The Making of Triple Jeopardy

Abstract

The Making of Triple Jeopardy Tiana U. Wilson (bio) Over fifty years ago, Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) members made their debut with the first women-of-color-focused newspaper of the New Left movement in the United States. The name of their newspaper, Triple Jeopardy, also reflected these activists' political standpoint and theorization of power—how it is constructed, maintained, and eradicated. In a telephone interview, cofounder and leading Triple Jeopardy editor Frances Beal reflected on the group's ideological contributions, explaining, "A lot of the academic people just talk about it in terms of identity, racism, sexism, and classism, and the intersection of those things. Well, we talked about it in terms of the struggles against racism, against sexism, and against imperialism, and the intersection of those struggles "(Frances Beal, pers. comm., October 3, 2022). The idea of triple jeopardy operated as a framework, a lens for understanding structural oppression on a national and international scale. Members also utilized it as a tool to connect Black, Latina, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native American women's domestic issues to a larger movement against colonialism and global capitalism. Their newspaper thus served as a political education platform for members to map these intellectual and material linkages. As articulated from the very first Triple Jeopardy issue published in 1971, studying "revolutionary theory and tactics" was the primary avenue to changing women of color's socioeconomic conditions in the United States and abroad (TWWA 1971, 16). More recently, scholars have begun to critically engage with the content of Triple Jeopardy, its internationalist, feminist, and revolutionary components. However, few explore the creation story of the newspaper and how members produced and disseminated copies. Examining the "behind the scenes" activities of the TWWA's newspaper launch contextualizes the [End Page 201] group's pioneering efforts to envision a socialist society with women of color struggles at the forefront. In my telephone interview with Fran Beal, she graciously shared her early memories of the newspaper and recalled names, events, locations, and dates of important and influential forces that shaped the TWWA's decision to develop Triple Jeopardy. Recovering the process of making the newspaper, especially its first issue, offers insight into the ways Black, Asian, and Latina women worked together under one collective to empower themselves and voice their concerns in national and international discourses of revolution and liberation. Beal accredited two previous activist experiences with equipping her with the necessary skills to lead Triple Jeopardy's editorial team. First, she learned the art of journalism from leftist French teachers while studying abroad in Paris between 1960 and 1966. Beal remembered, "I had a whole class on how to write an essay. I learned about the who, what, when, where, how, and why approach to journalism. [. . .] And we recruited stories from some people. We didn't have that much luck with that. But we essentially taught ourselves to write stories" (pers. comm., 2022). When Beal arrived in Paris, she was planted in the strong African American expatriate community that had been well established since the interwar period, and she met Caribbean and African students from formerly French colonies. Beal advanced her journalism skills in an African diasporic environment, where students engaged in radical internationalist politics and debated strategies and tactics for the larger anti-colonial movement. Her time abroad sowed the seeds of her founding work with the TWWA's newspaper, which included a feminist and anti-imperialist analysis of international events relevant to Third World communities. Organizing with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) also prepared Beal to spearhead Triple Jeopardy. During her years abroad, Beal spent the summers in the United States, visiting family and working with SNCC. When she permanently relocated to New York in 1966 and took a research position with the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), she also continued her activism with the local SNCC chapter. Beal joined the International Affairs Commission under the leadership of James Forman. By that time, SNCC's California branch was regularly publishing the organization's newspaper, The Movement, which covered domestic civil rights efforts and global liberation struggles. Beal drew inspiration from Forman, whom she recalled as the "one who said, we...