Remaking Black Power

How Black Women Transformed an Era

Ashley D. Farmer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469634388
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this comprehensive history, Ashley D. Farmer examines black women's political, social, and cultural engagement with Black Power ideals and organizations. Complicating the assumption that sexism relegated black women to the margins of the movement, Farmer demonstrates how female activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power and social justice by developing new ideas about black womanhood. This compelling book shows how the new tropes of womanhood that they created--the "Militant Black Domestic, " the "Revolutionary Black Woman, " and the "Third World Woman, " for instance--spurred debate among activists over the importance of women and gender to Black Power organizing, causing many of the era's organizations and leaders to critique patriarchy and support gender equality. Making use of a vast and untapped array of black women's artwork, political cartoons, manifestos, and political essays that they produced as members of groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Congress of African People, Farmer reveals how black women activists reimagined black womanhood, challenged sexism, and redefined the meaning of race, gender, and identity in American life.

CHAPTER ONE

The Militant Negro Domestic, 1945–1965

“The revolution is on, and it isn’t just tonight,” seventy-year-old radical activist Audley Moore told a group of protesters and schoolteachers in 1968. “I want you to know that it isn’t just this week. This revolution has been going on for the last fifty years, because when I came into the movement, I came in only because it was revolutionary. This is something for you to think about, so don’t just think that because Carmichael said ‘Black Power’ that all of sudden people today are thinking in terms of their freedom.”1 These New York City–based activists and educators had invited Moore to the “Priorities in Urban Education Conference” to help garner support for their campaign for community control of Brooklyn public schools.2 As one of the movement’s midwives, Moore had been fighting for black self-determination longer than most of her audience members had been alive. She used the speaking invitation to proffer an alternative genealogy of the Black Power era, one in which 1960s protests were the continuation rather than the origin of the movement.

Moore counted herself among a cadre of activists who were instrumental in developing the ideological frameworks of the Black Power era and in formulating gendered expressions of its central principles. Although the story of the movement typically begins in 1966, with Stokely Carmichael’s speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, Black Power was much larger than the slogan he introduced into the popular and political discourse.3 A lifelong black nationalist, Moore consistently argued that black women radicals developed and sustained radical emancipation projects well before the 1960s. She also credited these women with creating the new definitions of black “self-identity” that Carmichael and others would later argue were at the core of Black Power projects.4

Moore located the origins of the Black Power movement in the intellectualism and activism of postwar women radicals. Coming of age in the 1920s and 1930s, many of these women were politicized by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a global black nationalist organization that advocated for black self-determination, African repatriation, and separate black cultural and political institutions. As the Depression hit and the UNIA dissipated in the 1930s, many of these women joined the Communist Party (CP). Employed almost exclusively as maids and cooks in white households, they found the CP attractive because it combined Garveyite nationalist frameworks with sophisticated critiques of domestic workers’ class oppression. As CP members, they espoused a black nationalist, working-class, women-centered political agenda and organized around their unique experiences with racism, sexism, and capitalism.

In the first half of the twentieth century, black nationalists and Communists often theorized black liberation through the lens of the working class. Moreover, these activists and organizations framed the struggle for black self-determination and liberation as the fight to regain black manhood.5 Popular and political perceptions of black womanhood, on the other hand, often focused on the domestic worker as a symbol of black working-class womanhood. Although leftist organizations identified black women’s “special” race, class, and gender oppression, they did not always articulate a gender-inclusive emancipatory vision. Instead, leading activists and groups often marginalized the domestic worker and the plight of black women more broadly, reinforcing popular perceptions of black women that were steeped in the ideal of the “docile” mammy figure and entrenched in the legacy of slavery.6

From the 1940s to the 1960s, black women radicals both centered and reimagined the political identity of the black domestic worker. Drawing on Garveyite frameworks, they maintained that black Americans constituted a distinct cultural and political group entitled to separation and self-determination. These activists’ communist-inspired analyses of their intersecting race, class, and gender oppression also led them to view black working-class women as the vanguard of black Americans’ self-deterministic pursuits. Combining these positions, they collectively constructed the idea of a Militant Negro Domestic, a political identity that framed the domestic worker as a political activist who advocated for community control, black self-determination, self-defense, and separate black cultural and political institutions. By reimagining this dominant symbol of black womanhood, black women activists reshaped contemporary masculinist conceptions of the black working-class political subject. They also linked the ideologies and symbols of early twentieth-century black nationalism to the burgeoning Black Power movement of the early 1960s, making both black women and womanhood foundational to Black Power–era thought.

Radical Networks and Domestic Worker Politics

Many Black Power foremothers started the backbreaking work of cleaning white women’s homes at the same time that the UNIA began its ascent as the preeminent, global black nationalist organization.7 Marcus Garvey’s organization reached its zenith in the United States in the early 1920s and was a powerful antidote to black Americans’ daily experiences of disenfranchisement, discrimination, and dehumanization. Garvey’s sermons about racial pride, black-controlled business enterprises, and plans to redeem Africa through repatriation prompted many black Americans to join their local chapter of the UNIA.8 Garveyites created independent schools, cultural programming, medical services, and economic relief funds to enact their leader’s calls for black autonomy and self-determination.9 The UNIA’s uplift-oriented nationalism, formulated through extensive symbolism and catechism, galvanized black people worldwide and created a substantial black nationalist base within the United States.

Despite its middle-class leadership, Garveyism was a working-class movement, and black working-class women were critical to its success.10 They supported the organization’s many parades and programs; became part of the UNIA women’s auxiliary, the Black Cross Nurses; and subscribed to the organizational newspaper, the Negro World.11 Garvey’s second wife and fellow UNIA leader, Amy Jacques Garvey, emphasized black women’s special role in the UNIA and black nationalist activism more broadly. Through her column, “Our Women and What They Think,” she roused many domestic workers to spend what little money they had on UNIA dues and stock in Garvey’s black-owned shipping company, the Black Star Line.12 Countless black women radicals identified Garveyism and the UNIA as progenitors of their activism. Audley Moore, who was a domestic worker in New Orleans and Harlem, found Marcus Garvey’s emphasis on black pride and global solidarity promising. Throughout her life, she maintained that it was the UNIA leader’s ideology that showed her the “nature of [her] oppression,” revealed that she was part of a diasporic community, and taught her how to formulate nationalist claims.13 Moore was among the many black working-class women who remained committed to the ideological and programmatic tenets of Garveyism well after 1927, when the U.S. government convicted and deported the UNIA leader for mail fraud.14

While Garvey battled federal authorities, the CP gained a foothold in black communities. During the 1920s, the CP’s governing body, the Third Communist International (Comintern), identified black workers as important partners in ending global capitalism and imperialism. By 1928, the Comintern had developed a formal position on what it called the “Negro Question,” or the larger issue of how black people fit into its ideological frame. At the Sixth World Congress held that same year, officials announced their support of the Black Belt Thesis, or the claim that black Americans in the southeastern United States and northern urban centers constituted a nation set apart from other Americans by their shared cultural heritage, economic subjugation, and political exclusion.15 According to the CP, black Americans in the Deep South constituted an oppressed nation within a nation and were entitled to self-determination, political and economic power, and the right to secede from the United States.16 By adopting the Black Belt Thesis, the Comintern made black nationalism and black self-determination central components of the CP’s U.S. agenda. It also positioned the CP—both ideologically and programmatically—to capture Garvey’s membership base in the United States.

The party’s stance on black political and economic self-determination gained traction among black Americans during a period in which both the UNIA and the U.S. economy were weakening. In the aftermath of Garvey’s deportation and the failure of the Black Star Line, UNIA membership declined. Far more detrimental, however, was the economic collapse of 1929 and the subsequent depression that engulfed the country.17 The Great Depression affected black women workers more than any other segment of the population. Before the nationwide crisis, Jim Crow laws and hegemonic gendered divisions of labor relegated black women to domestic work in white households.18 As jobs and money became scarce, more white women sought domestic work. An overcrowded labor market led many black women to seek employment through exchanges such as the Bronx Slave Market, a term activists Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke used to describe the process in which black women lined the New York City streets “waiting expectantly” for white “housewives to buy their strength and energy for an hour, two hours, or even for a day.”19 The popularity of these street-corner markets made it clear that, despite President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to ameliorate suffering through New Deal programs in the 1930s, black women would continue to be shut out of other occupations and shoulder the brunt of the discrimination brought on by universal economic hardship. In an effort to gain better pay and treatment, some turned to progressive organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the New York–based Domestic Workers Union (DWU).20 Others joined the CP.

Bronx Slave Market (detail). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum Purchase; copyright 1938 by Robert McNeill.

The CP attracted thousands of black women through its working-class, nationalist, and gender-conscious ideology exemplified by its vigorous attacks on racism and imperialism. Domestically, the CP’s backing of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers accused of raping two white women in 1931, confirmed its support of black working-class women.21 Within days of the boys’ arrests, the CP’s legal advocacy wing, the International Labor Defense (ILD), had successfully turned the trial into a powerful symbol of race and class injustice. The organization also supported the mothers of the Scottsboro Boys, some of whom were domestic workers. With its help, mothers such as Ada Wright framed their arrest and trial as another example of black working-class women’s oppression, emphasizing the unique hardships they faced in trying to provide for and protect their sons.22 Party members’ involvement in the Scottsboro case showcased the organization’s ability to recognize and mobilize around black women’s concerns. Many former Garveyites found their way to the CP through ILD-sponsored Scottsboro protests, where they joined in with hundreds of black and white protesters carrying “red banners, the hammer and sickle,” and placards reading, “Death to the Lynchers” and “End Jim Crow.”23

Black women also appreciated Communist support of global black self-determination. When Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in an effort to annex it to Italy in 1935, CP members framed the incursion as both an imperialist atrocity and an affront to black sovereignty. They also joined with local black nationalist groups to protest the violation of the African nation’s autonomy and self-determination. In Harlem, CP members participated in large, multiorganizational demonstrations and formed the Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia in order to publicly denounce Italy’s imperialist and racist aims.24 This and other protests attracted black women who found ideological and organizational congruence between the UNIA and CP platforms. Claudia Jones, who had migrated to Harlem from Trinidad, recalled that she joined the party because she, “like millions of negro people[,] … was impressed by the communist speakers who explained the reasons for this brutal crime against young Negro boys; and who related the Scottsboro case to the struggle of the Ethiopian people against fascism, and Mussolini’s invasion.”25

Although the CP advanced an antiracist and anti-imperialist agenda, it, like other nationalist organizations at this time, framed black nationalism and liberation in masculinist terms and imagery.26 Party literature emphasized the revolutionary potential of a black ma...