around the turn of the century. The party tailored its campaign for unity against fascism to appeal to the black community, as in the case of its opposition to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Black members went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War; the Lincoln Brigade was the first military force of Americans to include blacks and whites integrated on an equal basis and black officers commanding white troops. Organizing black workers The Communist Party made the fight against racism within the labor movement and Jim Crow outside it one of its consistent principles from the early 1920s forward. While maintaining a position against white supremacy, the Party made special efforts to organize black miners in the strikes its National Miners Union led in western Pennsylvania in 1928 at the same time as leading strikes of (nearly exclusively) white textile workers in the Carolinas and Georgia in 1929 and coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1931. Local authorities used this issue and the Party's support for "godless communism" and the Soviet Union to drive a wedge between the strike leadership and white workers. The Party made more progress in organizing African-American workers in the New Deal era, particularly through unions associated with it, such as Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, which organized black miners in Alabama, the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, which created interracial coalitions in the meatpacking plants in Chicago and elsewhere, and the Food and Tobacco Workers, who established integrated unions with interracial leadership in North Carolina and Kentucky. Those unions established deep roots among the black workers in those industries, who remained supportive of the left leadership of their unions even as the party itself became increasingly unpopular in the late 1940s and the 1950s. In the United Auto Workers, in which the CPUSA once vied for leadership, both the party and its opponents led by Walter Reuther campaigned for the demands of black workers and against "hate strikes" and race riots led by white workers opposed to working with African-Americans, but disagreed as to how the union should respond. Party activists and organizers also played a significant role in organizing black workers in other unions, such as the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, in which the CPUSA had a role, but not leadership. The party did not, however, make any consistent progress in recruiting black members through its union organizing