Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party during the Great Depression

Abstract

a 1931 article in the Daily Worker, NAACP leader Walter White proclaimed that American women who joined the ranks of the Communist Party (CP) were and uncouth who were being led to the slaughter by dangerously bold radicals. (1) While all American leaders did not share White's sentiments and did not openly criticize American participation in the CP during the first half of the 20th century, a significant group of black leaders and intellectuals, including A. Philip Randolph, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and others, voiced their pressing concerns regarding CP activists' role in the black freedom struggle. (2) Although White's indictment of black female communists and American women who supported CP activists was clearly reflective of broader conflicts between NAACP and other black leaders and the CP, American women in the CP challenged White's charges against them. The historical record reveals that these black female activists were far from ignorant and were in no way victims who were being led to the slaughter. (3) Many American women who came from various socioeconomic backgrounds and geographical regions and who possessed varying levels of political experience and education were active in the CP during the 1930s. While northern and midwestern CP women in New York City and Chicago, for example, tended to be working class and members of the black intelligentsia and black-nationalist groups such as the Blood Brotherhood (ABB) and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), many black female communists in the South were usually working class and poor, often working as laundresses, sharecroppers, and domestics. Collectively, this new vanguard of female activists emerged from a legacy of American women's activism. Like their foremothers, their social and political activism demonstrated race, class, and gender consciousness and emphasized racial advancement and community building. These American women also built upon the Progressive Era activism of CP leaders such as Elizabeth Hendrickson and Helen Holman by combining leftist reform with the traditional organizing patterns among black women. A significant group of American women viewed the CP as a potential vehicle for black liberation, along with gender and working-class advancement. These women were what political theorist Antonio Gramsci described as organic who embraced reform that involved working people engaged in social and political contestation against capitalist exploitation. Organic intellectuals often lacked formal recognition from society, opposed mainstream through protest and agitation, employed principles that united disparate groups into effective coalitions, and represented a set of political ideologies that was different from those of university-trained intellectual elites. (4) Often dismissed, black female CP leaders and rank and file members endorsed a racial discourse that challenged prevailing black political strategies and embraced liberationist strategies outside women's traditional reform activities. As communists, they became local and national leaders, distributed the CP's Daily Worker, served as representatives at major international conferences, ran for political office on the CP ticket, and were active street corner orators. Through their rhetoric, protest styles, and social activism, black women in the CP often reconstructed the politics of respectability. Until recently, historians have largely ignored the dynamic role of American women within the CP. In much of the history and historiography of the American Left, historian Robin D. G. Kelley has observed, African American women have largely been invisible, lost in the cracks somewhere between the 'Negro Question' and the 'woman question.' (5) Because few black female CP activists wrote autobiographical works or memoirs, their stories have often been overlooked. …