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Chicago: Published by Modern School of Pedagogy, 1923. Sm 8vo (7.5” x 5.25”), original red illustrated staple-bound wrappers. 56 pp. CONDITION: Good, wrappers rubbed with minor stains and a few small chips, contents clean and a touch dog-eared at lower right corner.

First edition of this class-based history of chattel and economic slavery in America, the coordinated roles of the Church, the Ku Klux Klan, and the capitalists in African American oppression, and how to solve “the negro problem.”

Addressed to “the colored people of the United States on account of their brilliant and heroic struggle against capitalistic autocracy” and written by a “Wobbly,” i.e., a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, this work condemns the clergy for “failing to actively oppose, denounce and fight this barbarous, unchristian practice [of slavery] at each step from its very inception.” Through its tacit representation of capitalism, the Church “perpetrated one of the blackest crimes of omission of which we have historic record” and “has antagonized and persecuted the negro in every field of human progress” (pp. 42–44).

Complementing historical analyses of the slave trade and sections on the American Revolution, Abolitionism, and the Civil War are sections on “Lynch Law” and “The Shame of America” (providing a table of lynching numbers from 1892 to 1920), as well as accounts of the shifting geographical center of the Black population and the “Rapid Spread and Increase of Negro Population in America”: 

The birth rate of the black is 5.7 per cent greater than the white. Should the blacks continue to gain, what will then eventually become of the dominant white race, the capitalist class, the state and the church? Obliteratum, exterminatus, destruction! We leave to those, whose vicious interests lead them to continue to stir up race hatred and riots, by one subterfuge or another, to worry over the problem of the rapid increase of the black population in America. From our standpoint this situation presents no horrifying terror…The capitalists are reaping just what they may well have expected… (p. 51)

Claude McKay’s “America” and “The Lynching” as well as Percy Shelley’s “Slavery ”and an original poem by Russo himself, punctuate the prose. The final sections urge a solution to the “negro problem”—in brief: “Workers, unite wherever you are, black or white, Jew or gentile, Christian or infidel, stand together, fight together, for the emancipation of the working class. It is only industrial solidarity that will save us from the menace of the Ku Klux Klan and from the tyranny of the capitalist system.”

Negro Slavery was published in the spring of 1923, and was reviewed that June in the Industrial Pioneer: “The book is interesting, bristling with facts, and has a constructive outlook. It should be in the hands of all those who wish to be informed on the social status of the Negro” (Ball). The cover illustration shows a giant scale, a cluster of hanged workers outweighed by a fat, cackling pig with a giant dollar sign on his belly.

Pasquale Russo was a regular contributor to the Industrial Pioneer and other “rationalistic and working class periodicals” (Voice of Labor). His other publications include Ku Klux Klan, Church and Labor, Twelve O’Clock Lunch, and Tony the Immigrant.

REFERENCES: Ball, Samuel. “(1923) ‘Negro Slavery or Crime of the Clergy’ review” at Wobbly History online; Voice of Labor (Chicago), May 26, 1923, p. 3.

Item #9498

Price: $575.00