| On International Women’s Day in 1950, revolutionary Black communist, Claudia Jones delivered the speech, “Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security.” In the speech Jones challenged the Truman Administration and expressed the “widespread condemnation, among numerous sections of the American people, of Truman’s cold blooded order to produce the hydrogen bomb and to inaugurate a suicidal atomic and hydrogen weapon race.” She continued, “Not to the liking of the imperialist ideologists of the ‘American Century’ is the growing indication by millions of American women of their opposition to war, their ardent desire for peace, their rejection of the Truman-bipartisan war policy.” True to the Socialist tradition that founded International Women’s Day, Jones spoke passionately about the militant role of women against war and atrocity: “In these lands, anti-fascist women collect millions of signatures for the outlawing of the A-bomb, against the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic war pact, for world disarmament, etc. In the German Democratic Republic, five million signatures were collected by women for outlawing the A-bomb. In Italy, the Union of Italian Women collected more than 2 million such signatures for presentation to the De Gasperi government. In France, women conducted demonstrations when bodies of dead French soldiers were returned to their shores as a result of the Marshall-Plan-financed war of their own government against the heroic Vietnamese. In Africa, women barricaded the roads with their bodies to prevent their men from being carted away as prisoners in a militant strike struggle charged with slogans of anti-colonialism and peace. And who can measure the capitalist fear of emulation by American Negro and white women of these peace struggles, particularly of the women of China (as reflected in the All-Asian Women’s Conference held last December in Peking), whose feudal bonds were severed forever as a result of the major victory of the Chinese people’s revolution?” For her International Women’s Day speech Claudia Jones was tried, incarcerated, and deported in the 1951 Smith Act Trials. In Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly writes “Jones’s persecution was also tinged with sexism insofar as her original indictment was based on her article “Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security,” in which she urged Negro and white mothers and women to join their antifascist sisters throughout the world to put pressure on the US government in the cause of peace. This flew in the face of the Truman administration’s “fascist triple-K (Kinder-Küche- Kirche)” ideology. This emphasis on “Children, Kitchen, and Church” was deeply antiwoman and aimed to hamper women’s social participation and progressive politics. As such, it especially penalized Black and working women and that worsened their economic status. In the same article, Jones argued that progressive labor forces didn’t always glean how the ideological attack on women, couched in terms of her femininity, womanliness, and pursuit of family happiness, was rooted in capitalist racism. “Big capital” levied this ideological offensive against Black and working women to discredit their drive for peace and their “pressing economic and social demands. Here, she emphasized that the interrelationship between patriarchal, sexist, and misogynistic denigration of women; superexploitation of Black women; and suppression of working women as a function of dominating labor and the working class more broadly was characteristic of anticommunist governance—and of fascism.” Join us tonight on this International Women’s Day for a discussion of Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States–Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly in conversation with Kamau Franklin at 7 PM at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History. |
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