SOJOURNING FOR FREEDOM

Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left FeminismBy Erik S. McDuffie

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5033-0

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………………….xiiiAbbreviations………………………………………………………………………………………………1Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………….25Chapter 1 Black Communist Women Pioneers, 1919-1930…………………………………………………………….58Chapter 2 Searching for the Soviet Promise, Fighting for Scottsboro and Harlem’s Survival, 1930-1935…………………91Chapter 3 Toward a Brighter Dawn: Black Women Forge the Popular Front, 1935-1940…………………………………..126Chapter 4 Racing against Jim Crow, Fascism, Colonialism, and the Communist Party, 1940-1946…………………………160Chapter 5 “We Are Sojourners for Our Rights”: The Cold War, 1946-1956…………………………………………….193Chapter 6 Ruptures and Continuities, 1956 Onward……………………………………………………………….221Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………..261Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………….297Index

Chapter One

Black Communist Women Pioneers, 1919–1930

Grace Campbell showed herself an ardent Communist … Though employed by the City Administration, is frank in her disapproval of it and said the only way to remedy the present situation was to install Bolshevism in place of the present Government. BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, NEW YORK BUREAU FILE, 61-6864-1, 4 MARCH 1931

Grace P. Campbell was exhilarated. In May 1920, she spoke passionately ata rally in Harlem for a candidate of the Socialist Party of America (SPA)who was running for a seat in the New York State Assembly from the neighborhood’sTwenty-First District. A government informant reported thatshe “made a few remarks upon the need of women waking up to the factthat they are being driven to prostitution and other evils by the low scale ofwages. She promised to work hard among the women, not only of her racebut all of the women.” In addition to stumping for Socialist candidates,Campbell ran on the SPA ticket for a seat in the New York State Assembly forHarlem’s Nineteenth District in November 1920. She was the “first coloredwoman to be named for public office on a regular party ticket,” accordingto The Messenger, an SPA-affiliated black radical newspaper co-founded byA. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Owen. They, too, stood for election on theSPA ticket for state office. The newspaper endorsed Campbell’s candidacy,lauding “her pioneer [sic] social service work for colored girls” in Harlem.On Election Day, she won nearly two thousand votes, more than any otherblack SPA candidate, including Randolph and Owen. The impressive supportfor Campbell spoke to her reputation in Harlem as a trustworthy, able communityorganizer and social worker committed to fighting for the dignity,rights, and survival of black women, children, and the entire community.Her high profile in Harlem radicalism also caught the attention of authorities.In the years immediately after World War I, the Bureau of Investigation,the predecessor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, meticulously monitoredher left-wing activism.

Campbell’s active involvement in the SPA signified her pioneering role inHarlem’s early twentieth-century radicalism. From World War I through theeve of the Depression, she was the most prominent woman in the HarlemLeft. By 1923, she had joined the Workers (Communist) Party (WP). Shewas the first black woman to officially do so. But she was hardly alone. Asmall, dedicated cadre of Harlem women radicals enlisted in the WorkersParty during the 1920s. These included Williana Burroughs, Maude White,and Hermina Dumont Huiswoud. Like Campbell, they earned reputationsas well-respected community leaders. Combining a pragmatic approach tocommunity work with a leftist, transnational political vision, they called forworld revolution and focused special concern for black women’s freedom.Passionately committed to the nascent Communist movement, early blackwomen radicals saw it as a viable alternative to mainstream black protest organizations.Black left feminists embraced this conviction through the entireOld Left period.

Tracing these women’s lives, this chapter focuses on the first generationof black Communist women who joined the Party immediately after WorldWar I and prior to the social upheavals of the Depression. Trailblazers, theybegan formulating black left feminism. The first part of the chapter looksat their varied social backgrounds and journeys into the Communist Left,demonstrating how early black women radicals were hardly a monolithicgroup. Next, the chapter examines how these women often functionedas outsiders within the early Communist Left. Grappling with the Party’scontradictions and neglect of black women’s issues, these pioneers neverthelesspressed forward with their black left feminist agenda. They were at thefrontlines of building left-wing movements in Harlem for the community’seconomic survival. Black women radicals understood how struggling fordecent housing and jobs was vital to the well-being of Harlem residents. RethinkingMarxism-Leninism, they proffered early articulations of the “tripleoppression” paradigm, the thesis on black women’s superexploitation, andthe vanguard center approach. They also embraced the “New Woman” ideal,a term referring to early twentieth-century American urban writers, suffragettes,journalists, educators, and bohemians who were less constrainedby Victorian gender mores and domesticity and who pursued independentwomanhood. This sensibility prompted some to challenge ideals of bourgeoisrespectability espoused by church, club, and Garveyite women. Thelatter part of the chapter looks at the importance of traveling to the SovietUnion in helping black Communist women rethink their place in the worldand begin forging a “black women’s international.” Through their experiencesin the early Communist Left, black women radicals began buildinga community and collective identity. Paving the way for black women whojoined the CPUSA during its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s and anticipatingthe black feminism of the 1970s, the lives of first generation black Communistwomen speak to the radical aspects and ideological complexities of earlytwentieth-century black feminism.

Local and global events provided the background in which early blackCommunist women came of age, cultivated an oppositional consciousness,and enlisted in the Workers Party. They were born during the “nadir” inAfrican American life (1880–1915). These years witnessed the consolidationof Jim Crow, the highpoint of lynching, and the beginning of the Great Migration,which, between 1910 and 1930, brought more than one million AfricanAmericans from the rural South to the urban North in search of a betterlife. During these years, nearly forty thousand people from the Caribbeanarrived in Harlem. The New Negro movement (1890–1935) emerged in responseto these events. Committed to “nation building,” New Negro protestorganizations and intellectuals promoted “racial uplift ideology,” whatthe historian Kevin Gaines describes as a “black middle class ideology …that came to mean an emphasis on self-help, racial solidarity, temperance,thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation ofwealth.”

Black women were visible in the New Negro movement. In 1893,Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, the prominent Boston newspaper publisherand clubwoman, named her newspaper Woman’s Era, aptly capturing cluband church women’s sentiment that the “race could rise no higher than itswoman” and that women were best qualified to lead the race. Women’sclubs were at the forefront in agitating for the protection of black womenand crusading against lynching and Jim Crow. No organization was morevisible in these campaigns than the National Association of Colored Women(NACW), the first national secular black women’s organization, founded in1896. Club and church women also vocally demanded equality with blackmen. However, by the early 1920s women’s clubs had become increasinglyelitist. Their growing concern with middle-class female respectability and attemptsto police the behaviors of purportedly licentious, lazy black working-classpeople alienated clubwomen from the very communities they intendedto uplift.

Internationally, World War I marked the beginning of the end of Europeanglobal supremacy. Unprecedented carnage on the battlefield, wartimemigrations, strikes, and nationalist revolts in India, Ireland, and Chinaweakened the European colonial grip on Africa and Asia. In 1917, the RussianRevolution established the world’s first socialist state, the Soviet Union.Two years later, Bolsheviks organized the Communist International (Comintern)to coordinate the world revolution from Moscow. Inspired by theBolsheviks’ success, short-lived Communist insurrections shook Westernand Central Europe immediately after the war.

The World War I era also witnessed a global black revolt as anti-colonialuprisings erupted in Africa and across the diaspora. In the United States,these global upheavals, together with massive wartime black migrations,a spike in lynching, the “race riots” in East St. Louis in 1917 and Chicagoin 1919, and a national wave of strikes in heavy industries, spawned “NewNegro radicalism,” a more militant New Negro tendency. As a political andcultural movement composed of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro ImprovementAssociation (UNIA), the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), TheMessenger, and other protest groups, as well as news and literary journals,New Negro radicalism linked black struggles for self-determination withpostwar, anti-colonial struggles across the Global South.

The early twentieth century also proved to be an exciting and tumultuousmoment for the U.S. Left. The Russian Revolution both inspired and dividedAmerican radicals. In the summer of 1919, two groups of left-wing militantsheld inaugural conventions, forming the Communist Labor Party and theCommunist Party of America respectively. Both organizations claimed tobe the legitimate “Communist” party. Authorities immediately targeted bothparties as part of a wider government crackdown—popularly known as thered scare—against left-wing organizations, civil rights and black nationalistgroups, and trade unions. Under this intense wave of government repression,both Communist groups functioned as underground organizations.Upon the urging of the Comintern, they merged in 1922, forming a unified,aboveground organization, the Workers Party of America. In 1929, itrenamed itself the Communist Party, USA.

Developments in the global Communist Left around the Negro Questionand the Woman Question had lasting implications for framing discussionsaround race, gender, and class within the Workers Party. The Comintern’sresolutions of 1922 and 1928 on the Negro Question were key in recruitingblack men and women. The resolution of 1922 defined black strugglesacross the diaspora as key partners in the world revolution, while the resolutionof 1928, commonly referred to as the “Black Belt thesis,” declared theright of African American self-determination in the South. Soviet women’sstatus also influenced U.S. Communists’ thinking. In the years immediatelyafter the Russian Revolution and into the 1930s, the ideal of “the new Sovietwoman”—a modern, sexually liberated, revolutionary woman—generatedimmense interest in left-wing, bohemian, and even politically mainstreamcircles throughout the West. Soviet laws on women’s rights, which on paperwere some of the most progressive in the world, granted women full citizenshiprights and legalized divorce and abortion (the first nation in the worldto do so). Soviets initially adhered to a policy of tolerance toward homosexuals.A small group of Bolshevik feminists, such as Aleksandra Kollontaiand Clara Zetkin, argued that women’s sexual liberation and the “witheringaway of the bourgeois family” were vital both to women’s liberation and tobuilding a classless society. In 1919, Soviet officials established the Zhenotdel(Women’s Department) to raise Soviet women’s gender consciousness. Inthe following year, the Comintern founded the International Women’s Secretariatto coordinate Communist women’s work around the world.

The world revolution failed to materialize immediately after the war, asCommunists had predicted. So the Soviet Union went about constructing asocialist state in isolation. But Communists globally, including a small cadreof black women radicals in Harlem, remained confident that capitalism andimperialism were doomed. Informed by the early Communist Left’s positionson race, gender, and class, together with their lived experiences, blackwomen radicals forged their own left-wing politics. Viewing black womenas the revolutionary vanguard, early black left feminists both contested andaffirmed the politics of middle-class respectability espoused by church andclubwomen, and rejected the pro-capitalist agendas of New Negro groupsand the masculinist articulations of black self-determination advanced bythe international Left.

The Social Origins of Early Black Communist Women

Several prominent first generation black Communist women enjoyed successfulprofessional careers as social workers, teachers, and secretaries beforejoining the Workers Party. This pattern would continue through theentire Old Left period. These women were part of a new middle class thatemerged across the African diaspora beginning in the late nineteenth century.Focusing on the uplift and protection of black women and childrenin the age of Jim Crow and European global supremacy, early black womenradicals’ work underscored how the New Negro movement was foundationalto their political visions before and after they joined the WP.

No person better exemplified this than Grace Campbell, who was bornin 1882 in Georgia. Her father was a Jamaican immigrant and teacher andher mother was a woman of mixed African American and Native Americanheritage from Washington, D.C. Her family eventually settled in Washingtonwhere she grew up. She apparently never traveled to Jamaica to visither father’s family. Following in her parents’ footsteps, she graduated fromthe historically black Howard University in Washington. Like many blackwomen reformers of the Progressive era, she never married or had children.By 1908, Campbell had made her way to New York. There, she beganher distinguished career as a social worker, community activist, and civilservant. She joined the multiracial, mixed-gendered National League forthe Protection of Colored Women (NLPCW), one of three organizationsthat merged in 1911 to form the Committee on Urban Conditions AmongNegroes, later renamed the National Urban League. She also briefly sat onthe committee’s board. Given that a key tenet of turn-of-the-century blackwomen reformers was their belief that women were best qualified to lead therace and taking into account their demand for equality with black men, herreform work surely helped to cultivate her feminist sensibility.

Meanwhile, Campbell worked on multiple fronts in pursuit of upliftingblack women and children. In 1911, she became the first black woman appointedas a parole officer in the Court of General Sessions for the City ofNew York. She worked as a jail attendant in the women’s section at “theTombs,” New York’s infamous prison, until her death in 1943. In 1915, sheestablished the Empire Friendly Shelter for Friendless Girls, a settlementhome in Harlem for young, single black mothers. The home solidified herreputation as “one of the best known colored women in New York,” as theHarlem-based New York Age put it in 1924.

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