Rebellious Daughters of History #42

by ,,Judy Cox

Black America Rising: Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896 – 1977)

Lola Shirley Graham Jr. was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1896, one of six children. Her father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister. In June 1915, Shirley graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Washington.

She married her first husband, Shadrach T. McCants, in 1921. Their son Robert was born in 1923, followed by David in 1925. In 1926, Shirley moved to Paris, France, to study music composition at the Sorbonne to provide a better life for her children.

In 1931, Shirley entered Oberlin College and earned her B.A. In 1932, she composed an opera, ‘Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro’. She used music and dance to express the story of Africans’ journey to the North American colonies, through slavery and to freedom. The opera attracted 10,000 people to its premiere at the Cleveland Stadium.

Shirley and Shadrach divorced in 1927. In 1934, she went on to do graduate work in music, completing a master’s degree in 1935. In 1936, Shirley was appointed director of the Chicago Negro Unit of the Federal Theater Project.

In the late 1940s, Shirley became a member of ‘Sojourners for Truth and Justice’ – an African-American organisation working for global women’s liberation. She also joined the American Communist Party and became a key organiser in the ‘Rosa Lee Ingram’ campaign. Rosa was an African American sharecropper and widowed mother of 12. In 1948, Rosa and her two of her teenage sons were sentenced to the electric chair after a fight with a white neighbour who had sexually harassed Rosa. He was not charged with any offence. The death sentence was handed down by an all-white jury and scheduled to take place less than three weeks later. But the country erupted in protests against the trial, led by the ‘Sojourners for Truth and Justice’. The Ingram family’s sentences were commuted to life in April 1948. Further campaigning saw them released ten years later.

Shirley turned to decolonising literature by writing biographies of leading African-American and world leaders such as Paul Robeson, Kwame Nkrumah, Phillis Wheatley, and Booker T. Washington aimed at young readers. She won a prize for ‘There Once Was a Slave’ (1947), a novel about Frederick Douglass.

In 1951, she married the great activist W. E. B. Du Bois, the second marriage for both. They later emigrated to Ghana, where he died in 1963. She met Malcolm X in Ghana in 1964. In 1967, Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah, was overthrown and Shirley moved first to Egypt and then to Tanzania.

Shirley Graham Du Bois died of breast cancer on March 27, 1977, aged 80, in Beijing, China.

Katharine Chidley and the English Revolution

Katherine Chidley was born around 1598. In 1616 she married Daniel Chidley, a tailor of Shrewsbury. She gave birth to eight children. In 1626 she and her husband were prosecuted for non-attendance at church. She was also reported for refusing “to come to be churched after childbirth”.

The family moved to London and mixed with radicals. Katherine become a preacher in Stepney, east London. She also began writing religious pamphlets which challenged the authority of the church hierarchy, suggesting that the humblest members of society, were better qualified to create churches than “ill-meaning priests”. She argued that “a husband had no more right to control his wife’s conscience than the magistrate had to control his.”

In January 1642, civil broke out between parliament and royalist forces led by Charles I.

Katherine associated with the Levellers, the radicals with the parliamentary side who demanded democracy, and end to censorship, the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords and an end to taxation of the poor.

In February, 1649, leveller leader John Lilburne was arrested for protesting against Cromwell’s military government. Katherine organised Britain’s first ever all-women petition demanding his release with 10,000 signatures. Women protested outside parliament and faced down soldiers, who pointed muskets at them, to get the petition presented to the House of Commons on 25th April, 1649.

Parliament’s response was to tell the women, “The matter you petition about is of an higher concernment then you understand therefore you are desired to goe home, and looke after your owne businesses, and meddle with your housewifery”.

Daniel Chidley died in 1649 and Katherine Chidley took over her his haberdashery business.

In 1653 John Lilburne was again on trial, this time for his life. Twelve women, led by Katherine again confronted Parliament with a petition , signed by 6,000 women. They boldly knocked on the door, but were sent away. An MP told them that parliament could not recognise their petition, “they being women and many of them wives, so that the Law tooke no notice of them”.

However, John Lilburne was acquitted to popular rejoicing. This was the last heard of Katherine although her son Samuel continued her fight for democracy.

Rebellious Daughters of History #41

by Glyn Robbins (guest contribution) and ,,Judy Cox

Shirley Chisholm (1924 – 2005)

Shirley Chisholm was a trail-blazer for insurgent US politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She was the first black woman elected to Congress, returned by the people of her native working class Brooklyn neighbourhood in 1968. Four years later, she became the first black woman to run for the US Presidency. Her candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination was a long-shot, but as she said, “someone had to go first” and it represented a significant moment in the fight for equality that continues today in the shape of #BlackLivesMatter.

Shirley Chisholm was, first and last, a teacher. The daughter of poor Caribbean immigrants to the US, she was sent to live with her grandmother in Barbados as a young child, where she excelled academically. After returning to the country of her birth, Chisholm started a successful career in education, but also developed an interest in politics, partly inherited from her father, a labourer and follower of Marcus Garvey.

Chisholm resisted playing the establishment political game. Her autobiography is called “Unbought and Unbossed”. She faced institutional racism and sexism in Congress, recalling sitting on her own in the Capital Hill dining room and being allocated to committees with little influence. When she sought the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, she came under pressure to withdraw for more moderate candidates, much as Bernie Sanders has. Like Sanders, her campaign was snuffed out by the party machine, but Chisholm continued to champion progressive causes like Palestinian and abortion rights and opposition to apartheid South Africa and the Vietnam War. This marked her out as an enemy to the corrupt Nixon regime, who smeared her with false accusations.

Although Shirley Chisholm’s life is little remembered, particularly outside the US, that could be about to change. The actress Viola Davis is planning a biopic of the woman who said “racism is invisible because it’s so normal”

Bina Das (1911–1986)

Bina was an Indian revolutionary and nationalist from West Bengal. She was the daughter of a well-known Brahmo teacher, Beni Madhab Das and a social worker, Sarala Devi. Her elder sister Kalyani Das (Bhattacharyee) was also a freedom fighter.

Bina was a student of St. John’s Diocesan Girls’ Higher Secondary School

Bina Das was a member of Chhatri Sangha, a semi-revolutionary organisation for women in Kolkata. On 6 February 1932, she attempted to assassinate the Bengal Governor Stanley Jackson, in the Convocation Hall of the University of Calcutta. The revolver was supplied by another freedom fighter Kamala Das Gupta. She fired five shots but failed to kill him. She was sentenced to nine years in prison.

After her early release in 1939, Bina joined the Congress party. In 1942, she participated in the Quit India movement and was imprisoned again from 1942–45. From 1946–47, she was a member of the Bengal Provincial Legislative Assembly and from 1947–51 she was a member of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly. In 1947, she married Jatish Chandra Bhaumik, an Indian independence movement activist.

Her sister edited Kalyani Bhattacharjee a book called ‘Bengal Speaks’, published in 1944, and dedicated it to her.

She won the Padma Shri award in 1960 for her “Social Work”. In 2012, she and Pritilata Waddedar were conferred their certificates of merit posthumously.
After the death of her husband, she led a lonely life in Rishikesh and died in anonymity. Her body was recovered from the roadside in 26 December 1986. It took police a month to identity her.