Organize, Fight, Win – Black Communist Women’s Political Writing
Edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean
Verso, £19.99

CLAUDIA JONES is well known as the driving force behind the establishment of the Notting Hill Carnival. Morning Star readers will also be aware that she was an American communist, a member of the CPUSA, and deported to Britain in 1955 having been indicted under the Smith Act.

Indictments under this Act, together with the House Un-American Activities Committee, decimated the leadership of the CPUSA as well as ruining the lives of sympathisers.

Many of those affected were black African-Americans, like Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson and Ben Davis.

What is less well-known, but which this book brings home forcefully, is that Claudia Jones was just one of a myriad of black women working in, around and with the CPUSA from the 1920s to the 1950s. There can be no doubt after reading this book that the groundwork of the Civil Rights Movements of later decades was laid by men and women organised through the CPUSA. Yet, as the editors of this collection point out, communists have been excluded “from popular visions of 20th-century radical left politics.”

This book is the antidote to such myths.

The writings, painstakingly unearthed by the editors, are presented chronologically with each section prefaced with insightful summaries bringing out themes which cross the decades.

Eighteen black women figure here, mainly but not all Communist Party members. They played leading roles in civil rights struggles. We meet, for instance, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, the National Negro Congress, International Labor Defense which organised the defence of the “Scottsboro boys,” and the 1946 successor to these – the Civil Rights Congress.

Their urgent and passionate writings about the lives of black women exposed their “triple exploitation” as blacks, as women and as workers. Williana Boroughs, Grace Campbell, Louise Thompson and Esther Cooper gave stark delineations of the “slave markets” for domestic workers and prostitutes in the Bronx and elsewhere, all driven by desperate poverty.

85 per cent of all “Negro” women workers were domestics and made up two thirds of the total two million domestic workers in the US.

Prostitutes could be tried in Day Courts for soliciting and when sentenced: “some scream and fall… others suffer in silence and still others hear their fate stoically or even with callous indifference.”

They write of the difficulties of organising and integrating black and women workers into wider trade union or democratic struggles. Thyra Edwards in 1935 described the “corralling” of black employees into company unions in Chicago and hence their separation from their white fellow workers; Dorothy Burnham in 1952 looked at the problem of organising southern share-croppers.

They also emphasised the unity of struggles against racist violence and “racialised” exploitation with the struggles of all peoples against capitalism, colonialism and fascism.

They urged support for the war effort in 1941; Thyra Edwards reported from the front line during the Spanish Civil War; Claudia Jones argued that the resurgence of racist attacks on Negro people after 1945 was perpetrated by “representatives of the most reactionary section of monopoly capital and of the semi-feudal economy of the Black Belt” and that these constituted “the main danger of fascism to the world.”

They also took leading roles in the postwar peace movement; Lorraine Hansberry reported on anti-imperialist demonstrations in Egypt in 1952; Eslande Goode Robeson on the treatment of Korean PoWs and on national liberation struggles in Africa.

Hence the writers in these pages saw the route to emancipation for black women not through assertion of difference and special identity, but through making common cause with the whole of the working class, nationally and internationally.

Claudia Jones in her address on International Women’s Day in 1950 urged the CPUSA to “carry on their struggle among the broad masses of women upon the scientific conviction that the final guarantee of peace, bread and freedom and the full emancipation of subjected womankind, will be achieved only in a socialist America.”

In spite of the sobering final section which contains several accounts of the impact of McCarthyism on the women and their husbands, overall the editors’ careful work has not only corrected the historical narrative but achieved something inspiring. The words and deeds of these women, to quote John Cornford, “will throw a longer shadow as time recedes.”