Black Women Were at the Heart of the Struggle to Build American Communism
https://jacobin.com/2022/11/black-women-communist-party-usa-imperialism
"Throughout the early to mid-20th century, black communist women led mass campaigns to build collective power, joining the fight for black liberation with the struggle for economic equality. Their goal: the overthrow of capitalism."
The newly published book Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing helps makes sense of the ongoing connections between red-scare politics and racism in the United States. Edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, the collection spans three decades of US communist history, from the early days of the Communist Party in the 1920s to the brutal days of McCarthyism at home and imperialist war abroad in the 1950s. It brings together previously uncollected works of writers and leaders like Claudia Jones, Williana Burroughs, Grace P. Campbell, Louise Thompson Patterson, Marvel Cooke, Yvonne Gregory, and Charlotta Bass.
The collection confounds decades of obfuscation and contemporary misconceptions, uncovering a hidden history of black women’s leadership of and struggle within communist parties and movements in the twentieth century. Debates around theory and strategy take on a new vibrancy in these writings and paint a picture of left-wing party building that challenges stale caricature."
"The Red Summer of 1919 — called that because of the bloody violence of white mobs against black soldiers returning from World War I — was blamed on the Bolsheviks. Rather than recognizing that people were sick and tired of being lynched and attacked, the major newspapers blamed legitimate black fightback on “the Reds,” who were somehow inciting black people to riot.
The combination of anti-communism and antiblackness has rendered parts of history invisible. Strong parties that are anti-racist are invisible because of antiblackness, and legitimate grassroots communist or socialist movements are eliminated because of anti-communism."
"Intersectionality is about recognition before the law and the possibility of remedying the forms of discrimination that black women are experiencing. Triple exploitation is about oppression, exploitation, and overthrowing those structures of domination. The women featured in our book understand imperialism to be the primary contradiction. Part of what they’re describing is how imperialism and their own particular relation to the capitalist mode of production situates them in terms of political economy and social relations. That is not the analysis that intersectionality offers. Which one resonates more is up for grabs."
"These women’s anti-imperialism demands a critique of colonization and identification with the struggle of everyone struggling against colonialism. Their analysis of black people in the United States as essentially constituting a colonized people within the country was crucial to the Communist Party’s organizing efforts in the South. This understanding made a very powerful parallel with any other colonized struggle. It pointed out to black people that their struggles are part of a global struggle against oppression. What this thesis did was make the black struggle objectively revolutionary. It held to the same level for communists as the class struggle. It wasn’t like one is more important. Both are necessary for the success of the other one."
Significant Women Communists of the 1930s: Your true intersectional foremothers
Charlotta Bass
Debbie Bell
Dorothy Burnham
Willimina Burroughs
Grace P. Campbell
Elizabeth Catlett
Marvel Cooke
Esther Cooper
Etta Furlow
Vickie Garvin
Eslada Goode Robinson
Yvonne Gregory
Edna Griffin
Lorraine Hansberry
Ella Cooper Jackson
Claudia Jones
Charlene Mitchell
Audley Moore
Louise Thompson Patterson
Archived
https://archive.ph/714v6
#USRadicalHerstory #RadicalFeminism #RadFem #MarxistFeminism #BlackFeminism #CommunistPartyUSA #Socialism #Marxism #Progressive #USHistory #USImperialism #Decolonize
