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.

Rebellious Daughters of History #40

by ,,Judy Cox

America Rising: Charlene Alexander Mitchell (1930)

Born in Cincinnati in 1930 in Ohio, Charlene migrated with her working-class family to Chicago. During the World War II, she grew up in the Frances Cabrini Housing Rowhouses and took classes at nearby Moody Bible Institutes.

When she was just 7, Charlene’s mother was ill so Charlene had to take food to her labour-activist father in prison. After several terrifying bus transfers, she arrived late and had to argue with guards to be allowed to see her dad. She later recalled, “I probably have been trying to be an organiser most of my life,” Charlene recalled in 1995

In 1943, at the age of 13, Charlene joined black and white teenagers in picketing segregated theatres and bowling allies. Charlene joined the American Youth for Democracy which staged sit-ins in ‘whites-only’ areas.

Charlene joined the Communist Party in 1946 aged 16. In 1955, she moved to Los Angeles and in 1957, at the age of 27, she became the youngest person ever elected to the CP’s National Committee. For the next thirty years, she remained a ranking Communist Party official.

In 1967 she founded the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black, CPUsA club in Los Angeles through which Angela Davis joined the CP. Charlene became Angela’s mentor and her close friend.

Charlene was the executive director of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, helping to forge a broad Free Angela Davis movement which linked Davis’s case to demands for social justice, black liberation, women’s rights, free speech, peace, and Third World liberation.

Charlene recalled visiting London in 1960 and meeting Claudia Jones and Yusuf Dadoo, an Indian member of the Communist Party and a member of the Indian Congress of South Africa: “So to me, Africa opened its doors, to me, more as part of the movement and solidarity with us as we were with them. And I kind of always saw that as an equal thing, because I would learn so much from it”.

Charlene was one of the party’s most influential leaders during the 1950s and 1960s, developing the party’s links with African American labour activists and pushing for a engagement with Third World liberation movements.

Charlene traveled widely and met various African liberation movement leaders, most notably Amilcar Cabral of the African Party for the Liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.
Charlene was the CP candidate in the Election of 1968, the first African-American woman to run for President of the US.

In 1988, she ran as an Independent Progressive for U.S. Senator from New York against the incumbent Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was re-elected by a large margin.

As of 2006, Mitchell was active in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), an independent offshoot of the Communist Party.

Rebellious Mother and Daughter of History: Esther Georgia Irving Cooper (1881–1970) and Esther Cooper Jackson (1917 – )

Esther was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Her parents were former slaves. Esther taught English and she founded and became president of the Arlington County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1942, she joined the executive board of the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP which challenged racial inequalities in the county’s high schools. This culminated in Carter v. School Board of Arlington County, when courts ruled that segregated schools constituted unlawful racial discrimination.

Esther senior was also a member of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. She registered voters and campaigned to end voting poll taxes.

Esther married George Posea Cooper in 1913, and they had three daughters. One daughter was Esther Cooper Jackson.

Esther junior attended segregated schools but went on to study at Oberlin College and to earn a master’s degree in sociology from Fisk University in 1940. Her 1940 thesis was “The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism.”

She joined the Southern Negro Youth Congress where she met her future husband James Jackson, a Communist and trade union activist. Together, they fought to desegregate transport and promote the rights of Blacks and poor whites.

In 1942, 23 year old Esther delivered the opening address of the Fifth All-Southern Negro Youth Conference in Alabama. She focused special attention on black women, who were central to “the preservation of democracy in the world.” Black women’s freedom was critical to defeating Jim Crow, fascism, and colonialism.

In 1952, she moved to New York City and joined the American Communist party. In 1961, she became editor of Freedomways, the central theoretical journal of the 20th century black arts and intellectual movement in the United States. Esther called it, “a tool for the liberation of our people.”

The Jacksons faced persecution during the McCarthy years but continued to be active in the Civil Rights Movement. Esther played an important role in the Free Angela Davis Campaign. She never stopped campaigning for social change.

James Jackson died in 2007 aged 92. Esther celebrated her 101 birthday and, as far as I can discover, is still alive.

Rebellious Daughters of History #39

by Farida Haque (guest contribution) and ,,Judy Cox

Why the Statues Must Fall: Leela Roy (Bengali: লীলা রায়) (1900 – 1970)

Leela was born into an upper middle class Bengali Hindu Kayastha family in Sylhet in Bengal and educated at the Bethune College in Calcutta, graduating with a gold medal in English.

Leela had to fight with university authorities to became the first woman admitted to the University of Dhaka.

Leela threw herself into social work and education for girls, starting girls schools in Dhaka.
In 1921 during the Bengal floods, Leela, then a student at Dhaka University, was instrumental in forming the Dhaka Women’s Committee to organise flood relief.

In 1931, she began publishing Jayasree, the first magazine edited, managed, and written by women writers.

Leela formed a rebel organisation called Deepali Sangha in Dhaka at the end of 1923. She took part in the Civil Disobedience Movement and was imprisoned for six years.

In 1938, she was nominated to the National Planning Committee of the Congress.
She married Anil Chandra Roy in the same year. On Bose’s resignation from the Congress, the couple joined him in the Forward Bloc.

In 1942, during the Quit India Movement both she and her husband were arrested and her magazine was forced to cease. On her release in 1946, she was elected to the Constituent Assembly of India.

During the partition violence, she met Gandhi in Noakhali where she had opened a relief center and helped 100s of women. After the Partition of India, she ran homes in Calcutta for destitute women and helped refugees from East Bengal.

Leela founded the Jatiya Mahila Sanghati, a women’s organisation in West Bengal 1947. She continued to be active during the 1969s and died in June 1970.

Emma Tenayuca (1916 – 1999)

Emma Tenayuca grew up in a Mexican Comanche family of eleven and lived with her grandparents.

The family were hit hard by the Depression, and Emma became a labour activist before graduating from Brackenridge High School in San Antonio.

Emma was first arrested aged 16, in 1933, when she joined a picket line of workers in strike against the Finck Cigar Company. After high school, Tenayuca worked as an elevator operator, but she continued her activism.

She founded two international ladies’ garment workers unions, and was involved in both the Worker’s Alliance of America and Woman’s League for Peace and Freedom.

She organized a protest over the beating of Mexican migrants by United States Border Patrol agents. She was arrested twice, once for “disturbing the peace” during a nonviolent protest, and again for her leadership role in a labor strike in 1938.

‘I was arrested a number of times.
I don’t think that I felt exactly fearful.
I never thought in terms of fear.
I thought in terms of justice’,

Emma recalled.

Emma was instrumental in one of the most famous conflicts of Texas labour history–the 1938 San Antonio pecan shellers strike at the Southern Pecan Shelling Company. During the strike, thousands of workers at over 130 plants protested against a wage reduction. Mexicana and Chicana workers who picketed were gassed, arrested, and jailed. The strike ended after 37 days and in October, the National Labor Relations Act raised the wages.

Emma joined the Communist Party in 1936. In 1937, she was due to speak at a Communist Party meeting at the Municipal Auditorium. A crowd of 5,000 attacked the auditorium with bricks and rocks, “huntin’ Communists.” Emma escape from the mob, but she was blacklisted and forced to move out of San Antonio

In 1938 she married organizer Homer Bartchy and took a college degree. She divorced Brooks in 1941 and left her hometown in order to attend San Francisco State College where she majored in Education.

She later earned a master’s in education from Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. Emma went on to teach in Harlandale School District until her retirement in 1982. Emma Tenayuca developed Alzheimer’s disease and died on July 23, 1999.