Correcting the Record

What have been the consequences of largely obscuring the contributions of self-identified Black communist women to radical left praxis and history? What would their recovery—and the concomitant rewriting of said history—look like? Organize, Fight, Win offers answers to these questions. Indeed, most reviews and blurbs mention that it is the first anthology of its kind, assembling a range of Black communist women’s voices. That this is correct prompts one to speculate about why these contributions have been largely erased even from radical left history, such that most readers will be unfamiliar with many of the women whose writings are included here. The volume’s editors, Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, remark in their introduction that “Black communist women . . . have a lot to teach the contemporary radical left about concrete, action-oriented, materialist analysis” (14) and this is borne out in the ensuing pages. Theoretical analysis certainly has its place in Organize, Fight, Win but the key concern throughout is action: Williana Burroughs, for example, gave enumerated lists of tasks to accomplish, emphasizing the need to reach out to Black women in particular (31), while Thelma Dale specified the petitioning work needed to “maintain[] and extend[] wartime employment gains of Negroes” (144), and Esther Cooper elaborated a detailed program for the integration of Black youth into the war movement of the 1940s (126–141). And so on. A scholarly volume that demonstrates that Black communist women were often on the forefront of class analysis, the content nonetheless emphasizes praxis. The authors included in Organize, Fight, Win: BlackCommunist Women’s Political Writings are certainly fighting to win but the emphasis throughout is on organizing, primarily through the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

The editors share a similar interest in balancing analysis and praxis. For Burden-Stelly and Dean, the book “aims to support and supplement the path-breaking research that has challenged liberal reductions of Black politics to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, other mainstream organizations, and the civil rights movement; left reductions of Communist politics to white male workers, industrial and trade unionism, and Cold War stereotypes of domination from Moscow; and feminist reductions of women’s politics to white, bourgeois, idealist preoccupations with attitude, identity, and privilege” (4). There is, in other words, an agenda for recouping not only these voices but the communist politics to which they were devoted. To that end, the anthology offers an in-depth consideration of Black communist women’s political analysis, demands, and practices, beginning in 1925 and running through 1960. It also complements recent histories by Dayo Gore (Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War) and Erik McDuffie (Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism) by allowing us to hear directly from the women themselves.

Communist commitments may of course exist outside of party allegiance but, for the most part, to be a communist within the context of Organize, Fight, Win is to be a member of the CPUSA or one of its “adjacent” organizations, such as the National Negro Congress (3) and the National Negro Labor Council (1).1 This is not, of course, to say that their voices were always heeded by said organizations. Yet it is one of the editors’ central arguments that while Black women’s leadership has largely been forgotten, it was often powerfully effective in the early twentieth century. In reading Organize, Fight, Win, what strikes the reader first is not necessarily a devotion to communism or the CPUSA but the strength and breadth of the claims—for equality, for respect, for justice—made by Black communist women. What comes almost immediately afterwards is an appreciation for the authors’ insistence on marrying theory and practice and the volume’s overall emphasis on drawing lessons from our historical predecessors, a bitter irony given how that lesson has been neglected. The editors skillfully reveal both the continuities and discontinuities of women living in the mid-twentieth century for whom the institution of slavery was within living memory. Remarks about the “Bronx slave market,” for example, are more than an abstract point of comparison or turn of phrase for a present that fails to live up to expectations; the slave market remains a powerful and apt point of comparison (see 62–69, especially).

Because one rarely reads an anthology from front to back, allow me to elucidate the different sections’ various concerns. Organize, Fight, Win is organized chronologically, with thematic unities suggested by the section headings and brief editorial notes. This succeeds in most cases, though the first section in particular—“Struggle in the Early Years,” with a collection of essays by Grace Campbell and Williana Burroughs—could use further contextualization. Where did these women come from? How did they come to communism? By the time we “meet” them, they are leaders within various parties and organizations, but their histories remain shrouded. That said, there is an immediacy to their reportage, particularly Campbell’s, such that it is easy to imagine the women she writes about negotiating the court system for trumped up charges of solicitation as having stepped out the pages of another recent exploration of poor Black women’s lives, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives. Both texts invite us to fill in lacunae with what we can claim to know for sure. Campbell and Burroughs are especially clear-eyed when it comes to the failures of institutional politics to serve Black women’s interests, as they are labeled by the editors, such as improving living conditions, eradicating child labor, and lowering the death rate of Black women and children in particular (35).

The second section, “Organizing, Labor and Militancy,” covers the years 1932 through 1940. Containing material from a period of worldwide economic depression, the section includes an essay by communist organizer Louise Thompson and her powerful analysis of the “triple exploitation” endured by Black women: “as workers, as women, and as Negroes” (71). This critique, published in 1936, provides a foundation, often implicitly, for many other thinkers included in Organize, Fight, Win. One particular strength of the volume is thus to broaden notions of intersectionality. As the introduction does a fine job of establishing, the voices included in this text speak to both the enduring interest in the topics discussed—concerns Black communist women were writing about as early as the 1920s—as well as the dedication of these thinkers to intersectionality avant la lettre. As Grace Campbell argued in 1928, to address the inequalities faced by Black women would mean addressing all of the injustices suffered by other groups as well (70, 2). As Burden-Stelly and Dean observe, Black communist women’s commitment to the tenets of modern liberal feminism has been less than complete because modern liberal feminism has often been inattentive to the importance of race and class in its analyses (12). “The goal,” our editors remind us, “was organizing the Black working class in order to liberate Black people and the whole working class; Black women, as a key sector of the working class, were essential to this aim” (12). Yet “describing the Black Communist women’s organizing up through the 1950s as ‘feminism’ risks a certain anachronism as it sweeps aside the raced and classed dimensions of their interactions with non-Black women” (13). As such, Organize, Fight, Win offers an important corrective to the narrow visions that sometimes dominated second wave feminism in particular.

“Fighting Fascism,” the third section, details the domestic and international work necessary for protecting not just Black workers but all laborers, in industry as well as the armed forces. The latter, per Thelma Dale, was a particular point of contention, with the “false illusion” that parity in the Army would result in the full distribution of rights after the war—an illusion all the more resonant given that parity within the Army was itself an unrealized aim (145). Throughout many of the texts included, there is a recurring theme of communist responsibility to African Americans in particular to not only protect the slight gains made but to make the bigger gains seemingly promised by white society (150). In the growing post-war conservatism of the late 1940s and 1950s, figures including Claudia Jones emphasized the need for the CPUSA to recommit to the pursuit of civil rights (or, as it is more often phrased, of “equality”) against encroaching fascism. In the North, this entailed securing formal rights in practice, as “the problems of the Negro people in the North are akin to those of an oppressed national minority” (160). For Jones, African Americans in the Black Belt, on the other hand, constituted an oppressed nation within the United States, an insight she attributed to no less a luminary than Lenin himself. Nothing short of the capacity for self-determination was required “as a basic programmatic point” (161). Dale and Jones also emphasize the special status of Black women vis-à-vis the war effort, stemming from their triple exploitation, though without using that particular language. Much like in the case of Black veterans, they focus on the lack of stability in the fragile wartime gains that had been made—and for both Dale and Jones, the condition of Black women is a bellwether for the condition of all women in the United States (167, 171). Jones in particular urges the CPUSA to proactively encourage “militant resistance to Wall Street’s program of fascism and war,” as well as its imperialist politics (171). As Burden-Stelly and Dean remark, “one of the most significant contributions of Dale’s and Jones’s chapter is the emerging theorization of the US as the primary source of the fascist threat” (125). To that extent, the reader may wish that the included excerpts dealt more explicitly with rising fascism on the international stage throughout, rather than primarily in the fourth, following section. But as the editors have explained elsewhere, one of the key arguments of Black communist women was the way national politics mirrored rising fascism internationally.2

The fourth section, “Winning Peace at Home and Abroad,” has the least degree of thematic unity but nonetheless contains some of the volume’s most interesting pieces, over half of which, as the editors observe, were first published in Paul Robeson’s and Louis Burnham’s Freedom newspaper (177). What does unite the selections is the strong anti-imperialism of the authors, a commitment that spans party reports, personal memoirs, and analyses of the centrality of the blues for Black American life. Contrary to its meager appearances in the index, one of the book’s strongest contributions is its emphasis on the internationalism of its collected authors’ politics, addressing affairs in Egypt, Korea, Brazil, and the Black Belt; to that end, it complements To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism, edited by Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill. It is a recurring theme across the enumerated section for the editors to emphasize that the anti-militarism and anti-fascism of Black communist women bound them together as firmly as their commitments to anti-racism and anti-misogyny (which is perhaps the more accurate label for their overall vision we might otherwise call feminism). Writers like Dorothy Hunton find solace in the sense of community among those “who are determined, whatever the personal cost, to make this a decent world in which to live,” knowledge that “brings with it not only a sense of personal freedom but also a sense of great responsibility to one’s fellow men” (205).

The fifth and final section, “The Struggle Continues: White Supremacy and Anticommunism,” traces the rise of anti-Communism in the form of McCarthyism and the Red Scare and its punishing effects on many Black activists. One of the most touching selections comes from a newspaper column by Alice Childress, who would find herself blacklisted two years after writing that “the question today is not McCarthyism or Communism. It is American Justice” (264). The section as a whole outlines the dangers inherent in being a Black communist in times of both racial and political paranoia. It simultaneously maintains the previous section’s emphasis on internationalism, as anticolonial struggles began to come to the fore, though mostly as prolegomena.

If there is a downside to Organize, Fight, Win, it is that a genuinely standalone volume would require more contextualization of the individual writers and the historical conditions in which they were writing to be self-sufficient. But that is rather like wishing for a different book than the one we have received, which is tremendous on its own merits. Fortunately, there is plenty of secondary literature to read alongside Burden-Stelly and Dean’s volume, some of which is cited above, that offers a more detailed vision of the world in which these women lived and wrote. (One of the more trivial challenges of reading Organize, Fight, Win is not to get lost in the myriad acronyms, organizations, and disputes.) To the degree that Burden-Stelly and Dean hope that their volume will provide a blueprint for radical action in the present, it is not entirely clear what qualities contemporary actors are meant to mimic or what actions to employ. There are certainly tactics proposed that could be adopted, but they often seem rather historically specific to the mid-century struggles their conception was meant to address. But perhaps more than a literal blueprint for action, we should learn from the authors’ tenacity and their resourcefulness; in the face of failures and setbacks, they persevered in setting political agendas and winning concrete gains.

At the heart of the selections in Organize, Fight, Win is a claim that recalls, among others, Anna Julia Cooper, and prefigures, among many, the Combahee River Collective: that Black women are the benchmark for a society’s advancement. This resonates throughout and the individual selections give insight into the gains Black communist women made in support of this claim. Ultimately, Organize, Fight, Win is an extraordinary accomplishment and one that will serve students and scholars well. It should enjoy a thriving reception, alongside Patricia Owens et. al.’s recent anthology, Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon. (Both volumes include excerpts from Claudia Jones, but that is where the overlap ends.) Both texts recuperate voices rarely acknowledged today. Yet at the same time, Organize, Fight, Win gives voice to a more radical contingent of Black women than the emphasis on middle- and upper-class women that seemingly dominates historiographical work at the moment. Its centering of voices frequently denied or decried makes it just that much more valuable and Burden-Stelly and Dean have done us the great favor of bringing them to life once more.

Megan Gallagher is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama, where she teaches classes on contemporary feminist theory and sex and gender in the history of political thought.