Sojourners for Truth and Justice was a radical civil rights organization led by African-American women from 1951 to 1952. [1] It was led by activists such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Charlotta Bass.
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Sojourners for Truth and Justice was a radical civil rights organization led by African-American women from 1951 to 1952. [1] It was led by activists such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Charlotta Bass.
In 1951, a group of 14 African-American women leaders issued "a call to Negro women to convene in Washington, D.C. for a Sojourn for Truth and Justice" to protest government attacks on sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, who was also an historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author and editor. [2] In less than two weeks, more than 132 women from 14 states responded to the call. [2]
The Sojourners for Truth and Justice held their inaugural meeting in Washington, D.C., from September 29 - October 1, 1951. [3] The 1951 founding of the group was inspired by a 1950 poem written by Beah Richards, "A Black Woman Speaks of White Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of Peace." [4]
Invoking the tradition of radical black women like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, Sojourners for Truth and Justice mobilized "black women against Jim Crow and U.S. Cold War domestic and foreign policy". [1] The only group on the Communist Left led by African-American women, Sojourners for Truth and Justice's members included newspaper editor Charlotta Bass, Angie Dickerson and Shirley Graham Du Bois, activist Dorothy Hunton, Louise Thompson Patterson, the young poet and actor Beulah Richardson, and writer Eslanda Goode Robeson.
In addition to their defense of prominent Black Left intellectuals and activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Claudia Jones, Sojourners for Truth and Justice organized to free Rosa Lee Ingram, the widowed mother of 12 who was sentenced to death for shooting a white man who had attempted to rape her. [5] They also organized in support of W. Alphaeus Hunton, executive director of the Council on African Affairs (CAA) and editor of the CAA's publication, New Africa , who had been imprisoned for his affiliations with the Communist Left. [6] and Paul Robeson whose passport had been confiscated by the Justice Department in 1950. [1]
Sojourners for Truth and Justice provides us with deep insight on the impact that black Communist women had on leftist leading movements throughout the early 1950s. [7] "Erik S. McDuffie an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)", mentions how the Sojourners for Truth and Justice garnered political ties towards the Communist party in Russia.
Sojourners for Truth and Justice existed for a year and helped to articulate a Black Left Feminism that, in historian Erik S. McDuffie's words, "paid special attention to the intersectional, systemic nature of African-American women’s oppression and understood their struggle for dignity and freedom in global terms." [1] In the repressive climate of the Cold War, Sojourners for Truth and Justice envisioned a political movement that understood race, gender, and class as being central to struggles for equality and justice, in biographer Carole Boyce Davies's words, "extending far beyond the narrow gendered formulations that appeared later in the mainstream feminist movement." [2]
Triple oppression, also called double jeopardy, Jane Crow, or triple exploitation, is a theory developed by black socialists in the United States, such as Claudia Jones. The theory states that a connection exists between various types of oppression, specifically classism, racism, and sexism. It hypothesizes that all three types of oppression need to be overcome at once.
Beulah Elizabeth Richardson, known professionally as Beah Richards and Bea Richards, was an American actress of stage, screen, and television. She was also a poet, playwright, author and activist.
Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.
The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was a United States civil rights organization, formed in 1946 at a national conference for radicals and disbanded in 1956. It succeeded the International Labor Defense, the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, and the National Negro Congress, serving as a defense organization. Beginning about 1948, it became involved in representing African Americans sentenced to death and other highly prominent cases, in part to highlight racial injustice in the United States. After Rosa Lee Ingram and her two teenage sons were sentenced in Georgia, the CRC conducted a national appeals campaign on their behalf, their first for African Americans.
We Charge Genocide is a paper accusing the United States government of genocide based on the UN Genocide Convention. This paper was written by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) and presented to the United Nations at meetings in Paris in December 1951.
Charlotta Amanda Spears Bass was an American educator, newspaper publisher-editor, and civil rights activist. She also focused on various other issues such as housing rights, voting rights, and labor rights, as well as police brutality and harassment. Bass is believed to be the first African-American woman to own and operate a newspaper in the United States; she published the California Eagle from 1912 until 1951. In 1952, Bass became the first African-American woman nominated for Vice President, as a candidate of the Progressive Party.
Louise Alone Thompson Patterson was a prominent American social activist and college professor. Patterson's early experiences of isolation and persecution on the West Coast had a profound impact on her later activism. She recognized the ways in which racism and discrimination affected individuals and communities and dedicated her life to challenging these systems of oppression. Her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, a period of intellectual and cultural awakening in African American communities, allowed her to connect with other artists and activists who were similarly committed to social justice. In addition to her notable contributions to civil rights activism, Thompson Patterson was also recognized as one of the pioneering Black women to be admitted to the University of California at Berkeley.
Claudia Vera Jones was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the United States, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and Black nationalist, adopting the name Jones as "self-protective disinformation". Due to the political persecution of Communists in the US, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. Upon arriving in the UK, she immediately joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and would remain a member for the rest of her life. She then founded Britain's first major Black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, in 1958, and played a central role in founding the Notting Hill Carnival, the second-largest annual carnival in the world.
Eunice Roberta Hunton Carter was an American lawyer. She was one of New York's first female African-American lawyers and one of the first African-American prosecutors in the United States. She was active in the Pan-African Congress and in United Nations committees to advance the status of women in the world. She led a massive prostitution racketeering investigation, building the case and strategy that allowed New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey to successfully charge Mafioso kingpin Charles "Lucky" Luciano with compulsory prostitution.
The All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) is a socialist political party founded by Kwame Nkrumah and organized in Conakry, Guinea in 1968. The party expanded to the United States in 1972 and claims to have recruited members from 33 countries. According to the party, global membership in the party is "in the hundreds".
The Council on African Affairs (CAA), until 1941 called the International Committee on African Affairs (ICAA), was a volunteer organization founded in 1937 in the United States. It emerged as the leading voice of anti-colonialism and Pan-Africanism in the United States and internationally before Cold War anti-communism and liberalism created too much strife among members; the organization split in 1955. The split was also precipitated by co-founder Max Yergan's abandonment of left-wing politics; he advocated colonial rule in Africa.
Gerald Horne is an American historian who holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.
Esther Victoria Cooper Jackson was an American civil rights activist, social worker, and communist activist. She worked with Shirley Graham Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Strong, and Louis E. Burnham, and was one of the founding editors of the magazine Freedomways, a theoretical, political and literary journal published from 1961 to 1985. She also served as organizational and executive secretary at the Southern Negro Youth Congress.
Angie Dickerson was a New York-based American tenants' rights organizer involved in the Communist Party who was under surveillance by the FBI. She was one of the members of Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a leftist, black feminist organization formed in 1951.
Rosa Lee Ingram was an African-American sharecropper and widowed mother of 12 children in Georgia, who was at the center of one of the most explosive capital punishment cases in U.S. history. In the 1940s, she became an icon for the civil rights and social justice movement.
Addie Waites Hunton was an African-American suffragist, race and gender activist, writer, political organizer, and educator. In 1889, Hunton became the first black woman to graduate from Spencerian College of Commerce. She worked for the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), served as the national organizer for the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) from 1906 to 1910, and served in the U.S. Army during World War I. Hunton was a regular participant in the work of the Equal Suffrage League.
Carole Boyce Davies is a Caribbean-American professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University, the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones (2008) and Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), as well as editor of several critical anthologies in African and Caribbean literature. She is currently the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, an endowed chair named after the 9th president of Cornell University. Among several other awards, she was the recipient of two major awards, both in 2017: the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York State African Studies Association.
Freedom was a monthly newspaper focused on African-American issues published from 1950 to 1955. The publication was associated primarily with the internationally renowned singer, actor and then officially disfavored activist Paul Robeson, whose column, with his photograph, ran on most of its front pages. Freedom's motto was: "Where one is enslaved, all are in chains!" The newspaper has been described as "the most visible African American Left cultural institution during the early 1950s." In another characterization, "Freedom paper was basically an attempt by a small group of black activists, most of them Communists, to provide Robeson with a base in Harlem and a means of reaching his public... The paper offered more coverage of the labor movement than nearly any other publication, particularly of the left-led unions that were expelled from the CIO in the late 1940s... [It] encouraged its African American readership to identify its struggles with anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Freedom gave extensive publicity to... the struggle against apartheid."
Louis Everett Burnham was an African-American activist and journalist. From his college days, and continuing through adulthood, he was involved in activities emphasizing racial equality, through various left-wing organizations, campaigns and publications in both the northern and southern United States, particularly in New York City and Birmingham, Alabama.
Alphaeus Hunton Jr. (1903–1970) was a civil rights activist. He was executive director of the Council on African Affairs.
sojourners for truth and justice.
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