By John Forte
“… we never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution—real girl’s talk.”[1]
Nina Simone, I Put a Spell On You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone
Black women’s interest in the intersection between anti-racism, socialism, and women’s emancipation – or ‘Black left feminism’ – came to prominence during the era of the Great Depression. This politics was shaped by the Communist Party (CP), but developed its own form of street politics, deepened theories of women’s oppression, and put black women at the center of the class struggle. Their work with the International Labor Defense, Unemployed Councils, Tenants Unions, and other CP-affiliated organizations carved out a space for their own interests.
Through their lived experiences, they challenged traditional conceptions of black womanhood. They theorized intersections between race, class, and gender that demonstrated the unique revolutionary capabilities and internationalism of black women. Overall, the tradition of black left feminism demonstrates a different path forward for radicals and activists today.
Grace Campbell’s work with the Harlem Tenants League (HTL) situated her as a pioneering figure of black left feminism. Formed in January 1928, the HTL reflected black women’s unique interest in addressing the basic needs of the working-class. Its activities included demonstrations, rent strikes, physically blocking evictions, and fighting for housing regulations to be enforced through direct action. Its rhetoric connected housing issues to the interlocking oppressions of imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy.
The HTL became the model for Unemployment Councils — some of the most popular organizing platforms during the height of the Great Depression. With as many as 500 members, the female-led HTL connected everyday experiences to capitalism by focusing on cost-of-living issues that directly impacted working families.[2] This suggests that black women organizers recognized a different method of raising class consciousness, which brought an entirely new swath of people into the left.
Campbell’s published a column titled “Women in Current Topics” in the New York Age, which argued that the criminal justice system functioned primarily to reproduce hierarchies’ of race, class, and gender. She noted that institutional oppression reproduced stereotypes about poor black women as criminal and deviant.[3] This work was ahead of its time, as it predated studies that connected the ideology of the ruling class to the prison-industrial-complex. Campbell was one of the first black left feminists to argue that the hyper-exploitation of black women made them the vanguard for social change.
The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) represented the Communist International’s highest commitment to Pan-Africanism. Burroughs served on the ITUCNW’s Provisional Executive Committee, which organized the group’s founding conference in Hamburg, Germany. Internal reports in preparation for the conference reveal that she pushed the organization to address child labor. Furthermore, she wanted it to organize black female industrial laborers across the United States and the Caribbean.
Burroughs pointed to the fact that “Negro women among whom are a large number of foreigners from the Caribbean, themselves suffer from imperialism.”[4] To her, opposing colonialism was central to advancing the status of black women in America. Internationalist politics offered a means to capture women’s cultural imagination through the African Diaspora and prove that a new world was possible.
In November of 1930, Williana Burroughs wrote an article for the Negro Worker on the importance of the ITUCNW to the black freedom movement. She explicitly called for workers in Britain and the United States to unite with workers in the colonies. Showing the depth of her analysis, she detailed American imperialism’s penetration into Africa with statistics of investments in Belgian copper mines in the Congo and Firestone’s investments in Liberia.[5] Her analysis showed a keen understanding of finance capital’s role in imperialism. Also, she called on the left press to pay closer attention to international workers’ struggles:
The Negro workers in America know very little about the heroic fight of the Chinese workers, very little about the revolutionary movement of the workers of India; they know almost nothing of the movement in South Africa, simply because our press is very small and very weak.[6]
Burroughs concluded with a demand that workers in the west “make real to the workers in the colonies the solidarity of the workers of the world.”[7] Despite her calls for internationalism, her article did not pay specific attention to women of color. Perhaps her articles were limited by men who dominated leftist editorial boards. In 1937, Williana Burroughs returned to the Soviet Union to work with English-language broadcasts in Moscow where her two children were enrolled in school.[8] All in all, Williana Burroughs was a figure who attempted to build international bridges between workers in the United States, Soviet Russia, and the third world. Still, other women argued more explicitly for the position of black women.
In her 1936 piece “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” Louise Thompson Patterson cast light on the special oppression that black women faced as domestic workers. Through her lyrical tone, she described their soul-breaking work:
Early dawn on any Southern road. Shadowy figures emerge from the little unpainted, wooden shacks alongside the road. There are Negro women trudging into town to the Big House to cook, to wash, to clean, to nurse children – all for two, three, dollars for the whole week. Sunday comes – rest day. But what rest is there for a Negro mother who must crowd into one day the care of her own large family? Church of course, where for a few brief hours she may forget, listening to the sonorous voice of the pastor, the liquid harmony of the choir, the week’s gossip of neighbors. But Monday is right after Sunday, and the week’s grind begins all over.[9]
To Thompson, the pain and suffering these women endured was emblematic of employers’ views that domestic workers were less than human. Sunday was both a blessing and a curse. It was the day for unpaid housework for the family, but also a day of spiritual rejuvenation and collective joy. In comparison, Thompson described domestic work in Northern cities using the image of the “slave market”:
So thrifty “housewives” drive sharper bargains. There are plenty of women to choose from. And every dollar saved leaves that much more for one’s bridge game or theater party! The Bronx “slave market” is a graphic monument to the bitter exploitation of this most exploited section of the American working population – the Negro women.[10]
With a sarcastic tone, Thompson damned middle class white women for their selfish materialism and hypocritical exploitation of black domestics. The symbolism of the slave market was not hyperbole. The Great Depression hit African Americans disproportionately hard. On equal grounds, black domestic workers had to compete with white women who fell on hard times.[11] Middle class white women took advantage of this increased competition in what Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke referred to as “the Bronx slave market.” Their 1935 article for the NAACP’s The Crisis was a watershed expose of domestic workers lives, but it did not explicitly theorize interlocking oppressions facing poor black women.[12]
Driven by this rising consciousness, many black women joined organizations like the NAACP, the Communist Party, and the Domestic Workers Union (DWU) — which was formed in June of 1936 in New York City and quickly totaled around one thousand members.[13] Their anger against social and economic injustice fueled collective action.
It was Louise Thompson Patterson’s coining of the phrase “triple exploitation” that was most notable. In “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” she remarked that “over the whole land, Negro women meet this triple exploitation — as workers, as women, and as Negroes. About 85 per cent of all Negro women workers are domestics, two-thirds of the two million domestic workers in the United States.”[14] This was a clear expression of intersectionality — the overlapping of different identities without viewing them in isolation.
In addition, this was one of the first uses of the term “triple oppression.”[15] In Patterson’s view, the remedy for black women’s oppression was solidarity. Progressive-minded women, both white and black, had to show support for each other without sadness or pessimism. Her experience with the Women’s Sub-Session at the National Negro Congress in 1936 sparked this realization. She recalled that “women from all walks of life, unskilled and professional, Negro and white women found themselves drawn together, found that they liked being together, found that there was hope for change in coming together.”[16] In other words, collective organizing was the means to develop a consciousness that viewed race, class, and gender as inseparable.
In a mass action known as the “Revolt of the Housewives,” working class organizer Bonita Williams led hundreds of working-class women in Harlem — both black and white — against exorbitant meat prices. By the spring of 1935, butcher prices rose over fifty percent in most Harlem neighborhoods. Recognizing this issue, Williams formed the Harlem Action Committee in June of 1935.[17] Through this committee, women met in churches, lodges, and prayer meetings to discuss direct action. An article in New Masses published that year on June 18, reported that “women who have never ventured farther than a neighbor’s flat to voice their views, have flung themselves into the activities of the meat strike.”[18] This action galvanized housewives into militant action.
Open air meetings and elections for local committees against the high price of meat erupted across the city. An article in New Masses depicted this new unity:
In Harlem, where the unemployment rate – and the food prices – are higher than anywhere else in the city, three hundred Negroes, mainly women, stand before a single butcher shop and chant “Don’t Buy Meat Until the Price Comes Down!” “Don’t Buy Meat Until the Price Comes Down!!”[19]
In many cases, meat retailers closed their doors. Other butchers actually joined demonstrations against wholesalers and suppliers. In the aftermath of strikes, marches, and picketing, meat prices fell as far as Chicago, with local newspapers reporting that the New York Action Committee Against the High Cost of Living was to blame. As many as 300 butchers agreed to close their stores to pressure wholesalers to lower their prices as much as twenty-five percent.[20]
The most significant effect of the “Revolt of the Housewives” was on the rising expectations of working women in Harlem. During the protests, women connected meat prices to malnutrition and children’s health. One organizer proclaimed “this is a fight for the right to eat — for the right to feed our children. Isn’t it so, sisters?” Housewives aggressively pressured men who owned butcher shops. Unrepentantly, one woman told a butcher “we do hope you’ll cooperate with us. Because, you see, if you don’t, the women will picket your place. You wouldn’t want that. So, we’ll both cooperate.”
In another instance, a housewife signaled the influence of internationalism in Harlem’s diverse communities, proclaiming “that’s the way to do it — fight for your rights! That’s the way they do it where I come from — in Panama!”[21] Not only did street politics arouse a strong sense of class consciousness, they encouraged women to assert Pan-African unity. Bonita Williams’s fearless organizing represented black left feminism’s ability to mend a deeply divided American working class.
Audley Moore was inspired to become active in CP circles when she saw a rally for the Scottsboro Boys in New York City. She was amazed by the number of white people she saw chanting “Death to the Lynchers!” and immediately joined in. She fought for the removal of racist principals and against corporal punishment with the Harlem Committee for Better Schools. Formed in 1935, this committee was composed of community members and radical Jewish teachers who were shocked by physical decay and blatant racism in schools.[22]
In other cases, principles concerned with white teachers’ attitudes towards black students asked Moore for help. She recalled that “the white teachers used to call our children *****, in the classroom. Yes, they did. The white teachers used to fling books across the room and have the blood gushing.” Whether this was exaggeration or not, the issue was personal for Moore, given her lack of educational opportunity as a child. Connecting these issues to racial advancement, she pointed out that “it’s so disheartening to see our children come into school in first grade all bright eyed, eager, hungry to learn, and go out drooping in sixth grade.”[23] CP organizers such as Moore pushed to prioritize everyday conditions of working African Americans.
Additionally, Audley Moore was at the forefront of struggles for tenants’ rights and better hospital conditions. During the height of the Great Depression, struggles against evictions and for better housing conditions were a major activity. With the Consolidated Tenants League, Party activists such as Moore helped organize marches against high rents and for the construction of additional public housing. They carried out rent strikes against rent increases and poor conditions in buildings.[24]
Self-educated Party members from working class backgrounds were quick to recognize the importance of these actions. Moore stated “the first strikes we had, I organized ’em. I mean, I was organizing the houses when I joined the Communist Party. I was right in the process of organizing the houses.[25] In addition to poor housing, African Americans in Harlem faced poor conditions in neighborhood hospitals. The issue of inadequate public resources was more than a depression-era problem; it was an issue of racial discrimination:
we had to fight to get black nurses in Harlem hospitals, and we had to fight for decent treatment, every day, every day, every day was a struggle. We had to fight to get black doctors in Harlem hospitals. It was something. even to get clean sheets on the receiving table. There were dirty and bloody sheets and they didn’t mind putting you right on somebody else’s blood.[26]
Audley Moore’s movement building helped push the Harlem Communist Party closer to the people. As she remarked, “every struggle was Communist initiated.” Blacks in Harlem had a sense of this and the Party was generally well received. Moore pointed out that “our people didn’t have the red scare like the white people had it. The party did so much positive things, fought so hard, against Jim Crow, and so on.”[27] Further, the Party’s devotion to internationalism and anti-fascism inspired other grassroots efforts. Moore eventually left the party due to her growing commitment to black nationalism, but she argued that the Party’s class analysis was its greatest gift.
Communist Party leadership never let go of the notion that working-class men in industry were the vanguard of the revolution. Black left feminists argued otherwise.
In doing so, they pushed the Communist Party further to the left. Their politics united working people by directly addressing their needs, while it emphasized the hyper-exploitation of black women as domestic workers and redefined the notion of ‘black womanhood.’ In their eyes, black women were exceptionally militant, vital to the community, and capable of connecting to African American cultural traditions. Internationalism, anti-fascism, and anticolonialism came naturally to these women, as they lived lives that were simultaneously American and immigrant West Indian. They used institutions of the political left to hone their unique talents and show that women’s liberation was not something that had to wait to be achieved after the revolution.
Bibliography
Adams, Mary. “The Negro Movement in North and Latin America.” The Negro Worker III, no. Special, November 1, 1930.
Baker, Ella, and Marvel Cook. “The Slave Market.” The Crisis. November 1935, 42 edition. https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/ella-baker-and-marvel-cooke-the-slave-market/.
Barton, Anna. “Revolt of the Housewives.” New Masses. June 18, 1935, Vol. 15 edition, sec. No. 12. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v15n12-jun-18-1935-NM.pdf.
Farmer, Ashley D. Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era. Chapel Hill, NJ: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend. Audley Moore. Other. Black Women Oral History Project. Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, June 8, 1978. https://sds.lib.harvard.edu/sds/audio/460147962.
Harris, Lashawn. “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party during the Great Depression.” The Journal of African American History 91, no. 1 (2008): 21–43. https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/25610047?seq=1.
Makalani, Minkah. “An Apparatus for Negro Women: Black Women’s Organizing, Communism, and the Institutional Spaces of Radical Pan-African Thought.” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 4, no. 2 (2016): 250. https://doi.org/10.5406/womgenfamcol.4.2.0250.
McDuffie, Erik S. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Moore, Audley. Audley (Queen Mother) Moore. Other. Communist Party Oral Histories. NYU’s Tamiment Library, July 17, 2017. https://wp.nyu.edu/tamimentcpusa/audley-queen-mother-moore/.
Naison, Mark D. The Communist Party in Harlem during the Depression, 1928-1936. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.
Patterson, Louise Thompson. “Toward a Brighter Dawn.” Woman Today, April 1936. https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/toward-a-brighter-dawn-1936/.
Pearl, Jeanette D. “Negro Women Workers.” Daily Worker. February 16, 1924, Volume 1 edition, sec. No. 341.
Prago, Ruth F. Louise Thompson Patterson. Other. Communist Party Oral Histories. NYU’s Tamiment Library, July 14, 2017. https://wp.nyu.edu/tamimentcpusa/louise-patterson/.
Simone, Nina. I Put a Spell on You: the Autobiography of Nina Simone; with Stephen Cleary. Cambridge (Massachussets): Da Capo Press, 2003.
Solomon, Mark I. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1919-36. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
Taylor, Clarence. Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
[1] Simone, Nina. I Put a Spell on You: the Autobiography of Nina Simone; with Stephen Cleary. Cambridge (Massachusetts): Da Capo Press, 2003, 87.
[2] McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 44-45.
[3] McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 50-51.
[4] Makalani, “An Apparatus for Negro Women,” 266-267.
[5] Mary Adams, “The Negro Movement in North and Latin America,” The Negro Worker , November 1, 1930, pp. 23.
[6] Adams, “The Negro Movement in North and Latin America,” 24.
[7] Adams, 24.
[8] Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 265.
[9] Louise Thompson Patterson, “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” Woman Today, April 1936, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/toward-a-brighter-dawn-1936/.
[10] Patterson, “Toward a Brighter Dawn.”
[11] Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill, NJ: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 23
[12] Ella Baker and Marvel Cook, “The Slave Market,” The Crisis, November 1935, 42 edition, https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/ella-baker-and-marvel-cooke-the-slave-market/.
[13] McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 116.
[14] Patterson, “Toward a Brighter Dawn.”
[15] Farmer, 27.
[16] Patterson, “Toward a Brighter Dawn.”
[17] McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 85.
[18] Anna Barton, “Revolt of the Housewives,” New Masses, June 18, 1935, Vol. 15 edition, sec. No. 12, pp. 18-19, https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v15n12-jun-18-1935-NM.pdf.
[19] Anna Barton, “Revolt of the Housewives.”
[20] Anna Barton.
[21] Anna Barton.
[22] Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Great Depression, 214.
[23] Audley Moore, Communist Party Oral Histories.
[24] Naison, 258-259.
[25] Audley Moore, Communist Party Oral Histories.
[26] Audley Moore.
[27] Audley Moore.
South Jersey DSA 