Radicalism at the Crossroads

Sojourning for freedom: black women, American communism, and the making of black Left feminism

“…In this sense they enrich Jacqueline Dowd Hall's 2005 thesis of "The Long Civil Rights Movement" 3 by revising what Dayo Gore describes as "the historical periodization that ignores Cold War black radicalism [in order to] uncover its connections to later decades of activism, including African American civil rights activism after 1955." 4 More specifically, the three reinforce the argument of Nikhil Pal Singh's 2005 Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy on behalf of the existence of "a more or less consistent tradition of radical dissent" from the Great Depression forward. 5 2) All regard the paramount intellectual bridge between Black women activists of the Old Left and later developments to be a hitherto hidden history of "intersectionality," today's preeminent sociological method in feminist studies.…”

Gender violence as genocide: the Rosa Lee Ingram case and We Charge Genocide petition

“…Both Gore and McDuffie agree that the Ingram case helped to 'galvanize' radicals around the specific and unique needs of Black women. 30 The petition noted that no political official, from the Georgia Governor to the President of the United States, was willing to take any action on this or other cases of egregious legal misconduct. But it also noted the failure of the United Nations Human Rights Commission to take seriously any cases from the United States that were in clear violation of the nation's alleged commitment to human rights.…”

Staging Gendered Radicalism at the Height of the US Cold War: A Raisin in the Sun and Lorraine Hansberry's Vision of Freedom

“…This gender politics took for granted the premier value of hetero-patriarchal social and family structures and understood employed black women who participated in family decision-making as obstructive to black men's rightful patriarchal aspiration. 40 Furthermore, in the contexts of the burgeoning civil rights movement and the postwar idealisation of suburban middleclass life as the indication of American capitalist triumph, black matriarchy theory implied that a successful black freedom movement would right this African American gender anomaly, that black freedom meant the achievement of patriarchal status for black men and the concomitant domestic subordination of black women. 41 Disseminated in popular media like Negro Digest and Ebony magazine as well as in academic journals, black matriarchy theory thus began to shape the gendered politics of racial solidarity in the civil rights era.…”