cpusa

In this conversation Charisse Burden-Stelly returns to the podcast, and is joined by Jodi Dean to talk about their new book Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing. 

Charisse Burden-Stelly is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. Along with Gerald Horne she co-authored W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life In American History. She is a co-editor of the book Reproducing Domination On the Caribbean and the Postcolonial State. She is also the author of the forthcoming book Black Scare / Red Scare. She is a member of Black Alliance for Peace and was previously the co-host of The Last Dope Intellectual podcast.

Jodi Dean teaches political, feminist, and media theory in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited thirteen books, including The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party, and Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. She is also a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

The first collection of its kind, Organize, Fight, Win brings together three decades of Black Communist women’s political writings. In doing so, it highlights the link between Communism and Black liberation. Likewise, it makes clear how Black women fundamentally shaped, and were shaped by, Communist praxis in the twentieth century.

Organize, Fight, Win includes writings from card-carrying Communists like Dorothy Burnham, Williana Burroughs, Grace P. Campbell, Alice Childress, Marvel Cooke, Esther Cooper Jackson, Thelma Dale Perkins, Vicki Garvin, Yvonne Gregory, Claudia Jones, Maude White Katz, and Louise Thompson Patterson, and writings by those who organized alongside the Communist Party, like Ella Baker, Charlotta Bass, Thyra Edwards, Lorraine Hansberry, and Dorothy Hunton.

Dr. CBS and Dr. Dean introduce the text further in the discussion, and read some excerpts from it along the way as well. In conversation we talk about a number of the interventions made by Black Communist Women that are collected in Organize, Fight, Win. We also talk about how many of these women have often been written about, frequently to further intellectual frameworks that are not the Black Communist analysis and modes of organizing that they themselves espoused.

We discuss the interventions these women made in relation to unionization efforts, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and the struggle for peace. We also discuss the difference between common manifestations of identitarian politics  today and the materialist analysis these Black Communist Women deployed.  We also talk about the internal critiques that they leveed against certain positions of the CPUSA, not in attempts to destroy the party, but in dedication to its mission.

Organize, Fight, Win is available for pre-order from Verso Books and it will come out on this coming Tuesday. Black Alliance for Peace has a webinar kicking off the International Month of Action Against AFRICOM on Saturday October 1st. We’ll include links to those as well as to pre-orders for Socialist Reconstruction: A Better Future all of which are named in the episode. We’ll also include links to some previous discussions that relate to topics covered here.

And as always if you like what we do, please support our work on patreon. You can become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. 

Relevant links:

Socialist Reconstruction: A Better Future  

Black Alliance for Peace webinar on AFRICOM 

Black Alliance for Peace's International Month of Action Against AFRICOM 

Our previous conversation with Dr. CBS which provides a lot of useful context on anti-communism and anti-blackness and other terms and frameworks that are relevant to this discussion.

Our previous discussion on Lorraine Hansberry’s time at Freedom

Our conversation with Mary Helen Washington (who was also referenced in the show)

 

 

In this episode we interview Dr. Mary Helen Washington. Mary Helen Washington is an accomplished African-American literary scholar and the editor and author of many books including Midnight Birds and Black-eyed Susans: Stories by and about Black Women, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860-1960, Memories of Kin, and the book we focus on in this discussion on The Other Blacklist: The African-American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s.

Mary Helen Washington is also a  Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She previously served as the president of the American Studies Association. Washington worked for many years developing Black Studies programs, including in Detroit where she has stated she was “part of the ground troops helping in the activities of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), an offshoot of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.”

In this conversation we specifically focus on the work of Gwendolyn Brooks prior to her joining the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960’s, within the Black cultural and literary left that Washington analyzes in The Other Blacklist. 

Mary Helen Washington situates Brooks within this Black cultural milieu as a member of the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood and as someone who was connected and had relationships to Black communists, and other communists and progressives as well as to cultural institutions and magazines of the Popular Front.

Washington highlights Brooks' attentiveness to working class concerns and critiques of racism both interpersonally and institutionally in her writing as far back as the 1940’s. She also highlights Brooks’ work in dialogue with critiques reflected by other communist and progressive Black women of her era, including Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Childress. In doing so, Washington argues that Brooks’ work offers early blueprints for Black Left Feminism operating within her poetry, essays and her novel Maud Martha.

The discussion is also firmly attentive to the racial politics and the anticommunism of the 1950’s, in which racially radical or progressive analyses were automatically cause for suspicion, surveillance, and potentially repression. 

Additionally, Mary Helen Washington talks about other important figures from her book The Other Blacklist including other communist and leftwing Black figures of the 1950’s including visual artist Charles White, and authors Lloyd Brown, Alice Childress, and Frank London Brown.

We want to thank all of the patrons who support our show. We are funded solely by our listeners and patrons. You can become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month or 10.80 per year at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism.

 

In this episode we interview Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert about her recently published book, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Most well known as the playwright behind A Raisin In The Sun, Hansberry was a journalist and editor for Paul Robeson’s Freedom, which covered domestic and international politics and social movements from a Black Radical perspective in the 1950’s. In the 50’s Hansberry was firmly embedded in a radical milieu that included Robeson, Du Bois, William Patterson, Claudia Jones, and Alice Childress among others in the Popular Front left of the era. 

An anti-imperialist activist and supporter of anti-colonial movements, Hansberry’s radical past was obscured or unknown in the press reports following the success of her play A Raisin In The Sun. Colbert’s work discusses the breadth of the radical journalism, organizing and thought that exists within Hansberry’s archive and how it weaves into her more well known published work. We talk to Colbert about Hansberry’s internationalism, her comrades, her friends, and her theoretical contributions as a Black Queer Radical, in a 1950’s and early 60’s era when anti-black racism, McCarthyism, patriarchy and homophobia meant that Hansberry’s most radical contributions were delivered under multiple forms of duress and at times anonymity. Nevertheless, her contributions to Black Internationalism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the politics of gender and sexuality were all substantial and prototypical of the elaborations of Black Left Feminism that would evolve after her untimely death at just 34 years of age.

We will include in the show notes, links to the archives of the publication Freedom and links to some of Lorraine Hansberry’s speeches and recorded interviews.

Lastly August is upon us, and we’re getting ready to make some announcements and have some more big episodes in the coming weeks. We are about 150 patrons short of hitting 1,000 patrons, which is our new goal. So if you have not become a patron of the show, please do, you can join for as little as $1 a month.

The past week's political events that help shape American
politics. Políticos de la sem Hiroshimaana pasada queayudan a conformar el cuerpo político estadounidense.

Democracy Dies in Darkness Washington Post
Stetson Kennedy Foundation
http://www.stetsonkennedy.com

This week we’re very excited to bring you a conversation with Mariame Kaba. 

Mariame is an organizer, educator and curator. Her work focuses on ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, transformative justice and supporting youth leadership development. After over 20 years of living and organizing in Chicago, she moved back to her hometown of New York City in May 2016.

In this episode we talk to Mariame about where her interest in US Communist Party came from and talk about some of the figures, cases, positions and formations within and around CPUSA that have historical significance for her and that drew Black women into party membership particularly in the first half of the 20th century before McCarthyism really took hold. In particular Mariame talks about the CPUSA’s many examples of mass participatory defense work.

We also talk about her work around clemency with FreeThemNY. We talk a little bit about Survived and Punished and Mariame’s interest in undermining the ways that the prison industrial complex violently enforces gender

We end by taking a little time talking about what it means to call a protest “direct action,” and discussing recent discourses in the mainstream around “civility” in relation to protests deemed too provocative by the political class.

About our guest:

Mariame Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Prior to starting NIA, she worked as a program officer for education and youth development at the Steans Family Foundation where I focused on grantmaking and program evaluation.

She co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander and the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT) among others. She has also served on numerous nonprofit boards.

She has extensive experience working on issues of racial justice, gender justice, transformative/restorative justice and multiple forms of violence. She has been active in the anti-violence against women and girls movement since 1989. Her experience includes coordinating emergency shelter services at Sanctuary for Families in New York City, serving as the co-chair of the Women of Color Committee at the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network, working as the prevention and education manager at Friends of Battered Women and their Children (now called Between Friends), serving on the founding advisory board of the Women and Girls Collective Action Network (WGCAN), and being a member of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. She co-founded and currently organizes with the Survived and Punished collective and is a founding member of the Just Practice Collaborative.

She served as a member of the editorial board of Violence Against Women: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal from January 2003 to December 2008. She is the co-editor (along with Michelle VanNatta) of a special issue of the journal about teen girls’ experiences of and resistance to violence published in December 2007. She has written and co-authored reports, articles, essays, curricula, zines, and more. She is currently an active board member of the Black Scholar. She runs the blog Prison Culture. In 2018, she co-authored the guidebook “Lifting As They Climbed” and published a children’s book titled “Missing Daddy.”

She was a member and co-founder of We Charge Genocide, an inter-generational effort which documented police brutality and violence in Chicago and sent youth organizers to Geneva, Switzerland to present their report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture. She is an advisory board member of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, a group (along with Project NIA and WCG) that worked to get the Chicago City Council to pass a reparations law providing restitution to the victims of Jon Burge, a police commander who tortured more than 200 criminal suspects, most of them black men, from the 1970s through the early 1990s.

She is a founding advisory board member of the Chicago Community Bond Fund. The CCBF pays bond for people charged with crimes in Cook County, Illinois. Through a revolving fund, CCBF supports individuals whose communities cannot afford to pay the bonds themselves and who have been impacted by structural violence. She is also a member of Critical Resistance’s community advisory board. Critical Resistance’s vision is the creation of genuinely healthy, stable communities that respond to harm without relying on imprisonment and punishment.

She was a 2016-2017 Soros Justice Fellow where she extended and expanded my work to end the criminalization of survivors of violence.

Currently she is a researcher in residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality and Criminalization at the Social Justice Institute of the Barnard Center for Research on Women through September 2020. She is co-leading a new initiative called Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action with Andrea J. Ritchie. Combining participatory research, data analysis, and systemic advocacy, Andrea and Mariame will work in partnership with local campaigns to identify primary pathways, policing practices, charges, and points of intervention to address the growing criminalization and incarceration of women and LGBTQ people of color for public order, survival, drug, child welfare and self-defense related offenses. Research will be disseminated in accessible formats for use by organizers, advocates, policymakers, media makers, and philanthropic partners working to interrupt criminalization at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. This initiative will also host convenings of researchers, organizers, advocates, policymakers, and philanthropic partners on key topics relating to violence and criminalization, and support partners in developing and implementing campaigns designed to interrupt criminalization of women, girls, trans and GNC people of color.

She has a long history in the fields of education and youth development, having taught high school and college students in New York and Chicago. She has taught sociology and Black studies courses at Northeastern Illinois University, Northwestern University, and Columbia University. She has developed and facilitated many workshops and presented at events. She was a founding board member of the Education for Liberation Network.

She studied sociology at McGill University, City College of New York, and Northwestern University. She has received several honors and awards for my work over the years. She am occasionally available to consult on various topics.