OLIVER LAW – THE BLACK OFFICER IN THE LINCOLN BRIGADE

It was in January 1937 when the liner ‘Paris’ steamed out of New York with its cabins filled with men who believed they could change the world. One man on that boat would do just that. He would make history.

Oliver Law was born in Matagorda, Texas. A shack by the Gulf. He was one of ten children, a father breaking his back for wages, a mother holding them together with prayer. Oliver was tall, hungry, restless. School ended early; work began aged ten.

At nineteen, he signed his name to an enlistment paper. The U.S. Army, 24th Infantry. All-black. Stationed on the Mexican border, he drilled, marched, learned the language of rifles. Six years later, he was still a private. No medals, no promotions. Just calloused feet, a soldier’s back, and the lesson that no matter how well he fought, no matter what skills he showed, a black man went only so far in the American Army.

Chicago after discharge. A Yellow Cab driver, dock worker, a failed restaurateur. He wasn’t built for business. The Depression pressed down on everyone. On the streets, he found a voice. “We demand jobs, we demand dignity!” The police Red Squad answered with truncheons. They beat him bloody more than once. Still he protested. Still he raised his fist.

When General Franco drove his troops out of their barracks to overthrow the elected Spanish government, Oliver took to the streets again, yelling ¡No Pasarán! – They Shall Not Pass, the cry of antifascists across the globe, he was dragged off and locked up. That night in the cell, ribs aching from police boots giving him a good kicking, he came to a decision that would change his life. He took out a passport. January 7, 1937. Address: 4928 Calumet Avenue.

He boarded the ‘Paris’ in New York nine days later and sailed for Europe.

International Brigade in Action

Oliver Law had no illusions. Spain was a war already half lost. Hitler had sent the Condor Legion with ace pilots flying modern planes, tanks, troops. Mussolini the same. The United States with France and Britain was hanging back, appeasing fascism while Oliver Law’s mission was to go and fight it head-on.

When the ship docked in France, the volunteers made the hazardous trek over the freezing peaks of the Pyrenees into Catalonia. They were teachers, steelworkers, poets, farmhands, idealists. Law was different from most. He was a soldier.

At the training base of the International Brigades in Albacete, commanders looked him over. He wasn’t loud. He didn’t brag. But he had the stance of a man who knew where to put his feet in a trench. They gave him a machine-gun section in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, XV Brigade. It was February, freezing with ice rain and the battalion was headed to the front at Jarama, 25 miles from Madrid. 

The Nationalists had set out to cut the Madrid–Valencia road to enter the capital. The Republic was throwing everything it had to stop them. The Lincolns were raw, untested. They marched out singing, shoulders squared. Two days later, they were crawling through olive groves, drenched in mud, pinned down by machine-gun fire, the ground shaking under artillery shells, the sky filled with Messerschmitt fighter planes from the Condor Legion.

Law’s section took up the heavy Brownings up what had been dubbed Suicide Hill. He shouted above the chaos:

“Steady your aim! Keep firing!”

Few men on the mountainside had ever been under fire before. Even held a gun before. He had. He knew the rhythm of lulls and bursts, the cool discipline needed when death cracked in the air like whiplash. Bullets tore through the branches. Men cried out, fell, didn’t get up again. Law kept the guns going until his hands blistered.

When the battalion staggered back from Jarama, half its strength gone, something unusual had happened, something special. Amid the shattered bodies and broken morale, Oliver Law had stood tall. He was promoted to company commander. Then, as weeks turned into months in the mud and sludge of the trenches, he climbed again to adjutant of the battalion. It was not his politics that lifted him. It was his presence.

Holding the Line

Life on the Jarama front was a slow crucifixion. Endless days of waiting, of crouching in dugouts, of listening to the whistle of snipers’ bullets. Soldiers burnt lice from their shirts with the tips of cigarettes, boiled thin soup in tin cans, wrote letters by candlelight. They called home by ink, not telephone. Few wrote of fear. They wrote of holding the line, of waiting for the next push.

In this purgatory of fear and death, Law emerged as a leader. He walked the trenches, calm, unhurried. He told jokes, smoked when cigarettes came through, kept his men steady. One comrade remembered: “He was serious, but he could laugh, and he gave you the feeling he’d be there when it got hot.”

When Martin Hourihan, commander of the Lincolns, was promoted to staff, the battalion needed a new leader. Eyes turned to Oliver Law. They needed the best. That’s who they chose. A black man, in 1937, was made captain and given command of an integrated unit of Americans, Europeans, Latinos. The first in U.S. history.

Brunete

July 1937. The twice-elected Spanish Republic launched an offensive west of Madrid to relieve pressure on the capital. The assault would be on Brunete. A name that still tastes of dust, blood and disappointment. Temperatures soared past a 100 degrees. Water ran out. Men collapsed from heatstroke before the enemy touched them.

On 6 July, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion went into action. Captain Law led from the front commanding 400 men. They advanced through sun-scorched fields, rifles at the ready, sweat pouring down their backs. They took villages abandoned by fascist troops in haste – and found men with their throats cut, weeping women with daughters who had been raped. The air stank of death and cordite. Dogs barked in empty courtyards. Planes swooped low overhead.

Then Franco’s forces counterattacked. On 9 July, the Lincolns along with the British Battalion were ordered to take Mosquito Hill – so called because the bullets swarmed down at them like mosquitoes. It was no hill at all, just a low ridge bristling with machine guns. The men looked up at the slope and knew it was suicide. Law raised his arm.

“Forward! Let’s go.”

He led. His men followed. They weren’t recruits now. They were veterans. They had learned the truths only soldiers know. And this is what they knew. The days of our lives are quickly forgotten. War days are vivid, protracted, indelible. We are as moths who singe our wings and still fly back into the flame. The soldier exists in a private hell half deaf and half blinded by poisonous fumes.

And on they march. Across open ground, no cover but the heat haze and dust. The first volley cut swathes through their line. Men dropped, screaming into the blood drenched earth. The survivors pressed on. Law strode among them, unflinching, shouting encouragement, refusing to crawl.

Halfway up the hill, the guns found him. A burst of fire snapped his body backward. He fell with arms outstretched. Some said he died instantly. Others swore he was still breathing, mumbling ¡No Pasarán! as comrades dragged him a few yards before the weight became too much. They left him where he fell, on Mosquito Hill, with dozens of others who never saw another sunrise.

Law’s Legacy

Word spread quickly through the battalion. Their commander was gone. For some, it was unbearable, a black man who had risen by sheer merit, who had stood shoulder to shoulder with them, now lying in the dust. One American volunteer wrote later: “Law was the best commander we ever had. He led by example. He asked nothing of us he wouldn’t do himself.”

The Lincoln Battalion reeled. Brunete ground on for weeks, men dying in ditches for scraps of ground won one day and lost the next. The offensive failed. Madrid remained under siege. But Oliver Law had left his mark in those few short months: the first African American to lead an integrated military force.

Back in the United States, his name faded. Too awkward for the times. A socialist. A black man. No medals, no monuments. Families of volunteers buried their grief in silence. Only in whispers did comrades remember the tall Texan who walked into Spain and found a command no one would have given him at home.

It took fifty years for his name to be spoken again. In 1987, Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, declared November 21 ‘Oliver Law and Abraham Lincoln Brigade Day.’ Speeches were made, photographs taken, hands shaken. Then the city moved on.

But history is not written in proclamations. It is written in the dry dust of Spain, in the trenches of Jarama, on the slow rising gradient of Mosquito Hill. It is written in the men who followed Oliver Law, a man committed to social justice who crossed an ocean to fight an enemy he could have ignored. He died with his face to the guns. And in that brief, searing moment of command, he rewrote what was possible for a black man in uniform.

Oliver Law should be remembered, not as a martyr, but as what he was: a soldier who fought for justice, and the first black commander of American troops. That is his legacy.

                   oOo

You may enjoy my novel We Shall Pass – 

‘Young idealistic British volunteers to the Spanish Civil War find themselves in a Guernica-like nightmare and an ever-rising body-count. Add a love triangle stretched across the extremes of the English 1930s class system and you have something very powerful.’ PETER YORK

WE SHALL PASS is available from indy publisher Luath Press – click HERE.

All the Amazons – click HERE.

Waterstones.

And all good bookshops.