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Reviewed by:
  • Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism
  • Bryan D. Palmer
Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2011)

It is surprising how little we know about the history of African American women and communism, on the one hand, and, on the other, their contribution to Black feminism. Erik S. McDuffie provides a pioneering excavation of some important burial grounds, where obscure histories have rested undisturbed for decades. The result is an engrossing book, and one that makes a wide interdisciplinary contribution to the study of women, African Americans, and the revolutionary left.

If you can not judge a book by its cover, you most emphatically can get a sense of this study’s approach and subject by its index. Four women have lengthy, complex, cross-referenced entries: Claudia Jones, Louise Thompson Patterson, Esther Cooper Jackson, and Audley “Queen Mother” Moore. Jones, the subject of an existing scholarly monograph, joined the Communist Party in the US in 1936 out of a commitment to anti-fascism, a cause that also attracted Jackson to the Party. Patterson and Moore, who were drawn to the Communist Party in the early 1930s through mobilizations to free the Scottsboro Boys, preceded Jackson and Jones in their enlistment. McDuffie’s focus on these four women and their recruitment to the Communist Party in the 1930s structures his book in particular ways.

The early years of communism and Black women’s involvement in the Party, for instance, are suggestive, if sketchy. McDuffie alludes to the importance of a significant and little-appreciated cohort of African American Harlem women who were centrally involved in the African Blood Brotherhood and communist street speaking, introducing figures such as Grace P. Campbell, Williana Burroughs, Maude W hite, Helen Holman, and Hermina Dumont Huiswood. If such women tended to be overshadowed in Black radical circles by their counterparts in the nationalist Garveyite movement, they nevertheless clearly emerged as a forceful presence in New York African American circles. McDuffie reconstructs their intense internationalism and concern with the global place of women, as well as their community activism in organizations like the Harlem Tenants League, by piecing together accounts of speeches, sifting through rare articles in the Black and communist press, and outlining the meanings African American women drew from their trips to the Soviet Union.

As the Communist Party developed its Black Belt Nation thesis in 1928 and upped the level of its anti-racist agitation in the Third Period (1929–1934), “the Negro Question” assumed a place of increasing prominence for all Party members. Black women were more likely to be featured in Party activities, especially as leaders and writers, and this nurtured the important second generation of African American women that figure so decisively in McDuffie’s account. Weaned on Scottsboro agitations, the Soviet Union’s commitment to expose the American cancer of racism in its creation of a propaganda film, Black and White, Harlem’s League of Struggle for Negro Rights, Depression-era rent strikes, unemployed councils, and tenants’ movements, and the post-1935 Popular Front campaigns associated with anti-fascist mobilizations relating to Ethiopia and Spain, Black women of the first and second generations of American communism figured forcefully in a broad range of activities.

McDuffie outlines how this period saw the politics of a particular Black feminism cohere, one of its most articulate [End Page 309] statements being Louise Thompson’s [Patterson] groundbreaking 1936 article, “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” which appeared in the official voice of the CP’s National Women’s Commission, Woman Today. Thompson’s critical contribution was to elaborate an understanding of the “triple exploitation” Black women workers confronted on a daily basis, “as workers, as women, and as Negroes.” (112) McDuffie suggests that this may well have been the first time that this phrase, “triple exploitation,” so pivotal in the emergence of Black feminism, appeared in print. Thompson also wrote a 1937 article, “Negro Women in the Party,” suggesting that communist promotion of interracialism had the detrimental effect of leaving Black women isolated and alone as African American movement...

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