his autobiography Black Bolshevik, that "this work was the single most important book I had read in the entire three years of my political search and was decisive in leading me to the Communist Party." Military service Haywood's military career included service in three wars. His interest in military combat began when his friends recalled tales of their service in the Eighth Illinois, Black National Guard Regiment. During World War I, he served with the Eighth Regiment, a black United States regiment. In the Spanish Civil War, like many Americans there, he fought for the Popular Front with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades. Haywood held the position of Regimental Commissar in the XV International Brigade during the Battle of Brunete. While in Spain he, Langston Hughes and Walter Benjamin Garland broadcast from Madrid in support of the Republican cause. During World War II, he served in the Merchant Marine, where he was active with National Maritime Union. Career with the Communist Party USA Harry Haywood began his revolutionary career by joining the African Blood Brotherhood in 1922, followed by the Young Communist League in 1923. Soon after in 1925, he joined the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA). After joining the CPUSA, Haywood went to Moscow to study; it was on his passport application that he first adopted the pseudonym "Harry Haywood", deriving it from the first names of his mother and father. In Moscow, he studied first at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in 1925, then at the International Lenin School in 1927. The anticolonial revolutionaries he met while in Moscow included Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. He began to advocate for African-American concerns, arguing that they were captives in the United States and that "they must embrace nationalism in order to avoid the harmful effects of integration." He stayed until 1930 as a delegate to the Communist International (Comintern). Haywood was General Secretary of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, but he was active in issues involving working-class Whites as well. In the early 1930s, while head of the CPUSA Negro Department, he led the movement to support the Scottsboro Boys; organized miners in West Virginia with the National Miners Union; and was a leader in the struggles of the militant Sharecroppers' Union in the Deep South. In 1935 he led the "Hands off Ethiopia" campaign in Chicago's Black South Side to