Rebellious Daughters of History #37

by ,,Judy Cox

The fire last time: Ada Wright and the Scottsboro Boys

On March 25, 1931, nine young Black men—Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, Charlie Weems, Andy and Roy Wright, Olin Montgomery, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, and Eugene Williams—were arrested for raping two white women on a train in Paint Rock, Alabama. The teenagers were taken to Scottsboro, Alabama where all but one, Roy Wright aged just 13, were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

The Scottsboro Boys case galvanized an international movement organised by the Communist Party and the Labor Defense League. At the heart of this movement was Ada Wright, mother of Andy and Roy.

Ada struggled to survive on wages five dollars a week so, like thousands of others, she allowed her sons Andy, 19, and Roy, 12, to go look for work.

Ada had never left rural Tennessee but now her two sons were facing the electric chair, she faced down racist sneers to tour the US and Europe fighting for justice.

There were demonstrations for the Scottsboro Boys at US embassies in Europe. In June 1931 protestors smashed windows at the U.S. embassy in Berlin.

In London, Communists organised among the black and Asian dock workers in East London and black organisations. In February 1932, 2,000 marched from the Thames to Hyde Park. In April supporters marched from Poplar and Bermondsey to the US embassy.

Ada spoke in Greenwich and in Willesden, she spoke before a crowd estimated at five hundred. Crowds greeted Ada in Bristol and Dundee, singing the “internationale.” She spoke in Kirkcaldy, Lockerbie, Springburn, Glasgow, and Manchester.

Communist leader Shapurji Saklatvala addressed Ada’s farewell at Shoreditch church: “The British workers have shown by their reception to Mrs. Wright that they have broken down the barriers dividing them from the negro races.” A thousand marchers took her to Liverpool Street Station when she left for Scandinavia where 10,000 people demonstrated in Copenhagen.

Ada was arrested in Kladno, Czechoslovakia, on suspicion of spreading Communist propaganda. She spent three nights in a cell before she was expelled.

Ada ended the tour in Moscow. In Red Square, tens of thousands of workers crowded the streets with banners, calling for freedom for the sons of Ada Wright and the collapse of the world imperial order.

Ada gave interviews to The Woman Worker, an American CP magazine. In August 1934 Woman Worker featured an article titled “Think of Them” with the faces of four of the Scottsboro. Ada wrote an article in which she described the prison conditions the young men experienced, the lack of food, and their mistreatment at the hands of guards.

The case went to the US Supreme Court in 1937, and the lives of the nine were saved, though it was almost 20 years before the last defendant was freed from prison.

The trial of the Scottsboro Boys is one of the high points of American radicalism, when a mass movement of blacks and whites—led by Communists—successfully beat the racist Jim Crow legal system.

Black Britain Rising: Claudia Vera Jones (1915-1964)

Claudia Cumberbatch was born in 1915 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, a British colony. Her family emigrated to New York City in 1922. Her mother, who worked in a garment factory, died in 1927.

As a student, Claudia joined the campaign to save the lives of the Scottsboro Nine, who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama. The young African-American men only escaped execution because of the campaign by the Communist Party.

Claudia was a brilliant student but she had to take on unskilled jobs in laundries, factories and shops.

In 1932, at the age of 17, she contracted tuberculosis which shortened her life.
She became deeply involved with left politics and joined the Young Communist League in 1936. She became a staff writer for the Daily Worker, and a Communist Party organiser in Harlem.

By the early 1940s, Claudia served on the National Council of the YCL, and the editorial board of the Weekly Review. In 1945, she was appointed “Negro Affairs” editor of the Daily Worker and joined the Communist Party’s National Committee.

In 1950, Claudia talked about “the special discrimination facing Negro women as women, as workers and as Negroes.”

During the MacCarthyite the FBI discovered Claudia had been denied US citizenship. She was arrested on immigration charges in 1948. She was held at the notorious Ellis Island detention facility while a campaign was launched that postponed her deportation.

In 1951, Claudia was charged with violating the Smith Act, which outlawed support for overthrowing the US government. After a national campaign, she was released but was forced to leave the US to live in Britain.

In Britain, Claudia campaigned against racism in housing, education and employment. She launched the anti racist, anti imperialist West Indian Gazette, based in Brixton.

In August 1958, race riots broke out in Notting Hill. In response Claudia initiated the famous Notting Hill Caribbean Carnival.

Claudia died In December 1964, aged 49. She was buried in Highgate cemetery near Karl Marx. A message from Paul Robeson was read at her funeral:

‘She was a vigorous and courageous leader of the Communist Party of the United States, and was very active in the work for the unity of white and coloured peoples and for dignity and equality, especially for the Negro people and for women’.

Rebellious Daughters of History #36

by ,,Judy Cox and Shona Pollock (guest post)

America Rising: From ‘Freedom Now’ to ‘Black Power’: Kathleen Neal Cleaver (1945-)

Kathleen Neal Cleaver was born in Dallas, Texas. Her parents were both activists and college graduates of the University of Michigan. When her father joined the Foreign Service, the family travelled around the world.

The family returned to the US after her brother died from leukaemia. Kathleen continued to study until 1966, when she began working for the New York office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) after her childhood friend, Sammy Younge, was murdered by racists.

Kathleen organised a conference at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee where she met Eldridge Cleaver, minister of information for the Black Panther Party.

Kathleen moved to San Francisco in 1967 to join the Black Panther Party, and she married Eldridge. She became the Communications Secretary for the Panthers and organised demonstrations and press conferences, designed posters, and spoke at rallies and on TV. She organized the national campaign to free Huey Newton.

In 1968, the Cleavers’ apartment was raided by the San Francisco Tactical Squad. Later that year, Eldridge was involved in a shoot out with Oakland police officers. He and two police officers were injured and Panther Bobby Hutton was killed. Charged with attempted murder, Eldridge jumped bail to flee to Cuba and later to Algeria.

Kathleen reunited with Eldridge in Algeria in 1969, where she gave birth to their two children.

In 1971 the Cleavers formed a new organization called the Revolutionary People’s Communication Network and Kathleen returned to New York to promote the new organisation.

In 1974, the French government granted legal residency to the Cleavers, and the family was reunited.

A year later, the Cleavers moved back to the US, and Eldridge was tried for the shoot-out in 1968, found guilty of assault. Kathleen worked on the Eldridge Cleaver Defense Fund and he was freed on bail in 1976.

Eldridge moved to the right politically. Kathleen left him and in 1981 she went back to university. In 1987, she divorced Eldridge and trained as a lawyer.

In 2005, she was Senior Research Associate at the Yale Law School, and a Senior Lecturer in the African American Studies department at Yale University. She is currently serving as senior lecturer at Emory University School of Law.

Kathleen has never stopped campaigning, example, for freedom for death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. She has contributed to books on feminism and racism and she helped to edit Eldridge Cleaver’ writings.

Black Britain Rising: Beryl Gilroy (1924-2001)

Beryl is an elusive character not least because claims that she was Britain’s first black headteacher were rejected in favour of a man. But she was prodigious and assiduous in her devotion to Black literature and education.

Born Beryl Agatha Answick in 1924, she appears to have been the archetype of a British Guyanese woman, with a heady mix of bloods, as was common in Skeldon, a small port on the border with Dutch Guyana or Suriname.

She appears to have taken her teaching certificate at Georgetown College in 1945 at the age of 19 – even more impressive as she seems not to have entered formal education until the age of 12. She then worked for UNICEF on a child nutrition program, teaching impoverished communities about child development and health.

In 1951 at the age of 26 she was selected from teachers across the Caribbean for an educational scholarship which saw her undertake a post-graduate thesis on early years education and its role in child development. She developed a lifelong interest in the impact of culture and ethnicity on child rearing and development. Eventually she became an expert on the then emerging field of attachment theory, applying Piaget’s idioms to BAME children, which made her a pioneer in the field of ethno-psychology.

By 1953 she was working in London schools, teaching the Windrush children, whose parents were pursuing a similar immigrant dream but often in more chastened circumstances.

Despite being the graduate of a colonial scholarship for educators, when she first approached London boroughs looking to work as a teacher, she was told that her qualifications were not recognized. Undeterred, she worked her way up from the bottom, undertaking additional qualifications at night while bringing up two small children. She had by now married eminent black scientist Patrick Gilroy.

She is often cited as Britain’s first black headteacher and is frequently mistaken for Yvonne Connelly, who also became a headteacher with the Inner London Education Authority in the post-immigration period. However, in truth Beryl Gilroy was more of a writer and independent educator than a public servant. In writing ‘Black Teacher’ she took a defiant stance against the race-politics in post-colonial institutions including schools.

Turned down by many publishers, her fictitious black teacher is really an amalgam of all highly educated Caribbean women trying to plough the choppy fields of race prejudice in public sector workplaces.

Although she did briefly become the Head of a school in Kilburn, it was her prodigious writing, whilst homeschooling her children, that sets her apart. Her works of fiction, were somewhat overlooked, and ranged from the adult fiction of ‘Frangipani House’ to the teen offerings of ‘Boy Sandwich’. Compared to V S Naipaul, or even her son Professor Paul Gilroy, commercial success as a writer eluded her.

However, the beauty of Beryl was that she was a polymath and entirely ahead of her time. She typified that most Caribbean of concepts in being the ultimate “can-do-woman”, if there was a job, she would say I can do it, if there was a story to tell she would say “I can tell it”.

When she died of a heart attack in 2001 at age 76, Roxann Bradshaw was present at the 4th annual Caribbean Women Writers Association, she states “there was not a dry eye in the house” when it was announced that keynote speaker Dr Gilroy had passed.

Rebellious Daughters of History #35

by ,,Judy Cox

America Rising: Joan Tarika Lewis

Tarika Lewis grew up in Oakland, California, a town infamous for police brutality and segregation.

In the 1960s Tarika studied at Oakland Tech, following in the steps of other Black Panther Party Bobby Hutton and Reginald Forte.

She was a talented violinist and jazz musician who became involved in racial politics. At high school she co-founded the Black Student Union and staged sit-ins to demand the implementation of a Black Studies.

Tarika met founding members of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, and was inspired by their visions. She also supported the Black Panther Party’s Community Survival Programs, like the Free Breakfast for Children, Free Food Program, and Child Development Center.

In the spring of 1967, when she was 16, Lewis became the one of the first women to join the Black Panther Party. She rose in the ranks of the party, completing political education classes and training in weaponry. When male panthers questioned her shooting abilities, Tarika challenged them to a shooting match.

Tarika supported the Black Panther Party through her work as a revolutionary graphic artist. She contributed over forty images to the Black Panther newspaper between 1967 and 1969 under the pen name “Matilaba”.

Her drawings showed armed black women panthers rather than men, a shift from the very masculine representation of militant self-defense usually pictured in the newspaper.
Lewis left the Black Panther Party in January 1969, becoming a graphic artist and Jazz violinist but continued to support their campaigns.

Tarika toured with saxophonist John Handy and went on to teach visual arts as well as Jazz to inner city youth. She also is the founder of the Oakland Black String Ensemble.

Tarika published Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panthers. She worked on the 1995 Panther movie with Mario Van Peebles, acting as a consultant with a minor acting role.

Leader of the Black Panthers: Elaine Brown (1943)

Elaine Brown grew up in inner city, North Philadelphia with her single mother Dorothy Clark. Despite desperate poverty, Dorothy worked hard to provide Elaine with a good education.

Brown moved to California and worked as a cocktail waitress at a strip club. She soon became became involved with the Black Liberation Movement and she began working for the radical newspaper Harambee.

Elaine became the first representative of the Black Student Alliance to the Black Congress in California. In April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior, Elaine joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party. She sold the Black Panther Party newspapers, and cleaned guns.

Elaine helped the Party set up its first Free Breakfast for Children program in Los Angeles, and the Party’s initial Free Busing to Prisons Program and Free Legal Aid Program.

She became editor of the Black Panther publication in the Southern California Branch of the Party. In 1971, Brown became a member of the Party’s Central Committee as Minister of the Education.

When Huey Newton fled to Cuba in 1974, he appointed Elaine to lead the Party, the only woman to do so, Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 until 1977. In her memoir she recalled gathering the Panthers together and telling them:

“I HAVE ALL THE GUNS AND ALL THE MONEY. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?… I’m telling you this because it’s possible some of you may baulk at a woman as the leader of the Black Panther Party. If this is your attitude, you’d better get out of the Black Panther Party. Now… If you are such an individual, you’d better run—and fast! I am, as your chairman, the leader of this party as of this moment. My leadership cannot be challenged. I will lead our party both above ground and underground. I will lead the party not only in furthering our goals but also in defending the party by any and all means. They understood.”

In 1977, she managed Lionel Wilson’s victorious campaign to become Oakland’s first black mayor. Elaine also developed the Panther’s Liberation School.

In 1977 Elaine left Oakland with her daughter, Ericka, and moved to Los Angeles.

Brown recorded two albums, Seize the Time (Vault, 1969) and Until We’re Free (Motown Records, 1973).

After leaving the Black Panther Party to raise her daughter, Elaine worked on her memoir, A Taste of Power. She returned to the struggle for black liberation, especially radical prison reform.

From 1980 to 1983 she attended Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles. In 1996, Brown moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and founded Fields of Flowers, Inc., a non-profit organization providing educational opportunities for impoverished African-American children.

In 1998, she founded the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee, named after a 14 year old sentenced to life in prison for a murder he did not commit.

In 2003, Brown co-founded the National Alliance for Radical Prison Reform to campaign for prison reform. From 1995 to the present, she has lectured at more than forty colleges and universities, as well as numerous conferences.

In 2010, inmates in more than seven Georgia prisons used contraband cellphones to organize a nonviolent strike for better prison conditions, Brown became their “closest adviser outside prison walls.”

Rebellious Daughters of History #34

by ,,Judy Cox

America Rising: Fannie Lou Hamer (1917 – 1977)

“We been waitin’ all our lives, and still gettin’ killed, still gettin’ hung, still gettin’ beat to death. Now we’re tired waitin’!”

—Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Townsend was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the last of 20 children. The family’s animals were poisoned by a local white supremacist, so in 1919 the Townsends moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, to work as sharecroppers.

From the age of six, Fanny Lou picked cotton with her family, going to school in winter. At 12 she left school to support her aging parents.

In 1945, Fanny Lou married Perry “Pap” Hamer, a tractor driver. She wanted children but she had been sterilized without her consent during stomach surgery, a weapon used against African-American women in Mississippi. The Hamers adopted two girls. One of them died after being denied admission to the hospital because of her mother’s activism.

In 1962, Fanny Lou began to take direct action in the civil rights movement. On August 31, she traveled with other activists to Indianola, Mississippi, to register to vote. She failed the impossible test and her boss went ballistic. “I didn’t try to register for you”, Hamer told her boss. “I tried to register for myself.” She was fired and kicked off the plantation.

On September 10, Hamer was shot at 16 times in a drive-by shooting by white supremacists in retaliation for her attempt to vote.

She recalled “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared — but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember”.

Fanny Lou finally passed the test on 10 January 1963. She was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, registering others to vote.

Fanny Lou was on a bus with activists in Winona, Mississippi. When some activists from the bus went to the local cafe they were refused service and a highway patrolman arrested the party. Fanny Lou left the bus and was arrested as well.

Once in jail, Fanny Lou was brutally beaten and sexually assaulted. She suffered permanent kidney damage.

When she was released on June 12, 1963, Fanny Lou returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives.

She helped young volunteers, including Sammy Younge Jr., who was later murdered, in 1966, at a petrol station in Alabama when he used a “whites-only” restroom.

In 1964, Fanny Lou helped co-found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the racism of the Democratic Party.

In 1964, Hamer unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the Senate. She worked with Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign and published her autobiography in 1967.

Fanny Lou campaigned for poor sharecroppers. She pioneered the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) in 1969 and established a food program called The Pig Project to provide food.

Fanny Lou spent weeks within a hospital for nervous exhaustion in January 1972 and was hospitalised in January 1974 with a nervous breakdown. Two years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer and she died on March 14, 1977, aged 59. Her tombstone is engraved with one of her famous quotes: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

America Rising: Billie Holiday (1915-1959)

Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan, on April 7, 1915, in Philadelphia. She was the daughter of unmarried Sadie Fagan and Clarence Holiday. Her father left the family.

In 1925, when Billie was 9 years old, she was brought before the juvenile court for truancy and she was sent to a Catholic reform school. She dropped out of school at age 11.

In 1926, a neighbour tried to rape Billie and she was taken in protective custody as a state witness. Billie was released in February 1927, when she was nearly twelve and found a job running errands in a brothel.

By early 1929, Billie had joined her mother in Harlem, the place where her mum became a prostitute. Their house was raided on May 2, 1929, and Holiday and her mother were sent to prison.

As a teenager, Billie started singing in nightclubs in Harlem. She made her first record aged 18, in November 1933.

In the 1930s, Billie’s reputation as an exceptional jazz singer grew. She was one of the first black women to work with a white orchestra. She also toured in the segregated south where she was the target of racist abuse.

In November 1938, Holiday was told to use the service lift at the Lincoln Hotel instead of the passenger lift. She recalled: “I was never allowed to visit the bar or the dining room as did other members of the band … [and] I was made to leave and enter through the kitchen.”

In 1938, Billie was introduced to “Strange Fruit”, a song based on a poem about lynching written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish Communist. The song reminded Billie of her father who died when he was denied medical treatment because of racism. It also spoke to generations of black people enraged by unceasing racist violence.

In September 1946, Holiday began her only major film, New Orleans, in which she starred opposite Louis Armstrong. In the context of racism and McCarthyism, producer Jules Levey and scriptwriter Herbert Biberman were pressed to avoid giving the impression that black people created jazz. In 1947, Biberman was listed as one of the Hollywood Ten and sent to jail.

By 1947, Billie was at the peak of her popularity and commercial success, but she was also persecuted for her addiction to heroin.

On May 16, 1947, she was arrested for possession of narcotics in her New York apartment and sentenced to Alderson Federal Prison in Virginia.

Billie was released on March 16, 1948, and on March 27, Billie played Carnegie Hall to a sell-out crowd. After the third curtain call, she passed out.

Billie was arrested again on January 22, 1949, in her room at the Hotel Mark Twain, San Francisco.

Billie’s drug abuse, drinking, and relationships with abusive men caused her health to deteriorate.

In July 1959, Billie was diagnosed with cirrhosis and was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics never stopped targeting Billie. She was arrested and handcuffed for drug possession as she lay dying, her hospital room was raided, and she was placed under police guard.

The guard was removed hours before she died aged 44.