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

Rebellious Daughters of History #26

by Judy Cox

Striking a Light: Sarah Chapman (1862-1945)

Sarah was born in 1862 to Samuel Chapman, a brewer and sometime docker, and Sarah Ann Mackenzie. Sarah and her six siblings grew up in Mile End and could all read and write.

By the age of 19, Sarah worked with her mother and sister, Mary, at the Bryant and May match factory in Bow.

The match women were known for being rowdy and rebellious. Mainly were of Irish descent and were familiar with republican and socialist ideas. In 1882, factory boss, Theodore Bryant, deducted a shilling from each worker’s wage to pay for a statue of William Gladstone. Workers disrupted the unveiling by pelting the statue with stones, red paint and their own blood.

Anger among the women was fuelled by low wages, long hours, appalling working conditions and the unfair fines system. Poisonous white phosphorus left many girls suffering from ‘phossy jaw’, a form of cancer.

In July 1888, some 1400 women marched out of the factory. The next day some 200 girls marched from Mile End down to see Annie Besant, a campaigning journalist. A deputation of three, including Sarah, went into her office and Annie agreed to help them organise a Strike Committee to which Sarah and 8 other women were elected.

The first strike meeting was followed by meetings with Members of Parliament. The women marched from the East End into central London to win support and went from door to door collecting solidarity donations.

By 17th July, their demands were met. All fines and deductions were abolished and sacked workers reinstated. Bryant and May provided a room for meals away from the work room. The women’s victory helped to inspire the Great Dock Strike of 1889.

The Union of Women Match Makers was set at Stepney Meeting Hall, and 12 women, including Sarah, were elected to its committee.

Sarah was elected by her union to be the first TUC representative and she was also a delegate to the 1888 International TUC in London.

In December 1891 Sarah married Charles Henry Dearman, a Cabinet Maker, and stopped working at Bryant and May. They moved to Bethnal Green and had six children.

Sarah died of lung cancer, in Bethnal Green in 1945 aged 83. Louise Raw has rightly pointed out that the Match women should be remembered, not as women dependent on any leaders, but as a collective of powerful and insurgent women.

Read more in Louise Raws great book ‘Striking a Light: the Match Women’s Place in History’ which is available from Bookmarks bookshop.

From terrorism to Marxist Revolutionary : Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (1851 – 1919)

Vera was born in Mikhaylovka, in the Russian Empire, daughter of an impoverished minor noble. After graduating from high school in 1866, she moved to Saint Petersburg, and worked as a clerk. She became involved in radical politics and taught literacy classes for factory workers. She was just 17 when she was arrested and imprisoned for 4 years in 1869.

Vera was released in 1873, she settled in Kiev, where she became a leader of a revolutionary group of Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchist supporters.

In July 1877, a political prisoner, Alexei Bogolyubov, refused to remove his cap in the presence of Colonel Trepov, the governor of St. Petersburg who was famous for his suppression of rebellions. Trepov ordered Bogolyubov to be flogged, which caused outrage. A group of revolutionaries plotted to kill Trepov and Vera was selected to act. She walked calmly into his office and shot and seriously wounded Trepov.

At her widely publicized trial, it was Trepov’s crimes which were put on trial and the jury found Zasulich not guilty. Vera fled the court as the police tried to rearrest her. A crowd gathered to protect her and one of her supporters was shot dead. In the chaos, Vera managed to escape.

Vera fled to Switzerland, where she became a Marxist and co-founded the Emancipation of Labour group with Georgi Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod in 1883. The group commissioned Zasulich to translate a number of Karl Marx’s works into Russian, which was one of the factors that led to the creation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898.

In mid-1900, the leaders of the radical wing of the new generation of Russian Marxists, Julius Martov, Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Potresov, joined Zasulich, Plekhanov and Axelrod in Switzerland. The six founded Iskra, a revolutionary Marxist newspaper, and formed its editorial board.

The Iskra editors convened a pro-Iskra Second Congress of the RSDLP in Brussels and London in 1903. However, Iskra supporters split into two factions, Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Martov’s Mensheviks. Vera sides with the Mensheviks.

She returned to Russia after the 1905 Revolution. She joined a group with Plekhanov in early 1914. The group supported Russian side in World War I and opposed the October Revolution of 1917.

In the winter of 1919, she developed pneumonia and died in Petrograd on 8 May 1919.

In his book Lenin, Leon Trotsky acknowledged her contribution to Russian socialism:

‘She remained to the end the old radical intellectual on whom fate grafted Marxism. Sasulich’s articles show that she had adopted to a remarkable degree the theoretic elements of Marxism. But the moral political foundations of the Russian radicals of the ’70s remained untouched in her until her death.’

Oscar Wilde’s first play was ‘Vera; or, The Nihilists’, inspired by Vera’s shooting of Trepov. The play was published in 1880 and first performed in New York in 1883

Rebellious Daughters of History #25

by Judy Cox

The Red: Louise Bryant (1885 –1936)

Louise grew up in rural Nevada and attended the University of Nevada and the University of Oregon, graduating with a degree in history in 1909. She became a journalist and an activist in the women’s suffrage movement. In 1915, she met John Reed and left her fist husband, and moved to Greenwich Village. The worked on ‘The Masses’, a socialist newspaper and married in 1916.

In August 1917, Louise and John got assigned to report from the Russian Revolution. They arrived in Petrograd in time to witness the October Revolution.

They attended gatherings at the Smolny Institute and interviewed many leading political figures, including Lenin, Trotsky, and Kerensky, and both eventually compiled books—Six Red Months in Russia by Bryant and Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World.

Louise covered Duma meetings, dining in public mess halls with soldiers and workers, and interviewing women revolutionaries, such as Maria Spiridonova and Aleksandra Kollontai, who was the only woman in the Bolshevik cabinet. By the time she returned to New York, her work was being read across North America.

Louise returned to New York, arrived in New York in 1918. The government had forced The Masses to shut down but Bryant wrote articles about the October Revolution and gave public meetings urging support for the revolution.

In October, Bryant’s first book, Six Red Months in Russia 1918, an inspirational account of how the revolution transformed every aspect of life in Russia.

In February 1919, Louise went to Washington, D.C., to speak about Russia. She participated in a National Woman’s Party suffrage rally, during which she was arrested, arraigned, and sentenced to five days in jail.

Louise testified in front of the Overman Committee, which investigates Bolshevik activity in the United States. Soon after, she began a cross-country speaking tour, “The Truth About Russia”, during which she addressed large audiences in Detroit, Chicago, Spokane, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Louise was the first woman to defend Lenin and Trotsky at political gatherings across the United States. Her message was simple, ‘Hands off Russia!’

The U.S. government outlawed the American Communist Party. In danger of being arrested and unable to get a passport to go to Russia, Reed, disguised as a stoker, left the United States in late September 1919.

During the Palmer Raids, John was charged with conspiring to overthrow the government by force. In March 1920, he was arrested returning home through Finland then returned to Moscow in a prisoner exchange. He cabled Bryant, “Passport home refused. Temporarily returning headquarters. Come if possible.”

Traveling without passport, Bryant, disguised as the wife of a Swedish businessman, arrived in Petrograd in late August 1920. She arrived in time to be by John’s side when he died of typhus.

Bryant obtained Lenin’s approval for a trip to the southern Russian border and neighboring countries. She went by train over the Kazakh Steppe, through areas hard hit by famine.

She returned to the U.S. in mid-summer 1921, and married William Christian Bullitt, Jr., a wealthy film maker who became the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Louise returned to Russia to write portraits of Russians which led to her second book, Mirrors of Moscow, in 1923. Bryant’s travels in Europe this time included Moscow, Berlin, London, Paris. Louise also covered the Turkish War of Independence.

Later in 1923, Bryant and Bullitt moved to Paris, where they married in December. Two months later, Bryant gave birth to her only child, Anne Moen Bullitt. In 1925 she and Bullitt adopted an 8-year-old Turkish boy. Her last piece of journalism, “A Turkish Divorce”, about Atatürk’s treatment of women, appeared in The Nation in August 1925.

By 1926, Louise was suffering from a painful disease and was drinking heavily. Bullitt accused her of having a lesbian affair and divorced her winning sole custody of Anne. Bryant remained in Paris, occasionally advising writer Claude McKay.

Louise died on January 6, 1936, of a brain hemorrhage near Paris

The Bryant–Reed story is told in the 1981 film Reds, starring Diane Keaton as Bryant and Warren Beatty as Reed.

Black Liberation: Assata Shukar (1947….)

JoAnne Byron was born in Flushing, Queens, and grew up in New York City. She became involved in political activism at Borough of Manhattan Community College and City College of New York.

After graduating in 1971, JoAnne moved to Oakland, California and joined the Black Panther Party. She organised protests and community education programs. After returning to New York City, Shakur led the panther chapter in Harlem, coordinating the Free Breakfast Program for children.

She left the Panthers and joined the Black Liberation Army (BLA), whose members drew inspiration from the Vietcong, and led a campaign of terrorist activities against the U.S. government.

She began using the name Assata Olugbala Shakur in 1971, rejecting Joanne Chesimard as a “slave name”. She now identified as an African.

Between 1971 and 1973, she was charged with several crimes and was the subject of a multi-state manhunt. In May 1973, Assata was arrested after being wounded in a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in which a state trooper was shot dead.

Between 1973 and 1977, Assata was charged with murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, bank robbery, and kidnapping in relation to the shootout and six other incidents. She was acquitted on three of the charges and three were dismissed. In 1977, she was convicted of the murder of the state trooper and of seven other felonies related to the shootout.

In prison, Assata was treated appallingly, continuously confined in a men’s prison, without adequate food and exercise.

Assata was identified as a political prisoner in 1973 by Angela Davis, and in 1977, in the The New York Times. International investigators cited Shakur as “one of the worst cases” of prison abuse and described her as a victim of the FBI, who had terrorised black activists with false arrests, entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal prosecutions.

On November 2, 1979, she escaped the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women, when three members of the Black Liberation Army visiting her drew concealed .45-caliber pistols and a stick of dynamite, seized two correction officers as hostages, commandeered a van and escaped.

After her escape, Shakur lived as a fugitive protected by her community. The FBI circulated wanted posters throughout the New York; her supporters hung “Assata Shakur is Welcome Here” posters in response. In New York, three days after her escape, more than 5,000 demonstrators carried signs with the same slogan.

In July 1980, FBI director William Webster said that the search for Assata had been frustrated by residents’ refusal to cooperate.

Assata surfaced in Cuba in 1984, where she was granted political asylum. Shakur has lived in Cuba since, despite US government efforts to have her returned. She is on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list, as Joanne Deborah.

Rebellious Daughters of History #24

by Judy Cox

‘We are Lions’’: Jayaben Desai (1933 – 2010)

Jayaben Desai was born in 1933 in Gujarat, India. She later migrated to Britain, where she took up low-paid work, first as a sewing machinist, then processing film in the Grunwick factory.

There was no union allowed at Grunwick, where the white management controlled the workers through threats, racist insults and harassment. On 20 August 1976, Mrs Desai,
and her son, Sunil, walked out.

Her parting words to the manager were, ‘What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. But in a zoo there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your finger-tips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr. Manager.’

Outside she joined four other workers who had left earlier that day in protest at conditions at Grunwick. The six workers joined the APEX union, and started picketing the factory. Soon there were 137 workers on strike, protesting about the conditions at Grunwick and calling for union recognition.

The strikers launched a campaign to win solidarity from other workers, from engineering factories in Glasgow to the coalmines of south Wales.

On Monday 13 June 1977, the police arrested 84 pickets out of 100 who had come to demonstrate their solidarity on what was called Women’s Support Day.

There were 1,300 by the following Friday, and 12,000 by 11 July, the day that 20,000 went on a TUC-organised march to the factory. The Cricklewood postal workers took solidarity action, blacking the mail to Grunwick. Colin Maloney, their leader, observed: “You don’t say ‘no’ to Mrs. Desai.” The postal workers, who were mostly white, were suspended for three weeks.

The government used the law to crush the strike and the union leaders betrayed them. When Jayaben was suspended by her own union she said, ‘the union views itself like management. There’s no democracy there’.

Defiant to the end, Jayaben told the final meeting of the strikers that they could be proud. “We have shown”, she said, “that workers like us, new to these shores, will never accept being treated without dignity or respect. We have shown that white workers will support us”. Only 10 years previously, dockers had marched in support of the racist Conservative politician Enoch Powell.

Grunwick had witnessed the biggest mobilisation in British labour-movement history in support of fewer than 200 mainly Asian women strikers.

Jayaben Desai died in 2010 aged 77.

Poet, wit, radical: Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967)

Dorothy Rothschild was born In 1893, New Jersey, U.S. to Jacob Henry Rothschild and his wife Eliza Annie. Her mother died a month before Dorothy’s fifth birthday. Following her father’s death in 1913, she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living while she worked on her poetry.

In 1917, she met a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker, and they married but divorce in 1928. Dorothy Parker then married actor Alan Campbell, and moved to Hollywood.

Dorothy’s career took off in 1918 while she was writing theater criticism for Vanity Fair, she was a central figure in the Algonquin Circle and established a national reputation as a wit and poet.

Her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, published in 1926 sold 47,000 copies. Parker divorced her husband in 1928 and had a number of affairs. When she fell pregnant Parker is alleged to have said, “how like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard”. She had an abortion, and fell into a depression that culminated in her first attempt at suicide.

In 1934 Dorothy met Alan Campbell and they wrote the script for the 1937 film A Star Is Born, and were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing. She wrote dialogue for The Little Foxes in 1941.

Parker’s lifelong commitment to political activism began in 1927 when she protested about the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston and was arrested and fined. She claimed that from then on “my heart and soul are with the cause of socialism”.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Parker became a vocal supporter of radical causes. In 1937, went to Spain and reported from the Republicans side for the Communist magazine, ‘The New Masses’. She also wrote an impressive short-story, Soldiers of the Republic.

With Otto Katz, a Soviet Comintern agent and German Communist Willi Münzenberg, Parker helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936.

Dorothy served as chair of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee’s fundraising arm, “Spanish Refugee Appeal”. She organized Project Rescue Ship to transport Republican fighters to safety Mexico, and headed Spanish Children’s Relief.

Dorothy made donations to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that was fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She also wrote articles on injustice. For example, Scribner’s Magazine published Clothe the Naked , an article about the great inequality between the races.

During this period Dorothy described herself as a “communist” and she was listed as a Communist by the publication Red Channels in 1950. The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her because of her suspected involvement in Communism. Studio bosses placed her on the Hollywood blacklist. Her final screenplay was The Fan, a 1949 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, directed by Otto Preminger.

Her marriage to Campbell was tempestuous. They divorced in 1947, remarried in 1950, then separated in 1952. Campbell died from a drug overdose in 1963.

Parker died on June 7, 1967, of a heart attack at the age of 73. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. Following King’s death, her estate was bequeathed by his family to the NAACP.

Dorothy Parker’ “One Perfect Rose”

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet–
One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret;
“My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.