Rebellious Daughters of History #31

by ,,Judy Cox

The First Black Communist: Grace Campbell (1883-1943)

Grace Campbell was born in 1882 in Georgia. Her father was a Jamaican immigrant and teacher and her mother was a woman of mixed African American and Native Ameri- can heritage. The family moved to New York City in 1905 and Grace devoted herself to community projects such as the Empire Friendly Shelter, a home for unwed mothers.

In 1911, she became the first black woman appointed as a parole officer in the Court of General Sessions for the City of New York. She worked as a jail attendant in the women’s section at “the Tombs,” New York’s infamous prison, until her death in 1943.

Grace became active in the Socialist Party of America, the first African American woman to join the party. Her involvement in the Socialist Party in New York placed her in a community of radical women, many of whom were gay and bi- sexual, and agitated for birth control, free love, and gender equality.

In 1920, Grace helped found the People’s Educational Forum in 1920, a forum for debating socialist and black nationalist ideas.

Grace played a pioneering role in Harlem’s early 20th century radicalism and was the most prominent woman in the Harlem Left.

In 1919 and 1920, Grace ran for office in the New York State Assembly on the Socialist ticket. Her groundbreaking ticket won 10% of the vote, nearly 2,000 votes, more than any other black Socialist party candidate. Grace was the first African-American woman to run for public office in the state of New York.

In 1921, she moved away from the Socialist party and was a founding members of the African Blood Brotherhood, which advocated armed self-defense, equal rights, and self-determination and was known as the first Black communist organisation. Grace was the only woman in the leadership of the organisation, which met in her Harlem apartment. Her home remained a busy hub of radical political activity into the 1930s.

In 1923, Grace became the first black woman to join the Communist Workers’ Party and worked as an organizer. She combined community work with a socialist political vision, called for world revolution and focused special concern for black women’s freedom and a passionate commitment to the Communist movement. Later, Grace fell out with the Stalinist leadership of the international communist movement.

Grace was monitored by the FBI, which noted that she carried the Bolshevik red card and reported: ‘Grace Campbell showed herself an ardent Communist . . . Though employed by the City Administration, is frank in her disapproval of it and said the only way to remedy the present situation was to install Bolshevism in place of the present Government.’ (FBI, 4 March 1931)

Grace never married or had children. She continued her work in socialist politics and civil service until her death in 1943, aged 60.

Not just Mrs Lenin: Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869-1939)

Nadezhda (Nadya) Krupskaya was born to a noble but impoverished family. She won a medal at school but was excluded from higher education because she was a woman.

Nadya was already a well-read Marxist when she met Vladimir Lenin in 1894. In October 1896 she was arrested and was allowed to join Lenin in exile in Siberia on condition that they married.

In 1900 Nadya published a pamphlet, The Woman Worker, which explained how women could liberate themselves.

Released from exile in 1901, Krupskaya joined Lenin and spent five years in Munich, Paris and London. Leon Trotsky described how Nadya, ‘received comrades when they arrived, instructed them when they left, established connections, supplied secret addresses, wrote letters, and coded and decoded correspondence. In her room there was always a smell of burned paper from the secret letters she heated over the fire to read’.

After the 1905 Revolution, Nadya returned to St Petersburg and became secretary of the Central Committee before being forced back into exile. She was one of the first Marxists to formulate a socialist theory of education, writing ‘Public Education and Democracy’ (1915).

In the summer of 1917, Nadya became a member of the Vyborg Bolshevik Committee. She was also chair of the Vyborg Committee for Relief of Soldier’s Wives.

In August 1917, Krupskaya was a delegate to the Sixth Party Congress in renamed Petrograd. On 5 October she was one of a seven-person delegation from the Vyborg District to the Bolshevik Central Committee argued in favour of the October Revolution.

Nadya joined a government body devoted to eradicating illiteracy and setting up libraries. She became a prolific author and orator. Her biographer wrote that she, ‘hurled herself at a furious pace into the impossible task of designing and constructing a human, cultivated socialist system of education in a country that was economically ruined, racked by civil war’.

Free and universal access to education was mandated for all children and the number of schools doubled within the first two years of the revolution. Co-education was immediately implemented to combat sex discrimination, and for the first time, schools were created for pupils with disabilities.

Nadya survived for 15 years after Lenin’s death in 1924, both defending Lenin’s legacy and making compromises with Stalin to survive. She dedicated her life to the struggle for a better world and was a revolutionary in her own right.

Rebellious Daughters of History #30

by ,,Judy Cox

Chartist, Feminist, Journalist and Communist: Helen MacFarlane (1818-1860)

Helen Macfarlane was born in Barrhead, Paisley, Scotland. Her father, George, owned a calico-printing works. There was radicalism in the Macfarlane family and the mill workers who were solid supporters of Chartism.

In 1842 the Macfarlane mills went bust and the family were utterly ruined. Helen had to take employment as a governess.

In 1848 Helen was in Vienna when the Revolution against the Habsburg Monarchy broke out. She wrote: “I am free to confess that, for me the most joyful of all spectacles possible; one which I enjoyed extremely at Vienna, in March 1848, a universal tumbling of impostors. For it amounts to this, that men are determined to live no longer in lies!”

Following the defeat of the 1848 Revolution, Helen returned to Britain, first to Burnley, then to London. She began to write for the paper of radical Chartist George Julian Harney, The Red Republican, and became friends with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Historians of philosophy have ignored Helen’s role as the first British commentator on, and translator of, the writing of G.W.F. Hegel.

Helen saw Chartist tactics as less effective than the revolutionary French Blanquists:

“How comes it that our French brothers have done so much compared with us? Because they are organized into one compact mass, which, under the guidance of competent leaders, moves like an army of well-disciplined soldiers, steadily onward to a given point.”

In 1850 Austrian General Haynau, the infamous butcher of the 1848 Revolution, visited London. Workers at the Barclay Perkins brewery tried to drown him in a vat of beer then chased him dow the street. There was a press outcry, but Helen wrote,

“Had I been present when those brave proletarians gave this ruffian his deserts, I should certainly have dissuaded the mob from… laying hands on him… brothers, your hands are blackened and hardened from honest toil. Do not pollute them from touching that beast. Take mops and brooms, sweep him out as you do other kinds of dirt. Like to like. Filth to filth. Haynau to the common sewer.”

Helen published the first translation of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ in English, in the ‘Red Republican’ in 1850. When Helen fell out with Harney at the end of 1850, Marx commented that Harney had broken with, “the only collaborator on his spouting rag who had original ideas – a rare bird, on his paper…”

In 1852 Helen married Francis Proust and in 1853 gave birth to a daughter named Consuela Pauline Roland Proust (Pauline Roland was a great French leader of the 1848 Revolution). In 1853 the family sailed to a new life in South Africa, but Francis died on the journey, and Consuela died days after arriving in South Africa.

Helen returned to England and in 1856 she married Reverend John Wilkinson Edwards a widower with 11 children. She gave birth to two boys, Herbert and Walter. In 1860, at age 41, she fell ill with bronchitus and died.

Portuguese Anti-fascist icon: Catarina Eufémia

This month marks the anniversary of the assassination of Catarina Eufémia, a young militant agricultural worker who was gunned down for answering back to a police officer whilst canvassing support for a strike in Alentejo, Portugal.

Catarina became a serious icon for resistance against the fascist government of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

Catarina was born in Baleizão in the most arid and hot region of Portugal. The economy was run by a system Latifundia where landowners ruled the big estates ruthlessly, often with the help of the local police (GNR) and the hated secret police (PIDE).

Catarina was born into a family of jornaleiros (dayworkers). By the age of 17 she was married and had already been working in the fields for years. By 1954 she was a mother of 3 children and pregnant with a fourth.

From the mid 1940s onwards, agricultural workers raised economic demands, usually just before the harvest. In 1954 they demanded an increase in pay from 16 escudos to 23, still a pitiful amount. The landowners not only refused to pay but also hired other labour from different parts of the region.

On hearing that the other agricultural labourers had been hired, Catarina and 14 women workers went to address them as they arrived and appealed for solidarity. However, the police had already arrived. Undeterred, Catarina approached the workers but was stopped by a GNR who asked her what she wanted. ”Only bread and work’ was the reply.

The agent, considering the reply as ‘impudent’ gunned her down with a machine gun. She died minutes later and the 8 month child she was carrying in her arms was also injured. The agent was never prosecuted.

The police attacked people at Catarina’s funeral and some mourners were even sentenced to 2 years jail on trumped up charges.

Catarina then became a symbol of struggle in the Alentejo and throughout the country. Although not confirmed, many say she was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party, and she certainly attended meetings.

Catarina was an emblem of growing resistance to the Salazarista regime but it would be another 20 years before her great hope of a new world would flourish.

Some have commented that had she not been killed – she would have remained anonymous. But this is the point – socialism is about the tiny as well as the major struggles that are carried out regularly by nameless people, who make sacrifices in order to better the now but also work for a just future.

Rebellious Daughters of History #29

by Judy Cox

Poplar Revolt: Minnie Lansbury (1889 – 1922)

Minnie Glassman, the daughter of Jewish coal merchant Isaac Glassman, was born in Stepney in 1889. She became a school teacher and was active in the campaign for women’s suffrage.

In 1913, Sylvia Pankhurst, with the support of Millie Glassman, Keir Hardie and George Lansbury, established the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELF) to fight for socialism and demand for women’s suffrage.

In 1914 Millie married Edgar Lansbury, the son of George Lansbury, the Labour Party MP for Bow & Bromley. Millie opposed the First World War. In 1918 she was elected Assistant Secretary of the Workers’ Socialist Federation.

Siblings Edgar, Violet and Daisy Lansbury all joined the Communist Party. Daisy was active with Sylvia Pankhurst. Violet spent many years in Russia and married Anglo-Indian communist Clemens Palme Dutt.

In November 1919 Millie was elected to Poplar Council. The Labour Party had won 39 of the 42 council seats. In 1921 George Lansbury proposed that the Council stop collecting the rates for outside, cross-London bodies. On 31st March 1921, Poplar Council set a rate of 4s 4d instead of 6s 10d.

On 29th the Councillors were summoned to Court. They were told that they had to pay the rates or go to prison – they chose prison. At one meeting Millie said: “Poplar will pay its share of London’s rates when Westminster, Kensington, and the City do the same.”

On 28th August over 4,000 people demonstrated at Tower Hill. The Councillors were arrested on 1st September. Five women Councillors, including Millie Lansbury, were sent to Holloway Prison. Twenty-five men, including George Lansbury, went to Brixton Prison. On 21st September, public pressure led the government to release Nellie Cressall, who was six months pregnant.

Several Metropolitan Borough Councils announced their attention to follow Poplar’s example. The government was forced to back down and on 12th October, the Councillors were set free.

While in prison, Minnie developed pneumonia and she died on 1st January 1922. She was 32. Her memorial clock is on Bow Road.

Actress Angela Lansbury is the daughter of Edgar Lansbury and his second wife. Angela is a Democrat supporter in America, supports the Labour party in Britain. “How could I not? I’m not an active member but many members of my family are very much involved.”

Rebel against British Oppression: Nanny of the Maroons (1686 – 1755)

Nanny was born into slavery sometime during the 1680s, on the Gold Coast, now Ghana. She was transported to Jamaica as a slave. She escaped a British colony on Jamaica and led a group of slaves into the inner mountainous areas of the island. Soon, large communities of ex-slaves, calling themselves Maroons, gathered around her. They founded Nanny Town founded around 1723.

From this town, Nanny was able to lead raids against plantations to liberate the slaves. Her revolution quickly captured the attention of the British and a series of campaigns against the Maroons were launched.

Nanny and the Maroons were innovators in guerilla warfare. They used surprise, knowledge of the terrain, and cleverly chosen positions in their fight against the British. Their village was located in rugged territory with only one way in, so attacking soldiers were easily ambushed by camouflaged troops. Nanny never killed all of the attacking force. She would always allow a remnant to return to tell of the horror of massacre.

Nanny Town itself was attacked on a number of occasions, in 1730, 1731, 1732. Finally one British attack in 1734 captured the settlement. Nanny and the survivors fled to found a new camp, from which they proved just as defiant.

Although Nanny and her people faced nearly constant attack and hunger, they remained united and strong against the British under her rule. From 1739–40, the British signed a peace treaty with the Maroons, giving them 500 acres of land to call their own.

Besides being a superb tactician and leader, Nanny was an obea woman, who practiced African spirituality. According to legend, if any straight haired, white man, goes to Nanny Town, he is immediately struck dead.

Nanny, whose image is on the Jamaican $500 bill, remains a powerful symbol of the resistance to slavery

Rebellious Daughters of History #28

by Judy Cox

Mexican Revolutionary: Margarita Neri

Margarita Neri, “The Rebel Queen of Morelos”, was the daughter of a Mayan Indian and a former Mexican general who had rebelled against the repressive government of President Diaz around 1900.

The Mexican Revolution began on 20 November, 1910, and raged well into the 1920s. It was an attempt by revolutionaries to overthrow the ruler and dictator Porfirio Diaz Mori and win democracy and reform for the peasants.

The conflict was bloody, with around 900,000 people losing their lives. Despite facing constant inequality and sexism, women were still willing to play a major role in the old regimes eventual downfall.

The most famous of all the soldaderas was Margarita Neri, who not only fought in the war, but also acted as a commander.

From 1910, Margarita commanded a force of over 1,000 which swept through Tabasco and Chiapas, looting, burning and killing.

Neri was so effective in her slaughter of anti-revolutionary troops that the Governor of Guerrero hid in a crate and fled the town upon hearing of her approach.

Her soldiers were a serious threat to the Government.

In 1911, the Los Angeles Times reported on revolutionary battles taking place in Guerrero, a southern state in Mexico. “Petticoat leads band of Rebels,” the headline blared, in a story picked up all across North America. Margarita Neri, “La Neri” or “Pepita” to her 700-plus followers. La Neri ,“although beautiful in feature,” was a daring raider.

Brutal and fiery, the red-headed Neri was known for her passionate dancing—and her threat to personally “decapitate Diaz.”

Her troops were infamous for their violence—looting, burning and pillaging whole towns.

Neri was reportedly eventually executed, but the place and time of her death are unknown. The Mexican Revolution succeeded in transforming Mexican society.

So much more than Malcolm X’s Mum: Louise Little (1897–1989)

Louise Little was born in Grenada, to Edith Langdon. Edith was the daughter of Jupiter and Mary Jane Langdon, who were captured from what is now Nigeria, freed from the slave ship by the Royal Navy and then settled in Grenada.

When she was 11 years old, Edith, was raped by a Scottish man named Edward Norton, and gave birth to Louise.

Louise was raised by her grandparents and was fluent in English, French and Grenadian Creole French. After her grandmother’s death in1917, she emigrated to Montreal, where her uncle introduced her to the ideas of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

Through the UNIA, Louise met Earl Little, and they married on May 10, 1919. The following year they moved to Philadelphia, and then to Omaha, Nebraska. While in Omaha she was of the UNIA’s local chapter. She inculcated black pride in their seven children, and insisted that they read newspapers such as the Negro World, the official periodical of the UNIA.

Louise was pregnant with Malcolm when the Klan visited their house one night. They shouted threats that the Littles should leave town because her husband was “spreading trouble.” After breaking all the windows in the house, they rode off.

In1926, Ku Klux Klan threats‍ drove the family to move to Milwaukee and then to to Lansing, Michigan. There the family was frequently harassed by the Black Legion, a white racist group.

The family home was burned down in 1929. In 1931, Earl died in what was officially ruled a streetcar accident, though Louise believed he had been murdered by the Black Legion.

During the 1930s Louise Little and her son Wilfred were baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1937, a pregnant Louise was abandoned by her lover. In late 1938 she was committed to Kalamazoo State Hospital. The children were separated and sent to foster homes.

Louise was in the Hospital to 1963. Her son Malcolm X joined his siblings in securing her release from the hospital. She lived with her surviving family for another 30 years.

According to historian Erik S. McDuffie, she was “a brilliant and dynamic woman, not some ‘crazy’ or apolitical figure as she is often portrayed in the scholarship about Malcolm X.”

Rebellious Daughters of History #27

by Judy Cox

Agitating for Reform: Ernestine Louise Rose (1810 – 1892)

Rose Potowska was born in Poland. Her father was a wealthy rabbi and she later recalled, “I was a rebel at the age of five”.

When she was 16, her father betrothed her to an older man. Rose rejected the match and appealed to a secular civil court which ruled in her favour.

Rose left home at the age of seventeen. She traveled to Berlin, where an anti-Semitic law required all non-Prussian Jews to have a Prussian sponsor. She invented perfumed paper for use as a room deodorizer, which she sold to fund her travels.

Rose traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and finally England. Her ship was shipwrecked and all her possessions lost.

In England, she met Robert Owen, a Utopian socialist, who invited her to become a public speaker. She helped him to found the Association of All Classes of All Nations, a group that campaigned for human rights. She also met William Ella Rose, an Owenite. They were married by a civil magistrate.

In May 1836 the Roses emigrated to the New York where Rose began to give lectures on the abolition of slavery, public education, and equality for women. When she was in the South, one slaveholder said he would have “tarred and feathered her if she had been a man.”

In 1855, a local newspaper in Maine called her “a female Atheist… a thousand times below a prostitute.” Rose had to flee From Charleston, West Virginia, after giving a lecture on the evils of slavery.

In the winter of 1836, Rose organised the first petition in support of women’s rights. She also attended and spoke at numerous conferences and conventions, becoming the ‘Queen of the Platform’.

Rose was elected president of the National Women’s Rights Convention in October, 1854, in spite of objections that she was an atheist.

In 1869, she successfully lobbied for legislation in New York that allowed married women to retain their own property and have equal guardianship of children.

In 1869, Rose made the closing address at the nationwide Women’s Rights Convention but her health took a downward turn, and she and her husband set sail for England.

After 1873, her health improved, and she began to advocate women’s suffrage in England, attending the Conference of the Woman’s Suffrage Movement in London and speaking in Edinburgh at a large public meeting in favor of woman’s suffrage.

She died in Brighton, England, in 1892.

Haitian Revolutionary: Sanité Bélair, (1781 – 1802)

Sanité was a female Haitian Freedom fighter and revolutionary, lieutenant in the army of Toussaint Louverture.

Sanité was born an affranchi, a free person of colour, in Verrettes, Haiti in 1791, the year that a revolt against French colonial rule broke out.

This revolt became the Haitian Revolution, a successful insurrection by self-liberated slaves. Ex-slave Toussaint Louverture emerged as Haiti’s most charismatic hero.

Sanité married Charles Bélair in 1796 When she was 15. Charles was a Brigade commander and later a General in the revolutionary army. Sanité became a sergeant and later a lieutenant.

The Belairs were pursued by Faustin Répussard’s column of the French army, and took refuge in the Artibonite department. Répussard launched a surprise attack and captured Sanité. Her husband surrendered so he could be with her. Both were sentenced to death, he to be executed by firing squad and she by decapitation. She watched Bélair’s execution and went to her own execution, refusing to wear a blindfold. She was 21.

The Haitian revolution ended in 1804 with the former colony’s independence. It was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state free from slavery, and ruled by non-whites and former captives. It is now widely seen as a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World.

Sanité Bélair is remembered as one of the heroes of the Haitian Revolution. In 2004, she was the only woman featured on a banknote for the “Bicentennial of Haiti” Commemorative series