https://roanokepeoplespower.wordpress.com/
“Here is James Bernard “Bunny” Rucker (1912-1992), born in Roanoke, Virginia, raised in Columbus, Ohio, veteran of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Spanish Civil War (as a volunteer with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade), and World War II (three bronze stars and a purple heart), one-time Communist Party member, later an organizer with the Progressive Party, a graduate of Columbia University thanks to the GI Bill, and then, for 20 years, the chief librarian of the East Orange Public Library in East Orange, New Jersey. Rucker made an appearance in the final pages of my college thesis, which was about African-Americans and antifascism in the 1930s. During a snowy week in January of my senior year, as the Iraq War raged on, I remember taking the train to Manhattan and making my way to the Village so that I could read Rucker’s World War II letters to his wife in NYU’s Tamiment Library, along with other materials from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade — the 2,800 or so American volunteers who traveled to Spain to fight Franco.
I suddenly remembered Rucker today because, during the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, amidst tweets displaying photographs of men at the event waving Confederate and Nazi flags, I kept seeing tweets in response about how “the United States defeated Nazis in 1945 and would do it again” and so forth. Rucker played a part in that victory but his letters offered poignant reflections on the fact that the United States that defeated Nazi Germany remained itself in the thrall of its own brand of white supremacy.”
#Roanoke
#JamesRucker
#FightFascism
#PeoplesHistory
#CrushCapitalism
#BlackLiberationNOW
#NoBordersInTheWorkersStruggle
(photo: James Rucker, Langston Hughes in Madrid | credit: Langston Hughes Estate)
Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement 