“I Knew that Spain Once Belonged to the Moors”: Langston Hughes, Race, and the Spanish Civil War

Responding to Dolan Hubbard’s proposal to enhance scholarship on “Hughes and the international stage,” this essay addresses race within the context of Hughes’s numerous writings inspired by the Spanish Civil War, which he covered as a war correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American. Through close readings of a number of texts, I argue that the category of race provides a productive and neglected entry into reading the conflict in which the violent supremacist ideology of Spain’s colonial Army of Africa, chief instigators of the 1936 uprising, was contested by the opposing ideology of the African American combatants of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers. Inscribing race at the heart of the Spanish conflict enables us also to recover a key player in the forced transatlantic dispersal and enslavement of African men and women in the early modern period and to enrich Gilroy’s hugely influential paradigm by unearthing Spanish participation as well as recognizing Hughes as a vital black Atlanticist.