The Negro Workers: Address Delivered Tuesday, October 30, 1923, at Commonwealth Casino, 135th Street and Madison Avenue, N.y.c.

This is Eugene V. Debs at his most urgent and incisive. Delivered in October 1923 at a Harlem ballroom to an audience of Black workers, this address represents one of the most forthright critiques of racial division within the American labor movement ever spoken by a white leader of his stature. Debs, the five-time socialist presidential candidate and IWW co-founder, pulls no punches: he names slavery, Jim Crow, and the deliberate tactics of capitalists who keep workers fighting each other along racial lines while extracting profit from all of them. He argues that Black laborers must organize independently, reject the empty promises of both major parties, and recognize that their liberation is inseparable from the class struggle. The speech crackles with Debs's characteristic moral force and rhetorical power. Nearly a century later, it stands as a bracing historical document and a challenge to anyone who believes solidarity across racial lines was never possible or never attempted.