"For full freedom of . . . colored women in Africa, Asia, and inthese United States . . .": Black Women Radicals and the Practiceof a Black Women's International

Erik S. McDuffie

Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International,Volume 1, Issue 1, 2012, pp. 1-30 (Article)

Published by State University of New York Press

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“For full freedom of . . . colored women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States . . .”

Black Women Radicals and the Practice of a Black Women’s International

Erik S. McDuffie

Audley “queen mother” moore was ecstatic. Organizers of the All African Women’s Conference, a militant anticolonial, Pan-African women’s group, invited the seventy-three-year-old, New York City–based African American activist to address the gathering held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on July 26, 1972. Moore had attained an iconic stature as a revered, elder black nationalist amongst young black militants. This reputation was well earned. Moore was a life-long Garveyite and leading personality in the Harlem Communist Party (CPUSA) during the 1930s and 1940s. However, after the CPUSA endured internal storms and external buffeting after 1945, she departed and reinvented herself into a radical black nationalist who embraced all things “African.” But she never abandoned Marxism. In the ensuing years, she adopted an idiosyncratic politics combining black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, Third Worldism, Marxism, and feminism, with special concern for the rights and freedom of black women in the United States and across the African diaspora. She was the founder of the modern reparation movement and a progenitor of Black Power of the 1960s. She tutored Malcolm X and staunchly supported early Black Power leader Robert F. Williams. Internationally, she earned the respect of notable African heads of state. These included Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere. Years before it became chic, Moore wore long African-print dresses, amulets, and necklaces. Given her tenacious support for black self- determination and wide international political networks, she stands as a major figure in twentieth-century black nationalism, Communism, and Pan-Africanism.1

essays

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A powerful speaker, Queen Mother Moore opened her address, “Africa for the Africans, At Home and Aboard,” with a warm greeting to conference delegates. She declared: “I have the honor to convey sisterly greetings to you from thousands of your sisters in the United States of America who are conscious of their African heritage and are here with you in love and in spirit.” Praising the African woman as the “mother of civilization,” she lauded black women for their beauty, creativity, and brilliance. At the same time, she called attention to their sufferance under slavery, colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and global white supremacy. Empha-sizing the importance of forging political coalitions between African-descended women across the diaspora, she stated that African American women stood in revolutionary solidarity with their “sisters in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Guinea-Bissau, and all freedom fighters under the domination of the colonialists.” Without question, her call for building transnational political solidarities between African-descended women worldwide cohered with the Pan-African, anticolonial, anticapitalist, and feminist objectives of the All African Women’s Conference.2

Despite her international prominence in black nationalist, Pan-African, and communist organizations, the growing body of scholarship on “black interna-tionalism” has largely erased the transnational political practice of black women radicals like Queen Mother Moore who pursued their work in the Communist Left and Black Left during the early- and mid-twentieth century.3 As the literary scholar Carole Boyce Davies observes: “Black women have become sisters outside of the black radical intellectual tradition.”4 The erasure of black women radicals from narratives of black internationalism is curious given that several women had attained international reputations as leaders, community activists, and thinkers within the Black Left and CPUSA during the Old Left period, bookended by the Russian Revolution in 1917 and by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinist atrocities in 1956.5 These women include Queen Mother Moore, Trinidad-born Communist Party leader Claudia Jones, bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, civil rights activist Esther Cooper Jackson, and others.6

Decades ahead of their time, they forged Black Left feminism, a pathbreaking feminism that centers working-class women by combining black nationalist and American Communist Party (CPUSA) positions on race, gender, and class with black women radicals’ own lived experiences. Black Left feminists formulated a theory of “triple oppression.” Emphasizing the connections among racial, gender, and class oppression, the theory posited that the eradication of one form of oppression requires the concurrent dismantling of all systems of oppression. This conceptual framework, now referred to by feminist scholars as intersectionality, is most commonly associated with black feminist organizations of the 1970s such as the Third World Women’s Alliance and the Combahee River Collective.7

In this article, I am concerned with recovering the transnational political practice of black women of the Old Left. The historians Michael O. West,

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William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins’s recent definition of black internationalism is a useful starting point for explicating the transnational politics of the women discussed here: “At the core of black internationalism is the ideal of universal emancipation, unbounded by national, imperial, conti-nental or oceanic boundaries—or even by racial ones.”8 While black women radicals adhered to these positions, they also transcended them by proffering their own variant of black internationalism.

Black Left feminists’ key intervention to black internationalism rested in their practice of what I call a “black women’s international.” Black women radicals never explicitly used this term. But through their migrations, public speaking, journalism, activism, and overseas travel, we can see how they formu-lated and practiced an insurgent gendered vision of black internationalism in response to retrogressive practices embodied in slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism and their own lived experiences. They did not simply add gender to the discussion of internationalism. Instead, they rethought black internationalism by moving black women from the margins to the center in discussions in the Communist Left about black self-determination, women’s rights, trade unionism, peace, decolonization, and democracy.9 For Black Left feminists, black women in the United States and across the diaspora repre-sented the vanguard for transformative change globally due to their locations at the interstices of multiple oppressions. These conclusions presaged the black socialist feminist transnationalism articulated in the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977, arguably one of the most significant black and U.S. feminist manifestos of the twentieth century. Like the Combahee River Collective, Black Left feminists charged that realizing black women’s liberation would actualize the full freedom for all people since black women’s freedom would require the dismantlement of all forms of human oppression.10 Another important component of Black Left feminists’ global vision was their belief in the necessity of forging transnational political solidarities with women of color and white women leftists from around the world. For these reasons, Black Left feminists were constantly on the move, both domestically and internationally.11

Excavating the history of the “black women’s international” does more than simply tell an interesting—albeit largely unknown—story about the trans-national political practices of black women radicals of the Old Left. Rather, their global visions require us to rethink and dispense with the masculinist scholarly framings of black internationalism. Historically, black women have been central to building internationally focused protest movements that understood black women’s status as a barometer to measure democracy around the world. Tracing the practice of the “black women’s international” provides a genealogy for twentieth-century black women’s transnational praxis and black feminist knowledge production. Black Left feminists played an important role in nurturing the global visions of black feminists of the 1970s.

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These exchanges highlight the connections between twentieth century black feminist generations that scholars and activists themselves have not always readily acknowledged. The dynamic history of the “black women’s inter-national” elucidates the complex ways black women have confronted and negotiated power and marginalization, as well as citizenship and disenfran-chisement, in the United States and globally during the twentieth century, with implications for understanding and transforming our contemporary world.12

Migration, Global Travel, and the Making of Black Women Internationalists

Black women who joined the Communist Party were not blank slates. Rather, their lived experiences with migration and global travel were critical in culti-vating their black left feminism and their initial efforts in advancing a “black women’s international.” For several black women, the Soviet Union served as a political terrain for nurturing this politics. Although they never explicitly stated it, their comments reveal how black women travelers sought to build transnational alliances with Soviet women and viewed them as models for black women’s freedom.

This was the case of Louise Thompson Patterson. A luminary in the Harlem Renaissance and the twentieth-century black Left, Thompson grew up in poverty and racial isolation along the West Coast before she arrived in Harlem by the late 1920s. Her distaste for white paternalism and frustration with black middle-class reformers combined with the devastating impact of the Depression on Harlem sparked her initial interest in Marxism and the Soviet Union.13

Thompson’s five-month tour through the Soviet Union in 1932 proved to be a transformative experience, prompting her to enlist in the Communist Party soon after she returned home. She traveled there upon an invitation from Soviet officials to star in the motion picture Black and White, a Soviet propaganda film about U.S. race relations. The film was never completed. Nonetheless, her extraordinary encounters there convinced her that the Soviet Union represented an ally to racially and nationally oppressed people’s struggles for self-determination throughout the world.14

Also, the enhanced rights of Soviet women equally impressed Thompson. Soviet laws on women’s rights, which on paper were some of the most progres-sive in the world, granted women full citizenship rights and legalized divorce and abortion (the first nation in the world to do so). She expressed her interest in Soviet women’s status in an interview with the Harlem-based Amsterdam News within days of returning home. She gleefully stated: “[W]omen do everything here: work on building construction, on the street, in the factories . . . everywhere.” She added: “Women are constantly being encouraged to

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assume an equal role in life along side of the men.” Soviet women’s right to abortion also impressed her.15

The novelist and Black and White cast member Dorothy West drew similar conclusions about Soviet women’s status. In a letter to a friend, West wrote that observing female soldiers in the Red Army was a “splendid sight” that “I shall remember as long as I live.”16 She was also apparently interested in Soviet women’s reproductive rights, as a friend from home wrote to West requesting her to “soak up all the Russian birth control rules, and share them with your friends when you return.”17 For both Thompson and West, their Soviet encoun-ters convinced them that Soviet women and national minorities had not only benefited from Communism. They were also active participants in realizing their own emancipation and in building a new revolutionary society apparently committed to national liberation, women’s rights, international solidarity, racial equality, and democracy. For these reasons, Thompson and West believed that black women had much to learn from Soviet women and that cultivating ties of transnational political solidarity between them would be mutually beneficial.

While the Soviet Union loomed large in fostering black women radicals’ transnational vision, traveling and imagined links to Africa and the Caribbean were equally important in this regard. For example, support for the redemp-tion of Africa from European colonial powers was critical to Audley Moore’s political awakening in the World War I years. Born in 1898, Moore came of age under racial terror outside of New Orleans, Louisiana. Her parents’ untimely death when she was a teenager pushed her into poverty, prompting her migration to the Crescent City in search of a new life.18

Once there, Moore, like millions of black people around the world during the tumultuous World War I era, was drawn to the militant Pan-African, anti-imperialist vision of the Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey.19 Living in New Orleans located her in a center of Garveyism.20 There, she heard Garvey forcefully speak about African redemption, the glories of ancient Africa, self-help, and self-defense. For her, witnessing Garvey was a transformative event. Decades later she recalled: “[I]t was Garvey who brought the consciousness to me,” adding: “He raised in me a certain knowledge of belonging to people all over the world, the African people, and he gave me pride, and he gave me a great knowledge of the history of the wealth of Africa” stolen by European imperial powers. Garveyism provided her with an ideology to synthesize her lived experiences with racism and poverty and to understand them within a global context. She remained passionately devoted to Garveyism after she migrated in the mid-1920s to New York in search of better opportunities. For the rest of her life, Moore would apply this knowledge to her political work on behalf of black people, particularly working women.21

Similarly, Africa played a critical part in cultivating the transnational politics of the activist and anthropologist Eslanda Robeson, whose husband,

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Paul Robeson, emerged as arguably the best-known black leftist spokesperson during the 1940s and 1950s. A major Pan-African thinker and activist in her own right, Eslanda Robeson’s extended travels through southern and East Africa in 1936 were critical to helping her appreciate the global contours of racial, class, and gender oppression, as well as the agency of African people in resisting colonialism. Her monograph, African Journey (1945), a pathbreaking anthropological study of African peoples, captured this sentiment.22 In the ensuing years, this passion for African liberation fueled her radicalism.

Meanwhile, the Caribbean and migration played a key role in cultivating the global perspective of black women radicals. This was true for Hermina Dumont Huiswoud. A major figure in the Harlem Communist Party during the 1920s, she worked closely with early black communist woman Grace Campbell in grassroots campaigns for the economic survival and sustenance of the Harlem community. International travel profoundly affected Dumont Huiswoud’s life and global vision. She was born and raised in British Guiana. As a teenager, she migrated to Harlem with her mother in search of a better life. Once there, she relished in Harlem’s diasporic community. By her early twenties, she immersed herself in a group of diasporan radicals, which included her future husband, Otto Huiswoud, a leading early black spokesperson in the Communist International from Dutch Guiana.23 In 1930, she accompanied her husband, who at the time was on assignment as a field officer for the CPUSA-affiliated American Negro Labor Congress, on an extensive fact-finding tour of social and political conditions in the Caribbean. Being child free afforded the couple, especially Hermina, time to travel and to pursue their own political and intellectual interests. Their three-month trip took them to Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, Barbados, Trinidad, and British Guiana. For both, it was their first return to the Caribbean since their youth. Their visit to U.S.-occupied Haiti was the most important stop of the trip. Visiting Haiti enabled them to see most clearly the connections between empire, racism, and poverty in a subjugated black nation that held special meaning for blacks across the dias-pora.24 The presence of a U.S. gunboat ominously anchored in the harbor of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, as well as heavily armed, openly racist white U.S. marines throughout the city deeply troubled the couple. So did the nation’s abject poverty. These observations convinced Dumont Huiswoud that the U.S. occupation contributed to Haitian underdevelopment and suffering. Observing Haitian women’s participation in demonstrations against the U.S. occupation made a particularly powerful impression upon her, as it showed the power that ordinary black women could wield in struggles against racism, imperialism, and poverty. She identified with these women. Inspired by these encounters, she came home even more passionate about fighting for radical change.25

Similarly, migration and the Caribbean played a foundational role in nurturing the transnational political vision of Claudia Jones, one of the

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Communist Party’s leading theorists on race, gender, and class during the early cold war. Born in Trinidad, as a child she migrated to the United States in 1924. Her family dreamed of finding a better life in the United States. However, their dreams were dashed by the racism and poverty they encountered while living in Harlem. The death of Jones’s mother in the early 1930s due to exhaustion from overwork in a New York textile factory opened her eyes to black women’s triple exploitation. Despite these hardships, Jones was reared in a Caribbean immigrant family that was proud of its heritage. Her father was an editor of the West Indian-American, a Harlem-based newspaper that reported news about local and Caribbean affairs. Jones’s early years helped to cultivate her global vision and special concern for black women’s dignity and rights. But her move toward the left was hardly unique. Like other black women who came to join the Communist Party, migration and travel were crucial factors in sparking their political awakenings. This knowledge would continue to guide their efforts in building a “black women’s international” throughout these women’s lives.26

Public Speaking and Journalism

Throughout the entire Old Left period, public speaking and journalism were an important medium through which black women radicals attempted to build a “black women’s international.” While their transnational politics evolved and matured over time in response to local and global events, as well as with their own lived experiences, two key positions remained constant: first, black women constituted key agents in the struggle for transformative social change globally; second, forging transnational political solidarities with women around the world sincerely committed to racial equality, internationalism, women’s rights, and economic justice was essential for realizing black women’s freedom and democracy. This position was evident from the earliest days of black women’s involvement in the Communist Left.

Beginning in the early 1920s, Grace P. Campbell, the first black women to officially join the Communist Party, articulated the “black women’s inter-national” in her public speaking. Reared in Washington, D.C., she came to New York, where she emerged prior to World War I as a nationally renowned social worker for her advocacy on the behalf of poor, single black mothers in Harlem. Due to her encounters with these women, her associations with a group of diasporan radicals in Harlem, and own lived experiences, she came to appreciate the multiple oppressions facing black working women. This growing awareness radicalized her. She joined the Socialist Party and then the African Blood Brotherhood, a revolutionary nationalist group that was initially inde-pendent of the Communist Party. She then enlisted in the Communist Party.27

Like black women radicals in the coming years, Campbell was deeply impressed with the newly formed Soviet Union and the special promise she

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believed it offered to black people, particularly women. She gained a reputation in Harlem as a well-known street corner speaker who denounced capitalism, racism, and imperialism and championed women’s rights and the Soviet Union. For example, at a leftist rally in Harlem in 1921, a government informant reported: “[She] devoted about twenty minutes condemning all other forms of government but the Soviet, which she claims is the only hope of the work-ingman.”28 Convinced that socialism was essential to improving black women’s status, Campbell “conduct[ed] an active campaign [in generating interest in socialism] among the colored women,” reported another government agent.29 Her alleged remarks suggest that she saw the Soviet Union as an ally for black women and that building coalitions with radical women around the world was essential for realizing black women’s freedom.

Writings by black women radicals from the 1930s onward extended Grace Campbell’s concern for the status of multiply oppressed black women, under-stood their exploitation in a global context, and saw the international Left as the best vehicle to realize black women’s full freedom. Moreover, they consciously formulated their ideas in response to a prevailing tendency in the Communist Left that understood women as universally white and oppressed and articulated black liberation in masculinist terms.30 Arguably the most sophisticated of these works during the Depression years was Esther Cooper’s master’s thesis of 1940, “The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism.” The thesis remains the most thorough sociological study on the labor conditions of African American female household workers and their efforts to unionize. Reared in a politically active, middle-class family in Arlington, Virginia, Cooper wrote the thesis while earning her masters in sociology at the historically black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her disgust with the exploitation of black women domestics and her nascent leftist politics, which eventually led her to join the Communist Party, prompted her to write the thesis. The study was a key part of her early intellectual foundation, helping to set the stage for her staunch support for civil rights, social justice, internationalism, and radical democracy with special concern for African American women, which were trademarks of her life’s work.31

The thesis’ main argument asserted that “the problems faced by Negro women domestic workers [were] responsive to amelioration through trade union organizations.” Cooper discussed how domestic labor exploited black women household laborers as blacks, women, and workers and rendered their labor invisible to the mainstream trade union movement. Framing black women domestics as the most vulnerable and exploited women and workers in the U.S. political economy, society would collapse, she insisted, if was not for the backbreaking, low-paid, and undervalued household labor performed by black women. She added that white housewives enjoyed a degree of freedom from the daily drudgery of housework and childcare by employing black women to

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perform this labor. Despite their marginal status, she rejected the mainstream American labor movement’s position that black domestic workers were “unor-ganizable.” Such claims “have been proven false,” she argued, by the success in organizing domestic workers in Western Europe and, above all, the Soviet Union. In stark contrast to the United States, she pointed out that in the Soviet Union “the social standing of domestic workers is equal to any other worker.” Resembling other black women radicals’ admiration for the Soviet Union and Soviet women’s enhanced rights, Cooper also viewed the Soviet Union as a model for freeing black women.32

The literary work by the black women radicals Claudia Jones and Beulah Richardson of the early cold war marked the most sophisticated articulations of the “black women’s international” during the Old Left period. Jones’s prescient article, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” published in 1949 in Political Affairs, the CPUSA’s theoretical journal, is one example of this. Inspired by postwar black militancy, newly independent nations in Asia and Africa, and the Soviet Union as an emergent global super-power, the article popularized the triple oppression paradigm in the postwar Communist Left. Anticipating the intersectional and transnational approach articulated by black feminists of the 1970s, she argued: “Negro women as workers, as Negroes, and as women—are the most oppressed stratum of the whole population.” Echoing Esther Cooper’s thesis, Jones argued that the plight of domestic workers best fit this description. However, she did not view black women as victims. Instead, she understood how their location at the interstices of multiple oppressions, together with their tradition of resistance, located them at the vanguard of social change domestically and internation-ally. In drawing these conclusions, Jones consciously attempted to center black women in discussions in the Communist Party about racial, gender, and class oppression, and global revolutionary change.33

For Jones, no issue better illustrated this than the case of Rosa Lee Ingram. She was a forty-year-old Georgia sharecropper and widowed mother of twelve, who faced the electric chair for killing a white would-be rapist in 1947. According to Jones, Ingram’s plight underscored black working-class women’s exploitation and disfranchisement in the Jim Crow South, the violation of black motherhood, and the lack of legal and physical protection for black women from sexual assault by white men. Moreover, Ingram’s plight conjured the legacy of slavery. Still, the case energized Jones. She lauded Ingram as a “coura-geous, militant Negro mother” unjustly imprisoned by a Jim Crow court for defending herself from a white rapist.34 Jones praised the National Committee for the Defense of the Ingram Family, a Harlem-based protest organization formed in 1949. Comprised primarily of black communist and noncommunist women, the group sought to win Ingram’s freedom through petitioning the United Nations and building a grassroots amnesty movement on her behalf.

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The case, Jones charged, invalidated U.S. criticisms of Soviet human rights abuses and the U.S claim of being the leader of the “free world” before a global audience. Convinced that winning Ingram’s freedom would directly challenge U.S. imperialism, she asserted that black women and the Communist Party would play a key role in leading global struggles for peace, women’s equality, decolonization, and socialism.35

In addition, Jones’s writings on peace during the early 1950s signaled her call for a “black women’s international.” As the historian Robbie Lieberman writes, “For Communists, peace was part of a broad struggle to liberate humanity from imperialism, which was a natural outgrowth of capitalism” and to defend the Soviet Union.36 Inf luenced by the party’s position, Jones viewed the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence globally and understood “that war efforts had as their goals the expansion of capitalist and imperialist interests and, in the case of the United States, entailed at the same time the subordination of black people and women domestically,” observes Carole Boyce Davies.37 For Jones, the Korean War was an example of this position. She opposed this war on the grounds that it was an act of American military aggression against an anticolonial national liberation struggle. However, Jones focused special attention on the sufferance and militancy of Korean and African American women. She stressed how Korean women and children bore the brunt of the death, destruction, and disloca-tions caused by the war. Given these horrif ic realities, Korean women were positioned to stand at the front lines in the struggle for peace. Likewise, she stressed that African American women suffered the most from the U.S. war effort, as their sons, husbands, and brothers fought and died disproportion-ately in a racist army while remaining second-class citizens at home. This suffering exacerbated black women’s marginal position within U.S. society. In linking Korean and African American women’s plights, she suggested that the latter was part of an insurgent, global imagined community of women, whose suffering and resistance served as a common basis for political solidarity.38

The 1951 poem, “A Black Woman Speaks of White Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of Peace,” by the poet and activist Beulah Richardson, echoed Jones’s transnational framing of black women’s plight and agency and the importance of forging a politics of solidarity with women around the world. Richardson was not a communist. But she came to work closely with leading black radical spokespersons, including Louise Thompson Patterson, her husband, William L. Patterson, W. E. B. DuBois, Shirley Graham DuBois, and Paul Robeson. Brilliant and charismatic, Richardson wrote the provocative poem in response to the execution in 1951 of Willie McGee, a black Mississippi truck driver, who was found guilty by a Jim Crow court of raping a white woman with whom he had a long-term consensual romantic affair. Tracing

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black women’s exploitation and resistance from the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to the contemporary moment, the poem’s opening line declared:

It is right that I a womanblack,should speak of white womanhood, My fathers,my brothers,my husbands, my sonsdie for it — because of it.Their blood chilled in electric chairs,stopped by hangman’s noose, cooked by lynch mob’s fire,spilled by white supremacist mad desire to kill for profitgives me that right.39

The poem then posits how black women’s relegation to domestic labor rendered their bodies vulnerable to sexual violence and premature death while instilling in white women a sense of racial and class privilege. The poem ends with a call for white women to reject white supremacy and to stand in solidarity with African American women in the struggle for women’s rights, racial equality, global peace, and democracy. Although not her intended purpose, the poem served as the basis for the founding of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a short-lived Black Left feminist group of the early 1950s committed to champi-oning the freedom of black women and women of color globally.40

Despite the groundbreaking transnational framework articulated in the writ-ings by black women radicals, their work at times tended to simplify the complex social realities and historical differences between African American women and other women across the colonized world. Their writings often framed black women in the United States, as well women in emergent nations in Asia and Africa, as uniformly progressive and as natural allies. In addition, black women radicals had little to say about the links between sexuality and politics.

This tendency to conflate differences amongst an imagined, global commu-nity of women deemed as revolutionary and to overlook sexuality as a site of social intervention was hardly unique to black women radicals. More broadly, the international Left tended to romanticize “the masses” and insurgent social movements.41 Also, the Old Left lacked a political language and will for appre-ciating heterosexism, sexual orientation, domestic violence, and reproductive rights as pertinent issues for political struggle.42 These issues would not be taken up in earnest by black feminists until the 1970s.43 Still, these gaps in black women radicals’ thinking should not be summarily dismissed. As the transnational feminists Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Carole Boyce Davies, Jacqui Alexander, and others have argued, the designation of “women of color” and “Third World women” must be understood as categories of construction

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rather than as ahistoric, monolithic groups. In other words, these scholars reject these designations as unitary categories. The tendency to oversimplify simi-larities between women across what came to be known as the “Third World,” Mohanty argues, often “implicitly reinforc[ed] existing economic, cultural, and ideological hierarchies” that could, in effect, prevent women from building feminist coalitions across national boundaries.”44 Thus, an appreciation for how global systems of domination (e.g., colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and corporate globalization) have affected women differently over time and space is a perquisite for theorizing a politics of solidarity across geographic, sexual, racial, ethnic, national, class, and lingual boundaries.45 Despite oversights in their writings, black women radicals offered ideas on race, gender, and class that were often far more advanced than those posited by the Communist Party and black male radicals. Envisaging black women as key agents in global struggles against capitalism, racism, colonialism, and sexism, black women radicals would attempt to actualize this vision through their transnational organizational activism.

Transnational Political Organizing

While their speeches and writings demanded the dignity and rights of black womanhood worldwide, black women radicals also pursued a “black women’s international” in community and leftist organizations from the 1920s through the early 1950s. Demonstrating how their writings and activism were in conversation, Black Left feminists viewed black women as the vanguard of transformative social change globally. An important early group in this regard was the American West Indian Ladies Aid Society (AWILAS), a staunchly anticolonial, Harlem mutual aid society formed in 1915. The group’s name and Caribbean immigrant membership spoke to AWILAS’s transnational understanding of black women’s plight. The group was not officially associ-ated with the Communist Party. However, one of its most prominent leaders, Elizabeth Hendrickson, was a Danish Virgin Island–born Communist and close political associate of early black Communist women Grace Campbell and Hermina Dumont Huiswoud.46 Comprised largely of domestic workers, the group’s program reflected the needs of its working-class membership. Providing discount old age insurance, medical benefits, and burial costs to membership and their families, AWILAS also supported black trade unionism. During the late 1920s, it enthusiastically backed the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph’s efforts in organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. AWILAS focused attention on housing problems and the high cost of living, linking these issues with anticolonial nationalist struggles in the Caribbean. Probably due to Hendrickson’s influence, AWILAS publicized Communist Party–led rallies and demonstrations around survival issues and the Scottsboro

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case during the 1930s. Few AWILAS members seem to have joined the CPUSA; however, the organization undoubtedly exposed its working-class membership to Communist internationalism. AWILAS provided Hendrickson with direct links to black women wage earners, many of whom were the main family breadwinners. She would utilize these networks in the coming years as Harlem Communists organized their first mass campaigns for better housing, jobs, and racial justice.47

The Scottsboro case of the 1930s was another site from which black women radicals forged a “black women’s international.” The case involved nine young African American men who were falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a freight train near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. A Jim Crow court imme-diately sentenced eight of the defendants to death. Within weeks of their arrest, Communists built a worldwide amnesty movement on the behalf of the “Scotts-boro boys.” Under Communist leadership, the case became a powerful symbol of Jim Crow, imperialism, capitalist exploitation, and global white supremacy.48

Audley Moore was swept up in this fervor. She lived in Harlem, the epicenter of Communist Party activity in African American communities during the 1930s and 1940s. She joined the CPUSA in the early 1930s after she marched in a massive Scottsboro demonstration in Harlem. Years later, she vividly recalled the protest: “I heard the speaker say they had movements throughout the world, anti-imperialist movements.” The protest reminded her of the militant anti-imperialist message espoused by Garvey. Convinced that Communists around the world were sincerely committed to fighting against racism and imperialism, Moore enlisted in the CPUSA.49

Moore linked Communist-led global campaigns against imperialism and Scottsboro with local struggles for economic survival and sustenance in Harlem, with special concern for the status and well-being of black women and children. An indefatigable organizer, Moore played a visible role in leading grassroots campaigns to unionize black domestic workers, block evictions, organize tenants, desegregate public pools, and improve public schools in the neighborhood. These campaigns directly touched the lives of thousands of everyday Harlem women and children.50

While black women radicals advanced a transnational politics in Harlem, their counterparts in the South followed a similar route during the Depression and World War II. Several leading black women radicals came together in the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), a militant forerunner of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) of the 1960s. Formed in 1937 in Richmond, Virginia, and later headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, the SNYC embraced the Popular Front strategies of the 1930s in which Communists downplayed Marxist rhetoric to build Left-liberal alliances in response to the growing global threat of fascism. Committed to civil rights, trade unionism, and internationalism, the SNYC organized campaigns for

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voting rights, labor rights, desegregation of public accommodations, and the celebration of black culture. Black women were visible in the SNYC. The group’s leadership board included Thelma Dale, Dorothy Burnham, Augusta Strong, and Esther Cooper, who served as the SNYC’s executive secretary during most of World War II.51

Building transnational political solidarity between African American women and women of color across the colonial world was central to SNYC women leaders’ work. This was most evident in Cooper’s activism. In November 1945, she attended the World Youth Conference in London. An important event in early postwar global decolonization, the conference sought to extend the Popular Front agenda into the postwar period through the newly formed World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY). More than six hundred delegates from around the world attended the conference. These included scores of delegates from Asia and Africa, many of whom became prominent leaders in postcolonial nations. Cooper represented the SNYC as its only delegate.52

Once in London, Cooper became especially interested in the status of women globally, particularly in India and other emerging nations in Asia and Africa. She spent significant time with the Indian delegates Kitty Boomla and Vidya Kanuga. Both women were actively involved in the All-India Trade Union. After the conference, Kanuga emerged as a leading figure in the WFDY, as well as in the Communist Party of India and Indian women’s rights struggles from the 1940s onward.53 In London, Boomla and Kanuga invited Cooper to join them for dinner with Indian delegates at the confer-ence. She eagerly accepted their invitation and spent several exciting hours with them discussing Jim Crow, women’s rights, the independence struggle in India, and decolonization in Africa and Asia. From these exchanges, they came to appreciate issues of mutual concern. Boomla and Kanuga also encour-aged Cooper to attend the upcoming International Congress of Women in Paris in November 1945. The gathering established the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a women’s rights organization that initially embraced the Popular Front. She wanted to attend the gathering, but the U.S. State Department, for unexplained reasons, refused to issue her a visa to travel to Paris.54

This setback did not deter Cooper from continuing her international travels. While at the conference, she accepted an invitation from Soviet officials to travel to the Soviet Union.55 She spent six extraordinary weeks there. Like Louise Thompson and other black women radicals who had previously traveled to the Soviet Union, Soviet women’s enhanced rights aroused her curiosity and bolstered her belief that women’s liberation could only be achieved through socialism. Indeed, the World Youth Conference and her Soviet encounter convinced her as never before of the importance of appreciating women’s issues in a global context and in forming transnational political coalitions with

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women across the world to advance racial equality, decolonization, women’s rights, and democracy. She returned home in 1946. Similar to the experiences of black women radicals who had previously visited the Soviet Union, Cooper came home energized by her Soviet experience and more committed than ever before to championing democracy, racial equality, and black women’s freedom.56

No Black Left organization was more important in forging a “black women’s international” than the Sojourners for Truth and Justice. Formed in September 1951 by the young actor Beulah Richardson and the veteran radical Louise Thompson Patterson, the Harlem-based Sojourners was the first and only group in the Communist Left explicitly organized for and led by African American women. Growing post–World War II black militancy, global decolonization, the United Nations’ human rights declarations, and Beulah Richardson’s poem, “A Black a Woman Speaks,” inspired the Sojourners’ formation. Program-matically, the Sojourners sought to demand the full freedom of African American women and to foster ties of political solidarity with women across the African diaspora and beyond during the height of the virulent anticom-munist repression in the United States that came to be known as McCarthyism. At a moment when the NAACP, National Council of Negro Women, and other politically mainstream black protest groups retreated from their staunch anticolonial positions adopted during World War II out of fear that cold warriors would view such pronouncements as “subversive,” Sojourners went on the offensive in mobilizing black women against Jim Crow, lynching, poverty, U.S. cold war foreign and domestic policy, and colonialism. The Sojourners’ leadership brought together older and younger black women progressives, many of whom had been closely associated with the Black Left since the 1930s. These included the veteran activists Louise Thompson Patterson and Eslanda Robeson, the playwright Shirley Graham DuBois, and the activist Dorothy Hunton. All of them were leaders in the left-wing Civil Rights Congress and Council on African Affairs, and, with the exception of Robeson, members of the Communist Party. The board also included Beulah Richardson, the legendary clubwoman Mary Church Terrell, newspaper publisher Charlotta Bass; and the New York–based playwright Alice Childress. None of these women were communists. But they were unafraid of associating with known communists, and many were actively involved in the Progressive Party, most notably Charlotta Bass who ran in 1952 as the vice-presidential candidate on the Progressive Party’s ticket. CPUSA leader Claudia Jones also enthusiastically supported the group.57

Transnational activism and a politics of solidarity were central to the Sojourners’ praxis. These positions were evident in the group’s founding manifesto, “The Call to Negro Women,” issued in the late summer of 1951. The manifesto unapologetically denounced lynching, Jim Crow, the rape of black women, poverty, unemployment, and U.S. involvement in the

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Korean War. Like the writings by Claudia Jones, the “Call” viewed racism as the United States’ Achilles heel in the realm of world public opinion and openly questioned the nation’s claim as leader of the “free world.” Given the Sojourners’ determination to speak truth to power, the “Call” announced the group’s inaugural convention, “The Sojourn for Truth and Justice” in Washington, D.C., in late September 1951. Casting a transnational frame of analysis, the manifesto declared that the upcoming meeting would not only galvanize African American women to fight for their rights and dignity, but inspire “especially the colored women of Africa and Asia who expect us to make this challenge.”58

These were not hollow words. The Sojourners’ constitution drafted in early 1952 evidenced the group’s transnational political vision. The document declared that the group’s objectives were “to carry the truth to the people and unite, not only the Negro people, but all democratic peoples to fight for Justice and peace in our land and nation and in the world.” Pledging their uncompromising support to fight for the dignity and rights of black women everywhere, the Sojourners were determined to actualize these goals.59

No issue better exemplified the Sojourners’ efforts to pursue a “black women’s international” than the group’s campaign to build solidarity with South African anti-apartheid women activists. For Sojourners, championing the cause of racial democracy in South Africa was critical to ending both colonialism in Africa and Jim Crow in the United States. The Sojourners’ focus on South Africa was part of a larger anti-apartheid movement in the United States in which black leftists were visible. African American interest in apartheid increased in early 1952 on the eve of the Campaign of Defiance of Unjust Laws better known as the Defiance Campaign. Co-sponsored by the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Indian Congress, the campaign organized massive civil disobedience against the racist government repression of nonwhite South Africans’ human rights from April 6, 1952, the tercentennial of the first arrival of Dutch settlers in South Africa, through early 1953.60 Black South African women figured visibly in the Defiance Campaign. The South African government’s efforts to impose pass laws on black women, which would have severely restricted their mobility and threatened their access to work and bodily integrity, infuriated ordinary black women, galvanizing them into action across the country. They were at the forefront in leading sit-ins of segregated public facilities and organizing general strikes, which in some cases led to their arrest and imprisonment.61

Impressed by their militancy, the Sojourners corresponded with black, white, and South Asian female labor, Communist, and anti-apartheid activists about the Defiance Campaign. On April 5, 1952, Charlotta Bass and Louise Thompson Patterson wrote to Rachel (Ray) Esther Alexander (Simons), a white South African Communist Party leader and the general secretary of the

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Food and Canning Workers Union in Cape Town, who would remain a visible figure in South African struggles for racial democracy and women’s rights through the 1990s.62 Thompson Patterson and Bass wrote: “We have been inspired by the example of militant action on the part of African women. We realize that our fight for freedom in the United States is inextricably linked to the struggle against the tyranny of the white supremacists not only in South Africa but throughout the entire Continent.”63 In a statement that presaged ideas articulated by black feminists of the 1970s, Bass and Thompson Patterson emphasized “that these struggles for full freedom . . . of colored women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States must lead to the complete emancipa-tion of women throughout the world.”64

In addition to sending Alexander a letter, Sojourners sent an untitled poem about global peace and women’s rights by Beulah Richardson. Calling for political solidarity between women around the world, the poem articulated a more explicit and forceful anticolonial line than “A Black Woman Speaks.” In the final stanza, the untitled poem reads:

We salute you women of Viet Nam, Africa, China, Malaya, KoreaWe here in this country facing a fight for our lives. . .The fight against Facism [sic] and GenocideJoin women in women’s struggle, take our place by your side. . .65

Apparently, the Sojourners believed that the arts and culture could be utilized for nurturing transnational solidarities with South African women.

Sojourners also contacted black South African female anti-apartheid leader Bertha Mkize. A tailor by profession, a trade unionist, and a leader of the ANC Women’s League, Mkize was at the center of the anti-apartheid struggle in Durban.66 An ecstatic Mkize answered the group’s letter: “It is sweet and very encouraging” that the Sojourners “have made it possible the link [between African American and African women] we have always wished for [on] this side of the world.” These exchanges bolstered the hope that the Sojourners, as Thompson Patterson wrote in their newsletter, would stand at the forefront in “the liberation struggle of [black] people and the fight for peace and freedom in the nation and in the world.”67 This letter speaks directly to the Sojourners’ success in cultivating linkages of transnational political solidarity between radical women of color and white women sincerely committed to racial justice on both sides of the Atlantic.68

The radical, transnational vision of the Sojourners captured the imagina-tions of hundreds of black women across the United States. During the spring of 1952, Sojourners organized chapters across the United States. The bulk of the group’s members resided in the New York City area. Audley Moore participated in at least one meeting of the Sojourners’ Manhattan chapter,

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while Esther Cooper Jackson and Dorothy Burnham attended rallies and meet-ings in Brooklyn co-sponsored by the Sojourners for racial justice, civil rights, the protection of civil liberties, and the legal defense of persecuted African American leftist activists. Also, the Communist, African American, and Black Left press reported news about the group’s activities.69

Similar to the writings by black women radicals, their transnational activism of the Sojourners tended to oversimplify the apparent similarities facing women across the colonial world. Again, this should not be surprising given the roman-ticism and exuberance of black women radicals, as well as their concern for finding allies at home and abroad during a moment of extreme anticommu-nism. A more sophisticated analysis of the differences between women across the colonial world may have helped the Sojourners formulate a theoretical approach better able to capture both the commonalities and, more important, the particularities of third world women’s lives and their daily, oppositional struggles as potential grounds for fostering international solidarities amongst women in emergent African and Asian nations.70

But it would be fallacious to blame the Sojourners for their inability to realize their transnational program. Without question, government repression was the main culprit. Given that the group emerged during the height of the cold war, U.S. rulers were especially nervous about the Sojourners’ allegedly “subversive” campaigns to internationalize the response to Jim Crow and to win favor with newly independent African and Asian states.71 In a move that anticipated COINTELPRO and government surveillance of black militant organizations during the 1960s, the FBI kept close tabs on the Sojourners from its very beginning. Government agents infiltrated the Sojourners and provided detailed reports about the organization’s activities. Within less than two years, the FBI accumulated more than 450 pages of surveillance records on the orga-nization. Even more, the leadership of the Sojourners suffered tremendously under the onslaught of McCarthyite repression. In 1951, the State Department confiscated Charlotta Bass’s passport, while Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953 hauled both Shirley Graham DuBois and Eslanda Robeson before his infamous Senate Special Investigations Committee. They were never arrested or jailed. Louise Thompson Patterson spent much of her time during these years defending her spouse, the black communist leader William L. Patterson, from authorities. Similarly, Esther Cooper Jackson endured years of persecu-tion and FBI surveillance while her husband, the communist leader James E. Jackson Jr., went underground to avoid arrest for allegedly violating the Smith Act of 1940, a law that prohibited the advocacy of violently overthrowing the U.S. government.72 No Sojourner suffered more than Claudia Jones, who was repeatedly arrested by U.S. authorities during the McCarthy period for her involvement in the Communist Party. Ultimately, U.S. rulers jailed and then deported her to the UK in 1955.73 This virulent anticommunist political climate,

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together with the targeted suppression of the Sojourners, scared off potential allies, distracted the organization from carrying out its internationally focused activism, and, above all, forced the group to shut down by the end of 1952, less than two years after its founding.74

Similarly, the South African government persecuted Bertha Mkize and Ray Alexander for their anti-apartheid work. Like their counterparts in the United States, South African authorities viewed campaigns for racial democracy as a Soviet-led plot that threatened their nation’s security and way of life. Given this position, the South African regime launched a violent crackdown against the Defiance Campaign and its leadership. Thousands of people were arrested and jailed. This brutal wave of persecution continued for decades to come. Mkize fell victim to this repression. She was arrested and imprisoned for one year during the “Treason Trial,” a trial that began in 1956 and ended in 1961 in which 156 people, including the future first black South African president—Nelson Mandela—were arrested and charged with high treason. After her release from prison, Mkize decided to remain in South Africa.75 Ray Alexander suffered a different but no less harsh fate than Mkize. Due to their fear of persecution, Alexander and her husband, Jack Simons, a leading figure in the South African Communist Party, fled in the mid-1960s from South Africa to Zambia, where they lived in exile for nearly twenty-five years.76

The persecution of several Sojourner officials and female anti-apartheid activists in South Africa highlights the transnational nature of cold war repres-sion. Notably, there is no archival record of any correspondence between Louise Thompson Patterson, Beulah Richardson, Bertha Mkize, and Ray Alexander after the early 1950s. Still, anticommunism and racism did not quell these women’s radical activism. But it did stem their efforts in pursuing transnational political alliances at the organizational level during a propitious moment in global decolonization and the emergent civil rights movement. It was not until the formation of the Third World Women’s Alliance and the Combahee River Collective two decades later that U.S. black feminist organizations advanced an explicitly antiracist, antisexist, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist feminist position.77

The Struggle Continued: The 1950s Onward

While McCarthyism crushed Black Left groups such as the Sojourners and destroyed the Communist Party as a viable social movement by the late 1950s, black women radicals continued to agitate and to forge a “black women’s international” after the height of the McCarthy period. Indeed, they were at the forefront in building new, internationally focused political and cultural formations and in mentoring a new generation of black feminists from the 1950s through the 1980s. None of these groups was more important than Freedomways: A Quarterly Journal of the Negro Movement, a progressive magazine

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of African American and diasporic politics and culture founded in 1961. Esther Cooper Jackson co-founded and edited the magazine during its entire twenty-five-year run. Under her editorship, the magazine featured articles on the Civil Rights-Black Power movement, decolonization, the celebration of black culture, and peace. Freedomways published work by leading black male veteran radical spokespersons such as W. E. B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes and by younger black leaders in the United States and across the black world, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Kwame Nkrumah. However, in a nod to her longstanding special concern for black women’s freedom, Freedomways visibly featured black women on its editorial board and in its literary content. Work by veteran black radicals such as Claudia Jones, Eslanda Robeson, Louise Thompson Patterson, and Shirley Graham DuBois appeared in Freedomways. Equally important, the magazine published some of the earliest work by several young black women who would later emerge as internationally renowned figures in black feminist cultural and political formations. These included June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Sonia Sanchez, and others. Emphasizing both black women’s unique, multiple oppressions and their agency in creatively demanding their full freedom, writings published in Freedomways by young black feminists understood these issues through a transnational and intersectional lens. Without question, Freedomways must be credited as an important site for nurturing modern black feminism and for extending the internationalist politics of black women radicals of the Old Left period into the 1960s and onward.78

Meanwhile, veteran black radicals of the Old Left were at the forefront in building new, internationally focused protest groups during the Civil Rights-Black Power era of the 1960s and 1970s. No person was more important in this regard than Queen Mother Moore. Following her break from the Communist Party in 1950 on the grounds that it was no longer sincerely committed to black self-determination, she reinvented herself into a radical black nationalist, who nonetheless still appreciated Marxism as a potentially revolutionary ideology. In the ensuing years, she mentored a new generation of black militants in a broad range of revolutionary and cultural nationalist organizations. These included the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Congress of African People, the Republic of New Africa, and the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party.

Fighting for black women’s full freedom in the United States and globally remained central to Queen Mother Moore’s political outlook. Her leadership of the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women (UAEW) in 1957 is one example of this. In the group’s mission and name, the UAEW pursued the formation of a “black women’s international.” The group had no organizational affiliation with the Communist Party. Still, Moore took the lessons she had learned in the CPUSA and applied them to new struggles for social justice at home and abroad. Comprised primarily of working-class women, the UAEW

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built grassroots movements in New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, and in other cities around rape frame-up cases involving black men and white women, interracial rape, involuntary sterilization of black women, welfare rights, economic justice, the death penalty, and reparations. The UAEW appreciated how whites used the myth of the black male rapist and denigrating representa-tions of black women as unchaste to condone raping them. Moore and UAEW leader Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson in May 1959 presented a petition to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in New York, charging the United States with violating African Americans’ human rights. The petition cited the lynchings of Emmett Till and Charles Mack Parker, a twenty-three-year-old black man viciously murdered in May 1959 in Mississippi for allegedly raping a white woman, as grounds for UN intervention. Like the Sojourners, Moore hoped that the UN could exert international pressure against the United States to bring an end to racial injustice and black women’s second-class citizenship.

Another example of Queen Mother Moore’s transnational work was her attendance at several international conferences on women’s rights. These included the All-African Women’s Conference of 1972 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which she proudly addressed, and the first through the fourth World Conferences on Women sponsored by the UN between 1975 and 1995. For her, traveling overseas and forging a politics of solidarity with women across the global South was essential for empowering women of African descent around the world.79

Conclusions

Esther Cooper Jackson was elated. She received and gladly accepted an invita-tion to speak at a town hall meeting, “Dignity Overdue: Stand Together for the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights,” held on April 22, 2010, at New York City’s Riverside Church, a long-time stronghold of political activism. The Domestic Workers United (DWU), a New York City–based organization formed in 2000, sponsored the event. Declaring itself “[a]n organization of Caribbean, Latina, and African nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers in New York, organizing for power, respect, and fair labor standards and to help build a movement to end exploitation and oppression for all,” the DWU counts more than 4,500 members [emphasis original].80 Building an electrifying campaign to lobby the New York State Assembly to pass the “Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights” was central to the DWU’s work. The bill called for the amendment of existing state labor laws to guarantee domestic workers collective bargaining rights and to provide domestic service employees with a living wage, options for health insurance coverage, and basic work standards, including overtime, paid sick days, and vacation time. On August 31, 2010, New York State governor David Patterson signed the measure, making it the first law of its kind in

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U.S. history.81 The DWU’s town hall meeting in April 2010 was critical to this victory. Featuring addresses by leading local politicians, veteran activists, employers of domestic workers, and, most of all, domestic workers themselves, the rally re-energized the group’s mass membership, helped the DWU win new allies, and brought renewed media coverage to the plight of household workers locally and internationally.82

DWU director, Priscilla González, invited the ninety-three-year-old Cooper Jackson to address the group’s town hall rally. DWU leadership had learned about Cooper Jackson’s master’s thesis of 1940 on black domestic workers and unionization. They hoped Cooper Jackson’s presence would provide a living link between past and contemporary struggles of domestic workers. The audience of more than four hundred people was not disappointed with her talk. She gave a rousing address that discussed the victories and setbacks faced by black women domestic workers in their efforts to unionize during the Depression. Following her remarks, Cooper Jackson received a prolonged standing ovation.83

Cooper Jackson’s collaboration with the DWU speaks to the direct connec-tions between the transnational feminist practice of black women radicals of the Old Left and contemporary feminist of color organizations. Framing itself as a feminist of color organization, the DWU understands the plight of domestic workers in global terms. The DWU is keenly aware of how the interplay between corporate globalization, racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant sentiment not only relegates working immigrant women of color to the bottom of the U.S. and global political economy but also renders their labor and bodies invisible to the mainstream labor movement and general public. The DWU insists that entire industries and neighborhoods in New York City would collapse without domestic workers’ underpaid, undervalued labor. Despite these hardships, the DWU views domestic workers as agents, not victims. Drawing from its members’ lived experiences as workers, immigrants, and women of color, as well as from the cultures of opposition from their respective home countries, the DWU posits domestic workers as the vanguard of social change in the United States and internationally. Winning the full freedom of domestic workers, the DWU believes, would improve the lives of all people. To this end, the group appreciates both the importance and challenges of building feminist solidarities across racial, ethnic, linguistic, sexual, class, gender, and geographic lines.84 By any measure, the DWU’s radical transnational feminist of color praxis resembles the global perspective of their black radical feminist forebears in the Old Left.

This article has attempted to recover the practice of a “black women’s international” through the lives, writings, activism, and legacies of a group of dynamic black women who made the Communist Party and the Black Left the primary site of their activism during the mid-twentieth century. Following

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different paths through the Communist Left, black women radicals such as Esther Cooper Jackson, Queen Mother Moore, Louise Thompson Patterson, and Claudia Jones, and Black Left feminist formations such as the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, proffered a pathbreaking black radical feminist politics that located black women across the diaspora as the vanguard of global trans-formative change. Black women radicals contested the invisibility of black women in the international Left and labor movement. Looking to women in the Soviet Union and emergent independent nations in Asia and Africa as allies, Black Left feminists believed that forging transnational political solidari-ties between women was essential to black women’s freedom everywhere. Their politics were not without contradictions and gaps. At times, they simplified the complex realities and histories of women around the world. Nonetheless, their work and legacy provide a genealogy of twentieth-century black radical feminist transnational practice. Recovering this praxis not only challenges the masculinist scholarly readings of black internationalism but also illustrates how black women were central, not peripheral, to the making and practice of black internationalist social movements and thought.

Finally, excavating this history provides lessons for present-day black feminists and their allies who are committed to realizing the transnational vision of black women of the Old Left. Black women in the United States and across the diaspora arguably remain the most vulnerable and marginal women in the world. In the United States, black women are disproportion-ately impoverished and incarcerated compared to white women. HIV/AIDS is disproportionately ravaging black women across the diaspora. Black women and children are bearing the brunt of brutal civil wars, refugee crises, and ecological and natural disasters in various places across the global African world that are in no small way caused or exacerbated by external political and economic forces. And representations of black women in popular culture and media continue to frame them as servile, unchaste, and undesirable. Given these apparent intractable realities, it seems that those of us today committed to actualizing the transnational vision of black women radicals of the Old Left would be well served to appreciate their brilliance and missteps, as well as victories and defeats.

Notes

1. Queen Mother Moore, “Africa for the Africans, At Home and Abroad,” The Simons Collection: Women’s Organisations, R 13.3, All African Women’s Confer-ence, 1964–1974 folder, Manuscripts and Archives, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Erik S. McDuffie, “‘I wanted a Communist philosophy, but I wanted us to have a chance to organize our people’: the Diasporic Radicalism of Queen Mother Audley Moore and the Origins of Black Power,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 3, no. 2 (July 2010): 181–95.

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2. The All African Women’s Conference was a movement launched in Accra, Ghana, in 1958. Third Congress of African Women’s Conference, “Statutes of the All African Women’s Conference,” Simons Collection, Collection: Women’s Organisations, R 13.3, All African Women’s Conference, 1964–1974 folder.

3. In this article, the noun Black Left refers to a wide range of protest organizations with ties to the Communist Party. Similarly, the term Communist Left describes a broad array of organizations and individuals that associated with and to varying degrees supported the program of the Communist Party.

4. Carole Boyce Davies, “Sisters Outside: Tracing the Caribbean/Black Radical Tradition,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 28, no. 1 (March 2009): 218.

5. This article joins a growing body of scholarship that recovers black women’s radicalism. For a small sampling of this work see, Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds., Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Lashawn Harris, “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party during the Great Depression,” Journal of African American History Journal of African American History 94, no. 1 (2009): 21–43; Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Kevin Gaines, “Locating the Transnational in Postwar African American History,” Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 28, no. 1 (March 2009): 193–202; Patricia J. Saunders, “Woman Overboard: The Perils of Sailing the Black Atlantic, Deportation with Prejudice,” Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 28, no. 1 (March 2009): 203–17 ; Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

6. Several of the women discussed in this book deliberately did not use their married names throughout their lives. To honor these decisions, I will use the surname they used during the historical moment under inquiry or when I directly quote or cite an interview conducted with them later in life. I will employ a similar system in the case of Audley Moore, who had adopted the title “Queen Mother Moore” by the late 1950s.

7. Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 3–6. The term black left feminism is borrowed from Mary Helen Washington, ‘‘Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front,’’ in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 185, 193–98.

8. Michael O. West, William G. Martin, Fanon Che Wilkins, eds., “Preface,” in From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), xi.

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9. My thinking here is informed by Rebecca E. Welch’s “Gender and Power in the Black Diaspora: Radical Women of Color and the Cold War,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Culture, Politics and Society 5, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 71–82 and Dayo F. Gore’s “From Communist Politics to Black Power: The Visionary Politics and Transnational Solidarities of Victoria ‘Vicki’ Ama Garvin,” in Want to Start a Revolution?, ed. Gore et al., 72–94.

10. “Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 237.

11. Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx; Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 76–77.

12. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 17–19.13. Louise Patterson, interview by Ruth Prago, tape 1, Oral History of the American

Left, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University.14. Thompson was especially intrigued by her one-month tour of Soviet Central Asia,

a region populated by dark-skinned Muslims. Her encounters there convinced Thompson that Soviet rule had emancipated the region from underdevelopment, archaic cultural traditions, and patriarchal rule. At the same time, her enthusiasm for the Soviet Union may help explain her silence regarding Stalinist atrocities committed during the early 1930s. Louise Patterson, unpublished memoirs, “Chapter on Trip to Russia—1932,” Louise Thompson Patterson Papers, box 20, folder 2, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA (hereafter LTP Papers). Note that I first accessed the LTP Papers before they were reorganized in September 2002. All materials accessed after this date will be referenced as LTP Papers 2002; Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 115–39. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 66–71.

15. Amsterdam News, 23 November 1932.16. Dorothy West to Carrie Benson? 16 April [1933], Dorothy West Papers, box 1,

folder 1, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.17. Nadine Wright to Dorothy West, 15 July 1932, Dorothy West Papers, box 2,

folder 13.18. “Interview with Audley (Queen Mother) Moore,” interview by Cheryl

Townsend Gilkes, ( June 6, 8, 1978), in The Black Women Oral History Project, Vol. 8), ed. Ruth Edmonds Hill (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1991 (hereafter BWOHP), 123, 119–23.

19. Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘“But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1055–66.

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26 Palimpsest

20. Mary G. Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Associa-tion in the South, 1920–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 70.

21. Quoted in BWOHP, 123; McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 78.22. Eslanda Goode Robeson, African Journey (New York: The John Day Company,

1945); Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (manuscript in author’s possession).

23. Joyce Moore Turner, Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 3–59.

24. The Liberator, 15 March 1930, 3 in Hermina Dumont Huiswoud Papers, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, New York University (hereafter HDH Papers); Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Kelley, “But a Local Phase of a World Problem,” 1071–72.

25. The Liberator, 15 March 1930, in HDH Papers; Turner, Caribbean Crusaders, 153.26. Claudia Jones to William Z. Foster, 6 December 1955 in Howard “Stretch” Johnson

Papers, 2, 3.27. Erik S. McDuffie, “‘[She] devoted twenty minutes condemning all other forms of

government but the Soviet’: Black Women Radicals in the Garvey Movement and in the Left during the 1920s,” in Diasporic Africa: A Reader, ed. Michael Gomez (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 229; Minkah Makalani, “For the Liberation of Black People Everywhere: The African Blood Brotherhood, Black Radicalism, and Pan-African Liberation in the New Negro Movement, 1917–1936” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2004), 57–80.

28. Robert A. Hill, ed., Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, 4 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1985), 688.

29. P-138 to Bureau of Investigation, 4 March 1921, RG 65, BS 202600-667-307, Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans Records, reel 7, 304.

30. See McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom.31. Erik S. McDuffie, “Esther V. Cooper’s ‘The Negro Woman Domestic Worker

in Relation to Trade Unionism’: Black Left Feminism and the Popular Front,” American Communist History 7, no. 2 (2008): 203–209.

32. Cooper, “The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism,” 27, 29–30.

33. Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!,” Political Affairs, 28, no. 6 (June 1949): 52; Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx, 37–40.

34. Jones, “An End to the Neglect,” 63.35. Quoted in ibid. 52; McDuffie, “A ‘New Freedom Movement of Negro Women,”

83–85.36. Robbie Lieberman, The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anticommunism, and the U.S.

Peace Movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 43.37. Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx, 213.

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For full freedom of . . . 27

38. Jones, “An End to the Neglect,” 65 ; Lieberman, The Strangest Dream, 32–80 ; Claudia Jones, “For the Unity of Women in the Cause of Peace!,” Political Affairs 30, no. 2 (February 1951); Claudia Jones, “The Struggle for Peace in the United States,” Political Affairs 31, no. 2 (February 1952).

39. Beulah Richardson, “A Black Woman Speaks of White Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of Peace” (New York: American Women for Peace, 1951), 85–86.

40. Ibid., McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 172–73.41. Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (New York: The New Press, 2001), esp., 3–11.42. Bettina Aptheker, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and

Became a Feminist Rebel. (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006), 103.43. Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.44. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Prac-

ticing Solidarity (Duke University Press, 2003), 255, n. 1.45. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, “Genealogies, Legacies, Move-

ments,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), xiii–xlii; M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

46. Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 70–71.

47. “Eighth Annual Thanksgiving Sermon of the American-West Indian Ladies Aid Society,” Box 2, Folder 8, American West Indian Ladies Aid Society Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York [hereafter AWILAS Papers]; “Report of Joint Committee Meeting,” 10 May 1934; V. C. Gaspar to Miss A. Elizabeth Hendrickson, 28 October 1927, AWILAS Papers; Ethelred Brown to Mrs. Rebecca Matthews, 12 June 1928,” AWILAS Papers, box 1, folder 2; “Resolutions,” “Applications for Membership,” AWILAS,” AWILAS Papers, box 1, folder 12; “International Labor Defense” application, AWILAS Papers, box 1, folder 12; Blood Relations, 92; McDuffie, “Black Women Radicals,” 229–30.

48. James A. Miller, Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial (Princ-eton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Walter T. Howard, ed., Black Communists Speak on Scottsboro (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, Rev. Ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

49. Quoted in “Audley (Queen Mother) Moore,” interview by Ruth Prago, The Black Women Oral History Project, ed. Ruth Edmonds Hill (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1961), 197.

50. Ibid., 132–37.51. Erik S. McDuffie, “The March of Young Southern Black Women: Esther Cooper

Jackson, Black Left Feminism, and the Personal and Political Costs of Cold War

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28 Palimpsest

Repression,” in Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: “Another Side of the Story,” ed. Robbie Liberman and Clarence Lang (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 81–114.

52. Esther Cooper Jackson, “Historic London Conference Unites Youth for World,” Edward E. Strong Papers, box 7, folder 4, 1–2 ; American Youth at the United Nations of Youth: World Youth Conference—1945 (n.b.), 2–5; Esther Cooper to Louis Burnham, 30 October 1945, letter from London, report in SNYC Monthly Review [December 1945?], both in SNYC Papers, box 9, World Youth Festival, 1947 folder, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC; McDuffie, “The March of Young Southern Black Women,” 89–90.

53. Vidya Kanuga form letter, 27 September 1947, Albert Xuma Papers, 470930c, Historical Papers Library, University of Witwatersand, Johannesburg, South Africa; http://infochangeindia.org/200803106971/Women/Changemaker/Vidya-Munsi-Poster-girl-of-the-Indian-women-s-movement.html (accessed March 13, 2011).

54. “Report of the United States Delegation, World Youth Conference”; Congress of American Women, National Constitutional Convention report, 6–8 May 1949, Communism Collection, box 2, folder 20a, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA; McDuffie, “The March of Young Southern Black Women,” 90.

55. Cooper had no intention of traveling to the Soviet Union when she arrived in London. However, while attending a party for World Youth Conference delegates from the colonial world at the Soviet embassy in London, Russian officials unex-pectedly extended an invitation to her and other guests to visit the Soviet Union. Esther Cooper Jackson and James Jackson, interview by author, 2 April 1998.

56. Ibid.; McDuffie, “The March of Young Southern Black Women,” 90.57. Erik S. McDuffie, “A ‘New Freedom Movement of Negro Women’: Sojourning

for Truth, Justice, and Human Rights during the Early Cold War,” Radical History Review (Spring 2008): 81–83, 86.

58. “A Call to Negro Women,” LTP Papers, box 15, folder 26; McDuffie, “A ‘New Freedom Movement of Negro Women,” 86–88.

59. Constitution and By-Laws, Sojourners for Truth and Justice, box 15, folder 26, LTP Papers.

60. Defiance Campaign organizers demanded that the apartheid government repeal the Group Areas Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, and the Bantu Authorities Act or face massive civil disobedience “to defy unjust laws that subject our people to political slavery, economic misery and social degradation.” The 1950 Group Areas Act instated residential segregation of blacks, whites, and “coloureds.” The 1950 Suppression of Communism Act outlawed the South African Communist Party, while the 1951 Bantu Areas Act established black homelands administered by local and regional councils. Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Race for Sanc-tions: African Americans against Apartheid (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 17–20; James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans

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For full freedom of . . . 29

and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 90–98; “300 Years of Sorrow, Sin, and Shame,” Fa 12, “History of the Defiance Campaign and the Freedom Charter,” Fa 55; “What did the Defiance Campaign Achieve,” Fa 56, all in African National Congress Papers, box 5, University of Witwatersand, Johannesburg, South Africa; McDuffie, “A ‘New Freedom Move-ment of Negro Women,’” 91–92.

61. Memorandum on the Pass Laws and the Issuing of Reference Books to African Women Submitted by the Federation of South African Women to the Non European Committee of the City Council of Johannesburg, circa 1958, 20.9.1 ; Women in Chains, 20.92, South African Indian Congress Papers, UNISA Library Archives, Pretoria, South Africa.

62. Charlotta Bass and Louise Thompson Patterson to Ray Alexander, 5 April 1952, Z9.3.3.3 ; The Rachel Esther Alexander Autobiography Project, The Simons Collection: Women’s Organisations, Manuscripts and Archives, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

63. Bass and Thompson Patterson to Alexander.64. Ibid.65. Untitled poem by Beulah Richardson (circa 1952), Z9.3.3.3, The Ray Alexander

Autobiography Project, Simons Collection.66. Transcript of Interview with Miss Bertha Mkize, Inanda, August 4, 1979, Oral

History/Bertha Mkize Collection, UNISA Library Archive, Pretoria, South Africa.

67. Bertha Mkize to Sojourners, April 20, 1952, LTP Papers 2002, box 13, folder 4.68. McDuffie, “A ‘New Freedom Movement of Negro Women,” 93.69. Afro-American, 22 September 1951; Pittsburgh Courier, 18 September 1951; Freedom

(October 1951): 6; Daily Worker, 7 October 1951, 14 October 1951.70. McDuffie, “A ‘New Freedom Movement of Negro Women,’” 97–98.71. Quoted in FBI, “Sojourners,” New York Bureau file 100-384255-57, June 25, 1952,

3; “Sojourners,” FBI , Los Angeles Bureau file, 100-1068861-4647, 1 May 1951, 4.72. McDuffie, “A ‘New Freedom Movement of Negro Women,’” 96; McDuffie, “The

March of Young Southern Black Women,” 92–96; Martin B. Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988), 411–12; Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

73. Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx, 131–66.74. McDuffie, “A ‘New Freedom Movement of Negro Women.’” 93–97.75. Transcript of Interview with Miss Bertha Mkize, Inanda, August 4, 1979, Oral

History/Bertha Mkize Collection, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa; Nelson Mandela: The Struggle is My Life (New York: Pathfinder, 1986), 87–94.

76. Inventory, Simons Collection, Zambia; SACC Pays Tribute to Struggle Hero Ray Alexander, http://www.sacc.org.za/news04 /alexander.html (accessed February 22, 2011).

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30 Palimpsest

77. McDuffie, “A ‘New Freedom Movement of Negro Women,’” 96–97.78. Erik S. McDuffie, “‘[N]o small amount of change could do’: Esther Cooper

Jackson, the Popular Front, and the Making of a Black Left Feminist,” in Want to Start a Revolution: Women in the Black Revolt, ed. Dayo F. Fore et al., 25–46.

79. Louisiana Weekly, 2 November 1957, 9 August 1958, 28 March 1959, 14 January 1961, FBI, “Audley Moore,” New Orleans Bureau File 100-61122-70, 19 June 1958; idem, 100-6122-73, 8 September 1960; idem, 100-6122-75, 5 July 1962; Janet Gordall, “Audley Moore and the Politics of Black Revolutionary Motherhood,” 2 (paper in author’s possession); McDuffie, “I wanted a Communist philosophy, but I wanted us to have a chance to organize our people,’” 188–89. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 208.

80. Quoted in http://www.domesticworkersunited.org/ (accessed June 20, 2008); Esther Cooper Jackson, conversation with author, January 30, 2011 ; “Dignity Overdue: Stand Together for the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, Town Hall Meeting,” program in author’s possession; Priscilla González, interview by author, March 17, 2011.

81. http://www.domesticworkersunited.org/rightsandresources.php; http://www.domesticworkersunited.org/media.php?show=198 (accessed March 8, 2011); New York Times, June 3, 2010.

82. Priscilla González, interview by author; Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, Town Hall Meeting program.

83. Esther Cooper Jackson, conversation with author; Priscilla González, interview by author.

84. Prisci l la González , interv iew by author; http : //assembly.state.ny.us /leg/?bn=A00628& sh=t;http://www.nationaldomesticworkeral l iance.org/campaigns/ny-domestic-workers-bill-of-rights.

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