INTRODUCTION
This digital edition of Let My People Know was edited and annotated collaboratively by Isabel Estrada, Stefano Morello, and the students in the Spring 2022 course “Activism and the College Experience” at The City College of New York (CCNY). The course sought to examine political activism on the CCNY campus in the context of the transnational conflict between totalitarianism and democracy that preceded WWII, while introducing students to digital humanities tools and methodologies. Throughout the semester, students collaboratively digitized, edited, formatted, and critically annotated the text and created this public-facing archival recovery project. We invite educators to use the text as an Open Educational Resource to teach about the Spanish Civil War, its perception from the United States, as well as past and present forms of student political activism.
Wilfred Mendelson, “Mendy,” (1915-1938) was one of thirteen CCNY students, faculty and staff volunteers, out of a total of 60, who died fighting in support of Spain's democracy during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). A son of Ukranian immigrants who settled in the lower east side of NYC, he participated in the strong labor movement that emerged from the discrimination of the Jewish labor force in Eastern Europe. Before joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Mendy, a charismatic leader, wrote about the threat of fascism in college publications and lectured in New York City in favor of freedom of speech in the USA. Four years after his death, his classmates and fellow volunteers gathered to pay homage to and memorialize him with the publication of Let My People Know: The Story of Wilfred Mendelson (“Mendy”), Student Leader, Organizer, Journalist, Anti-Fascist Soldier Who Fell in Spain July 28, 1938. The book was edited by Joseph Leeds, and written and published by Mendy’s friends in the summer and fall of 1942. This volume represents not only an invaluable contribution to the legacy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, but also offers unique insight into a decade of intense political activism on the CCNY campus.
In the first section of the book, Mendy's friends contextualize his writings by offering his full biography, including his time as a college student, from 1931 until 1935, when he was expelled for his subversive political activity. The publication then offers letters of notable interest, written by Mendelson from the Spanish front: a first-hand account that blends his personal, political, and cultural perception of the conflict. Two essays authored by Mendy conclude the collection and position him as a mature political thinker. The first, “World Politics and Ethiopia,” focuses on the threat of fascism in Ethiopia, and was originally published by the student newspaper The Clionian. In the second one, “Who are the Spanish People Fighting for?” Mendy posits a much-needed agrarian reform as the root cause of the war.
Let My People Know represents both a unique document about the CCNY volunteers who fought and died in the Spanish Civil War as well as an invaluable teaching tool to reflect upon the role of college students in the shaping of 21st century democracy. While thousands of pages have been published about the Civil War and the more than 35,000 volunteers from all over the world that fought in support of Spanish democracy from 1936 to 1938, Let My People Know dialogues with recent scholarship that highlights the participation of African Americans in the conflict. I’m thinking, for instance, of the critical attention attracted by Mississippi to Madrid. Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1989) by James Yates, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. The memoir has been recognized by historian Robin D.G. Kelly, who contends that Yates supported the world of “radical possibility” both in Mississippi and Madrid (17). Also noteworthy is the 2021 release of the documentary Invisible Heroes. African-Americans in the Spanish Civil War by Jordi Torrent, about the little known 85 African American volunteers that answered the call to fight both inequality and fascism. The recent scholarship adds to the reports and essays written by Harlem Renaissance poet and journalist Langston Hughes from the Spanish front in 1937.This collection highlights the strong bonds of solidarity between Jewish and African American communities in the 1930s. It captures the affinities of their shared struggles not only in Brooklyn, where the Jewish labor movement developed early in the 20th century, but also in Harlem, right by and on the CCNY campus. For instance, CCNY students supported the organization ‘Young Liberators,’ made up of black and white activists fighting against discrimination of African-American workers. Through a variety of testimonies in Let my People Know, we learn that over 1,000 students rallied to protest the dismissal of Oakley Johnson, a black English professor that supported student activists and was publicly known for his communist sympathies. In light of the impact that the Black Lives Matter movement had on the US political discourse—especially after George Floyd’s killing in 2020—discussing these issues in the classroom became imperative.
Mendy invites us to reflect about social justice both from the local and the global perspectives, as evidenced by three additional aspects of the book. First, the references to The Negro Question in the United States (1936), a seminal work by James S. Allen that proposes the creation of an African American nation to end segregation in the US. Mendy, an avid reader of Marxist philosophy and politics, had this text in his reading list. Second, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was the first non-segregated army in the history of the USA, which leads Mendy to observe in his letters from Spain that the volunteers represented a real cross section of the American people. Finally, Let My People Know includes an essay by Mendy, also a prolific writer in student publications, entitled “World Politics and Ethiopia,” which decries the expansion of fascist imperialism in the African continent.
Our class discussions were inspired and informed by the reading of Let My People Know, alongside literary and historical texts that helped us contextualize Mendy’s experience. Bridging “little” histories and “big” history—the local and the global—, we reflected upon current activism on the CCNY campus; the limits of our freedom of speech; the ambiguities of what has been called “cancel culture;” the students’ political responsibility as engaged citizens; the potential and limitations of 21st-century activism on social media; moral responsibility in the face of injustice; horizontal organizing as a strategy to erode the existing hierarchical political structures; and the war in Ukraine vis-a-vis the Spanish Civil War. Undoubtedly, these were broad, overwhelming topics, but their urgency kept us grounded. This digital edition celebrates the activism of the generation of students growing up in the Great Depression and serves as a stark reminder of our own need to politically engage with both local and transnational agendas in order to shape 21st century democracy.
Throughout the semester, students digitally retraced Mendy’s words and those of his fellow CCNY students and contributed to keeping their memory alive by making this archive of youth idealism accessible to the world. Developing this project was an opportunity for students to learn about Digital Humanities tools and methods, and to engage with a text through modalities that required them to be active contributors not only to the class, but also to the broader ongoing discourses that informed the course’s topics.
Promoting active learning through project-based and collaborative pedagogy seemed especially important upon returning to the classroom after two years of distance learning that inexorably impacted sociality, participation, and motivation. As Spencer D. C. Keralis, Courtney E. Jacobs, and Matthew Weirick Johnson have observed of digital project-based assignments, “digital agency allows students to pivot quickly from being content consumers to knowledge producers, with digital tools providing the means of production, rather than being direct objects of learning in and of themselves.” In class, students and instructors became co-learners and co-creators, as we worked collaboratively to convert Let My People Know from digital scanned images into machine-encoded text, to format it using HyperText Markup Language, to weave a hermeneutic that allowed us to understand the text trans-historically and to appreciate the hermeneutic Mendy’s experience offers to understand the present moment. We made time for students to work together in the classroom and encouraged collaboration beyond class time through group assignments, as each step of the process offered challenges and opportunities to learn both critical and digital skills.
Publishing this project on the CUNY instance of Manifold—an open source publishing platform collaboratively created by the University of Minnesota Press, The CUNY Graduate Center, and Cast Iron Coding—allowed us room for experimentation and to think critically about the affordances of digital publishing. As Manifold “takes its visual and performative cues from the web browser rather than the printed page” (Gold, Karlin, and Michael, 278), students found themselves on familiar terrain when it came to working with and annotating the text they had contributed to creating. On the other hand, the flexibility of the platform, originally designed to publish scholarly monographs and repurposed in its CUNY hosted instance into a hybrid tool for teachers, allowed us to bend its existing functionalities to meet our needs. For instance, we used the platform’s social annotation functionality to create critical annotations that contribute to actualizing the text, embedding the results of our students’ research into the reading experience.
Working on a public facing humanities project also offered students an opportunity to not only build upon their pre-existing writing skills but to also write with a purpose. As they produced work geared towards the public (rather than just their instructor), we reflected on and experimented with elements of academic writing they had come to know in composition courses—such as audience, style, and tone—but never put into use beyond traditional academic writing. From our end of semester evaluations, we learned that nearly all of the students in the class found gratification in working on a non-traditional final project whose lifespan exceeded the end of the term.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Prof. Sydney Van Nort, from the Division of Archives and Special Collection of the M.R. Cohen Library (CCNY) for giving us access to the library materials, and to Ching Jung Chen for the support of the Digital Scholarship Services of the library. This project would not have been possible without the initial enthusiasm of my dear colleagues Ellen Handy and the late David Nocera. We are grateful to the Interim Dean of Humanities and the Arts Renata Kobetts-Miller for the creation of the Digital Humanities Working Group (CCNY), which has fostered the implementation of DH as pedagogy. We're grateful to Melanie Matonte, who helped revise the project in the summer of 2022 with funding from the Opportunities in Research and Creative Arts program at CCNY. Finally, a special word of appreciation to Dean Kobetts-Miller and her co-PI professor Thomas Peele for supporting this class through the NEH grant ‘Building a Digital Humanities Minor at The City College of New York.’ These resources provided our students with ground-breaking pedagogy in the Humanities.
Works Cited
Gold, Matthew K., Jojo Karlin, and Krystyna Michael. “Hybrid Scholarly Publishing Models in a Digital Age” in New Directions in Print Culture Studies. Jesse W. Schwartz and Daniel Worden, eds. Bloomsbury, 2022. 277-291