Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (review)

How many black women radicals active during the early part of the Cold War are you familiar with? I suspect that even this publication’s knowledgeable readership would be hard-pressed to come up with more than a handful of names, let alone identify speech texts delivered by them or newspaper articles they penned. And that is our loss, as Dayo F. Gore’s new book, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War, elucidates. Gore’s book does not just add a long overdue account of black women’s contributions to existing history. Through careful recovery and analysis, Radicalism at the Crossroads provides an “alternative perspective on many key aspects of U.S. radicalism and postwar politics, and de-centers dominant narratives that privilege the decimation of the U.S. Left and the experiences of well-known leaders in the black Left and Communist Party (CP)” (162). Centering the contributions of black women radicals enables Gore to unearth a legacy of leadership, prove their participation was sustained through a period of intense anticommunist pressure, and detail the models and mentorship that these women provided for 1960s and 1970s activists.

Gore’s unique contribution to American history unfolds in three parts. The book’s introduction and first chapter situate Radicalism at the Crossroads within the larger scholarly efforts to recover black women’s leadership and to reconceptualize the early Cold War period. Gore traces the intersection of black women and Popular Front activism to 1930s Harlem. Through oral history interviews, “underutilized archival sources,” and the activists’ spoken and written work, Gore introduces the reader to key figures like Vicki Garvin and Marvel Cooke (2). Their experiences are representative of many of the women Gore’s book features, in the sense that Garvin and Cooke arrived in New York during the Great Migration, they turned to the Left during the Great Depression, and their Popular Front involvement granted them personal relationships and political education upon which they continued to draw throughout their lifetimes.

The second portion of Radicalism at the Crossroads does not proceed chronologically; instead, it includes three chapters, each of which considers a slightly different period within the 1930s to 1950s timeframe. The chapters are organized thematically around issues of self-definition, collective activism, and the liberating potential of intersectional analysis, respectively. In chapter 2, Gore analyzes postwar debates over black womanhood, which took place in a variety of venues—from the pages of the Negro Digest to the poetry of Beulah Richardson. These debates challenged denigrating social constructions that defined black women as “inadequate versions of (white) womanhood” (50). By theorizing alternative visions of gender roles and interracial coalition building, black women fought against their triply oppressed status and, argues Gore, amplified their centrality to the American Left. Rosa Lee Ingram’s legal battle is featured extensively in the book’s third chapter. Ingram was a widowed black mother who carved out a living as a sharecropper in Georgia. In 1948, she and her two sons were sentenced to death for the murder of a white landowner (who was widely believed to have directed unwelcome sexual advances toward Ingram). For the subjects of Gore’s analysis, the case proved galvanizing, as it exposed issues of sexualized racial violence to a national audience while offering a “key opening for black women radicals to serve as the visible leadership of and to set the agenda for a celebrated civil rights campaign” (80). For the larger counter-narrative Gore’s book proffers, the Ingram case demonstrated the success of black women radicals’ collective activism, as Ingram and her sons were eventually released from prison.

Radicalism at the Crossroad’s twin claims that the black Left was not decimated by anticommunist backlash, and that black women radicals were vital to sustaining movement ideology, are explicitly taken up in Gore’s fourth chapter. Here Gore draws upon...