Radical Black Women, Leadership, and the Struggle for Liberation

Radical Black Women, Leadership, and the Struggle for Liberation

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/lopez021010.html

02.10.10
by Antonio Lopez

Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, eds. Want to Start a
Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York:
New York University Press, 2009. ix + 353 pp. $79.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-8147-8313-9; $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8147-8314-6.
--

In the last two decades, a growing field of movement scholarship has
complicated conventional representations of Black Power in the United
States. Historians have produced biographies of civil rights
leaders, social histories of postwar civil rights organizations,
intellectual histories of black liberation thought, and new studies
of the Black Panther Party that undermine the artificial structures
traditionally used to frame and demarcate civil rights activism and
Black Power resistance.1 Building upon the memoirs of Panther
members and political prisoners, and new examinations of urban
politics, recent historiography has provided students with a deeper
appreciation of the oppression faced by black people in the United
States, the politicization of black communities, and the freedom
dreams of activists.2

Despite the growing interest in the politics of black radicalism, the
editors of Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black
Freedom Struggle explain that the vital contributions and radical
political perspectives of black women remain largely overlooked. In
the introduction to this compilation of essays, the editors Dayo
Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard state: "Although, a new
generation of scholars has greatly expanded our knowledge of black
radicalism and the black freedom struggle, they have left intact a
'leading man' master narrative that misses crucial dimensions of the
postwar freedom struggle and minimizes the contributions of
women. Such histories have neglected crucial dimensions of the
postwar black radical tradition that held black women's
self-emancipation as pivotal to black liberation" (p. 2).

"Second-wave feminism" and other analytical frameworks commonly used
to examine radical feminist activism also obscure the intersectional
understanding of power that many black women brought into the
movement circles and organizations they worked in. The consequence,
the editors explain, is that the scope of black radicalism continues
to be limited, models of male leadership remain intact, and black
women are overlooked as figures of revolutionary resistance.

Aiming to correct the blind-spots in movement historiography, Want to
Start a Revolution? is comprised of fourteen new essays that center
on leading female activists who made major contributions to freedom
struggles of the postwar era. The first half of the anthology
recovers the life histories and political careers of Esther Cooper
Jackson, Juanita and Lillie Jackson, Vicki Garvin, Shirley Graham Du
Bois, and Rosa Parks. Contributing authors reveal that these women
challenged notions of female decency through their political
activities. They were students of radical theory, accomplished
writers and editors, cultural producers, skilled organizers and
charismatic speakers. As movement care-takers they were community
builders, and masters at creating activist networks. Providing rich
details about their early lives and the longevity of their political
careers, each essay demonstrates that black women were central
figures, tireless workers, and outspoken voices in popular front,
civil rights, pan-African, and black nationalist movements. In the
cases of Garvin and Shirley Graham Du Bois, their lifelong
anti-imperialist political commitments eventually took them to
Algeria, Ghana, China, and other Third World countries, where they
became recognizable figures of Third World revolution.

Gender politics and the efforts of black women to create a space for
intersectional struggle during the late 1960s and 1970s are the
subjects of the chapters that follow. Each essay reveals the ability
of radical black women to reconcile the seemingly antagonistic
contradictions of nationalist and feminist movements through their
intersectional understanding of oppression. Black feminist thought
is revisited in a close reading of Toni Cade Bambara's classic
anthology The Black Woman (1970), and an analysis of the political
career of radical lawyer Florynce Kennedy. Chapters about Assata
Shakur and the Oakland Community School highlight the gender politics
of the Black Panther Party and the visionary leadership qualities
that Panther women often demonstrated. The leading role of women in
the Black Arts movement in Atlanta, the national welfare rights
movement, and radical electoral politics are also examined in this
volume. Finally, essays on the lives and solidarity work of Denise
Oliver and Yuri Kochiyama complicate the notions that revolutionary
organizations were racially exclusive and opposed to coalitions.

For the most part, authors creatively mix archival research,
interviews, published writings, and the reflections of movement
comrades to reveal the experiences and political perspectives of
women. Joy James's essay on Assata Shakur, and Margo Natalie
Crawford's piece on the The Black Woman are also noteworthy for
integrating a literary analysis and exploring the questions of
hybridity, representation, and essentialism. As is the case in all
collections, some contributors to Want to Start a Revolution? are
more effective than others in conveying the radical political
commitments of the women they study. Certain essays, for example,
would have benefited from greater attention to the voices of the
activists, and their reflections on the meaning of their work, rather
than simply identifying individual accomplishments and explaining
their theoretical significance. This reviewer also wonders why the
critical intervention of writing women into postwar black liberation
history was not brought into conversation with important scholarship
that also critiques the erasure of Third World women activists as
related to the ongoing cultural politics of gender and
colonialism.3 Finally, the strong focus on East Coast communities
and organizations in many of the essays limits a comparative analysis
of radicalism, women activists, and gender politics.

These minor shortcomings aside, Want to Start a Revolution?
successfully meets its three goals of expanding the boundaries of
black radicalism, shedding light on the labor women performed to
sustain radical movements, and exploring the gender politics of black
women activists (pp. 3-4). Collectively, the essays will provide
activists, students, and academic specialists with powerful insights
into post-World War II black freedom struggles, the de-colonial
imaginary in black feminist thought, and the lives of women who
joined and guided movements to transform an oppressive society. This
collection will also be useful to teachers aiming to introduce
students to the politics of historical memory, and the recent
distortions of civil rights discourse. We owe a debt of gratitude to
the editors and contributors to this collection for reminding us that
in the postwar struggle for revolutionary change, as now, women of
color hold up more than half the sky.
--

Notes

1 Notable biographies include Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Michael Eric
Dyson, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King,
Junior (New York: Touchstone Press, 2000); and Barbara Ransby, Ella
Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic
Vision(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2003). Exemplary social histories that rethink civil rights activism
are Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom(Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The
Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003); Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds.,
Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South(New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2003); and Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty:
The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North(New York: Knopf,
2008). Intellectual histories include Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a
Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Robin D. G Kelley, Freedom
Dreams (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). New perspectives on the Black
Panther Party are found in Charles Jones, ed., The Black Panther
Party Reconsidered (New York: Black Classic Press, 1998); Kathleen
Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation, Imagination, and
the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their
Legacy(New York: Routledge, 2001); Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams,
eds., In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a
Revolutionary Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Jane
Rhodes, Framing the Panther: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power
Icon (New York: New Press, 2006); and Jama Lazerow and Yohuru
Williams, eds., Liberated Territory, Untold Local Perspectives on the
Black Panther Party(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

2 There are numerous memoirs written by former Panthers, political
prisoners, and POWs. Notable ones include Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On
Ice (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1968); Bobby Seale, Seize the
Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New
York: Random House, 1970); Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide(New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1973); Assata Shakur, Assata: An
Autobiography(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987); Elaine Brown, A
Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (New York: Anchor Books, 1992);
David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography
of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party(Chicago:
Lawrence Hill Books, 1993); Mumia Abu Jamal, We Want Freedom: A Life
in the Black Panther Party (Cambridge: South End Press, 2008); Safiya
Bukhari, The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black
Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting For Those Left
Behind (New York: Feminist Press, 2010); and James Yaki Sayles,
Meditations on Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan
Revolutionary Writings (Chicago: Spear and Shield Publications,
2010). Exemplary studies of urban politics that center on black
freedom struggles include Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the
Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2003); Biondi, To Stand and Fight; and Paul L. Street, Racial
Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago
History(London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).

3 I am thinking here of M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty,
Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures(New York:
Routledge, 1997); Emma Perez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing
Chicanas into History(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999);
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual
Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, South End Press, 2005).

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