12019-03-12T23:57:03+00:00Stanford University Pressaf84c3e11fe030c51c61bbd190fa82a3a1a1282414gallerypublished2019-11-03T21:53:14+00:00AnonymousOn February 2, 1936, the Atlanta Daily World reported on Ethiopians fighting an anticolonial battle against Italy. The article praised the “brave men of [Ethiopian] Emperor Haile Selassie” and described how in the first “great battle since Italy moved its legion of greedy warriors into the land of Ethiopia, the blood-thirsty Ethiopians registered a decisive victory over the rugged men of Mussolini January 28, annihilating the entire northern Italian army near Abbi Addi” (click to view PDF). This battle was part of the second Italo-Ethiopian War which led, after Mussolini’s army defeated the Ethiopian fighters, to Italy’s colonial occupation of Ethiopia. On May 9, 1936, Italy established the Italian East Africa colony by merging Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somaliland.
I first learned about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and how this colonization resonated in the Pan-African world from Robin D. G. Kelley’s chapter “‘This Ain’t Ethiopia, But It’ll Do’: African Americans and the Spanish Civil War” in his book Race Rebels. Kelley uses the fascist occupation of Ethiopia as a starting point to examine how African Americans, namely members of the black Communist left who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, saw the Spanish Civil War as an extension of the Italo-Ethiopian War. The epigraph that opens this chapter is from Langston Hughes’ poem “The Ballad of Ethiopia”:
All you colored peoples Be a man at last Say to Mussolini No! You Shall not pass
As Kelley suggests, the black press followed the Italian invasion of Ethiopia closely. This selection of editorial cartoons highlights frustration with the League of Nations and the United States for their lack of support for Ethiopians, praises journalists like Joel Augustus Rogers for bringing news from Ethiopia to African-American readers, and mourns for the Ethiopians who lost lives, land, and sovereignty.