About

Distributed between 1930 and 1937, Southern Worker was a regional newspaper produced by the Communist Party, USA. First edited by Solomon “Sol” Auberbach, who adopted the pseudonym “James S. Allen,” Southern Worker documents the Communist Party's attempt to unify Black and white laborers and farmers in a common struggle against capitalism, corporations, and inequality. In the inaugural August 16th, 1930 issue, the Southern Worker announces, “It is a paper of and for both white and black workers and farmers. It recognizes only one division, the bosses against the workers and the workers against the bosses. In this class struggle, the Southern Worker stands always, without exception, unflinchingly, for the workers. It is a workers' paper.”

While the paper addressed issues of labor broadly, it did reflect and speak to the concerns of Black laborers specifically, with an intentional focus on racist Jim Crow laws that prevented access to jobs to Black workers. Additionally, the Southern Worker maintained a prominently vocal anti-lynching stance and provided reporting and analysis on the Scottsboro Boys trials.

In 1937, the paper folded, with the September 1937 issue as the last publication of the Southern Worker. Represented here are 65 issues of the paper, from its first issue released on August 16, 1930 through March 5, 1932.

This digital edition reproduces the holdings of the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. To contact the library, please email special.collections@nyu.edu.