Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left FeminismSojourning for Freedom portrays pioneering black women activists from the early twentieth century through the 1970s, focusing on their participation in the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) between 1919 and 1956. Erik S. McDuffie considers how women from diverse locales and backgrounds became radicalized, joined the CPUSA, and advocated a pathbreaking politics committed to black liberation, women’s rights, decolonization, economic justice, peace, and international solidarity. McDuffie explores the lives of black left feminists, including the bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, who wrote about the “triple exploitation” of race, gender, and class; Esther Cooper Jackson, an Alabama-based civil rights activist who chronicled the experiences of black female domestic workers; and Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born activist who emerged as one of the Communist Party’s leading theorists of black women’s exploitation. Drawing on more than forty oral histories collected from veteran black women radicals and their family members, McDuffie examines how these women negotiated race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics within the CPUSA. In Sojourning for Freedom, he depicts a community of radical black women activist intellectuals who helped to lay the foundation for a transnational modern black feminism. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Black Communist Women Pioneers 19191930 | 25 |
Searching for the Soviet Promise Fighting for Scottsboro and Harlems Survival 19301935 | 58 |
Toward a Brighter Dawn Black Women Forge the Popular Front 19351940 | 91 |
Racing against Jim Crow Fascism Colonialism and the Communist Party 19401946 | 126 |
We Are Sojourners for Our Rights The Cold War 19461956 | 160 |
Ruptures and Continuities 1956 Onward | 193 |
Notes | 221 |
Bibliography | 261 |
297 | |
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Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of ... Erik S. McDuffie No preview available - 2011 |
Common terms and phrases
activists African American agenda American Communism American Women Angela Davis anti April Archives Audley Moore black Communist women black feminism black feminist black freedom black left feminism black left feminists black liberation black nationalist black radical black women radicals Boyce Davies Burroughs Campbell Caribbean civil rights Claudia Jones Cold Cold War Communist Left Communists in Harlem Congress CPUsA cultural Depression Esther Cooper Jackson fascism folder Freedomways Garvey gender global Harlem Communist Party International interview by author Jim Crow Labor leaders leadership Left of Karl leftist Louise Thompson Patterson LTP Papers militant movement munist Naison National Negro Congress Negro Question Negro Women nist Old Left oppression organization Party's political Popular Front Queen Mother Moore race racial racism Scottsboro sexual SNYC social Sojourners Soviet Union Spain struggles Tamiment Library telephone interview Thyra Edwards tion transnational triple oppression University Press W. E. B. Du Bois white women Woman World