Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism by Eric McDuffie (review)

Eric McDuffie’s Sojourning for Freedom inspires new thinking and opens up old scholarly paradigms to fresh reexamination. McDuffie focuses on black women communists between 1919 and the 1970s, asking: why did they become communists? What radicalized them? Rather than sketching out the history of an obscure corner of black radicalism, he instead finds these women as pioneers. They opened up both activist and intellectual pathways trod by later black left feminists in the 1960s and 1970s—all the way through those who innovate within critical race theory and intersectionality in the present day.

McDuffie initially sets out to study black communist women as a way to balance the “overwhelming attention to the church, women’s clubs, and the Garvey movement” that overshadows other kinds of black women’s radical activity (6–7). Rather than view black communist women as individuals, he wants to show their activity as “part of a community of black women radicals whose collective history spanned more than fifty years” (7). This is an important and difficult innovation in the study of radical activity, and one fairly uncommon in the current crop of studies of the social movements of the twentieth-century United States. In the book, McDuffie suggests a powerful “alternative genealogy of twentieth century black feminism” which puts his subjects, rather than the later civil rights/black power and feminist movements, as the major “progenitor for the black feminism of the 1960s and 1970s” (13).

It is an ambitious agenda. McDuffie knows it, and supports his claims with exhaustive archival documentation bolstered by over 40 oral interviews of his own. The amount of cross-referencing and solid grounding in the relevant secondary sources is notable, particularly when situating this work within the historiography of the black freedom struggle, the black Left, and black feminism. He also makes clear to the reader in the text (much appreciated) when he is using FBI or FBI informant sources, so one can weigh this information in light of the Bureau’s unrelenting hostility.

The women in the Communist Party jump off the pages, so vivid and bold are his descriptions of Grace Campbell, Williana Borroughs, Claudia Jones, and Queen Mother Moore, among others. Campbell, who worked as a jail attendant in the women’s section of the infamous New York “Tombs,” presaged the current work on the prison industrial complex by calling attention in 1925 to the sentencing disparities between black and white women. “She noted that courts convicted black women at higher rates and sentenced them to longer prison terms even than white repeat offenders,” due to racial biases of white judges who stereotyped black women (50). Claudia Jones, born in the Caribbean but raised in New York, drew hundreds of women into activism through her “fantastic oratory” and vibrant friendships (98). And black women writers Esther Cooper and Louise Thompson began writing in the 1930s about something Barbara Smith and her peers noted in their 1982 book: “All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave.”¹ Cooper and Thompson made clear 50 years earlier that black women’s freedom from racism, sexism, and classism was the central measure of the struggle for democracy (111).

A few quibbles: I wish McDuffie had indicated to the reader when he was drawing on other kinds of sources needing interrogation like the Russian State Archives or personal interviews. It would have been helpful to have a guide to abbreviations used in the notes—there is a little bit of an “inside baseball” feel for those unfamiliar with the Communist Party documents. It would have been helpful to have the same attention to U.S. political historiography, and that of the left in general, as well as civil rights in the 1930s through 1956, but as his work in bringing all these...