Rebellious Daughters of History #25

by Judy Cox

The Red: Louise Bryant (1885 –1936)

Louise grew up in rural Nevada and attended the University of Nevada and the University of Oregon, graduating with a degree in history in 1909. She became a journalist and an activist in the women’s suffrage movement. In 1915, she met John Reed and left her fist husband, and moved to Greenwich Village. The worked on ‘The Masses’, a socialist newspaper and married in 1916.

In August 1917, Louise and John got assigned to report from the Russian Revolution. They arrived in Petrograd in time to witness the October Revolution.

They attended gatherings at the Smolny Institute and interviewed many leading political figures, including Lenin, Trotsky, and Kerensky, and both eventually compiled books—Six Red Months in Russia by Bryant and Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World.

Louise covered Duma meetings, dining in public mess halls with soldiers and workers, and interviewing women revolutionaries, such as Maria Spiridonova and Aleksandra Kollontai, who was the only woman in the Bolshevik cabinet. By the time she returned to New York, her work was being read across North America.

Louise returned to New York, arrived in New York in 1918. The government had forced The Masses to shut down but Bryant wrote articles about the October Revolution and gave public meetings urging support for the revolution.

In October, Bryant’s first book, Six Red Months in Russia 1918, an inspirational account of how the revolution transformed every aspect of life in Russia.

In February 1919, Louise went to Washington, D.C., to speak about Russia. She participated in a National Woman’s Party suffrage rally, during which she was arrested, arraigned, and sentenced to five days in jail.

Louise testified in front of the Overman Committee, which investigates Bolshevik activity in the United States. Soon after, she began a cross-country speaking tour, “The Truth About Russia”, during which she addressed large audiences in Detroit, Chicago, Spokane, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Louise was the first woman to defend Lenin and Trotsky at political gatherings across the United States. Her message was simple, ‘Hands off Russia!’

The U.S. government outlawed the American Communist Party. In danger of being arrested and unable to get a passport to go to Russia, Reed, disguised as a stoker, left the United States in late September 1919.

During the Palmer Raids, John was charged with conspiring to overthrow the government by force. In March 1920, he was arrested returning home through Finland then returned to Moscow in a prisoner exchange. He cabled Bryant, “Passport home refused. Temporarily returning headquarters. Come if possible.”

Traveling without passport, Bryant, disguised as the wife of a Swedish businessman, arrived in Petrograd in late August 1920. She arrived in time to be by John’s side when he died of typhus.

Bryant obtained Lenin’s approval for a trip to the southern Russian border and neighboring countries. She went by train over the Kazakh Steppe, through areas hard hit by famine.

She returned to the U.S. in mid-summer 1921, and married William Christian Bullitt, Jr., a wealthy film maker who became the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Louise returned to Russia to write portraits of Russians which led to her second book, Mirrors of Moscow, in 1923. Bryant’s travels in Europe this time included Moscow, Berlin, London, Paris. Louise also covered the Turkish War of Independence.

Later in 1923, Bryant and Bullitt moved to Paris, where they married in December. Two months later, Bryant gave birth to her only child, Anne Moen Bullitt. In 1925 she and Bullitt adopted an 8-year-old Turkish boy. Her last piece of journalism, “A Turkish Divorce”, about Atatürk’s treatment of women, appeared in The Nation in August 1925.

By 1926, Louise was suffering from a painful disease and was drinking heavily. Bullitt accused her of having a lesbian affair and divorced her winning sole custody of Anne. Bryant remained in Paris, occasionally advising writer Claude McKay.

Louise died on January 6, 1936, of a brain hemorrhage near Paris

The Bryant–Reed story is told in the 1981 film Reds, starring Diane Keaton as Bryant and Warren Beatty as Reed.

Black Liberation: Assata Shukar (1947….)

JoAnne Byron was born in Flushing, Queens, and grew up in New York City. She became involved in political activism at Borough of Manhattan Community College and City College of New York.

After graduating in 1971, JoAnne moved to Oakland, California and joined the Black Panther Party. She organised protests and community education programs. After returning to New York City, Shakur led the panther chapter in Harlem, coordinating the Free Breakfast Program for children.

She left the Panthers and joined the Black Liberation Army (BLA), whose members drew inspiration from the Vietcong, and led a campaign of terrorist activities against the U.S. government.

She began using the name Assata Olugbala Shakur in 1971, rejecting Joanne Chesimard as a “slave name”. She now identified as an African.

Between 1971 and 1973, she was charged with several crimes and was the subject of a multi-state manhunt. In May 1973, Assata was arrested after being wounded in a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in which a state trooper was shot dead.

Between 1973 and 1977, Assata was charged with murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, bank robbery, and kidnapping in relation to the shootout and six other incidents. She was acquitted on three of the charges and three were dismissed. In 1977, she was convicted of the murder of the state trooper and of seven other felonies related to the shootout.

In prison, Assata was treated appallingly, continuously confined in a men’s prison, without adequate food and exercise.

Assata was identified as a political prisoner in 1973 by Angela Davis, and in 1977, in the The New York Times. International investigators cited Shakur as “one of the worst cases” of prison abuse and described her as a victim of the FBI, who had terrorised black activists with false arrests, entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal prosecutions.

On November 2, 1979, she escaped the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women, when three members of the Black Liberation Army visiting her drew concealed .45-caliber pistols and a stick of dynamite, seized two correction officers as hostages, commandeered a van and escaped.

After her escape, Shakur lived as a fugitive protected by her community. The FBI circulated wanted posters throughout the New York; her supporters hung “Assata Shakur is Welcome Here” posters in response. In New York, three days after her escape, more than 5,000 demonstrators carried signs with the same slogan.

In July 1980, FBI director William Webster said that the search for Assata had been frustrated by residents’ refusal to cooperate.

Assata surfaced in Cuba in 1984, where she was granted political asylum. Shakur has lived in Cuba since, despite US government efforts to have her returned. She is on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list, as Joanne Deborah.

Rebellious Daughters of History #24

by Judy Cox

‘We are Lions’’: Jayaben Desai (1933 – 2010)

Jayaben Desai was born in 1933 in Gujarat, India. She later migrated to Britain, where she took up low-paid work, first as a sewing machinist, then processing film in the Grunwick factory.

There was no union allowed at Grunwick, where the white management controlled the workers through threats, racist insults and harassment. On 20 August 1976, Mrs Desai,
and her son, Sunil, walked out.

Her parting words to the manager were, ‘What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. But in a zoo there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your finger-tips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr. Manager.’

Outside she joined four other workers who had left earlier that day in protest at conditions at Grunwick. The six workers joined the APEX union, and started picketing the factory. Soon there were 137 workers on strike, protesting about the conditions at Grunwick and calling for union recognition.

The strikers launched a campaign to win solidarity from other workers, from engineering factories in Glasgow to the coalmines of south Wales.

On Monday 13 June 1977, the police arrested 84 pickets out of 100 who had come to demonstrate their solidarity on what was called Women’s Support Day.

There were 1,300 by the following Friday, and 12,000 by 11 July, the day that 20,000 went on a TUC-organised march to the factory. The Cricklewood postal workers took solidarity action, blacking the mail to Grunwick. Colin Maloney, their leader, observed: “You don’t say ‘no’ to Mrs. Desai.” The postal workers, who were mostly white, were suspended for three weeks.

The government used the law to crush the strike and the union leaders betrayed them. When Jayaben was suspended by her own union she said, ‘the union views itself like management. There’s no democracy there’.

Defiant to the end, Jayaben told the final meeting of the strikers that they could be proud. “We have shown”, she said, “that workers like us, new to these shores, will never accept being treated without dignity or respect. We have shown that white workers will support us”. Only 10 years previously, dockers had marched in support of the racist Conservative politician Enoch Powell.

Grunwick had witnessed the biggest mobilisation in British labour-movement history in support of fewer than 200 mainly Asian women strikers.

Jayaben Desai died in 2010 aged 77.

Poet, wit, radical: Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967)

Dorothy Rothschild was born In 1893, New Jersey, U.S. to Jacob Henry Rothschild and his wife Eliza Annie. Her mother died a month before Dorothy’s fifth birthday. Following her father’s death in 1913, she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living while she worked on her poetry.

In 1917, she met a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker, and they married but divorce in 1928. Dorothy Parker then married actor Alan Campbell, and moved to Hollywood.

Dorothy’s career took off in 1918 while she was writing theater criticism for Vanity Fair, she was a central figure in the Algonquin Circle and established a national reputation as a wit and poet.

Her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, published in 1926 sold 47,000 copies. Parker divorced her husband in 1928 and had a number of affairs. When she fell pregnant Parker is alleged to have said, “how like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard”. She had an abortion, and fell into a depression that culminated in her first attempt at suicide.

In 1934 Dorothy met Alan Campbell and they wrote the script for the 1937 film A Star Is Born, and were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing. She wrote dialogue for The Little Foxes in 1941.

Parker’s lifelong commitment to political activism began in 1927 when she protested about the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston and was arrested and fined. She claimed that from then on “my heart and soul are with the cause of socialism”.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Parker became a vocal supporter of radical causes. In 1937, went to Spain and reported from the Republicans side for the Communist magazine, ‘The New Masses’. She also wrote an impressive short-story, Soldiers of the Republic.

With Otto Katz, a Soviet Comintern agent and German Communist Willi Münzenberg, Parker helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936.

Dorothy served as chair of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee’s fundraising arm, “Spanish Refugee Appeal”. She organized Project Rescue Ship to transport Republican fighters to safety Mexico, and headed Spanish Children’s Relief.

Dorothy made donations to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that was fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She also wrote articles on injustice. For example, Scribner’s Magazine published Clothe the Naked , an article about the great inequality between the races.

During this period Dorothy described herself as a “communist” and she was listed as a Communist by the publication Red Channels in 1950. The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her because of her suspected involvement in Communism. Studio bosses placed her on the Hollywood blacklist. Her final screenplay was The Fan, a 1949 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, directed by Otto Preminger.

Her marriage to Campbell was tempestuous. They divorced in 1947, remarried in 1950, then separated in 1952. Campbell died from a drug overdose in 1963.

Parker died on June 7, 1967, of a heart attack at the age of 73. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. Following King’s death, her estate was bequeathed by his family to the NAACP.

Dorothy Parker’ “One Perfect Rose”

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet–
One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret;
“My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

Rebellious Daughters of History #23

by Judy Cox

Labour Movement Martyrs and their Stories: Ella May Wiggins (1900 – 1929) and Mary Heaton (1874-1966)

Ella May was born Sevierville, Tennessee, in 1900 and by 1926 she had settled in an African-American neighbourhood in Gaston County. Her neighbours looked after her nine children as she worked as a spinner at American Mill No. 2. She worked twelve-hour days, six days a week, earning about nine dollars a week’.

Ella May became a bookkeeper for the Communist-led union. She travelled to Washington DC, to testify about labour practices in the South:

‘I’m the mother of nine. Four died with the whooping cough, all at once. I was working nights, I asked the super to put me on days, so’s I could tend ‘em when they had their bad spells. But he wouldn’t. I don’t know why. … So I had to quit, and then there wasn’t no money for medicine, and they just died’.

Ella May sang ballads, including her best-known song, ‘A Mill Mother’s Lament’, which was recorded by Pete Seeger.

Wiggins organised African-American workers alongside whites, and her local NTWU branch was one of few to admit African-Americans to the union.

On September 14, 1929, she and some other union members drove to a union meeting in Gastonia. They were met by an armed mob and turned back. They had driven about five miles toward home when they were stopped by a car; armed men jumped out and began shooting. Wiggins was shot in the chest and killed. Her five children were sent to live in orphanages.

Five Loray Mill employees were charged in Wiggins’s murder but were acquitted after less than 30 minutes in a trial in Charlotte in March 1930 despite 50 witnesses.

She was buried in the Bessemer City Cemetery with a gravestone inscribed, ‘She died carrying the torch of social justice’. Three of her children were later buried near her.

Ella May Wiggins life—and death—became the grist for many works of fiction inspired by true events, including Strike!, a 1930 work by Mary Heaton Vorse, another labour activist and socialist.

Mary Heaton was born October 11, 1874, in New York City. She left school and spent time in Paris studying art. In 1896 she married her first husband, journalist Albert White Vorse, in October 1898 and had two children and campaigned for women’s rights.

In 1904, the Vorses moved to Venice, where Mary was first introduced to labour struggles. Bert died in 1910 and Mary married another journalist Joe O’Brien, a socialist she met at the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike. The couple had one child who died a year later.

Mary campaigned against World War I and was a founding member of the Woman’s Peace Party in January 1915. She was the delegate of the New York Woman Suffrage Party to an International Women’s Peace Congress.

Mary wrote for many left wing newspapers, including Crystal Eastman’s The Masses and wrote several novels, including ‘Strike!’ Mary participated in and reported on the Lawrence Textile Strike, the steel strike of 1919, the textile workers strike of 1934, and coal strikes in Harlan County, Kentucky.

From 1919 to 1923, Mary was in a relationship with the radical political cartoonist and Communist Party functionary Robert ‘Fighting Bob’ Minor.

Mary died in 1966 aged 92. You can hear Pete Seeger singing A Mother’s Lament ,here.

Rebellious Daughters of History #22

by Judy Cox

The most dangerous woman in America: Mary ‘Mother’ Jones (1837-1933)

Mary Harris was born in 1837 in County Cork, Ireland. Her father Robert fled to Canada after taking part in a revolt against the landowners. Mary became a schoolteacher but was barred from most schools because she was a Roman Catholic.

She later moved to Chicago and worked as a dressmaker. She met George Jones,iron worker and union organiser, in 1861 and they married and had four children. George and the four children, who were all under five, died in a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in Autumn 1867.

After the death of her family, Mary moved back to Chicago and to dressmaking but in 1871 she lost her home, shop, and belongings in the Great Chicago Fire. After the fire she became a full-time organiser for the Knights of Labor but in the 1880s Mary left the Knights to become a strike organiser.

In 1901, Mary was involved in a strike in Pennsylvania’s silk mills. Many strikers were teenage women demanding adult wages. Mary encouraged the families of the workers to beat on tin pans, and shout ‘Join the Union!’

In 1902 Mary was on trial for ignoring an injunction banning meetings by striking miners. ‘There sits the most dangerous woman in America’, announced the district attorney, ‘She comes into a state where peace and prosperity reign … crooks her finger [and] twenty thousand contented men lay down their tools and walk out’.

In 1903, Jones organized children from the mills and mines to join a ‘Children’s Crusade’, a march from Kensington, Philadelphia to the hometown of President Theodore Roosevelt with banners demanding ‘We want to go to school and not the mines!’

Mary, who was now in her 50s, became known as Mother Jones. In 1905, she was among the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World (the ‘Wobblies’). She was also a founder of the Social Democratic Party in 1898.

During the 1912 Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, Mary organised workers despite a shooting war between United Mine Workers members and the private army of the mine owners.

Martial law was declared and Jones was arrested on 13 February 1913 and brought before a military court. Accused of conspiring to commit murder, she refused to recognize the legitimacy of her court-martial. She was sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary but was moved to house arrest and released due to ill health.

She helped organize coal miners in Colorado in the 1913-1914 United Mine Workers of America strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron company, in the Colorado Coalfield War. Again she was arrested, serving time in prison.

Jones was a union organizer for the United Mineworkers Union into the 1920s and continued to give fiery speeches. One of her last public appearances was at her birthday celebration on May 1, 1930.

She died a few months later was buried at the Miners Cemetery at Mount Olive, Illinois: It was the only cemetery owned by a union.

A Revolutionary in her own Right: Inessa Armand (1874-1920)

Inessa Armand was born in Paris in 1874, the daughter of a French opera singer and a Russian aristocrat. She was brought up by her Russian grandmother in Moscow. She married a rich French Russian, Alexander Armand, at the age of 19 and had four children. In 1901, she was refused permission by the Moscow authorities to open a school for girls. The following year she opened a shelter for ‘downtrodden women’.

At the age of 28, Inessa left Alexander and went to live with his younger brother Vladimir, who was a revolutionary, and had a child with him. In 1903 she joined the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) and began to work in the underground.

For the next 15 years she tried to combine her political life with spending time with her children. She smuggled documents across the border from Switzerland into Russia in the false bottom of her children’s trunk.

In Moscow during the 1905 revolution, Inessa was arrested but released thanks to Alexander’s intercession. She was arrested again in April 1907 and exiled to northern Russia in November. She escaped a year later and hurried to Switzerland to nurse Vladimir, who died two weeks later. Armand then travelled to Paris, where she first met Krupskaya and Lenin. She was to share the next seven years of her exile with them.

Inessa taught at a party school in Geneva in 1911 alongside Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. She also became the main organiser of the committee that coordinated all the Bolshevik groups across Europe.

Armand returned to Russia in 1912 and was arrested, and again she escaped, but not before she helped to steer the Bolshevik Party’s paper towards addressing women workers. Inessa was the driving force behind the Bolshevik’s women’s paper Rabotnitsa. Inessa opposed World War I, organising anti-war conferences and publications.

In the revolution of 1917, Inessa became secretery to the Moscow Soviet and pushed through reforms to benefit women. Armand was vital to establishing the first Congress for working women in 1918. From this congress the Women’s Department, or Zhenotdel, was set up, enabling Inessa to organise communal facilities such as laundries, canteens and crèches.

She launched a paper aimed at women, Kommunista, but the fifth edition carried Inessa’s obituary. Exhausted by working 16-hour days she went to recuperate at a sanatorium in the Caucasus Mountains. She was evacuated when the area came under attack by White armies and when she left the train to buy bread and milk Inessa contracted cholera.

She died on 23 September 1920, aged 46. She was buried in Red Square with mass singing of the Internationale; one of very few women of the time to be accorded a state funeral.

In 1919 Inessa wrote:

‘All the interests of women workers, all the conditions for their emancipation are inseparably connected to the victory of the proletariat, are unthinkable without it. But this victory is unthinkable without their participation, without their struggle’.