[ A new anthology edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean
highlights the legacy and enduring relevance of Black communist
women’s political activism in the early 20th century.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE OBSCURED AND FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF BLACK COMMUNIST WOMEN  
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Morgan Forde
November 7, 2022
The Nation
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_ A new anthology edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean
highlights the legacy and enduring relevance of Black communist
women’s political activism in the early 20th century. _

Communist leader Claudia Jones at the National Communist Headquarters
in New York, January 1948. She is holding a copy of William Z
Foster’s book Pages from a Worker’s Life.,

 

At a time when organizing by leftists, particularly Black women,
faces numerous challenges in politics, public schools, and the media,
it can feel as though a dark history is repeating itself. Concerns
about the rising alt-right, police violence, anti-trans legislation,
book banning, and the erasure of “uncomfortable” histories are
colliding with reinvigorated anti-racism and pro-labor movements. This
year alone, we saw what Amazon union organizer Chris Smalls called the
“Hot Labor Summer
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an ongoing wave of strikes and unionization efforts from giant
corporations such as Starbucks, to museums, rail yards, and coal
mining facilities
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While seemingly newly urgent, the fights for racial justice, gender
equity, and workers’ rights began decades ago. A new collection of
Black women’s writing—_Organize, Fight, Win_—brings to light to
the theories and tactics activists used to build successful coalition
movements at the beginning of the 20th century, and their enduring
relevance in today’s political climate.

The anthology, compiled and edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi
Dean, professors of Africana studies and of political, feminist, and
media theory, respectively, collects and celebrates the work of
radical Black women who organized for political and labor-related
purposes. Many of the women featured in the book were key members of,
or connected to, the Communist Party of the United States, working
between the Red Summer of 1919, when racist and anti-communist riots
swept through major US cities, and the beginnings of the Red Scare in
the 1950s. For these women, communism represented an opportunity to
build interracial, gender-inclusive, and working-class solidarity in
the face of metastasizing fascism and segregation. However, because of
the US government’s attempts to tie communism to disloyalty, much of
these women’s work went unrecognized in mainstream histories of
Black activism, particularly in the decades before the civil rights
movement.

Organized chronologically, _Organize, Fight, Win_ serves as a
historical catalog of significant political writing, journalistic
investigations, union organizing, and protest work Black women engaged
in despite constant threats to their safety and livelihoods. The
anthology is composed of articles, speeches, and reports produced by
well-known activists, organizers, and writers such as Louise Thompson
Patterson and Claudia Jones, who remained politically active well into
the 1960s, as well as lesser-known women such as Maude White Katz, one
of the first Black women to study abroad in the USSR.

Burden-Stelly and Dean frame the collection as both a corrective for
American history’s mistakes, and as a call to action for activists
in our present moment. We talked about the making of their book during
the pandemic, how to broaden sites of knowledge production, and the
impact of intellectual McCarthyism, then and now. This conversation
has been edited for length and clarity.

_—Morgan Forde_

MORGAN FORDE: IN YOUR INTRODUCTION TO _ORGANIZE, FIGHT, WIN_, YOU
TALK ABOUT ORGANIZING THIS PROJECT DURING THE EARLY DAYS OF THE
PANDEMIC. HOW DID YOU CONNECT AND WHAT WAS YOUR COLLABORATION PROCESS
LIKE?

JODI DEAN: Charisse and I met at Red May, which is a kind of
communist extravaganza held in Seattle every year, organized by Philip
Wohlstedder. Then I was teaching a course on socialist feminism and
one of my students was looking for a text by Louise Thompson Patterson
from the 1930s. She couldn’t find it, and then I started to look
around and I also couldn’t find it. So I contacted Charisse, because
Charisse has copies of everything—really an amazing archive—and it
turns out she didn’t have it. Charisse started asking people and
nobody had it, and at this point, it seemed like: OK, not only do we
have to find this, but it shouldn’t be this hard. It shouldn’t be
this hard to find writing by these really important Black, female,
communist organizers. This needs to be a collection.

When Covid hit, that was the opportunity to really start getting the
work done. I didn’t even know where to start looking. I knew a few
names, but Charisse really knows this stuff backwards and forwards.
So, we started compiling a list and looking for the documents. We were
getting microfiche from libraries, and copies of documents from other
scholars in Charisse’s network who gave us things that they had.

MF: CHARISSE, I’D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU. WHEN YOU WERE SOURCING AND
PULLING ALL THESE PIECES TOGETHER, WHO DID YOU KNOW YOU WANTED
REPRESENTED IN THIS COLLECTION?

CHARISSE BURDEN-STELLY: We wanted to offer a primary document
collection that complemented many of the great secondary works that
were coming out about many of the women that we have in the book. That
includes Eric McDuffie’s _Sojourning for Freedom_, Minkah
Makalani’s _In the Cause of Freedom_, Dale Gore’s _Radicalism at
the Crossroads_, as well as some of the great biographies like Carole
Boyce Davies’s book about Claudia Jones, _Left of Karl Marx_. So we
wanted to have the primary document corollary. The women featured
in _Organize, Fight, Win_ are a combination of those who were
actually in the Communist Party of the USA or were adjacent to it.

We chose a combination of women who ran the gamut between the first
iteration of the Communist Party in 1919, up to 1956, when there [was]
this moment of attrition of the CPUSA (after details of Stalin’s
regime came to light). We have some women like Louise Thompson
Patterson who were present and working throughout that time period and
others like Williana Burroughs and Grace Campbell who are
representative of the early phase, and Dorothy Hunton and Lorraine
Hansberry who appear much later on. We also wanted to pick women who
were of different class positions and people who were at different
levels within the Communist Party. Claudia Jones was a very prominent
leader and Esther Cooper Jackson was married to a very prominent
leader in the CPUSA. None of them were exactly rank and file per se
because many of them had some sort of outward facing profile, which is
why we know what we know about them.

MF: YOUR OWN WRITING IN THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK CENTERS BOTH THE
IMPORTANCE OF RECLAIMING THE VALUE OF COMMUNIST ORGANIZING AND THE
HISTORY OF LEFT-WING BLACK RADICAL ORGANIZING. HOW CAN MODERN
MOVEMENTS LEARN FROM THE COMMUNIST, OR COMMUNIST-ADJACENT WOMEN YOU
DISCUSS?

CBS: One thing I think that Jodi and I would say [up front] is join
an organization. All of these women were in organizations. They were
in the CPUSA, but also other types of parties. They were constantly
building institutions and entities, whether it’s _Freedom
Magazine_, an organization like Sojourners for Truth and Justice, [or]
the multiple legal defense committees organized for William Paterson
(Louise Thompson Patterson’s husband) or W.E.B. Du Bois. They [were]
constantly organizing and building spaces to do theoretical,
political, and organizing work.

We’re in a racial capitalist society [and] a patriarchal society, so
contradictions are going to persist within even left-wing
organizations. But what these women show is that they struggled within
the organizations that they were in; they were critical of them when
they felt like “Negro work,” or Black women’s work was being
marginalized or there wasn’t enough effort being put into unionizing
Black women, and they pushed back. Importantly, they did that not only
because of some identity reductionism, whereby they said, “I’m in
this Black woman’s body, so listen to me.” [They also] did
analysis, wrote reports, and debated with their comrades. I think that
that’s one of the broader lessons to take away. I hope that Jodi
will talk about patterns, because that is something amazing that she
wrote about and identified in the introduction.

JD: One of the things that’s important for us in the whole book is
that the organizers we collected emphasize patterns of oppression and
patterns of winning and victory, across the board. But one of things
that concerns me sometimes, with the current very-online left, is
everything is treated like it’s brand new, or that it’s unique to
the United States or to their small social circle, rather than
recognizing that there are patterns in, for example, police violence,
dating from the slave period to the horrors of the 1919 Red Summer
when there was mass violence against Black people and Black soldiers
coming back from WWI. These are long-standing oppressions, and the
practices of resistance to them are [also] long-standing. Black
communist women found patterns and we need to see those patterns today
historically and globally. One of the things that that does is it lets
you link the struggles. This is one of the things that I find most
compelling. As they organized, they worked on building unity.

CBS: We start the introduction [by] talking about the National Negro
Labor Council, which was founded in 1951. That’s at the height of
McCarthyism, right? This is at the height of repression, after
organizations like the National Negro Congress and the Council on
African Affairs had already been under attack. Yet they organized on
behalf of Black workers. I say that to say, we’re in a moment, if
you will, of extreme repression. But that is a time for more
organizing, not less. It’s a time for a more steadfast commitment to
building a mass movement. It is hard, it’s scary, [and] it’s
dangerous in many ways. Our book is called Organize, Fight, Win,
because we always have to guide with this dogged belief that we’re
going to win, you know? So I think that’s a really important thing
this generation can [and] should take away as well.

MF: I’m curious where you see some of these connections for
contemporary media as well, because, as you mentioned, the book
includes a lot of articles published in the Black press. How do you
see the Substacks or independent magazines that are popping up as a
continuation or a departure from what these women were doing?

JD: That’s a good question. On the one hand, today there are a lot
of podcasts, right? People are doing all different kinds of media. So
that is a kind of organizing. It organizes the people who are
producing it, their guests, and their audiences somewhat. How
effective that will be remains to be seen.

CBS: One thing that I’m thinking about is the way that the women we
profiled were committed to their periodicals and journals and
newspapers. They were not only writing articles, but they were [also]
helping with editing. They were part of the venues in which they were
publishing and I think that’s important as well because that’s
what helps to link organizing and journalism. The other thing is that
it’s not just articles, right? We have all sorts of different types
of writing in this collection. I think what these communist women help
us to do is rethink the sites of knowledge production. They were
writing position papers and reports in their organizations and in
their parties. They were putting out pamphlets. They show how the
sites of knowledge production are expansive and that we can think
beyond the monograph and the peer-reviewed journal article or the
think piece. There are other ways to produce knowledge that we need to
pay attention to.

MF: You mention that some of the women featured in this book
wouldn’t have necessarily considered themselves feminists at that
time because they viewed the movement as more of a white, bourgeois
construct. I’m curious if you think the current debate around white
feminism and “The Girlboss” is an extension of the theorizing
about feminism that Black communist women were engaged in the ’30s,
’60s, and ’70s?

We’re in a racial capitalist society [and] a patriarchal society, so
contradictions are going to persist within even left-wing
organizations. But what these women show is that they struggled within
the organizations that they were in; they were critical of them when
they felt like “Negro work,” or Black women’s work was being
marginalized or there wasn’t enough effort being put into unionizing
Black women, and they pushed back. Importantly, they did that not only
because of some identity reductionism, whereby they said, “I’m in
this Black woman’s body, so listen to me.” [They also] did
analysis, wrote reports, and debated with their comrades. I think that
that’s one of the broader lessons to take away. I hope that Jodi
will talk about patterns, because that is something amazing that she
wrote about and identified in the introduction.

JD: One of the things that’s important for us in the whole book is
that the organizers we collected emphasize patterns of oppression and
patterns of winning and victory, across the board. But one of things
that concerns me sometimes, with the current very-online left, is
everything is treated like it’s brand new, or that it’s unique to
the United States or to their small social circle, rather than
recognizing that there are patterns in, for example, police violence,
dating from the slave period to the horrors of the 1919 Red Summer
when there was mass violence against Black people and Black soldiers
coming back from WWI. These are long-standing oppressions, and the
practices of resistance to them are [also] long-standing. Black
communist women found patterns and we need to see those patterns today
historically and globally. One of the things that that does is it lets
you link the struggles. This is one of the things that I find most
compelling. As they organized, they worked on building unity.

CBS: We start the introduction [by] talking about the National Negro
Labor Council, which was founded in 1951. That’s at the height of
McCarthyism, right? This is at the height of repression, after
organizations like the National Negro Congress and the Council on
African Affairs had already been under attack. Yet they organized on
behalf of Black workers. I say that to say, we’re in a moment, if
you will, of extreme repression. But that is a time for more
organizing, not less. It’s a time for a more steadfast commitment to
building a mass movement. It is hard, it’s scary, [and] it’s
dangerous in many ways. Our book is called _Organize, Fight, Win_,
because we always have to guide with this dogged belief that we’re
going to win, you know? So I think that’s a really important thing
this generation can [and] should take away as well.

MF: I’M CURIOUS WHERE YOU SEE SOME OF THESE CONNECTIONS FOR
CONTEMPORARY MEDIA AS WELL, BECAUSE, AS YOU MENTIONED, THE BOOK
INCLUDES A LOT OF ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN THE BLACK PRESS. HOW DO YOU
SEE THE SUBSTACKS OR INDEPENDENT MAGAZINES THAT ARE POPPING UP AS A
CONTINUATION OR A DEPARTURE FROM WHAT THESE WOMEN WERE DOING?

JD: That’s a good question. On the one hand, today there are a lot
of podcasts, right? People are doing all different kinds of media. So
that is a kind of organizing. It organizes the people who are
producing it, their guests, and their audiences somewhat. How
effective that will be remains to be seen.

CBS: One thing that I’m thinking about is the way that the women we
profiled were committed to their periodicals and journals and
newspapers. They were not only writing articles, but they were [also]
helping with editing. They were part of the venues in which they were
publishing and I think that’s important as well because that’s
what helps to link organizing and journalism. The other thing is that
it’s not just articles, right? We have all sorts of different types
of writing in this collection. I think what these communist women help
us to do is rethink the sites of knowledge production. They were
writing position papers and reports in their organizations and in
their parties. They were putting out pamphlets. They show how the
sites of knowledge production are expansive and that we can think
beyond the monograph and the peer-reviewed journal article or the
think piece. There are other ways to produce knowledge that we need to
pay attention to.

MF: YOU MENTION THAT SOME OF THE WOMEN FEATURED IN THIS BOOK
WOULDN’T HAVE NECESSARILY CONSIDERED THEMSELVES FEMINISTS AT THAT
TIME BECAUSE THEY VIEWED THE MOVEMENT AS MORE OF A WHITE, BOURGEOIS
CONSTRUCT. I’M CURIOUS IF YOU THINK THE CURRENT DEBATE AROUND WHITE
FEMINISM AND “THE GIRLBOSS” IS AN EXTENSION OF THE THEORIZING
ABOUT FEMINISM THAT BLACK COMMUNIST WOMEN WERE ENGAGED IN THE ’30S,
’60S, AND ’70S?

JD:The debate around the “woman question” was a big deal among the
European socialists and for the Bolsheviks as well. They did not think
that feminism was the same thing as the question of organizing around
women’s issues and organizing working-class women. So, if within the
history of socialism, early feminism was understood as a bourgeois
category, I think the continuity with the present is, yes: any
feminism that’s only worried about the wealthy people getting ahead
in a system that [favors the wealthy] is not going to be a feminism
that exists for most people. There’s also the continuity of
capitalism, and the fact that some people want to get ahead within
capitalism, rather than bring it down.

One of the things that I think is super crucial about the writing that
we’ve collected here is it lets you see that communist organizing is
organizing around anti-racism and against white supremacy. It is
organizing around the concerns of working women and families. It makes
us stop having this view that: “Oh, here are these are white men who
only take orders from Moscow and only think about an industrial labor
force.” That’s just not accurate with respect to the party that
was being built in the United States.

CBS: I think that it’s important to know that it’s not that these
women would not have identified as feminists later on. It’s not that
they’re hostile to feminism as such. I think our point is [that]
there’s a way in which intersectionality is foundational to
feminism, which is central to Louise Thompson Patterson’s concept of
“triple oppression”—that experienced as Black people, as women,
and as members of the working class. Hopefully people don’t get hung
up on this question of whether or not they’re feminists. In fact,
some of them often have been read as internationalist feminists or
Black internationalist feminists or socialist feminists. But too
often, that feminism can overdetermine their praxis to the point where
their Marxism or their communism, their anti-imperialism, or their
peace activism becomes secondary. And we both feel that that is a
historical mistake.

MF: WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT ERASURE, YOU NOTE THAT IT’S ALMOST DONE TO
“PROTECT” THESE WOMEN’S LEGACIES BECAUSE OF THE WAY AMERICA HAS
TURNED COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM INTO CONTROVERSIAL WORDS. YOU LINK THIS
TO THE WAY THE REACTIONARY LINE AGAINST BLACK LIVES MATTER, OR OTHER
FORMS OF PROGRESSIVE ADVOCACY, MALIGNS THESE MOVEMENTS BY CALLING THEM
“TOO RADICAL.” CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THIS NARRATIVE?

JD: I find this really helpful in recognizing the impact of
intellectual McCarthyism on the production of knowledge, which still
affects us now. The exclusion of the communist aspect of people’s
politics, and drawing that out, just seems more and more important
these days.

CBS: This is why currently critical race theory and “wokeness” or
cultural Marxism are red-baited. On the one hand, there’s the more
liberal anti-communism that erases the diverse voices that helped
create a communist movement in the US to make it seem like it was just
this sort of white chauvinist thing. But then you have the right-wing
anti-communism that saw race mixing, integration, and now
“woke-ism,” CRT, and transgender rights as this socialist project.
So communism just becomes this synecdoche for everything that
challenges conservative Americanism, broadly conceived.

MF: I WANT TO END ON A QUESTION ABOUT ARCHIVES WITH RESPECT TO
AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND MARGINALIZED PEOPLE IN GENERAL. WHAT ARE
YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE MOST APPROPRIATE WAYS TO APPROACH THESE WOMEN’S
WORK WHILE BEING COGNIZANT OF THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXT?

JD: First, I think keeping communism in play has got to be crucial
rather than trying to pretend that they weren’t really communist, or
that their criticisms of the party make them less of a communist even
though those same criticisms were published in leading party
publications. That’s how they understood being communist.

I also want to say, I think that we had at least two things in mind
when we put this together. One is for people who want primary sources,
as a supplement to all of the important monographs and biographies
that have been done. Now you can read the women’s writing in their
voices, read their own speeches, [and] read their own memoirs without
having to read solely _about_ them. So that’s a scholarly
contribution. But it is also a contribution for activists and
organizers to see the concerns of people organizing in practice. What
are some of the tactics they used? What were their commitments? So
there’s almost a handbook aspect in this for organizers that I think
needs to be held up and recognized.

CBS: For me, I think there are a lot of things that are missing in
the archive, and there are a lot of things there that are dusty,
neglected, and marginalized because these are not the women we care
about, right? When people say “listen to Black women,” or
“believe Black women,” it’s not all these Black women who were
in or around the Communist Party, right? It’s not the Black women
who were rooting for Black liberation. And that gets back to
intellectual McCarthyism.

We have to really rethink, and some historians are doing this, the
“long civil rights movement.” There is such an emphasis on the
1960s, as “the moment” of radicalism. And that is true, but then
there’s also the 1930s. There’s also the immediate post-WWII
moment when these people are struggling against impending fascism in
the US So when we look at these communist women, it expands our
historical timeline as it relates to the struggle for democracy,
citizenship, liberation, and socialism. With this volume, their work
is even more accessible, but it wasn’t impossible to find these
things. We just had to do it. We just had to see that it was
necessary.

_[MORGAN FORDE
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20th century African American and Soviet urban history at Harvard
University. She is also an editor at Cleveland Review of Books, and
writes for places like Los Angeles Review of Books, Popular
Mechanics, Mic, The Rumpus, and more.]_

_Copyright c 2022 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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* Communists
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* Communist women
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* African American communists
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* African Americans
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* Women
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* women activists
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* Communist Party
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* Black Liberation
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* 1930s
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* 40s
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* long civil rights movement
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* trade union women
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* U.S. history
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* McCarthyism
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* political activism
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