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BLACK WOMEN REDS AND BLACK WOMEN ON THE LIBERAL LEFT  
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Malik Simba
April 2, 2024
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_ As we left the month of February, which was African American
History Month--traditionally referred to as Black History Month--we
now have left Women's History Month. Each month's purposes are to
highlight and celebrate the achievements of each group _

Black women have been standing at the front of the social justice
movement for decades, from the civil rights movement to the ongoing
fight for women’s equality., Bettmann / Getty

 

As we left the month of February, which was African American History
Month--traditionally referred to as Black History Month--we now have
left Women's History Month. Each month's purposes are to highlight and
celebrate the achievements of each group against the odds of racism,
sexism, class exploitation, and the remnants of caste ideology of
hierarchy and privilege.

What I find peculiar is an emphasis on Martin Luther King during Black
History Month and not on the women workers and organizers of civil
rights change such as Jo Ann Robinson, Daisy Bates, Fannie Lou Hamer,
Diane Nash, Rosa Parks, and many others. The fact is that King cut his
political teeth during the Montgomery Boycott in 1955, as Parks cut
her political teeth in 1933 by working with the Communist Party U.S.A.
(CPUSA) to free the Scottsboro Boys, all falsely accused of raping two
part-time prostitutes who were White women. It was Parks' activism on
behalf of Recy Taylor and Gertrude Perkins, both victims of rape
either by White men as private citizens or White policemen that led
Parks to join the Committee for Equal Justice in 1944.

I place Rosa Parks on both the political left and as a progressive
liberal because of her support of trade unionism and workers' rights
as demonstrated by her affiliation with A. Philip Randolph and his
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. As early as February
14, 1936, with the first meeting of the leftist National Negro
Congress, Black women on the left, with many being Communist, helped
develop a resolution to unionize domestic workers, of which 85 percent
were Black. Park's progressive liberalism is etched in history books.

  
Grace Campbell, one of the first Black women to join the CPUSA,
observed in 1928 that "Negro women workers are the most abused,
exploited, and discriminated against of all American workers, not only
by the capitalist system . . . but by the unenlightened race prejudice
which is found even within the working class and is used by the
employers to drive a wedge between black and white workers and thus
destroy their unity and fighting power." 
 
Campbell was a member of the 1919 African Blood Brotherhood (ABB)
which was a Socialist cadre of which many were of West Indian
ancestry. The ABB voiced an opposite perspective about the evil of
capitalist "democracy" in America than the Black nationalist
back-to-Africa perspective of Marcus Garvey. Later, during the Great
Depression, Campell joined the Harlem Tenants League to combat
avaricious landlords evicting renters who were jobless, starving, and
like millions of workers at this time, down on their luck and asking
anyone, "Brother, can you spare a dime?" The famous Marxist historian
Herbert Aptheker observed of the proletariat cast outs, "White workers
were starving but Black workers were starving to death."
Advocating for the interests of the working class elevated the CPUSA
in the eyes of millions, and a united front was built across class
lines, in part because the U.S. was an ally of the Soviet Union/Russia
in the 1940s as they fought against the evils of Nazism and the
militarism of Italy and Japan. Black women "Reds" were in the vanguard
of this advocacy. 
A famous advocacy case involved, in 1948, the Georgia
sharecropper/peasant Rosa Lee Ingram and her sons, who defended her
against the attempted rape by a White plantation owner who was killed
in the confrontation. It was Black women on the left and liberal civil
rights Black women who organized and championed support for the Ingram
family. 

 
Urban proletariat women were championed by Black women in the CPUSA.
As early as the 1930s Black women workers comprised 39% of all women
who work. Leftist Williana Burroughs noted that "In America, the
continued search of the bosses for cheap labour, has a considerable
body of Negro proletarian women."
Conjoined in these capitalist exploitative social relations is what
the future giant of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, Liberal leftist
Ella Baker, called the "Bronx Slave Market." Writing in the NAACP's
news organ, The Crisis, in 1939, Baker wrote that in an enclave
located "at 167th street and Jerome Avenue and at Simpson and
Westchester Avenues . . . a market come rain or shine, cold or hot,
Negro women, old and young--sometimes bedraggled, sometimes neatly
dressed—waited expectantly for Bronx housewives to buy their
strength and energy for an hour" at pennies on the hour.

As one can see, Black politics were eclectic. Living in the "Belly of
the Beast," capitalism, Black women Reds and Black women in
left-liberal organizations moved in social activism to "fight to win"
against a system of racial oppression. One can readily see this
political pragmatism in the life and times of Charlotta Bass, the
owner and editor of the progressive left newspaper, the California
Eagle. 

Bass's left leaning could be seen when she ran for vice president of
the United States in 1953 under the banner of the Progressive Party.
Bass also lent her leadership voice in the Los Angeles branch of the
Universal Negro Improvement Association founded decades earlier by
Marcus Garvey. Bass's eclectic politics led her to being actively
involved in the Los Angeles branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and she became the National
Chair of Sojourners for Truth and Justice, an early Black womanist
organization. 

Another complex but non-contradictory woman was the famous Communist
Party member and liberal progressive playwright Lorraine Hansberry.
Hansberry wrote the 1959 award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun. The
play's plot revolves around a matriarch in a Harlem high rise
apartment, also known as a "ghetto in the sky," who inherits enough
money from her late husband to move her family to a new suburban home.
This move permits her family to move from the inner environs of
chocolate city to the vanilla suburbs. 

A representative from the all-White enclave arrives at the door of the
Black family and offers to buy the home on which the matriarch has put
a down payment. The matriarch rejects the offer and decides to move
her family to the "burbs" to integrate it or, as in the theme song in
the Black sit-com The Jeffersons, the family was "moving on up." As an
intellectual who embraced the class question, Hansberry, a lesbian and
member of the "Daughters of Bilitis," moved easily between two
ideologies, Marxism and integration.

These two political ideas became the locomotive of social change. The
Black Panther Party (BPP), Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC), Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC/SNICK) embraced these ideas,
or the idea of Black Power for SNCC, and the women members of these
organizations believed that one or another other of these ideas would
lead to progressive social change for the American society.

One such believer in social change was Elaine Brown, who became a
powerful voice in the Marxist-Leninist BPP and recorded their theme
revolutionary song, Seize the Time. Brown became Minister of
Information for the BPP and started the famous Free Breakfast for
Children program; upon leaving the BBP, she wrote a tell-all memoir, A
Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story. 

What connects these individual Black women is a bridge encapsulated in
the life and times of Molly Moon. Moon was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in
1907. She attended the All-Black Meharry Medical School in Nashville
and worked as a pharmacist before joining the National Urban League
(NUL) and founding the NUL Guild, which became its fund-raising arm.
Ms. Moon connected with billionaire Winthrop Rockefeller and became a
fund-raising socialite. Her journey to the left began when she and
other "New Negroes" traveled to Russia in 1932 to act in a movie on
the Black proletariat in America named Black and White, but the film
was never completed. In Russia, Moon witnessed the class progressivism
of a Marxist/Socialist nation.
As a socialite, Moon bridged the White, wealthy, liberal progressives
who helped fund the movement for Black civil rights. Her baton was
handed off to far too many for this essay to discuss. However, let me
mention the leadership of Fannie Lou Hamer, who helped found the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party during the 1964 "Freedom Summer."
During that summer, hundreds of White students, many of them women
from northern college campuses, traveled to Mississippi to register
Black peasants to vote. Hamer had been a peasant/ sharecropper who
picked cotton on a plantation, but she was fired when the plantation
owner found out she was an activist.

Hamer led an MFDP delegation to the National Democratic Convention, in
1964 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to challenge the All-White
delegation from Mississippi. Hamer, in fighting for her party to be
the proper multi-racial party to be seated and vote for the designated
Presidential candidate, gave a speech with these words: "Is this
America? The land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have
to sleep with our telephones off the hook because our lives be
threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in
America."
Both Black women who joined the Communist Party U.S.A. and Black women
who joined the many liberal-left integrationist parties sought to
resolve Ms. Hamer's question by their political involvement and
activities.

Malik Simba, Professor Emeritus, Africana Studies and History
California State University-Fresno
559-273-0800

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* Black Women's History; Left and Left Liberal Black Women;
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