Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

Profiles of Black women movers and shakers: revelatory but flawed

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Merle Woo
February 2010

Fabulous history fills Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in
the Black Freedom Struggle (New York University Press), edited by
Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard. Profiled are
indomitable, courageous Black women leaders of the 1930s through the
1970s who provided the organizing backbone in many movements
simultaneously: Black, feminist, anti-colonial, pan-African, and socialist.

These are stories of Black women who lived lives of militant activism
and then taught the young. Vicki Garvin and Shirley Graham Du Bois,
who in this book comes out of the shadow of her husband, W.E.B. Du
Bois, mentored Malcolm X. They, along with Esther Cooper Jackson,
were communists, labor leaders, feminists, and internationalists long
before second-wave feminism and Black Power hit the scene in the '60s.

Cooper Jackson's theory that Black women's location at the bottom of
the economic ladder positions them as the vanguard for radical
change, and that Black women's freedom can only be achieved by the
destruction of all forms of domination, was the inspiration for the
Combahee River Collective and the Third World Women's Alliance. These
groups believed that multi-issuism leads logically to anti-capitalism.

The anthology also covers Toni Cade Bambara, Rosa Parks, Shirley
Chisholm, Flo Kennedy, Assata Shakur, Johnnie Tillmon, Denise Oliver
and Yuri Kochiyama. Although Black men were the recognized leaders
and often repressed the leadership of women, these women's
unquenchable dedication lifted everyone as they rose.

The issues they dealt with remain relevant today. The question of
Black women's right to reproductive choice is still key as the U.S.
government dumps Norplant and Depo-Provera on Third World women and
denies funding for abortions ­ while some Black cultural nationalists
still insist that abortion is genocide.

On the positive side, it's eye-opening to learn or be reminded that
organizations like the Black Panther Party and the Puerto
Rican-centered Young Lords Party were not exclusive to one race.
Japanese American Yuri Kochiyama was an important educator in Malcolm
X's Organization of Afro-American Unity and African American Denise
Oliver was a political pacesetter in the Young Lords.

Revolution offers numerous resources for follow-up, and the footnotes
after each author's contribution are a treasure trove of information
and historical research sites.

But the book also has its disappointments. It gives no sense of how
activists today can use these biographies. Most of the contributors
are academics, and the book's disconnect between the struggles of
yesterday and today reflects an established trend in Ethnic Studies
and Women Studies. Racism and sexism and homophobia are put into the
bin of history. All these ugly realities are apparently irrelevant in
the "post-racial society."

How can we build a mass movement to win the fundamental change that
eluded these woman warriors of the past? To give us tools to choose
the right path, our radical education must include analysis and
evaluation ­ which this anthology neglects.

The book's title refers to "radical" women without differentiating
between reformists and revolutionaries. In talking about the Left,
the book focuses mainly on the Communist Party (CPUSA), Maoism, and
revolutionary nationalism. This mishmashing of terms and groups
without explanation is confusing, at times perhaps purposefully so.

There is no criticism of the CPUSA as it followed the political
zigzags of the Stalinized USSR, which included dropping the fight
against U.S. racism during WWII. And there is no mention of the
Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, with its thousands of Black
members during the period discussed. This amounts to a historical cover-up.

Finally, it is appalling that a book published in 2009 doesn't give
credit to the Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement
and its leaders for theorizing a Black revolutionary feminist
program. Pat Parker was ignored completely, Audre Lorde referred to
primarily as a poet, and the Combahee River Collective mentioned
briefly, without saying they were Black lesbian feminists ­ who
explicitly stated the need for a socialist revolution that is
feminist and anti-racist.

This omission is all the more unfortunate because of the many
militant queers who devoted their lives to the movements the book
discusses because of their rock-bottom social status ­ but who could
not be out at the time. Despite these serious flaws, Want to Start a
Revolution? is an important contribution to the history of Black
women who built movements. It proves they were the vanguard of the
Black freedom struggle, and it brings to light a heroism that is
inspiring for those who continue that struggle and others today.
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Merle Woo, a retired lecturer in Women and Asian American Studies who
won an epic discrimination case against the University of California
at Berkeley, can be reached at woogok@comcast.net.

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