#13- For Esther Cooper Jackson: Ten Timely Quotes from Black Communist Women

Today is Esther V. Cooper Jackson’s 105th revolutionary birthday, so naturally I’m thinking about Black communist women.

As time draws nearer to the publication of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing, the collection I co-edited with Jodi Dean, I have become increasingly convinced of its timeliness. The women profiled in this volume were deeply concerned with a number of issues that are relevant to our current moment, not least (Black) women’s role in labor organizing, the rise of fascism, the defectiveness of the two-party system, the violence of war and the necessity of peace, the importance of international solidarity, and the co-constitutionality of Black liberation and socialism. Irrespective of their class position, women like Esther Cooper Jackson, Thelma Dale, Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Charlotta Bass, and Vicki Garvin fundamentally understood that organizing Black workers and attending to their realities of oppression and superexploitation were essential to any successful proletarian revolution. They were also aware of the linkages between struggles—i.e. for the freedom of the Scottsboro Boys and the expulsion of the Italian fascists from Abyssinia—beyond national boundaries, and across oppressed groups.

Below are ten quotes from Black Communist and Communist-adjacent women that speak to the present. Even as our economic, political, and social realities change overtime, the durability of racial capitalism and the continued struggle against it produce reverberations that clarify our historical task.

#1- Neither US political party is committed to the interests of Black working people.

“Out of democratic and republican administrations alike, have come Jim Crowism, mobbing, segregation, lynching, southern disfranchisement, and general terrorism; lack of opportunity of making a living and poor educational facilities.”

-Grace Campbell, “How Shall the Negro Woman Vote?” (1928)

#2- It is essential to understand how racism generally, and antiblack racial oppression particularly, exacerbates economic exploitation.

“A sure test of our understanding of the Negro question in our trade union movement is the manner in which we handle the complaints and grievances of the Negro workers. These reflect not only their economic exploitation, but their social and political oppression as well—their oppression as a national minority.”

-Maude White, “Special Negro Demands” (1932)

#3- The integral link between war, fascism, capitalist exploitation, and coloniality produce acute forms of suffering that women continue to fight against.

“…the atrocities of war and fascism loom much nearer. The misery, suffering and degree of exploitation under capitalism and in the colonies is very great. In spite of this the women fight.”

-Williana Burroughs, “Women’s Department” (1935)

#4- The fight for freedom requires a deep understanding of Black women’s exploitation, not simply their identities.

“…the Negro women are the most exploited group in America. But they have banded together for the fight for freedom, and will win… Over the whole land, Negro women meet this triple exploitation—as workers, as women, and as Negroes.”

-Louise Thompson, “Toward a Brighter Dawn” (1936)

#5- Police brutality is foundational to the ongoing oppression of Black people, so the struggle against it—as a struggle against the storm troops of racial capitalism—is paramount.

“We as youth will act to end police brutality and other forms of attack upon the Negro people so prevalent in the Southern states. It is clear that those who deny the principles laid down in the Bill of Rights to Negro Americans do a disservice to the cause of the democracies… Police brutality which has recently been on the [increase] in many Southern communities is one of the worst crimes against National Unity.”

-Esther Cooper Jackson, “Negro Youth Organizing for Victory” (1942)

#6- A successful peace movement requires the organization of U.S. women—especially Black and working-class women.

“The importance of winning American women, especially in working- class and Negro communities, to militant resistance to Wall Street’s program of fascism and war, can be fully understood only if we correctly assess the decisive role American women can play in the political life of the nation.”

-Claudia Jones, “For New Approaches to Our Work Among Women” (1948)

#7- The day-to-day struggle for liberation requires ethical conduct toward, and principled commitment to, our organizations, our comrades, and ourselves.   

We hear so much about loyalty today. Loyalty, as I understand it, is not something that is demanded of one. Loyalty is recognition of the truth and the determination to follow it. It is loyalty to principles, to ideals, and to the fulfillment of those ideals in our daily lives. This to me is the real loyalty, certainly something altogether different from the loyalty oath business that we see today being used to make this country of ours into a nation of panic-driven sheep.

-Dorothy Hunton, “Where are YOU Hiding”? (1952)

#8- Revolutionary struggle is a continuous process, and to give up at any point would be to concede our future to those who brutalize and ravage the people and the planet for profit.

“To retire now meant to leave the world to these people who carried oppression to Africa, to Asia, who made profits from oppression in my own land. To retire meant to leave the field to evil. For there is an evil that stalks in our land, an evil that strikes at my people, that would enslave all people, that would send up the world in flames, rob us of our earnings to waste on arms, destroy our living standards, corrupt our youth, silence and enslave us with Smith Acts, McCarran Acts, passed by concentration camp Congressmen.”

-Charlotta Bass, “Acceptance Speech of Mrs. Bass” (1952)

#9- Oppressive forces employ manifold forms of physical and discursive violence to crush those engaged in liberatory struggle.

“In this universal struggle by people everywhere for freedom, there is always the same general pattern: There is always the beating of drums and the calling to arms, the name-calling, the flood of pious declarations of peaceful intentions, the ‘benefits’ of civilization by the oppressors, who scream about the evil intentions, the savagery and backwardness, the troublemaking, disloyalty, subversiveness and sedition of the people who insist upon equal rights, self-government, human rights, an end to oppression, and payment for services rendered. In this general pattern there is always the jailing and exile and persecution of the freedom leaders, the confiscation of their lands and resources, the use of real force and violence—the army, navy, air force. There is always the attack upon the freedom organizations, the banning of the publications, the forbidding of public meetings, the threats and the terror.”

-Eslanda Goode Robeson, “Unrest in Africa Due to Oppression” (1953)

#10- The connective tissue of US domestic and foreign policy is white supremacy, and white workers must be committed to its eradication.

“Today’s challenge, as we approach the threshold of far-reaching changes, is addressed in the main to American white workers, to defeat the white supremacists in their domestic and foreign policies, to rise more boldly in support of Negro rights, and in so doing to help guarantee their own survival and opportunity to progress.”

-Vicki Garvin, “White Advocates of Negro Freedom Continue the Tradition of John Brown” (1955)