Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

3. From Communist Politics to Black Power: The Visionary Politics and Transnational Solidarities of Victoria “Vicki” Ama Garvin

71 3 From Communist Politics to Black Power The Visionary Politics and Transnational Solidarities of Victoria “Vicki” Ama Garvin Dayo F. Gore As recounted in this collection’s introduction, when listing the key figures in Ghana’s expatriate community during the 1960s, writer Leslie Lacy referenced Vicki Garvin, a longtime labor activist and black radical , as one of the people to see “if you want to start a revolution.”1 While several recent studies on Black Power politics have acknowledged Vicki Garvin’s activism and transnational travels, she is often mentioned only as a representative figure, a “radical trade unionist,” or a “survivor of McCarthyism ,” with little attention given to the specific details of her life and political contributions.2 Yet Vicki Garvin played a leading role in the six decades of struggle that marked the shift from Negro civil rights to black liberation. Politicized in the upheavals of Depression-era Harlem and active in the U.S. left well into the 1980s, Garvin provides an important window for understanding the significant channels of influence between the Old Left and the New Left and between black radicalism and the black freedom struggle. Vicki Garvin arrived in Africa in 1961 as a single woman, a seasoned organizer, and a radical intellectual, who persevered through McCarthyism (the government-supported political repression of the U.S. left during the late 1940s and 1950s) with her political commitments intact, even as her spirits were tattered. She had served as leadership in several national organizations, including as staff for the Congress of Industrial Organization ’s (CIO) United Office and Professional Workers of America Union 72 Dayo F. Gore (UOPWA), a founding member of the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC), and a member of the editorial board of Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper. In 1970, after almost ten years of living in Ghana and China, Garvin returned to Newark and New York to work alongside a younger generation of activists in the New Left and Third World solidarity movements. Victoria “Vicki” Garvin preparing to speak at the founding convention of the Harlem Trade Union Council, 1949. Courtesy of Miranda Bergman, Vicki Garvin’s stepdaughter. From Communist Politics to Black Power 73 Recent scholarship has begun to acknowledge the role of black leftists such as Harry Haywood and Nelson Peery, or journals such as Freedomways in the development of student radicalism and the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s.3 However, few scholars have addressed the important influence that Vicki Garvin, and other black women radicals, had in channeling political knowledge from the U.S. Communist Party–affiliated black left to transnational solidarity efforts in Ghana and China and back to Marxist factions in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and black nationalist politics of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Garvin’s life is part of the untold story of black liberation politics in a global arena. Her distinct political legacy rests not in official titles but in revolutionary experience and solidarity efforts that always combined local organizing with a global vision. Garvin has remained an illegible figure in black radicalism, in part because her activism does not fit neatly into the convenient paradigms of the black freedom struggle. Garvin was a skilled theorist and strategic thinker, who wrote for movements and organizations but never produced a definitive text outlining her own political philosophy. She worked as a labor activist and was a proponent of black nationalism and Marxist-Leninism, even though these movements are often seen as incompatible. Garvin joined the Communist Party (CP) and served as a leader in New York’s black left during the height of McCarthyism. She continued to be politically active in the U.S. left amid these anticommunist attacks and well beyond her own departure from the Communist Party in 1957.4 She became an expatriate and international activist as the U.S. civil rights movement exploded onto the national arena and worked diligently as a behind-thescenes mentor, strategist, and advocate for unity during a Black Power movement that often celebrated charismatic male leadership and a New Left embroiled in factional debates. Along the way, Garvin could count such luminaries as Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, Harry Haywood, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Robert Williams, and Malcolm X as allies and mentors. Such diverse political engagements and sustained activism reveal Garvin as a central figure in the post–World War II...