said, we believe in the principles of justice and

equity. That is why we're in sympathy with Ireland. That is why we're in sympathy with the

Zionist movement. That is why we're in sympathy with the nationalist movement of Egypt and of India.

We believe all men should be free. Garvey in particular was very interested in the Irish question.

Saw that the ability of the Irish to weaken the British Empire would also weaken the British

Empire in the West Indies among their other colonies and might lead to freedom for people of color

there. He along with other West Indian radicals such as Cyril Briggs, Claude McKay,

Hubert Harrison were extremely enthused by the Irish Revolution. In 1919 the US Justice Department

reported that all the colored speakers in Harlem are using the Irish question in their discussions.

British intelligence reported in the same year that the general world unrest is not without

effect upon the Negroes and the South of the United States has become restless. This agitation

goes far beyond the redress of grievances and has taken the color of pan Negroism and a combination

with other colored races which are pan at the head. There is a tendency to draw in the Negro a lot

with the Irish, the Jews and the East Indies as oppressed peoples. People of color and others

were making connections and very interestingly they saw the Irish as part of their struggle.

Certainly Garvey saw the Irish question as central. Now Garvey's politics were complicated.

He was a black separatist. He believed that black people should leave the United States

and return to Africa but he also was an anti-imperialist. In August 1920 his organization

held one of their congresses in New York. Significantly they sent greetings to Aiman de Valera as

president of the Irish Republic. Their message read please accept sympathy of Negroes of the

world for your cause. We believe Ireland should be free even as Africa shall be free for the

Negroes of the world. Keep up the fight for a free Ireland. Now De Valera was actually in the

United States at this point and ultimately there was a reply to Garvey's message which was a

public message. Their reply however was private. Their reply from De Valera read,

My dear sir President De Valera has instructed me to convey to you his thanks for the message

of sympathy for our cause sent to him from the Negro mass convention. He believes that every

people are entitled to the possession of their own homeland and trust that the time will come

when no people will be dominated by another for selfish purposes but that all will be privileged

to enjoy the liberty plainly intended for them by the creator. So there's an expression of

sympathy there from De Valera but it's a private message of sympathy. Garvey was not the only

black radical who looked to Ireland. Cyril Briggs published a journal called The Crusader

argued in February 1921 that the Irish fight for liberty is the greatest epic of modern history.

It is a struggle that should have the sympathy and active support of every lover of liberty

and every member of an oppressed group. The Negro in particular should be interested in the Irish

struggle. For while it is patent that Ireland can never escape from the menace of the overshadowing

empire so long as England is able to maintain her grip on the riches and manpower of India and Africa,

it is also clear that those suffering together under the heel of British imperialism

must learn to coordinate their efforts before they can hope to be free and again Briggs

who would be drawn towards communism sees very much the importance of Ireland as a place that

can disrupt British colonial control of her other possessions. Claude McKay too also wrote

about the Irish question. He lived in England for a period attended Irish rallies

in Trafalgar Square. He said I react more to the emotions of the Irish people than those of

any other whites. They are so passionately primitive in their loves and hates. They are quite free

of the disease of Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy. I suffer with the Irish. I think I understand the Irish.

My belonging to a subject race entitles me to some understanding of them. I was born and

rare to peasant. The peasant's passion for the soil possesses me. It is one of the strongest

passions of the Irish revolution. But McKay also noticed because he lived in the United States

that American Negroes hold some sort of a grudge against the Irish. They have asserted

that Irishmen have been their bitterest enemies. And here was a reality that we cannot ignore

that there had been almost a century bitter tension and sometimes violence between the Irish in

America and African Americans. The greatest single African American intellectual of the era

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about this in March 1921 when he wrote to the Reverend DJ Boston

who was part of the Catholic board for mission work among the colored people. They were discussing

the Irish. And Du Bois asserted that, I regret to say that there can be no doubt of the hostility

of a large proportion of Irish Americans towards Negroes. It has been manifest in so many ways

and so continuously and emphatically that there can be absolutely no doubt about it.

I have been in personal contact with Irish Americans from my childhood up onto the present.

I have found very few of them who have expressed the slightest sympathy for the Negro.

And in our present organization, which was the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement

of Color People, we have lamentable few members of Irish descent. And Du Bois is being realistic here.

Then he goes on to say, this fact does not for a moment invalidate the justice of the Irish cause.

And I shall at all times defend the right of Ireland to absolute independence.

I believe that great Britain is today the greatest enemy of human freedom and independence.

Not only for the Irish, but for most of the peoples of the world.

When, however, I defend the Irish cause, I shall not fail to point out that Irish men have been

hereditary and historical enemies of Black folk with a few fine exceptions. He mentioned Daniel O'Connell,

the repeal leader of the 1840s as one of those exceptions. And Du Bois' worries were also echoed

by a Philip Randolph, Black American socialist and trade unionist. He too sympathized with the Irish.

He opposed British imperialism. He wrote in the messenger how Britain had crushed under

him our imperial heel, the bleeding body of Ireland, the suffering soul of India, and the dusky slaves

of Egypt. When a strike took place in New York in August 1920, which involved both Irish and African

American workers, Randolph proclaimed, long lived the solidarity of labor. Only labor can free

Ireland. He said, maybe later on, Negroes will be having their own Irish brothers strike for

Negro freedom. Who knows? When a Philip Randolph also noted that the Irish were the race which

Negroes dislike most. And this long history of tension and violence was one that would continue

to affect the ability of these people to cooperate during their evolutionary era.

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now. Explore further at RangeRover.com. Irish Republicans were active in the United States

during 1919 and 1919 at saw the worst race riots in the United States since the 1860s.

They were most severe in the city of Chicago, a multi-ethnic city in which the Irish played

a prominent role. These violent riots, the Red Summer, saw lynchings and attacks on black people

and numerous towns and cities across the United States were particularly intense in Chicago.

One historian has written about how the riots in Chicago, seen in a different light,

where a tar four, where Irish Americans and Southside neighbors fought against incoming African

American populations. The Irish had become well-organized, where numerous, politically connected,

with sympathy and even protection from the largely Irish American Chicago police force.

More effectively than any other number of ethnic groups, they had established informal territories,

with roughs, adolescents and others constantly patrolling. In other words, the Irish had played

a central role in the violence against African Americans in the Chicago riots. Now, what's

significant, of course, is that these riots occurred in the summer of 1919. Devil era visited Chicago

that summer, addressed thousands of Irish people and Irish Americans and was rapturously

received. He never mentioned one word in Chicago about the recent violence which had traumatized

the city. Indeed, in no place that he visited in the United States, did he mention the question

of African Americans, even as lynching reached new heights and even as the race question was

worn which was impossible to avoid. Devil era did speak about other races. In Wisconsin in 1919,

he visited a Chippewa reservation and he said to the Native Americans there,

I speak to you in Gaelic because I want to show you that though I am white, I am not of the English

race. We like you are a people who have suffered and I feel for you with a sympathy that comes

only from one who can understand as we Irishmen can. You say you are not free, neither are we free,

and I sympathize with you because we are making a similar fight. As a boy I read and understood

of your slavery and long to become one of you, I call upon you the truest of all Americans to

help us win our struggle for freedom. The Devil era was honored by the Chippewa became chief

dressing feather. So he was prepared to speak to Native Americans and empathize and actually express

solidarity with them. But Devil era and other Irish Republican leaders in the United States said

nothing at all about the question of discrimination against African Americans. Indeed,

when Devil era spoke at rallies in the United States, on several occasions he asserted that the

Irish were the one remaining white nation in the slavery of alien rule. Harry Bolum told the Boston

audience that the Irish were the only white race condemned to slavery and Mary McSweeney

informed Americans that the Irish were the only one of the white races in the world, which is today

not free. In Ireland itself George Gavin Duffy, born MacNeil and Erskine Childers,

all used the same terminology in their rhetoric. Sinn Fein pamphlets claimed that the Irish were the

only white people in the world whose numbers were in decline, so the assertion that the Irish were

white. And this whiteness entitled them to self-determination was something that Irish Republicans

stressed on various occasions in those years. It was particularly relevant in the United States

because by saying that you were white you were quite clearly differentiating yourself from other

Americans who were not. This is also relevant to Devil era's tour of the American South.

Irish Republicans wanted to travel to the American South. They were substantial Irish populations

living in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and elsewhere, but these were also bastions of

southern Protestantism and there was a fear that Devil era would meet a hostile reception,

indeed he was promised one in some parts of the American South. He was advised to stress the

historic Irish connections, not only to the American South but to the American Confederacy when he

visited. Liam Melos and others advised Devil era to stress historic figures such as Andrew Jackson,

the Rutledge's John C. Calhoun, Pat Claiborne, the southern Pat finders David Crocodne and Samuel

Houston, who were all in many ways sons of Irish immigrants. Melos also urged Devil era to note that

when the first scone of the Civil War was fired when the Union ships bombarded for Sumter,

the officer in command of the fort was Captain John Mitchell, a native of Ireland, the son of John

Mitchell of 48 fame and John Mitchell himself in the days before the war was one of the foremost

champions of the South in a newspaper which he published in New Orleans. Now this too is significant

because John Mitchell was remembered in the American South as a vigorous defender of not only the

Confederacy but a vigorous defender of slavery and white supremacy and here were Irish Republicans

stressing to Devil era that he should identify very strongly with Mitchell and with other Irish

immigrants who supported the Confederate cause. Indeed while he traveled across the American

South, Devil era did leave reeds at Confederate war memorials. There were still of course people

alive who'd fought in the American Civil War at this point. Now Devil era did not identify with

Confederacy politically that would have been suicidal in terms of American politics but he did go

out of his way not to offend the South in terms of its racial politics. But there are contradictions

and complicating factors. In August 1920, New York saw it's called the Irish Patriotic Strike.

As Irish workers and Irish Americans workers stopped work on New York stocks in protest at the

British arrest of Archbishop Mannix who traveled from New York towards Ireland but was intercepted

by the Royal Navy and taken into custody. Irish workers began strike action in protest and were

joined by workers of a number of other ethnicities including large numbers of African American

Longshoremen. One newspaper reported in fact that another feature of today was the presence of

numerous negresses who endeavored to lure the Negro Longshoremen away from work. Order is being

maintained on the peers but numerous encounters between blacks and whites over Negroes replacing

white Longshoremen have taken place. So during this strike there was both support for the Irish

by African American workers but also attempts by the dock companies to bring in black workers

as strikebreakers which was a feature again of Dockland labor disputes.

Marcus Garvey and others became involved and called on African American workers to support

the Irish. Leaflets were distributed arguing brothers if you scab Ireland you scab the Negro race.

A man's a patient of the Irish is the emancipation of all mankind. And this again was a long and

complex story but during this strike some Irish Republicans did travel to Ireland to speak to

Garvey's supporters. It had a longer term impact. Irish newspapers reported that African Americans

were attending Irish protest events particularly during the hunger strike of Terrence McSweeney.

One African American J.A. Adams from Albany in upstate New York wrote to the Irish world

newspaper to pay tribute to Terrence McSweeney. Under the headline an Afro-American

tribute Adams argued as a friend of Irish freedom permit me as a colored man to join in this way

in your demonstration of sympathy and appreciation of the heroic soul now at rest after his wonderful

triumph over the whole British Empire. Afro-Americans acclaim him among the immortals and pray for the

Republic of Ireland. In 1921 a branch of the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish

Republic was founded in Harlem and this group had put Irish American and African American members.

There are also reports of African Americans contributing to the dull bond collections and taking part

in other protests in support of the Irish cause in this period but unfortunately that again is

not entirely the whole story. From 1921 on there was a huge scare in Europe about the occupation

of the German rule by French troops, particularly French colonial troops. It was argued that the

French government had committed a crime against humanity by allowing African troops to be set amongst

white Germans. The Germans made huge propaganda of this reached the United States and Britain

where it caused great disquiet and it also reached Ireland and Irish Republican publications seemed

to have taken the German word for granted. So New Ireland, a Republican journal asserted during 1921

that taking the African Negro from his home in the Wales and setting him down on check

among the city populations of Germany has released an army core of black barbarians

upon the homeless and more civilized countryside in Europe. These conscript drafts from tropical

Africa have been torn from their homes and are naturally full of savage resentment against the white

race. This was also covered in Irish labour publications and the language was explicitly racist.

What was actually German propaganda without any foundation about mass rapes of German women by

these African troops was widely believed in Britain, Ireland and the United States. It suggests

then that Irish Republicans were not instinctively sympathetic towards people of color and instead

were more concerned about whether or not Britain was on one side or the other of these arguments.

And that had been notable before, many Irish Republicans had been enthused 20 years earlier

by the Bohr struggle for freedom against the British. People like Arthur Griffith,

Maud Gone and many others had written, movingly about the Bohr plight.

Maud Gone in fact argued in 1900 that one factor in the justice of the Bohr cause was that

the Bohr's had battled against what she called the fiendish treachery of the Native tribes.

It wasn't the case that Irish Republicans were unaware that the Bohr's were viciously racist

against Native Black South Africans, but as it was actually seen as a positive in their favor.

Similarly, Arthur Griffith who lived in South Africa accepted without question that there was

a natural racial hierarchy. When he wrote about John Mitchell in 1913 an introduction to Mitchell's

famous jail journal, he responded to criticisms of Mitchell's support for slavery by saying that

no excuse was needed for an Irish nationalist declining to hold the Negro his peer in right.

The right of the Irish to political independence never was, his not, and never can be dependent

on the admission of equal right in all other peoples. So some Irish Republicans at least did not

believe in the universal right of humanity to self-determination. They too bought into the

revering racial views of the time, but of course this was a contradictory situation.

The rhetoric around the Anglo-Irish treaty again shows us how racial language could affect

how people viewed themselves. Some of those who supported the treaty were very eager for Ireland to

join the ranks of the civilized white nations as they sought. Kevin O'Higgins for example argued

that if the Irish rejected the treaty and fought over it, we bid fair to be classed with the

racist term and the Mexican as a people unable to govern themselves. Similarly, another pro-treaty

out Alexander McCabe said, give us anything that would stamp us as white men and women, but for

heaven's sake don't give us a central American republic. But what was important here was that

there was a great interest in the Irish cause and the Irish revolution among African-American

and West Indian radicals. While the Irish were exceptionally cautious about expressing solidarity

with them, particularly in the United States, these radicals were supportive of the Irish nevertheless.

The generosity of W.E.B. Du Bois rings out. So too does the radicalism of Marcus Garvey,

who felt that no matter what the Irish taught about him and Irish victory against Britain,

would be a victory for all people of color. Nevertheless, it is important to remember too how

important the idea of whiteness and of race was even to a revolutionary world.

That episode certainly left me with a lot to think about and challenged perceptions I have

of Ireland's revolutionary era. I want to thank Brian for his work and research in making the show

and bringing out this often overlooked aspect of our history. Now I'll be talking to you and

Wednesday with that show with Dr. Nicholas Wolf on the history of the Irish language and Brian

we'll be back next Friday with the next installment of Brothers in Pain. Until then, Sloan.

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