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.

Rebellious Daughters of History #33

by Jack Robertson (guest contribution) and ,,Judy Cox

Red Clydeside Rent Strike Leader: Mary Barbour

Mary Barbour was born in the Renfrewshire village of Kilbarchan in 1875, daughter and third child of seven to James Rough, a carpet weaver, and his wife, Jane Gavin. Mary left school at the age of 14 and went to work as a thread twister and then carpet printer.

After her marriage to engineering worker, David Barbour, the couple settled in Govan where she became an active member of the ‘Kinning Park Co-Operative Guild’, the first to be established in Scotland. She also joined the Independent Labour Party and took part in the Socialist Sunday School.

By the outbreak of the First World War, Glasgow was a centre of the munitions industry. Discontent grew among the workers and led to widespread strike action in the engineering industry, much of it involving women and unskilled labour.

The trigger for what became known as Red Clydeside was a strike involving women workers at the Singer sewing machines factory in Clydebank, when the workforce of 11,000 came out in solidarity with 12 female colleagues in March 1911.

Housing conditions is Glasgow at the time were appalling. Writing about what he called Glasgow’s Housing Disgrace, one of the leaders of the First Shop Stewards’ Movement on Clydeside, Harry McShane, wrote that

‘thousands of families are denied a decent home life…in some houses, three, four and five persons share the same bed…the houses in which they live are rat infested…young people living in old, dilapidated properties cannot tell their friends where they live’.

When Glasgow landlords, or factors, tried to impose huge rent increases at the same time as young men of fighting age were being sent to fight in France, Mary Barbour was instrumental in forming the ‘South Govan Women’s Housing Association’. She was then a working class housewife with two sons and her husband was employed in the shipyards. The Govan organising committee prevented evictions, blocking the entrance to tenement blocks and the hounding of Sherriff’s Officers.

In his memoir, ‘Revolt on the Clyde’, the Clydeside MP, Willie Gallagher wrote: ‘Street meetings, back-court meetings, drums, bells, trumpets – every method was used to bring the women out and organise them for the struggle. Notices were printed by the thousand and put up in windows: wherever you went you could see them. In street after street, scarcely a window without one: “We Are Not Paying Increased Rent”.

Rent strikes soon spread to the entire Clydeside area and culminated, in November 1915, with one of the biggest demonstrations in Glasgow’s political history. Thousands of women and thousands of shipyard and engineering workers paraded to the Sheriff’s Court “where the demonstration was near riot proportions”. The protestors became known as ‘Mary Barbour’s Army’ and included other leading women fighters such as Agnes Dollan, Helen Crawfurd, Mary Laird and Mary Jeff.

Mary Barbour became a founding member of the ‘Women’s Peace Crusade’, which campaigned for a negotiated settlement to World War 1. Later she stood as a Labour candidate for the Fairfield ward in Govan and became one of the first women councillors elected to Glasgow Town Council.

In March 2018, after a long battle, a statue commemorating Mary Barbour was unveiled at Govan Cross in Glasgow. Her image also forms part of the commemorative mural displayed on the west side of the Clutha Bar, the site of the helicopter crash in 2013.

Black revolutionary: Angela Davis (1944- )

Angela was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the “Dynamite Hill” neighborhood, by the where houses were bombed to drive out middle-class blacks. Her mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a leading organizer of the ‘Southern Negro Youth Congress’, which was influenced by the Communist Party.

As a Girl Scout, she marched and picketed to protest racial segregation in Birmingham and joined a communist youth movement.

She studied French at Brandeis University and she was in Biarritz when she learned of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing by the Ku Klux Klan, in which four black girls were killed. She knew one of the victims.

Angela studied philosophy at the University of Frankfurt in West Germany under the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, later recalling that, “Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary”.

Back in the U.S., Angela studied at the University of California before moving to East Germany, where she gained a doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Back in the U.S., she joined the Communist Party and was active in the women’s movement, the Black Panther Party, and the campaign against the Vietnam War. In 1969, she told a meeting:

“We are facing a common enemy and that enemy is Yankee Imperialism, which is killing us both here and abroad. Now I think anyone who would try to separate those struggles, anyone who would say that in order to consolidate an anti-war movement, we have to leave all of these other outlying issues out of the picture, is playing right into the hands of the enemy.”

In 1969 she was fired as acting assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California (UCLA) due to her Communist Party membership. A court ruled this illegal, so the university fired her again, for using inflammatory language. The report stated, “We deem particularly offensive her repeated characterizations of the police as ‘pigs'”.

Davis supported the Soledad Brothers, three inmates who were accused of killing a prison guard at Soledad Prison.

In 1970, firearms registered to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in California. The teenage brother of a Soledad prisoner, George Jackson, led the raid but when police starting shooting, four people, including the judge, were killed.

A warrant was issued for Angela’s arrest. The FBI director J. Edgar Hoover listed Davis on the FBI’s ‘Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List’. When she was finally captured President Richard M. Nixon congratulated the FBI on its “capture of the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis.”

Across the nation, thousands of people began organizing a movement to gain her release. John Lennon and Yoko Ono contributed to this campaign with the song “Angela”.

On June 4, 1972, the all-white jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

After her acquittal, Davis went on an international speaking tour and the tour included Cuba, where she had previously been received by Fidel Castro in 1969 as a member of a Communist Party delegation.

During the 1970s she visited Marxist-Leninist governed countries and during the 1980s was twice the Communist Party’s candidate for Vice President

In the 1980s she was professor of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University. Much of her work focused on the abolition of prisons.

In 1991, Angela left the CP and joined the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

Angela joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has received various awards, including the Lenin Peace Prize.

In 2001 Angela spoke out against the war on terror following the 9/11 attacks. She supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel.

In 2017 Angela was an honorary co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington, in protest President Trump’s inauguration.

In November 2019, Davis signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

She continues to campaign for a better a world.