The Radical Black Women Series: A Black Women Radicals, Claudia Jones School, and Paul Robeson House & Museum Collaboration
“Radical Black Women” is an online political education series paying homage to historical and radical leftist Black women.
About The Radical Black Women Series
Black women leaders such as Charlotta Bass, Williana Burroughs, Angie Dickerson, Shirley Graham Dubois, Lorraine Hansberry, Claudia Jones, Una Marson, Charlene Mitchell, Louise Thompson Patterson, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and more have always been at the forefront of radical political organizing. Their political and intellectual productions have catalyzed, sustained, and transformed movement building in both historical and contemporary aspects. However, oftentimes their activism have been siloed due to a lack of the intersectional interrogation of their lives and leadership.
How do we honor the lives, leadership, and legacies of these radical Black women? What are ways to interrogate their political memories as integral to the Black radical tradition? How do we incorporate their political and intellectual productions in our own praxes? What are ways to ensure their work will not be lost among present and future radical organizers?
A collaboration between Black Women Radicals, the Claudia Jones School for Political Education, and Paul Robeson House and Museum , this online political education series pays homage to historical and contemporary radical leftist Black women.
Purpose/Mission
To provide political education about historical radical leftist Black women leaders.
To overcome erasure of radical leftist Black women activists and their productions.
To provide an intersectional and radical interrogation of the lives, leadership, and legacies of radical Black women.
Past Events
Radicalism at the Crossroads: African-American Women Activists in the Cold War
On April 28, 2021, the Claudia Jones School hosted the first event in our Radical Black Women Series titled “Radicalism at the Crossroads: African-American Women Activists in the Cold War” featuring Dr. Dayo F. Gore.
Dayo F. Gore is an associate professor of ethnic studies and critical gender studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is the co-editor (with Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard) of Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (NYU Press, 2009). In this presentation, Professor Gore discussed Black women radicals mentioned in her latest book, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War.
Claudia Jones, Afro-Asian Solidarity, and Black Left Visions of Peace
For the second installment in the series, the Paul Robeson House hosted “Claudia Jones, Afro-Asian Solidarity, and Black Left Visions of Peace” with scholar Zifeng Liu on Tuesday, June 29th from 6:30-8:00 PM EST. Liu will discuss his work on Trinidadian leftist-feminist Claudia Jones and explore Jones’ radical politics and solidarity with Maoist China, internationalism, and anticolonial thought.
Zifeng Liu is an intellectual historian of the 20th-century Africana world with specializations in Black internationalism, anticolonial thought, and Afro-Asian solidarity. His current project "Redrawing the Balance of Power: Black Left Feminists, Mao’s China, and the Making of an Afro-Asian Political Imaginary" explores how Black leftist women’s understandings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire evolved as they sought Afro-Chinese solidarity within often difficult geopolitical contexts.
Louise Thompson Patterson: A LIFE of Struggle for Justice
For the third installment of the series the Claudia Jones School for Political Education hosted “Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle and Justice” on Wednesday, July 14th from 6:30-8:00 PM EST. The conversation featured Dr. MaryLouise Patterson, daughter of Louise Thompson Patterson and co-editor of Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond and Dr. Keith Gilyard, author of Patterson’s biography, Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice.
A Call to Negro Women: The Radicalism of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice
For the fourth installment of the #RadicalBlackWomenSeries, featured guests Mariame Kaba, Ashley Farmer, and Erik S. McDuffie led an insightful discussion on the intersectional politics of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a radical civil rights organization led by African-American women from 1951 to 1952. Members of Sojourners for Truth and Justice included Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Audley Moore, and Esther Cooper Jackson. Playwrights and authors like Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Childress were members of the group. Shirley Graham Dubois and Mary Church Terrell also joined the delegation. Charlotta Bass, the first African-American woman to own and operate a newspaper in the U.S., and first African-American woman nominated as Vice President candidate of the Progressive Party, was also a member.
Black Women Bringing It All Back Home: Honoring Margaret Prescod
For the fifth installment of the #RadicalBlackWomenSeries, we hosted a discussion with renown activist, author, radio host, and journalist, Margaret Prescod! About Margaret Prescod: Margaret Prescod is an activist, author, journalist and radio host. She was a founder of The Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders and of Black Women for Wages for Housework. Prescod was born in Barbados and emigrated to the United States in 1962 as a teenager. Within her first two weeks of moving to the United States she was on a picket line, protesting against a medical center in Brooklyn that would not employ Black people.