Journal of Transnational American Studies

For East European migrants, part of acculturating to the US was embracing a “white” frame of mind. This process was facilitated by the Slavic-language press, where African, Asian, and other colonized peoples were often covered in a condescending manner. Yet a counternarrative rejecting white privilege and championing colonized peoples was offered in Communist-affiliated newspapers. For leftist Slovaks, the newspaper Rovnosť ľudu unequivocally condemned American empire and European colonization of Africa and Asia. The paper was one of the few Slavic organs to denounce imperialism and champion anticolonial struggles. In the 1940s, a Polish leftist newspaper, Głos Ludowy, likewise consistently advocated an end to European and American colonialism. Although the Slovak paper was red-baited out of existence by the end of the 1940s, the Polish paper survived until 1979, and into the 1960s championed African and Asian independence movements from Kenya to Algeria to Rhodesia and condemned American adventures in Vietnam and other sites of US imperialism. These newspapers rejected a narrow focus on the immediate concerns of Slavic readers and instead consistently adopted an editorial policy with a transnational, anticolonial focus. The Communist immigrant newspapers indicate that, for a minority of Slavic American workers, solidarity with anticolonial struggles was possible across racial and international divides.