How Eugene Debs Inspired a Black Leader to Keep Up the Fight

Research can be a slog — endless scrolling through obscure newspapers, mind-numbing traversals of microfilm, dead end after dead end. But sometimes you come upon a little treasure, and it’s all worth it.

Here’s a letter that ran in a black newspaper in Kansas City in 1917, not long after Debs really started to ramp up his antiracist rhetoric. The writer is IF Bradley, a prominent black leader and cofounder of the Niagara Movement, the WEB Du Bois–led forerunner to the NAACP.

A young IF Bradley in the late 1880s. Born to enslaved parents, he was the University of Kansas Law’s first black graduate. (Courtesy of University of Kansas School of Law)

Bradley had been in the trenches for years, and by 1917 his energy was flagging. But when he opened up the National Rip Saw, the socialist paper published out of St. Louis, and read Eugene Debs on the “Negro question” — indignation incarnate — Bradley couldn’t help but remain on the battlefield.