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Gwendolyn Midlo

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Growing Up Scared

Growing Up Scared

always sought to right any wrongs we felt were happening. I remember marching against segregation in the early 60’s, writing letters to various leaders, supporting causes and marching for peace. I was and am basically a pacifist. Even though my father fought against Fascism in Spain, he felt that war was not the answer to the world’s problems. So to continue his and my mother’s legacy, I will always stand up for my fellow man and keep myself informed on what is happening in the world.

Margo and her sister Dolores have another connection to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: their stepmother Lois Lord Romero was married to Nathan Meyer Schilling. Lois and Nathan met at the University of Chicago and married in April 1937. The couple were still newlyweds when Nathan volunteered to serve in the International Brigades. Nathan sailed to Europe bound for Spain on May 15 the same year. In Spain, he was attached to the newly formed Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and received training as a sniper. He was killed in his first action at Fuentes de Ebro on October 13, 1937. A month later Lois My father lived long enough to see Franco pass away and to see hope for the future of Spain and the rest of the world. He died in March 1978. Margo Szermeta is the daughter of Ernest J. Romero.

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received the news that she was widow. In an interview she stated that “Humanity and progress meant more to him than life.” When asked if she was sorry that he went she stated “I’m not sorry he went. It’s what we both felt he should do.”

—Chris Brooks

Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo (1929-2022)

By Chris Brooks

Civil rights activist Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall died August 29, 2022, in Guanajuato, Mexico. As a member of a politically liberal family, she engaged in activism from an early age. She was born June 27, 1929, in New Orleans to Herbert Midlo and Ethel Samuelson. Her father was a Jewish immigrant, from what is now Poland, who built a successful legal career defending African Americans, labor organizers and others who most of the legal community shunned.

Dr. Hall is best known for her groundbreaking database on enslaved blacks in colonial America. She spent most of her academic career teaching Latin American history. While conducting research in a small Louisiana courthouse, she came across records listing detailed information on enslaved people transported to Louisiana. She searched for similar records in dusty courthouses and archives in France and Spain. Her initial research was published in 1992 as Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. After retiring from teaching in 1993, Dr. Hall devoted the next seven years to assembling records of 107,000 enslaved persons into the Louisiana Slave Database and Louisiana Free Database1719-1820. The database is now available as part of Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network. Her work helped pave the way for greater study of the history of enslaved people in American. While her database is of great historic importance, her work promoting the legacy of her husband Harry Haywood is of special interest to the ALBA community. Gwendolyn met Harry Hall, better known by his party name Harry Haywood, at a May Day event in 1951. They married in 1956. Though they later separated, they remained on amicable terms and never divorced.

Haywood was the highest-ranking American Communist to join the International Brigades. He was an alternate member of the American Party’s steering body, the Politburo. In Spain he served as a staff officer in the XV Brigade and as the Commissar for the short-lived Anglo-American regiment during the Brunete campaign. In 1978 Haywood released his autobiography Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. He was the author of two other important texts: Negro Liberation (1948) and the pamphlet For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question (1959).

In 2012, Dr. Hall published a revised edition of Haywood’s autobiography. The much slimmer volume, A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle, reintroduced the public to Haywood and his role in the struggle against racism at home and fascism in Spain. Dr. Hall is survived by her son Haywood Hall, Jr., daughter Rebecca Hall and four grandchildren. Her son Leonard Yuspeh died in 2020.

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