For America we want the best that life in the 20th century can offer—because we love America. And it is because we are “good Americans” in the best sense that we also love our brother toilers throughout the world, regardless of race, color or nationality.
—Birmingham CP leaflet, 1935
Our Party has been close to the Negro people of the South. . . . We must now begin to advance a program which will bring us just as close to the masses of Southern whites. We will lead the Negro people to realize their demands, we will begin to win thorough-going liberation for the Negro people only when we begin in practice to rally the Southern whites in unison with the Negro people.
—Francis Franklin, “For a Free, Happy and Prosperous South,” 1938