Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for black activist Angela Davis.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Winter 1982-83 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**********
Angela Davis Peddles Liberal Myths
Women, Blacks and Class Struggle
A REVIEW
Women, Race and Class
by Angela Y. Davis Random House, Inc., New York 1981
The most striking thing about Angela Davis' book, Women, Race and Class, is what's not in it. Davis, a philosophy professor and member of the central committee of the reformist Communist Party (CP), achieved an international reputation as a black radical associated with the Black Panther Party. Framed up in 1970 as part of the massive cop/FBI vendetta against the Panthers, Davis spent over a year in prison before being acquitted. Her relationship with Panther martyr George Jackson was even featured in a slick Hollywood movie. To those not blinded by the celluloid, Davis remains a living symbol of the reconciliation of the militant, eclectic Panthers with the mainstream Stalinist reformism of the CP. Yet in this set of liberal-oriented essays, Davis doesn't even mention the Black Panther Party. The explosive '60s of militant black nationalism, the New Left women's movement, etc. is sunk without a trace.
Of course the Communist Party, then, was generally written off by the New Left and the best of the black radicals as rotten old reformist hacks irrevelant to the struggle. But the New Left's rejection of CP-style "coalitionism" with the Democrats was falsely equated with a rejection of working-class politics in general. The New Left's "answer" to CP sellouts was not revolutionary Marxist program, but eclectic Maoist/Third World-ist ideology and mindless militancy: "direct action," often physical confrontation with the state, passive enthusing over ghetto outbursts, "Off the Pig" rhetoric. When the inevitable capitalist reaction hit, the New Left either splintered or made its peace with the reformist status quo—and there was the CP, waiting with awful inertia to sell young militants its shopworn "strategy" of maneuvering within the capitalist system.
A watershed in the degeneration of the Panthers' militant impulse was the 1969 "United Front Against Fascism" conference in Oakland. Explicitly embracing the class-collaborationist formula of popular-front "theoretician" Dimitrov, the Panthers made a sharp right turn towards alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, brokered by the CP. The CP had money and lawyers, which the Panthers, facing massive repression, desperately needed. The price was returning to the fold of Democratic Party "reform" politics (indeed Huey Newton became a Democratic politician a few years later). Groups to the left of the CP were kicked out of the conference, particularly Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League. The SL argued that the road to black liberation must lie through revolutionary alliance with the working class, through building an integretated vanguard party with black leadership to fight for socialist revolution. Women at the conference who objected to the Panthers' gross male chauvinism were also harassed.
Angela Davis, in the CP's orbit at least since her high school days, should have been delighted with the "rectification" of Panther politics in the direction of mainstream Stalinist reformism. But Women, Race and Class does not deal at all with the Panthers.
In fact it makes no real attempt to come to grips with the searing reality of black America today—the explosive contradiction of ghetto misery and potential proletarian power. Nor can Davis suggest a solution to women's oppression, which is rooted in the institution of the monogamous family, linked inextricably to private property and thus insoluble without a revolution overthrowing capitalist property relations. Then what is Women, Race and Class about? It is basically an attempt to find historical antecedents for the CP's eternal search for the "anti-monopoly coalition": an alliance of workers, women, blacks, youth, etc. with right-thinking imperialists, Democrats of good will, progressive Republicans, anti-racist bankers and so on.
In the CP's view, the only obstacle to unity is... divisiveness. Never mind the brutal, racist, imperialist system that sets black against white, employed against jobless, skilled against unskilled, everywhere you look. For Davis, all that's needed is for the various sectors to be more receptive to each other. Thus, central to the book is the appeal to middle-class feminists to be more sensitive to race and class. "Today's feminists are repeating the failures of the women's movement of a hundred years ago.... Clearly, race and class can no longer be ignored [I] if the women's movement is to be resurrected" as the book's dust-jacket puts it. The solution? In the classic words of Alva Buxenbaum, reviewing Davis' book in the CP's own Political Affairs (March 1982), we must develop a "deeper understanding of and commitment to alliances based on unity." As opposed to disunity, we guess. Of course this inane language serves a purpose; it's CPese for support to the Democrats.
Davis also leaves out of Women, Race and Class all mention of international communism and the Bolshevik Revolution, which on the woman question and especially the black question in America had a decisive impact on radicals. This would certainly offend those bourgeois liberals the CP chases after today, as all wings of the bourgeoisie are united in hostility to the USSR and the gains of the October Revolution which remain despite Stalinist bureaucratic deformation. The history of American Marxism, its early counterposition to late 19th century feminism, even the aggressive work of the CP itself in the late '20s and '30s in winning blacks to a proletarian perspective, is all buried—and necessarily; it would expose too starkly the total bankruptcy and betrayals of the Communist Party today.
The Myth of the "Progressive Black Family"
So what is in the book? Davis opens with a discussion of black women under slavery. She points out that black women were full-time workers in the fields and other heavy labor, thus excluded from the 19th century ideology of "femininity" which relegated "many white women," as she puts it, to positions of useless, sentimentalized inferiority inside the home. Davis neglects to mention in this section that early Northern industrialization relied heavily on the intense exploita¬tion of "free" female labor, especially in textiles. Moreover, the large majority of white women in pre-Civil War America were the hard-working wives and daughters of farmers.
Her main point, however, is that the bitter experience of slavery created strong black women who "passed on to their nominally free female descendents a legacy of hard work...resistance and insistence on sexual equality—in short, a legacy spelling out stand¬ards for a new womanhood." Arguing against Daniel P. Moynihan's notorious 1965 "black matriarchy" thesis that the problem with blacks is that black women are running things too much, creating a "tangle of pathology," Davis contends that slavery, rather than destroying black families, actually promoted sexual equality within black family and community life, which has come down essentially unchanged to this day: "Black people—transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive quality: the equalitari-anism characterizing their social relations." This cheery Stalinist vision of some progressive black family emerging from slavery is absolutely grotesque!
In 1975 we pointed out that Moynihan's "The Negro Family: The Case for National Actions' a U.S. labor department study, sought to "shift the blame for the social problems of blacks from the capitalist system to blacks themselves, particuparly black women.... The so-called 'black matriarch' is, in fact, the most oppressed of all. She is paid the least and relegated to the lowest-paying jobs with no opportunity for advancement" ("Black Women Against Triple Oppres¬sion," W&R No. 9, Summer 1975). Where she even has a job, that is. "Equalitarian" black families? No way. Michelle Wallace, in her overall pretty despicable trashing of the "Black Power" era, the steamy Cosmopolitan-style confessional Black Macho and the Myth of the Super-Female, at least had the guts to cast a very cold eye on such liberal mythologizing:
"I remember once I was watching a news show with a black male friend of mine who had a Ph.D. in psychology We were looking at some footage of a black woman who seemed barely able to speak English, though at least six generations of her family before her had certainly claimed it as their first language. She was in bed wrapped in blankets, her numerous small, poorly clothed children huddled around her. Her apartment looked rat-infested, cramped, and dirty. She had not, she said, had heat and hot water for days. My friend, a solid member of the middle class now but surely no stranger to poverty in his childhood, felt obliged to comment—in order to assuage his guilt, I can think of no other reason— 'That's a strong sister as he bowed his head in reverence."
You literally would not know from reading Davis' book that such a thing as the miserable, rotting big city black ghetto even exists, with its poisonous, violent currents of humiliation and despair and hatred.
The Ghetto and the Factory: Disintegration and Power
The huge migrations of blacks to industrial centers out of the rural South—peaking during World Wars I and II, periods of capitalist boom, as well as after the Second World War when mechanization of Southern agriculture forced more blacks into the cities of the North and South—resulted in the integration of blacks into the American capitalist economy, albeit at the bottom. That fact has been the key shaping factor in black experience in contemporary America—and that integration into the industrial proletariat is the key to black liberation today. At the same time, this wrenching integration into urban life took place under conditions of growing racist segregation socially. Blacks formed the central native component of that huge "surplus population" necessary to the capitalist "free labor" system. Thus the resulting crowded, desperately poor black ghettos with their inevitable "social disintegration"—a fancy phrase for broken homes, abandoned women and children, a permanent welfare population, illiteracy, crime and violence, drugs and squalor. Richard Wright's Black Boy, pioneering urban studies like St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Black Metropolis, Malcolm X, James Baldwin—they spoke of this bitter reality. Today the statistics are overwhelming on the hideous condition of the black ghetto popula¬tion, and especially of black women. Three-quarters of all poor black families are headed by women alone, while 47 percent of all black families with children under 18 are headed by women, according to 1980 statistics (Department of Health and Human Services' National Center for Health' Statistics). Almost 55 percent of births to black women are "illegitimate." The fashionable phrase "feminization of poverty" expresses a terrible reality.
But Davis doesn't even mention it exists, because she can't. A world so crushing is not going to be touched by electing a few more "progressive" black Democrats, the CP's line. It's going to take a massive social upheaval—revolution—to break out of the black ghettos. Davis, however, confines herself to a series of hollow, eclectic essays on various "social uplift" causes. One whole chapter on the black clubwomen's movement, for example! Does Davis really believe that the personal rivalries between Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell in this cultured and ladylike milieu have anything significant to do with black or woman's liberation? As for black labor, there is but one chapter: on black women's long history of work as domestic servants. It's easy for liberals to weep over this humiliating labor, but it's hardly a source of black proletarian power. Blacks.integrated into the industrial working class at the point of production are the key to black leadership. And precisely because black workers may typically have a mother on welfare or a younger brother in prison, and are confronted in a thousand ways with evidence that the racist, capitalist "American dream" doesn't include blacks, they will be the most militant fighters for the entire working class, least tied to illusions that anything short of a fundamental social restructuring of this country through socialist revolution will liberate blacks.
Abolition and Suffrage:The Limits of Bourgeois Radical Idealism
Almost half of Women, Race and Class is devoted to the relationships between the abolitionist movement of the 1830s and '40s, the fight for women's rights and the post-Civil War suffragette movement, which developed in often explicitly hostile counterposition to continued demands for black political and civil rights. These chapters are the most interesting in the book, although here too Davis' reformist CP ideology deforms the past.
She has a hard time explaining the early and active participation of many prominent upper- and middle-class women in the abolitionist movement. "In 1833 many of these middle-class women had probably begun to realize that something had gone terribly awry in their lives. As 'housewives' in the new era of industrial capitalism, they had lost their economic importance in the home," Davis guesses. She contends that these women's identification with the slaves was essentially the result of "unfulfilling domestic lives." This projection of a Betty Friedanesque "feminine mystique" back into history not only fails to explain the fact that far more Northern men (e.g., William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the fiery abolitionist journal The Liberator; Thaddeus Stevens, head of the radical Republicans in Congress) took up the abolitionist cause, but actually is rather insulting to such powerful orators and theoreticians as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Utopian socialists like Frances Wright, or the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, who went to Italy to participate in the revolutionary upsurge of 1848.
In fact, rather than the "alliance of oppressed housewives and slaves" Davis evokes, the abolitionist movement in America was ideologically influenced bythe radical petty-bourgeois currents sweeping Europe,which reached their highest expression (and defeat) in the revolutions of 1848. As Kenneth B. Stampp pointed out in The Era of Reconstruction 1865-1877, the abolitionists, women as well as men, represented the:
"...heirs of the Enlightenment.... As nineteenth- century liberals, they believed in the autonomous individual—his right to control his own destiny—and therefore regarded slavery as the ultimate abomination In fact, radical reconstruction ought to be
viewed in part as the last great crusade of the nineteenth-century romantic reformers."
Both demands for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights were seen by their advocates as inseparable parts of the same progressive bourgeois struggle for "liberty, equality, fraternity." At the founding conference of the Women's Loyal League in 1861, organized by Stanton and Anthony to draw women into support for the North in the Civil War and press for the immediate enfranchisement of the slaves, Angela Grimke's "Address to the Soldiers of Our Second Revolution" expressed this radical spirit:
"The war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles, a war upon the working classes, whether white or black.... In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them.... The nation is in a death-struggle. It must become either one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Grimke undoubtedly represented the high point of this radical equalitarianism. Davis' ahistorical refusal to admit that this movement represented the limits of bourgeois radicalism is no accident. The CP today pretends that the American bourgeoisie from Reagan to Kennedy is potentially capable of fulfilling the same progressive role that the bourgeoisie of Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison and Thaddeus Stevens • played. But in pre-Civil War America, the industrial proletariat was not a class-conscious and decisive factor. Certainly the workers of the North were in no sense prepared to begin to wage a struggle for power in their owh name: given this, and the fundamental block to the expansion of modern, industrial capitalism represented by the agrarian slave society of the South, it was left to the liberal Northern bourgeoisie, in alliance with the "free soil" petty-bourgeois farmers of the West, to fulfill one of the unfinished tasks of the American bourgeois revolution: the abolition of slavery.
Even so it took a bloody four-year Civil War to crush the slaveocracy, while the following attempt at "radical Reconstruction" in the South was sold out, revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally "liberate" any sector of the oppressed. Instead of the "land of the free," America became the land of the robber barons, unleashed capitalist expansion and exploitation, while Ku Klux Klan terror, lynchings and Jim Crow segregation became the blacks' lot in the South. By the end of the nineteenth century the U.S. emerged as a rapacious imperialist power. As happened after 1848 in Europe, following the Civil War in America "the component elements of early nineteenth century radicalism (liberal democracy and socialism, trade unionism, women's equality and national libera¬tion) separated and began to compete and conflict with one another... it seemed that bourgeois society would continue for some time and that the interests of the oppressed, be they workers, women or nations [or the black population in the U.S.], would have to be realized within its framework It was Marx who cut the Gordian knot and provided a coherent, realistic analysis of the social basis for the socialist movement within bourgeois society" ("Feminism vs. Marxism: Origins of the Conflict," W&R No. 5, Spring 1974).
Revolutionary Marxism insisted on the need for working-class revolution to open the way to further human progress. In America, the main historic obstacle to the creation of a revolutionary workers party has been the divided ethnic consciousness of the working class, built upon waves of immigration, with black-white polarization underlying that. The ability of the Democratic Party in the 20th century, expressed in Roosevelt's "New Deal" coalition of labor, liberals and ethnic minorities, to successfully manipulate these divisions and absorb petty-bourgeois movements reflects the political backwardness of American labor— and the bitter fruit of decades of betrayal by so-called "socialists" like the CPand social-democrats. The New Left, too, with its sectoralist belief that every oppressed sector must "liberate itself" also accepted as unchangeable the racist, divided status quo. For the Communist Party, the Democrats are the only possible "coalition of the oppressed" within capitalist society. Thus in 1964 they greeted the election of Lyndon B. Johnson—mad bomber of Vietnam—as a "People's Victory"!
Feminism and Racism
The remainder of Davis' historical chapters are choppy and chock-full of "unfortunately"s—the telltale reformist throat-clearing device employed preparatory to leaping over some gross betrayal or crushing defeat. Accepting the grim capitalist frame¬work as immutable, Davis' detailing of the split between the suffragettes and black civil rights fighters is full of passive hand-wringing. She quotes Stanton's racist cry of alarm in 1865 when it appeared black men, but not women, would get the vote:
"The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro...but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk into the kingdom first Are we sure that
he, once entrenched in all his inalienable rights, may not be an added power to hold us at bay?... In fact, it is better to be the slave of an educated white man, than of a degraded, ignorant black one."
—New York Standard, 26 December 1865 letter.
Davis nails the women's suffrage leaders for their racism and support to American imperialism. She quotes Susan B. Anthony's admission, when preparing a Suffrage Association meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, that "knowing the feeling of the South with regard to Negro participation on equality with whites, I myself asked Mr. Douglass [Frederick Douglass, black abolitionist leader and early supporter of women's suffrage] not to come. I did not want to subject him to humiliation, and I did not want anything to get in the way of bringing the southern white women into our suffrage association." Anthony and Stanton allied with notorious racist Southern Democrats who argued for the enfranchisement of white women on the grounds that it would maintain white supremacy in the South after blacks got the vote. Davis gives a thorough account of rising racism in the women's suffrage movement, of the segregation of organizations and actions such as the 1913 suffrage parade, where an official attempt was made to exclude black activist Ida B. Wells from the Illinois contingent in favor of a segregated bloc. She quotes Stanton's insistence that "the worst enemies of Woman Suffrage will ever be the laboring classes of men" and records that Anthony urged women printers to scab on male printers' strikes.
Any serious reader must conclude that the pioneer feminist movement, preaching "unity of all women," essentially sought to advance the interests of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois white women, as against those of blacks and the working class. The icons of today's feminist movement are shown to be more than a little tarnished. Of course the opportunist Davis never challenges the ideology of "sisterhood," necessarily a screen for the subordination of working-class interests to bourgeois interests. Feminism, which seeks the reactionary splitting of the working class along sex lines and the collaboration of women of all classes, is a barrier to women's liberation, which can be won only through the revolutionary struggle of the working class—women and men, black and white—against their common exploiter, the capitalist class. The suffragettes' "unfortunate" racism and "capitulation to imperialism" flowed from their conscious identification with the interests of their own class.
American Communism
Davis' only chapter on the Communist Party, consisting solely of potted biographies of prominent CP women, opens with a gross omission. Davis asserts that when "Weydemeyer founded the Proletarian League jn 1852, no women appear to have been associated with the group. If indeed there were any women involved, they have long since faded into historical anonymity... to all intents and purposes, they appear to have been absent from the ranks of the Marxist socialist movement." Sliding over the Working-men's National Association and Communist Club as "utterly dominated by men," she manages neatly to avoid the major faction fight that took place in the American section of the First International over the question^of feminism. That flamboyant and notorious "free love" advocate, presidential candidate and early feminist Victoria Woodhull must be spinning in her grave. She was undoubtedly the most famous American to join the First International, organizing her own section (Section 12), which was a radical liberal faction, counterposing women's rights, "free love," and an electoralist strategy to proletarian socialism. Marx himself personally intervened to suspend Section 12, asserting the communist principle that the end to all kinds of oppression must run through the victory of the working class over capitalism.
Davis' omission of the tremendously important work of the early Communist Party among blacks is even more egregious. Her sole comment on that work as such is one bland statement, following a rather mysterious quote from William Z. Foster that the CP neglected Negro women factory workers in the 1920s, that "Over the next decade, however, Communists came to recognize the centrality of racism in U.S. society. They developed a serious theory of Black liberation and forged a consistent activist record—
Obviously it's impossible to go into detail in a review of this scope, but a few fundamental points are vital. First, there was the decisive impact of international Communism. As James P. Cannon, an early CP leader and founder of American Trotskyism, put it:
"The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as it later was by Stalin, and then filtered through the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, contributed more than any other influence from any other source to the recogni¬tion, and more or less general acceptance, of the Negro question as a spec/a/ problem of American society—a problem which cannot be simply subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labor, as it was in the pre-communist radical movement." —The First Ten Years of American Communism The Russian Revolution also affected blacks' attitude toward the Communist Party well through the 1930s, as Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis makes clear: "...widespread approval of 'the Reds' was not only associated with the fight of American Communists; it was also grounded upon admiration for the Soviet Union which, to thousands of Negroes, was the one 'white' nation that 'treated darker folks right'."
Despite the CP's sectarian "Third Period" excesses in the 1930s and its erroneous "Black Belt" theory (for Negro "self-determination" in the impoverished, segregated South, which was never actually raised agitationally), the CP's early work among blacks combined a proletarian orientation with the recogni¬tion that it was strategically necessary to fight racial oppression throughout America, especially addressing the problems of poor and unemployed blacks.
The CP made the first serious efforts to organize black workers and to attack the American Federation of Labor's conservative Jim Crow trade unions since the days of the Wobblies (IWW). In the South, there were heroic CP attempts to organize poor black share¬croppers, including a series of hard-fought strikes for better wages. Their most famous Depression-era work was their defense of the "Scottsboro boys," nine black youth framed up on charges of raping two white girls they were travelling with and sentenced to life imprisonment (this Davis does mention, but only in the context of appealing to the feminist "anti-rape" anti-porn movement—which she sees as essentially progressive—to avoid vigilante-type frameups of blacks). The CP won thousands of black members in this period, though few ultimately stayed.
By the mid-'30s the Communist Party had broken from the radicalism of the "Third Period" and was firmly wedded to the "Popular Front" line of open class collaboration in support of FDR. By 1941 the CP became Roosevelt's most slavish sycophant, instituting the no-strike pledge on behalf of U.S. capitalism's war to preserve and expand its empire. The CP made an open bloc with racism. When the "progressive" Earl Warren, acting on FDR's orders, interned the Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, stealing their property, the Stalinists not only refused to protest this racist atrocity, but told their own Japanese-American members to get lost. In 1945 the CP hailed the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki! While the Jim Crow U.S. was fighting its "war for democracy" with a segregated army and navy, the CP opposed every struggle for black rights on the grounds that it would "disrupt the war effort."
The Trotskyists in the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party opposed the bosses' imperialist war, while defending the Soviet Union and fighting to continue the class struggle, including militant support to black rights. While black soldiers and sailors were segregated and assigned the most humiliating, dirty and dangerous tasks, their wives and sisters were among those who suffered at home from the pro-imperialist betrayals of the labor tops and Communist Party. Brought into heavy industry in large numbers during the war, at war's end they were unceremoniously dumped back into low-paying service jobs or unemployment. Needless to say, the labor bureaucracy and the CP—which called for making the no-strike pledge permanent—took no effective action to save their jobs. The CP's "reward" for its class collaboration was the 1950s Cold War witchhunt, which shattered what was left of its mass influence.
It'll Take a Socialist Revolution to Finish the Civil War
Today the Spartacist League continues the fight for an American workers party, in opposition to those like the CP who tell workers and blacks to be passive and rely on "good" capitalist politicians. The CP cynically uses the history of the Civil War to cover its alliance with the liberal imperialist bourgeoisie today. We say it's going to take a socialist revolution to finish what the Civil War started! For the CP, women, blacks and the working class are simply three "constituencies" within capital¬ism, whom they tell to petition the racist, bourgeois state to ameliorate their oppressed condition. But exploitation of the working class is the motor force of capitalism. And capitalist society can never replace the family unit, the main social institution oppressing women. For blacks, the deeply embedded racism of American society, their forced segregation into miserable, rotting ghettos cannot be overcome short of ripping up this institutionalized oppression in socialist revolution. Our strategy is to build a women's section of a revolutionary vanguard party, to link the fight against the particular oppression of women to the power of the working class. A vital component of black leadership will be key to the second American revolution; we have fought since our inception for black Trotskyist cadre and leadership of an integrated mass workers party, like Lenin's Bolsheviks, that can lead all the oppressed against their common enemy, the capitalist class, in battle for the American socialist revolution."
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
*"Follow The Drinking Gourd"- Songs Of The Underground Railroad
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Richie Havens performing "Follow the Drinking Gourd".
CD REVIEW
February Is Black History Month
Follow The Drinking Gourd, Please
Steal Away: Songs Of The Underground Railroad, Kim and Reggie Harris, Appleseed Records, 1998
My purposes in this space have been primarily to review political books that reflect on various aspects of history and politics. Along the edges of this work I have filled in the borders with commentary on musical and cultural phenomena that reflect those concerns. Thus, one is as likely to find a review of some old forgotten folkie or blues singer as a more well-known historical figure like Leon Trotsky or John Brown. However, sometimes music is not just an adjunct to historical narrative but forms a central cog in understanding the phenomena. That is just the situation here with Kim and Reggie Harris’ contribution to an understanding of slavery, freedom from slavery and how to get out from under slavery that was the primary fight for blacks, especially in the lead up to the America Civil War in the mid-19th century.
From a perusal of the liner notes this “concept” album is a labor of love by this singing/songwriting couple. The project developed in the 1980’s out a need to present the fight against slavery as epitomized by the organization of the Underground Railroad to the next generations so that it is firmly etched in their minds. Their musical abilities, especially when they harmonize (listen to “Oh, Freedom” and “Wade In The Water”), make this a very fruitful enterprise. As always with Appleseed recordings the liner notes give a detailed story of how this effort was produced and what each song represents in the anthology.
I will not repeat that information here. I will, however, mention that various figures highlighted here like “General” Harriet Tubman get their full due, as does Sojourner Truth on the nicely done “Aren’t I A Woman”. The various coded hymns and other songs that were used on the Underground Railroad to either symbolize the freedom struggle or for security like “Follow The Drinking Gourd” are also explained. “Heaven Is Less Than Fair”, a Harris tribute product, does a nice job on explaining the uses and need for the codes. Needless to say there are religiously-tinged songs like “Go Down Moses” that reflect that deep feeling that helped get through the hard days of slavery in one piece. Listen to the music and learn history at the same time. That’s a great combination, right?
Here are some helpful lyrics.
Music of the Underground Railroad
"Follow the Drinking Gourd"
When the Sun comes back
And the first quail calls
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the Drinking Gourd.
The riverbank makes a very good road.
The dead trees will show you the way.
Left foot, peg foot, traveling on,
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
The river ends between two hills
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
There's another river on the other side
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
When the great big river meets the little river
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.
For an explanation, the Planatarium at the Oklahoma Baptist University has a nice web page. Link submitted by Cazak. Thanks!
Here is an addition- a Civil Rights song made famous by Joan Baez and written by Richard Farina (her brother-in-law, married to her sister, Mimi, although I am not sure he was at the time the song was written). It concerns the tragic and obscenely racist bombing of a black church down in Birmingham, Alabama killing four young innocent black girls. Yes, one can still weep over that one today.
Birmingham Sunday
Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun,
And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one.
At an old Baptist church there was no need to run.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The clouds they were grey and the autumn winds blew,
And Denise McNair brought the number to two.
The falcon of death was a creature they knew,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The church it was crowded, but no one could see
That Cynthia Wesley's dark number was three.
Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
Young Carol Robertson entered the door
And the number her killers had given was four.
She asked for a blessing but asked for no more,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
The men in the forest they once asked of me,
How many black berries grew in the Blue Sea.
And I asked them right with a tear in my eye.
How many dark ships in the forest?
The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone.
And I can't do much more than to sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.
CD REVIEW
February Is Black History Month
Follow The Drinking Gourd, Please
Steal Away: Songs Of The Underground Railroad, Kim and Reggie Harris, Appleseed Records, 1998
My purposes in this space have been primarily to review political books that reflect on various aspects of history and politics. Along the edges of this work I have filled in the borders with commentary on musical and cultural phenomena that reflect those concerns. Thus, one is as likely to find a review of some old forgotten folkie or blues singer as a more well-known historical figure like Leon Trotsky or John Brown. However, sometimes music is not just an adjunct to historical narrative but forms a central cog in understanding the phenomena. That is just the situation here with Kim and Reggie Harris’ contribution to an understanding of slavery, freedom from slavery and how to get out from under slavery that was the primary fight for blacks, especially in the lead up to the America Civil War in the mid-19th century.
From a perusal of the liner notes this “concept” album is a labor of love by this singing/songwriting couple. The project developed in the 1980’s out a need to present the fight against slavery as epitomized by the organization of the Underground Railroad to the next generations so that it is firmly etched in their minds. Their musical abilities, especially when they harmonize (listen to “Oh, Freedom” and “Wade In The Water”), make this a very fruitful enterprise. As always with Appleseed recordings the liner notes give a detailed story of how this effort was produced and what each song represents in the anthology.
I will not repeat that information here. I will, however, mention that various figures highlighted here like “General” Harriet Tubman get their full due, as does Sojourner Truth on the nicely done “Aren’t I A Woman”. The various coded hymns and other songs that were used on the Underground Railroad to either symbolize the freedom struggle or for security like “Follow The Drinking Gourd” are also explained. “Heaven Is Less Than Fair”, a Harris tribute product, does a nice job on explaining the uses and need for the codes. Needless to say there are religiously-tinged songs like “Go Down Moses” that reflect that deep feeling that helped get through the hard days of slavery in one piece. Listen to the music and learn history at the same time. That’s a great combination, right?
Here are some helpful lyrics.
Music of the Underground Railroad
"Follow the Drinking Gourd"
When the Sun comes back
And the first quail calls
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the Drinking Gourd.
The riverbank makes a very good road.
The dead trees will show you the way.
Left foot, peg foot, traveling on,
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
The river ends between two hills
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
There's another river on the other side
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
When the great big river meets the little river
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.
For an explanation, the Planatarium at the Oklahoma Baptist University has a nice web page. Link submitted by Cazak. Thanks!
Here is an addition- a Civil Rights song made famous by Joan Baez and written by Richard Farina (her brother-in-law, married to her sister, Mimi, although I am not sure he was at the time the song was written). It concerns the tragic and obscenely racist bombing of a black church down in Birmingham, Alabama killing four young innocent black girls. Yes, one can still weep over that one today.
Birmingham Sunday
Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun,
And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one.
At an old Baptist church there was no need to run.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The clouds they were grey and the autumn winds blew,
And Denise McNair brought the number to two.
The falcon of death was a creature they knew,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The church it was crowded, but no one could see
That Cynthia Wesley's dark number was three.
Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
Young Carol Robertson entered the door
And the number her killers had given was four.
She asked for a blessing but asked for no more,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
The men in the forest they once asked of me,
How many black berries grew in the Blue Sea.
And I asked them right with a tear in my eye.
How many dark ships in the forest?
The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone.
And I can't do much more than to sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.
A Song Of The 1960's Civil Rights Struggle- Richard Farina's "Birmingham Sunday"
Commentary
Here is a song for Black History Month- a Civil Rights song made famous by Joan Baez and written by the late Richard Farina (her brother-in-law, married to her sister Mimi although I am not sure he was at the time of the song). It concerns the tragic and obscenely racist bombing of a black church killing four young innocent black girls. Yes, one can still weep over that one today.
Birmingham Sunday
Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun,
And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one.
At an old Baptist church there was no need to run.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The clouds they were grey and the autumn winds blew,
And Denise McNair brought the number to two.
The falcon of death was a creature they knew,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The church it was crowded, but no one could see
That Cynthia Wesley's dark number was three.
Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
Young Carol Robertson entered the door
And the number her killers had given was four.
She asked for a blessing but asked for no more,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
The men in the forest they once asked of me,
How many black berries grew in the Blue Sea.
And I asked them right with a tear in my eye.
How many dark ships in the forest?
The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone.
And I can't do much more than to sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.
Here is a song for Black History Month- a Civil Rights song made famous by Joan Baez and written by the late Richard Farina (her brother-in-law, married to her sister Mimi although I am not sure he was at the time of the song). It concerns the tragic and obscenely racist bombing of a black church killing four young innocent black girls. Yes, one can still weep over that one today.
Birmingham Sunday
Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun,
And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one.
At an old Baptist church there was no need to run.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The clouds they were grey and the autumn winds blew,
And Denise McNair brought the number to two.
The falcon of death was a creature they knew,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The church it was crowded, but no one could see
That Cynthia Wesley's dark number was three.
Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
Young Carol Robertson entered the door
And the number her killers had given was four.
She asked for a blessing but asked for no more,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
The men in the forest they once asked of me,
How many black berries grew in the Blue Sea.
And I asked them right with a tear in my eye.
How many dark ships in the forest?
The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone.
And I can't do much more than to sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.
Monday, February 23, 2009
*Songs of The Black Freedom Struggle Circa 1960
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Mavis Staple (of the renowned Staple Singers) performing "Keep Your Eyes On The Prize". (And it aint being President Of The United States-Markin)
CD REVIEWS
February Is Black History Month
Sing For Freedom: The Story Of The Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs, various artists and speakers, Smithsonian/Folkway Records, 1990
Every social movement, and the Southern black civil rights movement of the 1950’s and early 1960’s was no exception, not only has to have its slogans, its placards and its orators but also its anthems. For those unfamiliar with its history this little CD will, in song and speech, give the highlights of the movement as it pressed on from Montgomery, Alabama in the mid-1950’s to Albany, Georgia, Greenwood, Mississippi, Birmingham, Alabama and many, many other smaller but no less important ports of call in the struggle for first- class citizenship for blacks in the Jim Crow South. For those familiar with the story of the struggle down South you will get a full storehouse of memories of the songs that became part of the greater culture and still sent a chill of excitement and expectation through this reviewer’ s body when he listened to them. As we are painfully aware of today, that civil rights movement fell far short of creating that racial equality we were after but certainly not for lack of inspiring music.
As mentioned above, an added attraction here is some of the oration of the time by the black leadership. Obviously that meant Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference but also Bob Moses from the voter-registration drives led by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). And the NAACP’s Medgar Evers before his assassination. And the star of the piece- the heroic leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Fannie Lou Hamer who calmly set about turning the tables on the establishment. Two things should be remembered from that time. One is Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” (not included here) for that says in song what the struggle was all about and what civil rights workers were up against. The other, for all those who want to praise the Democratic Party’s role in civil rights history just remember that when there was choice between Ms. Hamer’s Freedom Democrats and the Jim Crow Democrats in the 1964 Democratic Convention they seated the Jim Crow delegation.
That said , musically the selections here reflect the central importance, for good or ill, of the black church in this democratic fight with some “fighting” songs, some of ‘redemption’ and some as fuel to keep the struggle going, especially when the Southern white establishment and their assorted henchmen counter-attacked. The songs that most reflect these themes are “ We Are Soldiers In The Army”, “This Little Light”, “Which Side Are You On?”, “Keep Your Eyes On The Prize” and the movement anthem “We Shall Overcome”.
Follow The Drinking Gourd, Please
Steal Away: Songs Of The Underground Railroad, Kim and Reggie Harris, Appleseed Records, 1998
My purposes in this space have been primarily to review political books that reflect on various aspects of history and politics. Along the edges of this work I have filled in the borders with commentary on musical and cultural phenomena that reflect those concerns. Thus, one is as likely to find a review of some old forgotten folkie or blues singer as a more well-known historical figure like Leon Trotsky or John Brown. However, sometimes music is not just an adjunct to historical narrative but forms a central cog in understanding the phenomena. That is just the situation here with Kim and Reggie Harris’ contribution to an understanding of slavery, freedom from slavery and how to get out from under slavery that was the primary fight for blacks, especially in the lead up to the America Civil War in the mid-19th century.
From a perusal of the liner notes this “concept” album is a labor of love by this singing/songwriting couple. The project developed in the 1980’s out a need to present the fight against slavery as epitomized by the organization of the Underground Railroad to the next generations so that it is firmly etched in their minds. Their musical abilities, especially when they harmonize (listen to “Oh, Freedom” and “Wade In The Water”), make this a very fruitful enterprise. As always with Appleseed recordings the liner notes give a detailed story of how this effort was produced and what each song represents in the anthology.
I will not repeat that information here. I will, however, mention that various figures highlighted here like “General” Harriet Tubman get their full due, as does Sojourner Truth on the nicely done “Aren’t I A Woman”. The various coded hymns and other songs that were used on the Underground Railroad to either symbolize the freedom struggle or for security like “Follow The Drinking Gourd” are also explained. “Heaven Is Less Than Fair”, a Harris tribute product, does a nice job on explaining the uses and need for the codes. Needless to say there are religiously-tinged songs like “Go Down Moses” that reflect that deep feeling that helped get through the hard days of slavery in one piece. Listen to the music and learn history at the same time. That’s a great combination, right?
Here is an addition- a Civil Rights song made famous by Joan Baez and written by Richard Farina (her brother-in-law, married to her sister Mimi although I am not sure he was at the time of the song). It concerns the tragic and obscenely racist bombing of a black church killing four young innocent black girls. Yes, one can still weep over that one today.
Birmingham Sunday
Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun,
And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one.
At an old Baptist church there was no need to run.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The clouds they were grey and the autumn winds blew,
And Denise McNair brought the number to two.
The falcon of death was a creature they knew,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The church it was crowded, but no one could see
That Cynthia Wesley's dark number was three.
Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
Young Carol Robertson entered the door
And the number her killers had given was four.
She asked for a blessing but asked for no more,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
The men in the forest they once asked of me,
How many black berries grew in the Blue Sea.
And I asked them right with a tear in my eye.
How many dark ships in the forest?
The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone.
And I can't do much more than to sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.
CD REVIEWS
February Is Black History Month
Sing For Freedom: The Story Of The Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs, various artists and speakers, Smithsonian/Folkway Records, 1990
Every social movement, and the Southern black civil rights movement of the 1950’s and early 1960’s was no exception, not only has to have its slogans, its placards and its orators but also its anthems. For those unfamiliar with its history this little CD will, in song and speech, give the highlights of the movement as it pressed on from Montgomery, Alabama in the mid-1950’s to Albany, Georgia, Greenwood, Mississippi, Birmingham, Alabama and many, many other smaller but no less important ports of call in the struggle for first- class citizenship for blacks in the Jim Crow South. For those familiar with the story of the struggle down South you will get a full storehouse of memories of the songs that became part of the greater culture and still sent a chill of excitement and expectation through this reviewer’ s body when he listened to them. As we are painfully aware of today, that civil rights movement fell far short of creating that racial equality we were after but certainly not for lack of inspiring music.
As mentioned above, an added attraction here is some of the oration of the time by the black leadership. Obviously that meant Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference but also Bob Moses from the voter-registration drives led by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). And the NAACP’s Medgar Evers before his assassination. And the star of the piece- the heroic leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Fannie Lou Hamer who calmly set about turning the tables on the establishment. Two things should be remembered from that time. One is Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” (not included here) for that says in song what the struggle was all about and what civil rights workers were up against. The other, for all those who want to praise the Democratic Party’s role in civil rights history just remember that when there was choice between Ms. Hamer’s Freedom Democrats and the Jim Crow Democrats in the 1964 Democratic Convention they seated the Jim Crow delegation.
That said , musically the selections here reflect the central importance, for good or ill, of the black church in this democratic fight with some “fighting” songs, some of ‘redemption’ and some as fuel to keep the struggle going, especially when the Southern white establishment and their assorted henchmen counter-attacked. The songs that most reflect these themes are “ We Are Soldiers In The Army”, “This Little Light”, “Which Side Are You On?”, “Keep Your Eyes On The Prize” and the movement anthem “We Shall Overcome”.
Follow The Drinking Gourd, Please
Steal Away: Songs Of The Underground Railroad, Kim and Reggie Harris, Appleseed Records, 1998
My purposes in this space have been primarily to review political books that reflect on various aspects of history and politics. Along the edges of this work I have filled in the borders with commentary on musical and cultural phenomena that reflect those concerns. Thus, one is as likely to find a review of some old forgotten folkie or blues singer as a more well-known historical figure like Leon Trotsky or John Brown. However, sometimes music is not just an adjunct to historical narrative but forms a central cog in understanding the phenomena. That is just the situation here with Kim and Reggie Harris’ contribution to an understanding of slavery, freedom from slavery and how to get out from under slavery that was the primary fight for blacks, especially in the lead up to the America Civil War in the mid-19th century.
From a perusal of the liner notes this “concept” album is a labor of love by this singing/songwriting couple. The project developed in the 1980’s out a need to present the fight against slavery as epitomized by the organization of the Underground Railroad to the next generations so that it is firmly etched in their minds. Their musical abilities, especially when they harmonize (listen to “Oh, Freedom” and “Wade In The Water”), make this a very fruitful enterprise. As always with Appleseed recordings the liner notes give a detailed story of how this effort was produced and what each song represents in the anthology.
I will not repeat that information here. I will, however, mention that various figures highlighted here like “General” Harriet Tubman get their full due, as does Sojourner Truth on the nicely done “Aren’t I A Woman”. The various coded hymns and other songs that were used on the Underground Railroad to either symbolize the freedom struggle or for security like “Follow The Drinking Gourd” are also explained. “Heaven Is Less Than Fair”, a Harris tribute product, does a nice job on explaining the uses and need for the codes. Needless to say there are religiously-tinged songs like “Go Down Moses” that reflect that deep feeling that helped get through the hard days of slavery in one piece. Listen to the music and learn history at the same time. That’s a great combination, right?
Here is an addition- a Civil Rights song made famous by Joan Baez and written by Richard Farina (her brother-in-law, married to her sister Mimi although I am not sure he was at the time of the song). It concerns the tragic and obscenely racist bombing of a black church killing four young innocent black girls. Yes, one can still weep over that one today.
Birmingham Sunday
Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun,
And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one.
At an old Baptist church there was no need to run.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The clouds they were grey and the autumn winds blew,
And Denise McNair brought the number to two.
The falcon of death was a creature they knew,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The church it was crowded, but no one could see
That Cynthia Wesley's dark number was three.
Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
Young Carol Robertson entered the door
And the number her killers had given was four.
She asked for a blessing but asked for no more,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
The men in the forest they once asked of me,
How many black berries grew in the Blue Sea.
And I asked them right with a tear in my eye.
How many dark ships in the forest?
The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone.
And I can't do much more than to sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-"The Color Purple" -A Guest Book Review
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for author Alice Walker.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**************
Race, Sex and Class:
The Clash Over The Color Purple
By Don Alexander and Christine Wright
"Well, you know wherever there's a man, there's trouble."
—Alice Walker, The Color Purple
'"Why do you always feel the need to castrate the black man?'"
—Ishmael Reed, Reckless Eyeballing
When The Color Purple, Stephen Spielberg's film of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was released in 1985, it roused loud debates among blacks, picketing and furious letters to the editor across the country. Painting a compelling picture of a terribly abused black woman in rural Georgia between the two world wars, the film really hit a nerve; the controversy quickly got much bigger than the novel. While debates raged in community meetings, feminist supporters of Walker and her liberal and black nationalist critics took up their pens to wage a feud which still soaks up gallons of ink.
Many of Alice Walker's critics accuse her of presenting an image of the black male as a violent monster. Walker has responded that black men don't want to face her "truth-telling." As Marxists, we find what amounts to a highly literary contest for the status of "most oppressed" somewhat beside the point. Nonetheless, the furor over The Color Purple has raised some basic questions about the clash of race and sex in this deeply bigoted, anti-sex society, not least about the explosive tensions between black men and women bred by the destruction of the fabric of life through poverty and oppression.
The Color Purple tells the story of Celie and her struggle to survive and defeat a series of physical and psychological assaults by men. She is raped repeatedly by her father, who gives away her two children against her will. She is married off to a man (Mister) who only agrees to take her if he gets the cow too. Mister treats her worse than a dog, beats her, and has kids as rotten as you can get. As she is later mocked by her husband, "Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam...you nothing at all."Then, through her relationship with Mister's lover, the blues singer Shug, Celie finds love and sexual pleasure, leaves her husband, goes into business making pants, discovers she is heiress to a fortune and is eventually reunited with her children, who have been raised in Africa by her missionary sister, Nettie.
Alice Walker's novel begins as a masterly evocation of Celie's nightmarish oppression through a series of letters in Celie's own words. But this artistic promise is betrayed to Walker's feminist agenda at the end of the book, which degenerates into a hokey miracle solution: Walker's "message" is that black women, however rotten and wretched their lives may be, can "make it." Celie embodies the liberal idealist myth that sheer individual will—and in her case, rather unbelievably good luck—can break the chains of oppression.
The novel largely ignores the social misery of the black sharecroppers in the rural Jim Crow South, and fails to so much as hint at the convulsive social struggles in the U.S. in the 1930s. The one exception is Celie's daughter-in-law, Sofia, who is destroyed when she tries to stand up to the white boss. Even then, no one else attempts to combat the vicious racism; Walker is already laying the basis for a retreat into "personal liberation." The novel also describes Nettie's experiences as a missionary in Africa, where she witnesses the destruction of tribal life by imperialism. All Walker can counterpose to this brutality is black Christian missionaries and throwbacks to such vicious, anti-woman tribal practices as ritual sexual mutilation.
Walker's brand of bourgeois feminism, which she calls "womanism," celebrates gooey, mystical "female bonding" not one whit different from the standard line in Ms., where she served on the editorial staff for years. Bourgeois feminism, preoccupied with the career advancement of female yuppies and closing porn shops in Times Square, cannot address the very real sexual and racial oppression of black women.
Who's Afraid of Alice Walker?
Most critics of The Color Purple enthusiastically embrace the liberal lies disguised in it. (Although the controversy exploded when Spielberg's movie was released, it's important to differentiate between Walker's novel and Spielberg's unintended parody.) Walker has been accused of reinforcing racist stereotypes because she wrote about a black woman who had been abused, raped and beaten by black men. There has also been a disgusting, moralistic streak in the outcry over The Color Purple, centering on opposition to Walker's sympathetic portrayal of black lesbianism. Black journalist/TV host Tony Brown, sounding like a Moral Majority Reaganite bigot, claims that anyone who liked the movie was either a "closet homosexual, a lesbian, a pseudo-intellectual or white."
Certain layers of the black establishment intelligentsia denounce as "racist" anything that presents black people in a negative or critical light. But this is another liberal lie just as dangerous as Walker's. Blacks are by no means exempt from 'social backwardness, such as anti-abortion and anti-gay bigotry. The real point (and Walker herself has made this point in previous novels such as The Third Life of Grange Copeland) is tha't terrible poverty and oppression breed personal cruelty and degradation such as that described in 7"he Color Purple. For example, in the eloquent film Nothing But a Man (1964), a spirited young black man, Duff, lives in a small Alabama town, where he is targeted by the racists for his independence and sense of pride. In one of the key scenes in the movie, Duff, blacklisted and unable to support his family, goes home to his wife feeling humiliated by racist mistreatment. Thinking that he sees his failure as a man reflected in his woman's eyes, he turns on her in rage, and their marriage is almost destroyed. Both Duff and his wife are victims of the
racist system which denies the black man his dignity.
When Richard Wright's Native Son was published in 1940, controversy broke out over his gripping portrayal of a brutalized and alienated young black man whose poverty and desperation turn him into a vicious anti-social criminal. Wright, influenced by the Stalinist Communist Party in the late '30s and early '40s, had been disturbed that even "bankers' daughters" were weeping over his earlier short stories, Uncle Tom's Children. As he said, "I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears." And so Wright brought his readers face to face with the starkness of brutal racial oppression in the U.S., implicitly suggest¬ing that there was no room for sentimental liberal drivel.
While Walker seems to have even the bankers' granddaughters bawling, many of her critics are no different from Wright's. Such critics want to perpetuate the myth that blacks owe their condition of savage oppression to the fact that they "don't stick together"—another version of blaming the victim. These critics seek merely to uphold the "respectable" image of the petty-bourgeois black establishment, personified by the "black family life" portrayed on TV's The Bill Cosby Show. And guilty liberals—both white and black—cannot acknowledge the truth about racist America: the ugly degradation of brutalized ghetto life that strips its victims of their dignity and humanity.
Clash of Race and Sex
Of all Walker's critics, the novelist and poet Ishmael Reed has made the best case against The Color Purple. Moving beyond concerns with mere image, Reed has raised some of the hard questions, and for this he has been smeared as a "misogynist" by the feminists. But Reed, whose seven novels are brilliant parables against American racism, is no more a misogynist than Walker is a racist. What the feminists can't stand is that he has got their number: drawing a simplistic sex line in society can put you on the wrong side on some fundamental questions. It simply is not woman-hating point out that Walker's man-hating is relentless. Celie says to Mister, "You a lowdown dog is what's,
wrong It's time to leave you and enter into Creation. And your dead body is just the welcome m need." And Celie berates her stepson, "If you had tried to rule over Sofia the white folks never would Pu caught her."
Reed's barbed and effective satire of feminism, Reckless Eyeballing, is the story of Ian Ball, a black dramal who has been "sex-listed" for his play about a black woman who likes having sex (with men). To make peace with the feminists Ball writes a new play in whi the body of a young black man, lynched by a racist mob for ogling (called "reckless eyeballing" in the South white woman, is exhumed so he can be tried for his se ist crime, which the feminists denounce as equally bad as the murder.
Those who think Reed is exaggerating should thir back about ten years to Susan Brown miller's Again Our Will, one of the bibles of contemporary Americc feminism. As part of her thesis that rape (or the threat of rape) is the main way that all women are controlled t all men, Brownmiller reviewed the famous case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white man's wife.
This monstrous racist murder was a touchstone on th race question. But as a feminist, Brownmiller disgustingly insisted that Till and J.W. Millam (one of th murderers) had something in common: "They both understood that... it was a deliberate insult just short o physical assault, a last reminder to Carolyn Bryant tha this black boy, Till, had in mind to possess her." As result, Brownmiller says, "Today a sexual remark on the street causes within me a fleeting but murderous rage.' Brownmiller's sex-war politics put her in bed with i racist lynch mob.
In the course of Reckless Eyeballing, successful black woman playwright Tremonisha Smarts (who some say was modeled after Alice Walker) was accosted by a man who:
"tied her up, and shaved all of her hair off. His twisted explanation: this is what the French Resistance did to those women who collaborated with the Nazis. The man had said that because of her 'blood libel' of black men, she was doing the same thing. Collaborating with the enemies of black men."
The horrifying racist murder at Howard Beach in December 1986 inspired Reed to make his definitive argument against Alice Walker and other black feminists in an essay serialized in the Amsterdam News in January-February 1987. But when Reed takes his argument out of the realm of fiction, where poetic license allows him to get at a core of truth, he goes astray. Citing the fact that Jon Lester, the teenager who led the lynch mob that murdered Michael Griffith, was said toj be "real emotional" about the film The Color Purple Reed argues that the description of black male violence incites race-terror. He claims that black feminism's "group libel campaign" against black men "is the kind of propaganda spread by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party." Reed has a point when he describes his "justifiable paranoia"—he knows it could have been him killed on that highway in Queens. (As black comedian Godfrey Cambridge said , "Paranoia is the occupational disease of black people.")
But the strutting little Mussolinis in Howard Beach could care less what black men do to black women in Harlem, and to lay the blame on "bad propaganda" is a dangerous trivialization of the real threat the race-terrorists pose. It is, however, to Reed's credit that in the days of the black nationalist anti-Semitic demagogue Farrakhan, Reckless Eyeballing savagely denounces anti-Semitism. The book's title page quotes an epigram: "What's the American dream? A million blacks swimming back to Africa with a Jew under each arm." Characters in Reed's novel include a psychotic New York City cop notorious for blowing away blacks and Puerto Ricans, and a Jewish writer who is beaten to death by a mob at the mythical Mary Phegan College. (Mary Phegan was in fact a young white woman murdered in Georgia in 1915; a Jewish businessman, Leo Frank, was framed up for the crime and lynched. The racist upsurge led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.) Reed uses such themes to calculate by sex and ethnic group the chances of being murdered in the U.S. As the critic Darryl Pinckney said: "Reed's subtext might be that the rape of black women and the lynching of black men are part of the same historical tragedy" (New York Review of Books, 29 January 1987). As a vivid picture of the viciousness of social relations in the United States, Reckless Eyebslling is eons ahead of The Color Purple—and a much better read, too.
The Talented Tenth Squares Off
In a certain sense, the literary debate over The Color Purple reflects the careerist interests of the black intelligentsia, struggling over shrinking economic opportunities in the absence of any movement for radical change. Thus Walker can snipe at black men from her sanctuary at Ms., the darling of white bourgeois feminists, while Reed raves that there is a publishing conspiracy against black male writers. (We thought this was even nuttier than it is, until we tried to buy his books and discovered they were all out of print!) While seemingly Reed and Walker are at loggerheads, they have at bottom the same program. Walker envisages a female Horatio Alger; Reed sees the "solution" in independent black art. Both posit individual struggle within capitalist society, which necessarily pits one section of the oppressed against another. Their message is, "see, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps," ignoring the fact that the majority have no boots.
What lies behind these squabbles is the frustration of the "talented tenth"—the tiny selection of minority people who have been able to integrate into the professional layers of American society. In the face of the swift elimination of the token and reversible gains of the civil rights movement and in the absence of any mass struggle for social change, such debates among the black intelligentsia take on the air of a dispute over the shrinking job market.
But we must say in passing that even during the heyday of the civil rights movement the reality of sexual oppression was never addressed. The ensuing black social struggle under revolutionary leadership which today allows the fundamentally despairing ideologies of black nationalism and feminism to flourish among those who see themselves as spokesmen for the oppressed. Walker and Reed, in their different ways accepting the basically hopeless framework of the capitalist status quo, see black women's progress as necessarily coming at the expense of black men—and vice versa. Only an anti-capitalist perspective provides the basis for uniting all the oppressed in a fight for freedom at the expense of the class enemy which aims to keep us divided and in chains.
Capitalism and "American Apartheid"
In the 1980s the harsh realities of a decaying class system have become ever more bleak. Especially for blacks, capitalism has less and less to offer. The unemployment rate has soared with the closing of giant industrial plants in the Midwest, which once provided decent union wages and basic social power to a crucial component of the working class. Funding for educa¬tion has been slashed, while segregation in schools and
in housing has increased. Blacks are not safe in many neighborhoods throughout the U.S. as lynch mob terrorists are emboldened by racist government policy. "Political power" for blacks has come to mean more black elected officials, who the Democratic Party has deemed useful to preside over the deterioration of the big cities, where they exact racist cutbacks and enforce "law and order." Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode, whose police firebombed an entire black neighbor¬hood in order to wipe out eleven MOVE members, including five of their children, is no more a champion of black rights than New York's fascistic Ed Koch.
With the exception of a very few who have "made it," the hellish conditions are compounded for black women through sexual oppression. Unskilled black women remain confined to the lowest-paying, most menial jobs, earning starvation wages as maids, laundresses and waitresses. Black women are made to bear the brunt of devastating cutbacks in social welfare. In the U.S., twice as many black girls are pregnant before the age of 18 as whites, twice the number of black infants die. The American bourgeoisie has long upheld the lie that ghetto poverty and degradation are the fault of the "deviant" promiscuous black "matriarch." In 1969 Daniel Moynihan argued that the black "matriarchy" was responsible for the breakdown of the black family and suggested that young black men should learn the right values by joining Uncle Sam's army. Over the years the black woman has been variously stereotyped as a presumed tower of strength, a sexless and obese mammy, a promiscuous baby machine, an emasculating fiend.
Yet the picture for black men is not much less bleak. The unemployment rate in big cities for a young black man is 50 to 60 percent. There is also the problem of "permanent unemployability"—e.g., black industrial workers, "last hired, first fired," who under today's conditions will never be rehired. Women account for two-thirds of all the professional jobs held by blacks: black women are seen by racist employers as docile,non-criminal, non-militant, non-violent, an upgraded version of what used to scrub floors; whereas that young black man in a suit who seems articulate and ambitious is suspected of being Malcolm X in disguise. In the 3 December 1987 New York Review of Books, the article "American Apartheid" describes the grim reality:
"...black men are more likely [than whites] to be in prisons or the military, or die at an early age. The fact that upward of 20 percent are missed by the census would point up their lack of stable jobs or even settled addresses. Moreover, of those black men the census manages to reach, fewer than half have full-time jobs."
It all comes home to roost in the black family. In a society which defines manhood as the ability to support a family, black men are often denied that very ability. "Single-parent households" are growing throughout the U.S., a phenomenon which affects blacks more heavily but by no means exclusively. Over 56 percent of black families are headed by women. Capitalist society needs the institution of the nuclear family not only to produce the next generation of wage laborers, but as an important force for social conservatism. At the same time, capitalist decay undermines the family through grinding poverty and oppression. The family is the main social institution by which women are oppressed. But in the absence of alternatives, those who fall outside the classic pattern of the family have nothing at all. Thus, this vicious racist system cannot but lead to embittered personal relations between men and women. Out of this rises the frustration which takes The Color Purple controversy out of the literary realm into the community, where it exploded in angry debates.
In this sense, Alice Walker triumphed as an artist: the depth of the controversy shows that she began to lay bare a painful reality. The solution to the reality she and Ishmael Reed have described in their novels lies not in the realm of art or bourgeois politics, but in the struggle for the socialist transformation of society."
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**************
Race, Sex and Class:
The Clash Over The Color Purple
By Don Alexander and Christine Wright
"Well, you know wherever there's a man, there's trouble."
—Alice Walker, The Color Purple
'"Why do you always feel the need to castrate the black man?'"
—Ishmael Reed, Reckless Eyeballing
When The Color Purple, Stephen Spielberg's film of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was released in 1985, it roused loud debates among blacks, picketing and furious letters to the editor across the country. Painting a compelling picture of a terribly abused black woman in rural Georgia between the two world wars, the film really hit a nerve; the controversy quickly got much bigger than the novel. While debates raged in community meetings, feminist supporters of Walker and her liberal and black nationalist critics took up their pens to wage a feud which still soaks up gallons of ink.
Many of Alice Walker's critics accuse her of presenting an image of the black male as a violent monster. Walker has responded that black men don't want to face her "truth-telling." As Marxists, we find what amounts to a highly literary contest for the status of "most oppressed" somewhat beside the point. Nonetheless, the furor over The Color Purple has raised some basic questions about the clash of race and sex in this deeply bigoted, anti-sex society, not least about the explosive tensions between black men and women bred by the destruction of the fabric of life through poverty and oppression.
The Color Purple tells the story of Celie and her struggle to survive and defeat a series of physical and psychological assaults by men. She is raped repeatedly by her father, who gives away her two children against her will. She is married off to a man (Mister) who only agrees to take her if he gets the cow too. Mister treats her worse than a dog, beats her, and has kids as rotten as you can get. As she is later mocked by her husband, "Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam...you nothing at all."Then, through her relationship with Mister's lover, the blues singer Shug, Celie finds love and sexual pleasure, leaves her husband, goes into business making pants, discovers she is heiress to a fortune and is eventually reunited with her children, who have been raised in Africa by her missionary sister, Nettie.
Alice Walker's novel begins as a masterly evocation of Celie's nightmarish oppression through a series of letters in Celie's own words. But this artistic promise is betrayed to Walker's feminist agenda at the end of the book, which degenerates into a hokey miracle solution: Walker's "message" is that black women, however rotten and wretched their lives may be, can "make it." Celie embodies the liberal idealist myth that sheer individual will—and in her case, rather unbelievably good luck—can break the chains of oppression.
The novel largely ignores the social misery of the black sharecroppers in the rural Jim Crow South, and fails to so much as hint at the convulsive social struggles in the U.S. in the 1930s. The one exception is Celie's daughter-in-law, Sofia, who is destroyed when she tries to stand up to the white boss. Even then, no one else attempts to combat the vicious racism; Walker is already laying the basis for a retreat into "personal liberation." The novel also describes Nettie's experiences as a missionary in Africa, where she witnesses the destruction of tribal life by imperialism. All Walker can counterpose to this brutality is black Christian missionaries and throwbacks to such vicious, anti-woman tribal practices as ritual sexual mutilation.
Walker's brand of bourgeois feminism, which she calls "womanism," celebrates gooey, mystical "female bonding" not one whit different from the standard line in Ms., where she served on the editorial staff for years. Bourgeois feminism, preoccupied with the career advancement of female yuppies and closing porn shops in Times Square, cannot address the very real sexual and racial oppression of black women.
Who's Afraid of Alice Walker?
Most critics of The Color Purple enthusiastically embrace the liberal lies disguised in it. (Although the controversy exploded when Spielberg's movie was released, it's important to differentiate between Walker's novel and Spielberg's unintended parody.) Walker has been accused of reinforcing racist stereotypes because she wrote about a black woman who had been abused, raped and beaten by black men. There has also been a disgusting, moralistic streak in the outcry over The Color Purple, centering on opposition to Walker's sympathetic portrayal of black lesbianism. Black journalist/TV host Tony Brown, sounding like a Moral Majority Reaganite bigot, claims that anyone who liked the movie was either a "closet homosexual, a lesbian, a pseudo-intellectual or white."
Certain layers of the black establishment intelligentsia denounce as "racist" anything that presents black people in a negative or critical light. But this is another liberal lie just as dangerous as Walker's. Blacks are by no means exempt from 'social backwardness, such as anti-abortion and anti-gay bigotry. The real point (and Walker herself has made this point in previous novels such as The Third Life of Grange Copeland) is tha't terrible poverty and oppression breed personal cruelty and degradation such as that described in 7"he Color Purple. For example, in the eloquent film Nothing But a Man (1964), a spirited young black man, Duff, lives in a small Alabama town, where he is targeted by the racists for his independence and sense of pride. In one of the key scenes in the movie, Duff, blacklisted and unable to support his family, goes home to his wife feeling humiliated by racist mistreatment. Thinking that he sees his failure as a man reflected in his woman's eyes, he turns on her in rage, and their marriage is almost destroyed. Both Duff and his wife are victims of the
racist system which denies the black man his dignity.
When Richard Wright's Native Son was published in 1940, controversy broke out over his gripping portrayal of a brutalized and alienated young black man whose poverty and desperation turn him into a vicious anti-social criminal. Wright, influenced by the Stalinist Communist Party in the late '30s and early '40s, had been disturbed that even "bankers' daughters" were weeping over his earlier short stories, Uncle Tom's Children. As he said, "I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears." And so Wright brought his readers face to face with the starkness of brutal racial oppression in the U.S., implicitly suggest¬ing that there was no room for sentimental liberal drivel.
While Walker seems to have even the bankers' granddaughters bawling, many of her critics are no different from Wright's. Such critics want to perpetuate the myth that blacks owe their condition of savage oppression to the fact that they "don't stick together"—another version of blaming the victim. These critics seek merely to uphold the "respectable" image of the petty-bourgeois black establishment, personified by the "black family life" portrayed on TV's The Bill Cosby Show. And guilty liberals—both white and black—cannot acknowledge the truth about racist America: the ugly degradation of brutalized ghetto life that strips its victims of their dignity and humanity.
Clash of Race and Sex
Of all Walker's critics, the novelist and poet Ishmael Reed has made the best case against The Color Purple. Moving beyond concerns with mere image, Reed has raised some of the hard questions, and for this he has been smeared as a "misogynist" by the feminists. But Reed, whose seven novels are brilliant parables against American racism, is no more a misogynist than Walker is a racist. What the feminists can't stand is that he has got their number: drawing a simplistic sex line in society can put you on the wrong side on some fundamental questions. It simply is not woman-hating point out that Walker's man-hating is relentless. Celie says to Mister, "You a lowdown dog is what's,
wrong It's time to leave you and enter into Creation. And your dead body is just the welcome m need." And Celie berates her stepson, "If you had tried to rule over Sofia the white folks never would Pu caught her."
Reed's barbed and effective satire of feminism, Reckless Eyeballing, is the story of Ian Ball, a black dramal who has been "sex-listed" for his play about a black woman who likes having sex (with men). To make peace with the feminists Ball writes a new play in whi the body of a young black man, lynched by a racist mob for ogling (called "reckless eyeballing" in the South white woman, is exhumed so he can be tried for his se ist crime, which the feminists denounce as equally bad as the murder.
Those who think Reed is exaggerating should thir back about ten years to Susan Brown miller's Again Our Will, one of the bibles of contemporary Americc feminism. As part of her thesis that rape (or the threat of rape) is the main way that all women are controlled t all men, Brownmiller reviewed the famous case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white man's wife.
This monstrous racist murder was a touchstone on th race question. But as a feminist, Brownmiller disgustingly insisted that Till and J.W. Millam (one of th murderers) had something in common: "They both understood that... it was a deliberate insult just short o physical assault, a last reminder to Carolyn Bryant tha this black boy, Till, had in mind to possess her." As result, Brownmiller says, "Today a sexual remark on the street causes within me a fleeting but murderous rage.' Brownmiller's sex-war politics put her in bed with i racist lynch mob.
In the course of Reckless Eyeballing, successful black woman playwright Tremonisha Smarts (who some say was modeled after Alice Walker) was accosted by a man who:
"tied her up, and shaved all of her hair off. His twisted explanation: this is what the French Resistance did to those women who collaborated with the Nazis. The man had said that because of her 'blood libel' of black men, she was doing the same thing. Collaborating with the enemies of black men."
The horrifying racist murder at Howard Beach in December 1986 inspired Reed to make his definitive argument against Alice Walker and other black feminists in an essay serialized in the Amsterdam News in January-February 1987. But when Reed takes his argument out of the realm of fiction, where poetic license allows him to get at a core of truth, he goes astray. Citing the fact that Jon Lester, the teenager who led the lynch mob that murdered Michael Griffith, was said toj be "real emotional" about the film The Color Purple Reed argues that the description of black male violence incites race-terror. He claims that black feminism's "group libel campaign" against black men "is the kind of propaganda spread by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party." Reed has a point when he describes his "justifiable paranoia"—he knows it could have been him killed on that highway in Queens. (As black comedian Godfrey Cambridge said , "Paranoia is the occupational disease of black people.")
But the strutting little Mussolinis in Howard Beach could care less what black men do to black women in Harlem, and to lay the blame on "bad propaganda" is a dangerous trivialization of the real threat the race-terrorists pose. It is, however, to Reed's credit that in the days of the black nationalist anti-Semitic demagogue Farrakhan, Reckless Eyeballing savagely denounces anti-Semitism. The book's title page quotes an epigram: "What's the American dream? A million blacks swimming back to Africa with a Jew under each arm." Characters in Reed's novel include a psychotic New York City cop notorious for blowing away blacks and Puerto Ricans, and a Jewish writer who is beaten to death by a mob at the mythical Mary Phegan College. (Mary Phegan was in fact a young white woman murdered in Georgia in 1915; a Jewish businessman, Leo Frank, was framed up for the crime and lynched. The racist upsurge led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.) Reed uses such themes to calculate by sex and ethnic group the chances of being murdered in the U.S. As the critic Darryl Pinckney said: "Reed's subtext might be that the rape of black women and the lynching of black men are part of the same historical tragedy" (New York Review of Books, 29 January 1987). As a vivid picture of the viciousness of social relations in the United States, Reckless Eyebslling is eons ahead of The Color Purple—and a much better read, too.
The Talented Tenth Squares Off
In a certain sense, the literary debate over The Color Purple reflects the careerist interests of the black intelligentsia, struggling over shrinking economic opportunities in the absence of any movement for radical change. Thus Walker can snipe at black men from her sanctuary at Ms., the darling of white bourgeois feminists, while Reed raves that there is a publishing conspiracy against black male writers. (We thought this was even nuttier than it is, until we tried to buy his books and discovered they were all out of print!) While seemingly Reed and Walker are at loggerheads, they have at bottom the same program. Walker envisages a female Horatio Alger; Reed sees the "solution" in independent black art. Both posit individual struggle within capitalist society, which necessarily pits one section of the oppressed against another. Their message is, "see, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps," ignoring the fact that the majority have no boots.
What lies behind these squabbles is the frustration of the "talented tenth"—the tiny selection of minority people who have been able to integrate into the professional layers of American society. In the face of the swift elimination of the token and reversible gains of the civil rights movement and in the absence of any mass struggle for social change, such debates among the black intelligentsia take on the air of a dispute over the shrinking job market.
But we must say in passing that even during the heyday of the civil rights movement the reality of sexual oppression was never addressed. The ensuing black social struggle under revolutionary leadership which today allows the fundamentally despairing ideologies of black nationalism and feminism to flourish among those who see themselves as spokesmen for the oppressed. Walker and Reed, in their different ways accepting the basically hopeless framework of the capitalist status quo, see black women's progress as necessarily coming at the expense of black men—and vice versa. Only an anti-capitalist perspective provides the basis for uniting all the oppressed in a fight for freedom at the expense of the class enemy which aims to keep us divided and in chains.
Capitalism and "American Apartheid"
In the 1980s the harsh realities of a decaying class system have become ever more bleak. Especially for blacks, capitalism has less and less to offer. The unemployment rate has soared with the closing of giant industrial plants in the Midwest, which once provided decent union wages and basic social power to a crucial component of the working class. Funding for educa¬tion has been slashed, while segregation in schools and
in housing has increased. Blacks are not safe in many neighborhoods throughout the U.S. as lynch mob terrorists are emboldened by racist government policy. "Political power" for blacks has come to mean more black elected officials, who the Democratic Party has deemed useful to preside over the deterioration of the big cities, where they exact racist cutbacks and enforce "law and order." Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode, whose police firebombed an entire black neighbor¬hood in order to wipe out eleven MOVE members, including five of their children, is no more a champion of black rights than New York's fascistic Ed Koch.
With the exception of a very few who have "made it," the hellish conditions are compounded for black women through sexual oppression. Unskilled black women remain confined to the lowest-paying, most menial jobs, earning starvation wages as maids, laundresses and waitresses. Black women are made to bear the brunt of devastating cutbacks in social welfare. In the U.S., twice as many black girls are pregnant before the age of 18 as whites, twice the number of black infants die. The American bourgeoisie has long upheld the lie that ghetto poverty and degradation are the fault of the "deviant" promiscuous black "matriarch." In 1969 Daniel Moynihan argued that the black "matriarchy" was responsible for the breakdown of the black family and suggested that young black men should learn the right values by joining Uncle Sam's army. Over the years the black woman has been variously stereotyped as a presumed tower of strength, a sexless and obese mammy, a promiscuous baby machine, an emasculating fiend.
Yet the picture for black men is not much less bleak. The unemployment rate in big cities for a young black man is 50 to 60 percent. There is also the problem of "permanent unemployability"—e.g., black industrial workers, "last hired, first fired," who under today's conditions will never be rehired. Women account for two-thirds of all the professional jobs held by blacks: black women are seen by racist employers as docile,non-criminal, non-militant, non-violent, an upgraded version of what used to scrub floors; whereas that young black man in a suit who seems articulate and ambitious is suspected of being Malcolm X in disguise. In the 3 December 1987 New York Review of Books, the article "American Apartheid" describes the grim reality:
"...black men are more likely [than whites] to be in prisons or the military, or die at an early age. The fact that upward of 20 percent are missed by the census would point up their lack of stable jobs or even settled addresses. Moreover, of those black men the census manages to reach, fewer than half have full-time jobs."
It all comes home to roost in the black family. In a society which defines manhood as the ability to support a family, black men are often denied that very ability. "Single-parent households" are growing throughout the U.S., a phenomenon which affects blacks more heavily but by no means exclusively. Over 56 percent of black families are headed by women. Capitalist society needs the institution of the nuclear family not only to produce the next generation of wage laborers, but as an important force for social conservatism. At the same time, capitalist decay undermines the family through grinding poverty and oppression. The family is the main social institution by which women are oppressed. But in the absence of alternatives, those who fall outside the classic pattern of the family have nothing at all. Thus, this vicious racist system cannot but lead to embittered personal relations between men and women. Out of this rises the frustration which takes The Color Purple controversy out of the literary realm into the community, where it exploded in angry debates.
In this sense, Alice Walker triumphed as an artist: the depth of the controversy shows that she began to lay bare a painful reality. The solution to the reality she and Ishmael Reed have described in their novels lies not in the realm of art or bourgeois politics, but in the struggle for the socialist transformation of society."
Saturday, February 21, 2009
*A Blues Potpourri-The Blues Is Dues, Part II-Feeling So Good, And That Ain’t No Lie
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of "Big Mama" Thornton (with Lightnin' Hopkins) on her classic, "Ball 'n Chain."
CD REVIEW
February Is Black History Month
As those familiar with this space know I have spent a good amount of ink touting various old time blues legends that I ‘discovered’ in my youth. My intention, in part, is to introduce a new generation to this roots music but also to demonstrate a connection between this black-centered music and the struggle for black liberation that both blacks and whites can appreciate. Like virtually all forms of music that lasts more than five minutes the blues has had its ups and downs. After becoming electric and urbanized in the immediate post-World War II period it was eclipsed by the advent of rock&roll then made a comeback in the mid- 1960's with the surge of English bands that grew up on this music, and so on. Most recently there was mini-resurgence with the justifiably well-received Martin Scorsese PBS six-part blues series in 2003. A little earlier, in the mid-1990’s, there had also been a short-lived reemergence spearheaded by the ‘discovery’ of urban blues pioneer Robert Johnson’s music.
The long and short of this phenomenon is that commercial record production of this music waxed and waned reflecting that checkered history. I have, in the interest of variety for the novice, selected these CDs as a decent cross-section of blues (and its antecedents in earlier forms of roots music) as to gender, time and type. The following reviewed CDs represent first of all an attempt by record companies to meet the 1990’s surge. They also represent a hard fact of musical life. Like rock&roll the blues will never die. Praise be. Feast on these compilations.
Feeling So Good, And That Ain’t No Lie
Living The Blues: Blues Classic, 1965-1969, Masters, MCA Records, 1995
1965-1969 represented something a mini-resurgence of electric blues in the wake of the British rock groups’ infatuation with this music. The main cast of characters here is the same as on the previously reviewed CDs, "Blues Masters" and "Blues Legends". Naturally Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker do their thing. However the real treat here is “Big Mama” Thornton doing her version of “Ball and Chain". While everyone appreciated rocker Janis Joplin’s version after hearing this one again (after not hearing it for a while- Janis step back please and let “Big Mama” show what’s what). Additionally, we finally get a little of the old Cajun influence-blues with Chifton Chenier on a sizzling “Black Gal”. More on Cajun later. For now this CD is fine although I would rate as the third choice of the three being reviewed in this series.
CD REVIEW
February Is Black History Month
As those familiar with this space know I have spent a good amount of ink touting various old time blues legends that I ‘discovered’ in my youth. My intention, in part, is to introduce a new generation to this roots music but also to demonstrate a connection between this black-centered music and the struggle for black liberation that both blacks and whites can appreciate. Like virtually all forms of music that lasts more than five minutes the blues has had its ups and downs. After becoming electric and urbanized in the immediate post-World War II period it was eclipsed by the advent of rock&roll then made a comeback in the mid- 1960's with the surge of English bands that grew up on this music, and so on. Most recently there was mini-resurgence with the justifiably well-received Martin Scorsese PBS six-part blues series in 2003. A little earlier, in the mid-1990’s, there had also been a short-lived reemergence spearheaded by the ‘discovery’ of urban blues pioneer Robert Johnson’s music.
The long and short of this phenomenon is that commercial record production of this music waxed and waned reflecting that checkered history. I have, in the interest of variety for the novice, selected these CDs as a decent cross-section of blues (and its antecedents in earlier forms of roots music) as to gender, time and type. The following reviewed CDs represent first of all an attempt by record companies to meet the 1990’s surge. They also represent a hard fact of musical life. Like rock&roll the blues will never die. Praise be. Feast on these compilations.
Feeling So Good, And That Ain’t No Lie
Living The Blues: Blues Classic, 1965-1969, Masters, MCA Records, 1995
1965-1969 represented something a mini-resurgence of electric blues in the wake of the British rock groups’ infatuation with this music. The main cast of characters here is the same as on the previously reviewed CDs, "Blues Masters" and "Blues Legends". Naturally Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker do their thing. However the real treat here is “Big Mama” Thornton doing her version of “Ball and Chain". While everyone appreciated rocker Janis Joplin’s version after hearing this one again (after not hearing it for a while- Janis step back please and let “Big Mama” show what’s what). Additionally, we finally get a little of the old Cajun influence-blues with Chifton Chenier on a sizzling “Black Gal”. More on Cajun later. For now this CD is fine although I would rate as the third choice of the three being reviewed in this series.
*A Blues Potpourri-The Blues Is Dues, Part II-Every Day He May Have The Blues But You Won’t
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Willie Dixon performing his"29 Ways."
CD REVIEW
February Is Black History Month
As those familiar with this space know I have spent a good amount of ink touting various old time blues legends that I ‘discovered’ in my youth. My intention, in part, is to introduce a new generation to this roots music but also to demonstrate a connection between this black-centered music and the struggle for black liberation that both blacks and whites can appreciate. Like virtually all forms of music that lasts more than five minutes the blues has had its ups and downs. After becoming electric and urbanized in the immediate post-World War II period it was eclipsed by the advent of rock&roll then made a comeback in the mid- 1960's with the surge of English bands that grew up on this music, and so on. Most recently there was mini-resurgence with the justifiably well-received Martin Scorsese PBS six-part blues series in 2003. A little earlier, in the mid-1990’s, there had also been a short-lived reemergence spearheaded by the ‘discovery’ of urban blues pioneer Robert Johnson’s music.
The long and short of this phenomenon is that commercial record production of this music waxed and waned reflecting that checkered history. I have, in the interest of variety for the novice, selected these CDs as a decent cross-section of blues (and its antecedents in earlier forms of roots music) as to gender, time and type. The following reviewed CDs represent first of all an attempt by record companies to meet the 1990’s surge. They also represent a hard fact of musical life. Like rock&roll the blues will never die. Praise be. Feast on these compilations.
Every Day He May Have The Blues But You Won’t
Living The Blues: Blues Greats, MCA Records, 1995
If you have read my review of “Living The Blues: Blues Masters” then this compilation is an extension of that CD as to the level of talent. Very good work ,as is to be expected, by Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, the under-appreciated Otis Rush on “Double Trouble” place this CD just fraction below the previously reviewed “Blues Masters”. Additional standout work includes impresario Willie Dixon (who deserves and will receive individual review later) on his own “29 Ways”. T-Bone Walker on his “T-Bone Shuffle" (was there a better electric blues guitar player?), Little Walter (and his incredible harmonica) on “Juke” and “Driving Wheel” by Little Junior Parker.
29 Ways
Willie Dixon
I got 29 ways to make it to my baby's door
I got 29 ways to make it to my baby's door
And if she needs me bad
I can find about two or three more
I got one through the basement
Two down the hall
And when the going gets tough
I got a hole in the wall
CHORUS
I can come through the chimney like Santa Claus
Go through the window and that ain't all
A lot of good ways I don't want you to know
I even got a hole in the bedroom floor
CHORUS
I got a way through the closet behind her clothes
A way through the attic that no one knows
A master key that fits every lock
A hidden door behind the grandfather clock
CHORUS
© 1956
CD REVIEW
February Is Black History Month
As those familiar with this space know I have spent a good amount of ink touting various old time blues legends that I ‘discovered’ in my youth. My intention, in part, is to introduce a new generation to this roots music but also to demonstrate a connection between this black-centered music and the struggle for black liberation that both blacks and whites can appreciate. Like virtually all forms of music that lasts more than five minutes the blues has had its ups and downs. After becoming electric and urbanized in the immediate post-World War II period it was eclipsed by the advent of rock&roll then made a comeback in the mid- 1960's with the surge of English bands that grew up on this music, and so on. Most recently there was mini-resurgence with the justifiably well-received Martin Scorsese PBS six-part blues series in 2003. A little earlier, in the mid-1990’s, there had also been a short-lived reemergence spearheaded by the ‘discovery’ of urban blues pioneer Robert Johnson’s music.
The long and short of this phenomenon is that commercial record production of this music waxed and waned reflecting that checkered history. I have, in the interest of variety for the novice, selected these CDs as a decent cross-section of blues (and its antecedents in earlier forms of roots music) as to gender, time and type. The following reviewed CDs represent first of all an attempt by record companies to meet the 1990’s surge. They also represent a hard fact of musical life. Like rock&roll the blues will never die. Praise be. Feast on these compilations.
Every Day He May Have The Blues But You Won’t
Living The Blues: Blues Greats, MCA Records, 1995
If you have read my review of “Living The Blues: Blues Masters” then this compilation is an extension of that CD as to the level of talent. Very good work ,as is to be expected, by Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, the under-appreciated Otis Rush on “Double Trouble” place this CD just fraction below the previously reviewed “Blues Masters”. Additional standout work includes impresario Willie Dixon (who deserves and will receive individual review later) on his own “29 Ways”. T-Bone Walker on his “T-Bone Shuffle" (was there a better electric blues guitar player?), Little Walter (and his incredible harmonica) on “Juke” and “Driving Wheel” by Little Junior Parker.
29 Ways
Willie Dixon
I got 29 ways to make it to my baby's door
I got 29 ways to make it to my baby's door
And if she needs me bad
I can find about two or three more
I got one through the basement
Two down the hall
And when the going gets tough
I got a hole in the wall
CHORUS
I can come through the chimney like Santa Claus
Go through the window and that ain't all
A lot of good ways I don't want you to know
I even got a hole in the bedroom floor
CHORUS
I got a way through the closet behind her clothes
A way through the attic that no one knows
A master key that fits every lock
A hidden door behind the grandfather clock
CHORUS
© 1956
Friday, February 20, 2009
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- The Grimke Sisters- Fighters For Slavery Abolition And Women's Rights
Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century American radicals, Sarah And Angelina Grimke.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
**********
Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985
The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
By Amy Rath
"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863
Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.
Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."
The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.
This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.
Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."
The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.
In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).
The Making of a Southern Abolitionist
The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.
Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."
As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.
Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.
The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.
The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.
For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.
The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.
Splits and the Coming Storm
By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."
Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.
The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.
When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!
Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,
"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."
It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.
Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:
"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."
—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64
The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class con¬sciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
**********
Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985
The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
By Amy Rath
"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863
Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.
Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."
The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.
This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.
Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."
The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.
In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).
The Making of a Southern Abolitionist
The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.
Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."
As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.
Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.
The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.
The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.
For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.
The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.
Splits and the Coming Storm
By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."
Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.
The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.
When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!
Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,
"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."
It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.
Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:
"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."
—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64
The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class con¬sciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.
Roosevelt and the New Deal: The Last Gasp The Last Time
DVD REVIEW
FDR: American Experience, four part series, PBS, 1994
The economic news of the past several months has created a virtual cottage industry of commentators whose comparative references to the Great Depression of the 1930’s has made it almost a commonplace. Also common are comparisons of the tasks that confronted the subject of this documentary, the 32nd President of The Unites States Franklin Delano Roosevelt (hereafter FDR), and those that confront the 2008 election victor the President-elect Barack Obama, who seemingly has that same kind of broad mandate,. Thus, as is my habit, I went scurrying to find a suitable documentary that would refresh my memory about the decisive role that FDR played back then as the last gasp “savior” of the American capitalist economic system.
An added impetus to do that search was the recent passing of the legendary oral historian, Studs Terkel, whose bread and butter was to capture the memories of the generation that was most influenced by FDR’s policies has been the subject of many reviews of late by this writer. Apparently then a biographic refresher on FDR seemed to be written in the stars. I found, for a quick overview of this subject, the perfect place to start is this American Experience four- part production on the life, loves, trials, tribulations and influence of this seminal American bourgeois politician.
That said, if one is looking for an in-depth analysis of the role that FDR played in saving the capitalist system in America in the 1930’s, or the concurrent rise of the imperial presidency under his guidance, or the increased role of the federal government through its various executive agencies or the role of his “brain trust” (Rexford Tugwell, Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickles, etc.) in formulating policy then one should, and eventually must, look elsewhere. However, if one wants to capture visually the sense of the times and FDR’s (and his wife Eleanor’s, who is worthy of separate series in her own right) influence on them then this is the right address.
As is almost universally the case with American Experience productions one gets a technically very competent piece of work that moreover gets a boost here from the always welcome grave narrative skills of David McCullough, who as a historian in his own right has a grasp of the sense of such things. Of course, as always with PBS you get more than the necessary share of “talking heads” commentators who give their take on the meaning of each signpost in the long FDR trail to the presidency and beyond. Of note here is the commentary of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin whose recent book on the Lincoln presidency “Team Of Rivals” has received much notice in the lead up to the Obamiad.
And what are those signposts of FDR’s life that might have given an inkling that he was up to the task of the times? Other than the question of class (in his case upper class, old New York money) FDR’s appetite to be president is not an unfamiliar one, if somewhat unusual from someone of that set at the turn of the 20th century. Except for this little twist in FDR’s case, when one’s relative, if a distant one, was an idolized Teddy Roosevelt who was President as he entered into manhood. That, at least as presented in this film, is a key source of FDR’s presidential “fire in the belly” drive.
The unfolding of the saga of FDR’s “fire in the belly” ambitions takes up the first two parts of the series. Here we find out the early family history, the various schoolboy pursuits, the private schools, the obligatory Ivy League education, the courtship of the sublime distant cousin (and Teddy favorite) Eleanor, his first stab at elective office in New York, his apprenticeship in Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, his little extramarital love affairs, his selection as Vice Presidential candidate in 1920, the seemingly political career-ending bout with polio and the fight against its physical restrictions, the successful efforts to hide this from the public, thereafter the successful return to politics as Governor of New York and, finally, the nomination and election as the 32nd President of The United States. Plenty of material for thought here.
But that is only prelude. FDR faced a capitalist system that had lost like today, although for different specific reasons, its moorings and was in need of deep repair (or overthrow). It is not unfair, I do not believe, to say as I have said in the headline of this entry that FDR’s effort was the last gasp effort of capitalism to survive (although his fellow capitalists and their intellectual, political and media hangers-on shortsightedly called him a “traitor to his class”). The most glaring contrast in the whole documentary is that between an overwhelmed President Hoover’s abject defeatism and FDR’s strident confidence (a like comparison could be made, at least of the defeated presidential part, with the current Bush today).
Although we now know that the ultimate way out of that Great Depression was World War II in 1933 FDR applied, piecemeal and as triage, a whole series of economic programs to jump start the system, most famously the National Recovery Act (NRA, later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). FDR’s first two terms were basically a fight to find ways, virtually any ways to keep the economy moving and get people back to work. He was running out of time and the public’s patience when the rumblings of WWII came on to the horizon in Europe.
The hard-bitten fight by FDR to get America into the European War against a public opinion that was essentially isolationist, mainly as a result of the WWI experience, takes up the last part of the series. The various efforts to aid England are highlighted here, including the various visits by and with British war time leader Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the fight to get America militarily mobilized including imposition of a military draft, the various conferences of the Big Three (the Soviet Union being the third) to carve up the post war world and FDR’s final illness round out the story. In our house when I was a kid the mere mention of the name FDR was said, by one and all, with some reverence for his efforts to pull America out of the Great Depression and for guiding it to victory in war. For a long time this writer has not had that youthful reverence but if you want to see why my parents and why I as a youth whispered that name with reverence watch here.
FDR: American Experience, four part series, PBS, 1994
The economic news of the past several months has created a virtual cottage industry of commentators whose comparative references to the Great Depression of the 1930’s has made it almost a commonplace. Also common are comparisons of the tasks that confronted the subject of this documentary, the 32nd President of The Unites States Franklin Delano Roosevelt (hereafter FDR), and those that confront the 2008 election victor the President-elect Barack Obama, who seemingly has that same kind of broad mandate,. Thus, as is my habit, I went scurrying to find a suitable documentary that would refresh my memory about the decisive role that FDR played back then as the last gasp “savior” of the American capitalist economic system.
An added impetus to do that search was the recent passing of the legendary oral historian, Studs Terkel, whose bread and butter was to capture the memories of the generation that was most influenced by FDR’s policies has been the subject of many reviews of late by this writer. Apparently then a biographic refresher on FDR seemed to be written in the stars. I found, for a quick overview of this subject, the perfect place to start is this American Experience four- part production on the life, loves, trials, tribulations and influence of this seminal American bourgeois politician.
That said, if one is looking for an in-depth analysis of the role that FDR played in saving the capitalist system in America in the 1930’s, or the concurrent rise of the imperial presidency under his guidance, or the increased role of the federal government through its various executive agencies or the role of his “brain trust” (Rexford Tugwell, Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickles, etc.) in formulating policy then one should, and eventually must, look elsewhere. However, if one wants to capture visually the sense of the times and FDR’s (and his wife Eleanor’s, who is worthy of separate series in her own right) influence on them then this is the right address.
As is almost universally the case with American Experience productions one gets a technically very competent piece of work that moreover gets a boost here from the always welcome grave narrative skills of David McCullough, who as a historian in his own right has a grasp of the sense of such things. Of course, as always with PBS you get more than the necessary share of “talking heads” commentators who give their take on the meaning of each signpost in the long FDR trail to the presidency and beyond. Of note here is the commentary of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin whose recent book on the Lincoln presidency “Team Of Rivals” has received much notice in the lead up to the Obamiad.
And what are those signposts of FDR’s life that might have given an inkling that he was up to the task of the times? Other than the question of class (in his case upper class, old New York money) FDR’s appetite to be president is not an unfamiliar one, if somewhat unusual from someone of that set at the turn of the 20th century. Except for this little twist in FDR’s case, when one’s relative, if a distant one, was an idolized Teddy Roosevelt who was President as he entered into manhood. That, at least as presented in this film, is a key source of FDR’s presidential “fire in the belly” drive.
The unfolding of the saga of FDR’s “fire in the belly” ambitions takes up the first two parts of the series. Here we find out the early family history, the various schoolboy pursuits, the private schools, the obligatory Ivy League education, the courtship of the sublime distant cousin (and Teddy favorite) Eleanor, his first stab at elective office in New York, his apprenticeship in Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, his little extramarital love affairs, his selection as Vice Presidential candidate in 1920, the seemingly political career-ending bout with polio and the fight against its physical restrictions, the successful efforts to hide this from the public, thereafter the successful return to politics as Governor of New York and, finally, the nomination and election as the 32nd President of The United States. Plenty of material for thought here.
But that is only prelude. FDR faced a capitalist system that had lost like today, although for different specific reasons, its moorings and was in need of deep repair (or overthrow). It is not unfair, I do not believe, to say as I have said in the headline of this entry that FDR’s effort was the last gasp effort of capitalism to survive (although his fellow capitalists and their intellectual, political and media hangers-on shortsightedly called him a “traitor to his class”). The most glaring contrast in the whole documentary is that between an overwhelmed President Hoover’s abject defeatism and FDR’s strident confidence (a like comparison could be made, at least of the defeated presidential part, with the current Bush today).
Although we now know that the ultimate way out of that Great Depression was World War II in 1933 FDR applied, piecemeal and as triage, a whole series of economic programs to jump start the system, most famously the National Recovery Act (NRA, later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). FDR’s first two terms were basically a fight to find ways, virtually any ways to keep the economy moving and get people back to work. He was running out of time and the public’s patience when the rumblings of WWII came on to the horizon in Europe.
The hard-bitten fight by FDR to get America into the European War against a public opinion that was essentially isolationist, mainly as a result of the WWI experience, takes up the last part of the series. The various efforts to aid England are highlighted here, including the various visits by and with British war time leader Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the fight to get America militarily mobilized including imposition of a military draft, the various conferences of the Big Three (the Soviet Union being the third) to carve up the post war world and FDR’s final illness round out the story. In our house when I was a kid the mere mention of the name FDR was said, by one and all, with some reverence for his efforts to pull America out of the Great Depression and for guiding it to victory in war. For a long time this writer has not had that youthful reverence but if you want to see why my parents and why I as a youth whispered that name with reverence watch here.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Obama Throws Down The Gauntlet On Afghanistan Troop Escalation- The Anti-War Movement Is Now On Notice
Commentary
Okay, the Obama “honeymoon” with the anti-imperialist section of the anti-war movement is officially over, or it should be. Any regular reader of this space knows that this writer had not, in any case, granted the new Commander-In-Chief any such “honeymoon” as a matter of course due the extreme distance in our respective political perspectives, but today he speaks to those who took Obama’s anti-war positions as good coin during last years run up to the presidential elections. Those who still want to give “Brother” Obama some additional 'quality' honeymoon time can wait until future events unfold on the slippery slope for those who venture in that god-forsaken part of the world.
And to those serious anti-war militants I will be short ands sweet as we have been down this road before. The news that Obama has given authorization for an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan is really old news. That Obama intended to make Afghanistan his war has been an ‘open’ secret for a while. What is interesting about this recent announcement is that the actual forces (mainly Marine and Army units) to be deployed later this year were originally scheduled to take a rotation in Iraq. Thus, by a rather nice sleigh-of- hand on his part Obama is able to draw down troops in Iraq and escalate their number in Afghanistan. Nice work. But again, if you had been paying even casual attention, this deployment was already laid out in last year’ campaign rhetoric. Here is one time at least that a bourgeois politician dose what he says he wants to do.
But that is neither here nor there for our purposes. Only a raw political neophyte would be shocked by such maneuvering. What is necessary to understand, even for those just mentioned political neophytes, is that this should be a wake up call for those who thought that Obama was going to dismantle the imperial war machine, turn swords in ploughshares or some such. You now have your notice. I will finish up by reposting a recent entry (Vote NO (With Both Hands) On The Obama Afghan War Budget):
“….. President Obama has already authorized an ‘intermediate’ troop escalation with more planned. He, moreover, has very publicly declared that Afghanistan, come hell or high water, is his signature war and has made Afghan policy a high priority. I have argued previously my belief that Obama intends to stake his administration, if not his place in history, on Afghanistan. In short, although he has proven he can raise fantastic sums of money for himself, since he is not going to pay for it personally he is coming to you looking for the loot. As the beginning of anti-war political wisdom therefore-“just say NO”. No money. Nada. I would urge every anti-war militant to sent e-mails, letters (does anyone do that anymore?) or call your representative and tell them the same thing. But here is the real anti-war ‘skinny’. Let’s get ready to, once again, go back into the streets and shout (and shout at least as loudly as we did at the unlamented Bush), Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan!”
Okay, the Obama “honeymoon” with the anti-imperialist section of the anti-war movement is officially over, or it should be. Any regular reader of this space knows that this writer had not, in any case, granted the new Commander-In-Chief any such “honeymoon” as a matter of course due the extreme distance in our respective political perspectives, but today he speaks to those who took Obama’s anti-war positions as good coin during last years run up to the presidential elections. Those who still want to give “Brother” Obama some additional 'quality' honeymoon time can wait until future events unfold on the slippery slope for those who venture in that god-forsaken part of the world.
And to those serious anti-war militants I will be short ands sweet as we have been down this road before. The news that Obama has given authorization for an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan is really old news. That Obama intended to make Afghanistan his war has been an ‘open’ secret for a while. What is interesting about this recent announcement is that the actual forces (mainly Marine and Army units) to be deployed later this year were originally scheduled to take a rotation in Iraq. Thus, by a rather nice sleigh-of- hand on his part Obama is able to draw down troops in Iraq and escalate their number in Afghanistan. Nice work. But again, if you had been paying even casual attention, this deployment was already laid out in last year’ campaign rhetoric. Here is one time at least that a bourgeois politician dose what he says he wants to do.
But that is neither here nor there for our purposes. Only a raw political neophyte would be shocked by such maneuvering. What is necessary to understand, even for those just mentioned political neophytes, is that this should be a wake up call for those who thought that Obama was going to dismantle the imperial war machine, turn swords in ploughshares or some such. You now have your notice. I will finish up by reposting a recent entry (Vote NO (With Both Hands) On The Obama Afghan War Budget):
“….. President Obama has already authorized an ‘intermediate’ troop escalation with more planned. He, moreover, has very publicly declared that Afghanistan, come hell or high water, is his signature war and has made Afghan policy a high priority. I have argued previously my belief that Obama intends to stake his administration, if not his place in history, on Afghanistan. In short, although he has proven he can raise fantastic sums of money for himself, since he is not going to pay for it personally he is coming to you looking for the loot. As the beginning of anti-war political wisdom therefore-“just say NO”. No money. Nada. I would urge every anti-war militant to sent e-mails, letters (does anyone do that anymore?) or call your representative and tell them the same thing. But here is the real anti-war ‘skinny’. Let’s get ready to, once again, go back into the streets and shout (and shout at least as loudly as we did at the unlamented Bush), Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All American/Allied Troops From Afghanistan!”
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
"Freight Train" Coming Home- The Picking Of Elizabeth Cotten
DVD Review
February Is Black History Month
Elizabeth Cotton: In Concert: 1969, 1975 &1980, Elizabeth Cotten, Vestapol Productions, 2004
Most of the points that I made in a previous review, the first paragraph of which is reposted below, of Elizabeth Cotten’s CD album for Folkways apply here as well.
“There is something about these North Carolina style guitar pickers that is very appealing. And here I am thinking not only of the artist under review, the legendary Elizabeth Cotten, but also another female picker extraordinaire Etta Baker, as well. It is different from the Delta pick, for sure. They pick cleanly, simply but with verve. Ms. Cotten shows her stuff here on her first album from Folkways. Here we have the folk classic, no super-classic, “Freight Train” that was a rite of passage for every one from Peter, Paul and Mary to Dave Van Ronk to Tom Rush to record in the early 1960’s. Along with that tune we have some nice renditions of “I Don’t Love Nobody” and a few medleys like “Sweet Bye and Bye” combined with “What A Friend You Have in Jesus” (that I believe Blind Willie Johnson first recorded, or variation of it at least). Listen away but also save your money up to get the album with “Shake Sugaree’’ (get the one with her granddaughter singing along) on it. That’s the ticket.”
The same can be said here of Ms. Cotten’s work as Stefan Grossman, who has produced several other videos featuring legendary country blues singers and instrumentalists, grouped together several concerts and/or interviews that Ms. Cotton gave in 1969, 1975 and 1980. Moreover, this subtly engaging and seemingly modest performer is fairly forthcoming in describing her long struggle to become one of the great guitarists, male or female, of this genre. Parts of this material are slow, parts are repetitious (especially of repeated versions of “Freight Train”) but overall one can learn about folk history. Or about guitar playing for those so inclined. At the end of the last concert where she does a little different rendition of "Shake, Sugaree” with verve is worth the price of admission here.
February Is Black History Month
Elizabeth Cotton: In Concert: 1969, 1975 &1980, Elizabeth Cotten, Vestapol Productions, 2004
Most of the points that I made in a previous review, the first paragraph of which is reposted below, of Elizabeth Cotten’s CD album for Folkways apply here as well.
“There is something about these North Carolina style guitar pickers that is very appealing. And here I am thinking not only of the artist under review, the legendary Elizabeth Cotten, but also another female picker extraordinaire Etta Baker, as well. It is different from the Delta pick, for sure. They pick cleanly, simply but with verve. Ms. Cotten shows her stuff here on her first album from Folkways. Here we have the folk classic, no super-classic, “Freight Train” that was a rite of passage for every one from Peter, Paul and Mary to Dave Van Ronk to Tom Rush to record in the early 1960’s. Along with that tune we have some nice renditions of “I Don’t Love Nobody” and a few medleys like “Sweet Bye and Bye” combined with “What A Friend You Have in Jesus” (that I believe Blind Willie Johnson first recorded, or variation of it at least). Listen away but also save your money up to get the album with “Shake Sugaree’’ (get the one with her granddaughter singing along) on it. That’s the ticket.”
The same can be said here of Ms. Cotten’s work as Stefan Grossman, who has produced several other videos featuring legendary country blues singers and instrumentalists, grouped together several concerts and/or interviews that Ms. Cotton gave in 1969, 1975 and 1980. Moreover, this subtly engaging and seemingly modest performer is fairly forthcoming in describing her long struggle to become one of the great guitarists, male or female, of this genre. Parts of this material are slow, parts are repetitious (especially of repeated versions of “Freight Train”) but overall one can learn about folk history. Or about guitar playing for those so inclined. At the end of the last concert where she does a little different rendition of "Shake, Sugaree” with verve is worth the price of admission here.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Ar'n't I A Woman?- Female Slaves In The Ante-Bellum South
BOOK REVIEW
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women’s History Month
Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves In The Plantation South, Deborah Gray White, W.W. Norton&Co. New York, 1985
I have mentioned more than once in this space, dedicated as it is to looking at material from American history and culture that may not be well-known or covered in the traditional canon, that the last couple of scholarly generations have done a great deal to enhance our knowledge of American micro-history. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the study of American slavery and its effects on subsequent history for the society and for the former slaves. The book under review represents one such effort in bringing the previously muddled and incomplete story of the triply-oppressed black women (race, gender and class) to the surface.
As the author, Deborah Gray White, has pointed out in her introduction the general subject of the American slave trade, its place in the culture and the general effects of plantation life on the slave has been covered rather fully since the 1950's and 1960's. However, she set as her task filling the gap left by the mainly male historians (Elkins, Genovese, Apteker,et. al) who tended to treat the plantation slave population as an undifferentiated mass. Ms. Gray White undertook to correct that situation with this 1985 initial attempt to amplify the historical record. Although other, later researches have expanded this field (as a sub-set of women's history, at the very least) this is definitely the place to start. I might add that copious footnotes and bibliography give plenty of ammunition for any argument that the female slave has been under-appreciated, under-studied and misunderstood within the context of the historical dispute of the effects of slavery on the structure of the black family and black cultural life.
Ms. Gray White set up a five pronged attack on the then current (up to 1985) conceptions about the role of the female slave: the always `hot button' and continuing controversy over her role as sexual "Jezebel" or asexual "Mother Earth" nurturing Mammy: her central economic role in the upkeep of the plantation and of the slave quarters: her critical role as "breeder" of children in order to maintain the laboring population and slave-owners' profits; her relationship to other females on the plantation and the division of labor among them by age, child-bearing status and health; and, the myths or misconceptions about black families, marriage and culture.
As part of Ms. Gray White's argument she has addressed the thorny issue of the female slave as a sexual object (to both white and black men) on the one hand and her critical role of 'nurturer' to the next generation of slaves on the other. This is a tension that in many ways has not been resolved even in post-slavery times and so was worthy of her attention (and ours today, as well). Moreover, this ambivalence flows over into the kinds of work the female slave was expected to perform at various stages of her life as a "breeder" and the differential treatment she received by the slave-owners at various stages of that cycle. Ms. Gray White also has some interesting things to say about female social solidarity (and rivalries) in the workplace and in the cabins. The age old question of social hierarchy between "house" and "field" slaves also gets her close attention.
Additionally, Ms. Gray covers a then relatively new topic (brought about by male historian's conception of the female slave as dominating the family structure and therefore producing the stereotypical "Sapphire"). Although she has not provided any really new information about the economic and social structure of plantation life (which drove Southern society in the ante-bellum period in everything from national politics to "correct" racial attitudes among non-slave-owning whites) her great achievement is to give voice to the differences between male and female slaves that had not been previously appreciated.
Perhaps the most important scholarly achievement in this little book however is her challenge to the orthodoxy about the female dominance of black family life on the plantation and its effects on post-slavery life. This additional `hot-button' issue gets fully outlined here. To seek further insight in this issue today look at other sources to see how the arguments have continued not only as a question of historical importance but national social policy.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women’s History Month
Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves In The Plantation South, Deborah Gray White, W.W. Norton&Co. New York, 1985
I have mentioned more than once in this space, dedicated as it is to looking at material from American history and culture that may not be well-known or covered in the traditional canon, that the last couple of scholarly generations have done a great deal to enhance our knowledge of American micro-history. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the study of American slavery and its effects on subsequent history for the society and for the former slaves. The book under review represents one such effort in bringing the previously muddled and incomplete story of the triply-oppressed black women (race, gender and class) to the surface.
As the author, Deborah Gray White, has pointed out in her introduction the general subject of the American slave trade, its place in the culture and the general effects of plantation life on the slave has been covered rather fully since the 1950's and 1960's. However, she set as her task filling the gap left by the mainly male historians (Elkins, Genovese, Apteker,et. al) who tended to treat the plantation slave population as an undifferentiated mass. Ms. Gray White undertook to correct that situation with this 1985 initial attempt to amplify the historical record. Although other, later researches have expanded this field (as a sub-set of women's history, at the very least) this is definitely the place to start. I might add that copious footnotes and bibliography give plenty of ammunition for any argument that the female slave has been under-appreciated, under-studied and misunderstood within the context of the historical dispute of the effects of slavery on the structure of the black family and black cultural life.
Ms. Gray White set up a five pronged attack on the then current (up to 1985) conceptions about the role of the female slave: the always `hot button' and continuing controversy over her role as sexual "Jezebel" or asexual "Mother Earth" nurturing Mammy: her central economic role in the upkeep of the plantation and of the slave quarters: her critical role as "breeder" of children in order to maintain the laboring population and slave-owners' profits; her relationship to other females on the plantation and the division of labor among them by age, child-bearing status and health; and, the myths or misconceptions about black families, marriage and culture.
As part of Ms. Gray White's argument she has addressed the thorny issue of the female slave as a sexual object (to both white and black men) on the one hand and her critical role of 'nurturer' to the next generation of slaves on the other. This is a tension that in many ways has not been resolved even in post-slavery times and so was worthy of her attention (and ours today, as well). Moreover, this ambivalence flows over into the kinds of work the female slave was expected to perform at various stages of her life as a "breeder" and the differential treatment she received by the slave-owners at various stages of that cycle. Ms. Gray White also has some interesting things to say about female social solidarity (and rivalries) in the workplace and in the cabins. The age old question of social hierarchy between "house" and "field" slaves also gets her close attention.
Additionally, Ms. Gray covers a then relatively new topic (brought about by male historian's conception of the female slave as dominating the family structure and therefore producing the stereotypical "Sapphire"). Although she has not provided any really new information about the economic and social structure of plantation life (which drove Southern society in the ante-bellum period in everything from national politics to "correct" racial attitudes among non-slave-owning whites) her great achievement is to give voice to the differences between male and female slaves that had not been previously appreciated.
Perhaps the most important scholarly achievement in this little book however is her challenge to the orthodoxy about the female dominance of black family life on the plantation and its effects on post-slavery life. This additional `hot-button' issue gets fully outlined here. To seek further insight in this issue today look at other sources to see how the arguments have continued not only as a question of historical importance but national social policy.
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