McDuffie-Sojourners Article, RHR, Spring 2008

A “New Freedom Movement of Negro
Women”: Sojourning for Truth, Justice, and
Human Rights during the Early Cold War
Erik S. McDuffie
On October 1, 1951, sixty determined African American women stormed past
bewildered guards at the doors of the Civil Rights Section of the Department of
Justice in Washington, DC. They had come to see the U.S. attorney general, J. How-
ard McGrath, to demand that the government end racial injustice and white racial
terror against African Americans. Members of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice,
a newly formed African American women’s social protest organization, crowded into
the office of Maceo Hubbard, an African American Justice Department official. The
charismatic, New York – based tenants’ rights organizer Angie Dickerson forcefully
conveyed the group’s sentiments: “Sir, we are here to speak our grievances. Our men
are lynched, beaten, shot, deprived of jobs, and, on top of it all, forced to become
part of a Jim Crow army and go thousands of miles [to] Korea to carry out war to
other colored peoples.”1 Then other Sojourners began berating Hubbard, with Amy
Mallard asking, “Where was the FBI and the Justice Dept. when they burned my
house down to the ground and shot my poor husband to death as he sat besides me
in our car?” Hubbard, who listened politely, said that he would pass the group’s
grievances to Attorney General McGrath, but the delegation never received a meet-
ing or a reply.2
From its opening convention in 1951 to its demise one year later, the Sojourn-
Radical History Review
Issue 101 (Spring 2008) doi 10.1215/01636545-2007-039
© 2008 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.
81

82 Radical History Review
ers defied an increasingly repressive Cold War political order. The first and only
group in the Communist Left explicitly organized for and led by African American
women, the Sojourners attempted to mobilize black women against Jim Crow and
U.S. Cold War domestic and foreign policy. It demanded freedom for the unjustly
sentenced such as the Georgia sharecropper and widowed mother of twelve Rosa
Lee Ingram, who faced death for killing a white would-be rapist, and the Council
on African Affairs (CAA) leader W. Alpheaus Hunton, jailed for his left-wing affili-
ations.3 It insisted that the U.S. government stop persecuting those who spoke out
against racism, colonialism, and the Cold War, including W. E. B. Du Bois, charged
in 1951 as an “agent of a foreign principle in the United States,” and Paul Robeson,
whose passport the Justice Department had confiscated in 1950. It called for ending
the Korean War.4 Like the left-wing Civil Rights Congress (CRC), the Sojourners
embraced the causes of human rights, black equality, and civil liberties.5
The Sojourners developed a “black left feminism,” which according to the
literary critic Mary Helen Washington is a politics that centers working-class women
by combining Communist Party positions on race, gender, and class with black
nationalism and black radical women’s lived experiences.6 Black left feminism paid
special attention to the intersectional, systemic nature of African American women’s
oppression and understood their struggle for dignity and freedom in global terms.
Many of its leaders — including the adept longtime left-wing organizer Louise
Thompson Patterson, the young poet and actor Beulah Richardson, the newspaper
editor Charlotta Bass, the activist Dorothy Hunton, the writer and world traveler
Eslanda Robeson, and the playwright and activist Shirley Graham Du Bois — exhib-
ited an intertwined domestic and internationalist sensibility partly forged by their
affiliation with the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) and its 1930s-era Popular Front
agenda of racial and economic justice, antifascism, internationalism, anticolonial-
ism, and the protection of civil liberties. Knowledge of post – World War II indepen-
dence movements in the third world and, above all, their own lived experiences also
shaped their viewpoint.7 Along with other Black Left organizations like the CRC
and the CAA, the Sojourners looked internationally for support in their demands
for justice.8
Until recently, scholars have overlooked the Sojourners in studies of the Afri-
can American encounter with the Communist Left and of black women’s human
rights activism during the mid-twentieth century.9 When discussing African-
descended women and human rights, they usually focus on violations in relation to
recent genocidal conflicts in Africa, late apartheid, and so-called genital mutilation.
Less attention is given to black women’s human rights activism.10 A critical examina-
tion of the Sojourners changes this picture.11
Excavating the group’s brief history reveals the ways in which a small but
vocal community of black women progressives invented unique understandings
of liberation and human rights during the early Cold War.12 Although they rarely

McDuffie | A “New Freedom Movement of Negro Women” 83
employed the idiom of human rights to describe their work, the Sojourners viewed
white supremacy, the oppression of black womanhood, lynching, and the notion of
black depravity as forms of genocide. These practices, along with political persecu-
tion and colonialism, represented a violation of basic, universal, inalienable human
freedoms such as “the right to life,” freedom of conscience, and the right of self-
determination protected in the United Nation’s human rights declarations.13
Recognizing the Sojourners’ work further historicizes black women’s trans-
national visions and internationalist agendas. The term transnationalism here refers
to the ways in which the Sojourners understood issues affecting African-descended
women to transcend national boundaries.14 I use the term internationalism as it was
commonly understood in the Old Left to describe the Sojourners’ efforts to forge
global political solidarities with individuals and movements committed to radical
democracy, women’s equality, working-class solidarity, anticolonialism, and peace.15
The group’s appreciation of the transnational dimensions of African-descended
women’s oppression complemented its efforts to win international support, espe-
cially from third world women, in the fight for black women’s rights and freedoms in
the United States and across the diaspora.
The Sojourners never had time to flesh out black left feminism. Limita-
tions of the group’s Marxist-influenced program, its middle-class character, and the
group’s uneasy relationship with the Communist Party prevented it from building
the national organization that its founders had envisaged. Ultimately, McCarthyism
shut down the Sojourners, as well as marking a turning point in black radical wom-
en’s activism and personal lives. A critical examination of the Sojourners provides a
lens for appreciating the continuities and the breaks in the postwar black freedom
movement and in black left feminism.
The Ingram Crusade: Black Left Feminist Organizing and Thought, 1948 – 1951
The Sojourners emerged during an important yet understudied surge in activism by
black women progressives in the early postwar period. These women actively took
part in building mass movements from the late 1940s through the early 1950s to
free African American men and women in high-profile human rights courts cases
such as those of the Martinsville Seven, the Trenton Six, Willie McGee, and Rosa
Lee Ingram. These cases involved allegations of murder, interracial rape, and legal
injustice and became intertwined with Cold War politics.16 No issue galvanized
black women in the Black Left more than the Ingram case. The National Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as well as the Communist
Party widely publicized her arrest in November 1947 and her conviction in January
1948. Bowing to public pressure, Georgia officials commuted her death sentence to
life in prison in March 1948.17
Although rarely mentioned in the master narrative of the postwar black free-
dom movement, Ingram through the amnesty campaign on her behalf became a

household name in African American communities and generated worldwide pub-
licity. Black women progressives took the lead in building this campaign. In March
1949, black women, many of whom were CRC members, formed the National Com-
mittee for the Defense of the Ingram Family. The veteran communist leader Maude
White Katz and the longtime women’s club leader Mary Church Terrell served as
the group’s administrative secretary and national secretary, respectively. The future
Sojourner leaders Eslanda Robeson, Charlotta Bass, and Shirley Graham Du Bois
also took part in the Ingram Committee. Modeled after Popular Front organiza-
tions, the group built broad-based mass support in the United States for Ingram’s
release and publicized the case internationally.18
Employing tactics similar to those used by black club women at the turn of
the twentieth century, black women progressives often articulated their demands
for Ingram’s freedom in maternalist terms. Scholars have often viewed maternal-
ism as conservative. The Sojourners’ tactics, however, underscore the ways in which
black women progressives used maternalist discourse to demand dignity and respect
for black motherhood and to promote a human rights agenda that directly chal-
lenged the Cold War order.19 The Ingram Committee described Ingram as “an inno-
cent Negro mother” and called attention to her plight as a “widow, sharecropper,
and mother . . . [who] defended her honor, virtue, and home” from a white male
rapist. Naming the case “a monument to racial bigotry and injustice,” the Ingram
Committee charged that her incarceration constituted “an outrage to all Ameri-
can motherhood and womanhood. It makes a mockery of civil rights.”20 Ingram’s
case represented in glaring terms the interlocking systems of oppression suffered by
African American women: the painful memories of and the continued day-to-day
sexual violence committed against black women’s bodies by white men, the lack of
protection for and the disrespect of black motherhood, the economic exploitation
of black working-class women, and the disfranchisement of black women in the Jim
Crow South.
Moreover, the case stood as a violation of human rights. “The United States,”
the Ingram Committee charged, “[could] intervene for human rights.” But, instead
of freeing her, the United States chose “to pardon hundreds of Nazis [sic] criminals
responsible for the extermination of six million Jews in Europe.” “The United States
government,” it added, “has failed to take a forthright stand for human rights for its
own citizens while showing mercy for Nazi criminals.”21 In the spring of 1949, the
Ingram Committee flooded the White House with ten thousand Mother’s Day cards
and sent a petition with twenty-five thousand signatories to President Harry S. Tru-
man demanding Ingram’s freedom. The group also requested a meeting with the
president, who initially agreed to grant them an audience. Yet Truman ultimately
cancelled the meeting, saying he was too busy to see the committee members.22
At the same time, the Ingram Committee pursued an internationalist strat-
egy to win Ingram’s freedom. Recognizing Jim Crow as the Achilles’ heel in the

U.S. claim to being the leader of the “free world,” the Ingram Committee sent a
brief about her case to all fifty-nine nations represented at the United Nations (UN).
On the request of the Ingram Committee, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a petition to the
UN Commission on Human Rights in September 1949 demanding that the Gen-
eral Assembly debate the case. The Ingram Committee followed up by sending a
small delegation, led by White Katz, to thirty UN delegation offices, including sev-
eral from the Soviet bloc. A Polish delegate remarked that Ingram’s incarceration
constituted a “most flagrant and brazen violation of human rights.” Infuriated U.S.
diplomats successfully prevented the General Assembly from discussing the case.23
This move did not deter Ingram’s supporters from making future appeals to the UN.
In May 1954, the Women’s Committee for Equal Rights, the Ingram Committee’s
successor, delivered a petition to the UN Commission on the Status of Women,
accusing the United States of violating Ingram’s human rights. In response to ongo-
ing pressure in the United States, international publicity, and the continued efforts
of her attorneys, Georgia officials finally released Ingram and her two sons in 1959
after twelve long years.24
The Ingram case brought black activist women together, and many of them
would help found the Sojourners, but the Sojourners more immediately developed as
a group in response to powerful writings by black left feminists. The Trinidad-born
CPUSA leader Claudia Jones popularized the concept of “triple oppression” with
the 1949 essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”25
Similarly, Beulah Richardson’s 1951 poem “A Black Woman Speaks . . . of White
Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of Peace” placed special emphasis on the social
consequences of being a black woman in a historically violent, racist, and sexist soci-
ety. Richardson, a dynamic, twenty-five-year-old aspiring actor who had fled to Los
Angeles to escape Jim Crow in her native Mississippi, wrote the poem in response
to Willie McGee’s execution and after befriending Paul Robeson, Louise Thompson
Patterson, and William Patterson. Drawing similar conclusions as the writings of
earlier antilynching women crusaders Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Jessie Daniel Ames,
a white southerner, the poem critiques the discourse of chivalry that justified the
lynching of black men on the grounds of protecting white women:
It is right that I a woman
black,
should speak of white womanhood, My fathers,
my brothers,
my husbands, my sons
die for it — because of it.
Their blood chilled in electric chairs,
stopped by hangman’s noose, cooked by lynch mob’s fire,
spilled by white supremacist mad desire to kill for profit
gives me that right.

Rejecting “woman” as a universal, ahistorical category, Richardson’s poem neverthe-
less posits a universal right to bodily integrity and the sanctity of life regardless of
race and gender. The poem ends with a call for white women to recognize African
American women as their equals and for black and white women to join hands in
fighting for women’s rights, racial equality, global peace, and democracy.26
“A Black Woman Speaks” became a smash hit in the Communist Left during
the summer of 1951. It also deeply impressed Louise Thompson Patterson, sparking
the initial idea for forming an all-black women’s social justice movement.27 In early
September, she approached Richardson about starting such an organization when
the latter arrived in New York to pursue an acting career. After a few all-night con-
versations, they formed what became the Sojourners for Truth and Justice. A few
weeks later, the Initiating Committee for the Sojourn for Truth and Justice was in
place.28
The Initiating Committee brought together older and younger black women
progressives. Depression-era political and economic upheavals had radicalized vet-
eran activists Louise Thompson Patterson, Dorothy Hunton, Shirley Graham Du
Bois and Eslanda Robeson, all of whom were members of the CAA, the CRC, and,
with the exception of Robeson, the CPUSA. Charlotta Bass, the septuagenarian pub-
lisher of the California Eagle and the vice presidential candidate on the 1952 Pro-
gressive Party ticket, sat on the board. While neither Bass nor the younger Sojourner
leadership such as Richardson, the organizer Senora Williams of Richmond, Vir-
ginia, the actor Frances Williams of Los Angeles, and the New York-based play-
wright Alice Childress were Communist Party members, they were actively involved
in the Progressive Party and worked closely with known communists. In addition,
the Initiating Committee included Willie McGee’s widow, Rosalie McGee, Bessie
Mitchell, a sister of one of the Trenton Six defendants, Amy Mallard, and Josephine
Grayson, the wife of one of the Martinsville Seven. These women’s lives served as
powerful symbols of the racist violence that African American women and their
families readily encountered. This group of older and younger black women progres-
sives would form the core of Sojourner leadership.29
“A Call to Negro Women”
The Initiating Committee issued “A Call to Negro Women,” a manifesto announc-
ing the group’s inaugural meeting, the Sojourn for Truth and Justice, in Washington
in late September.30 The call asked black women “to personally address this gov-
ernment for absolute, immediate, and unconditional redress.” Black women, it con-
tended, “will no longer in sight of God or man sit by and watch our lives destroyed
by unreasonable and unreasoning hate that metes out to us every kind of death it
is possible for a human being to die.” In outlining the ways that the United States
contributed to the death of black “human beings,” the Sojourners clearly linked
black suffering to the violation of rights and to human villainy. “We die of poverty,

loneliness, drudgery, and disease,” it declared. “We have watched our husbands
and fathers burned, quartered, hanged, and electrocuted by hooded and unhooded
mobs.” In particular, the Sojourners called attention to African American women’s
encounters with racialized sexual violence, and the state’s complicity with it. They
wrote, “We have seen our daughters raped and degraded,” implicitly referencing the
case of Ingram and castigating the government for incarcerating her because “she
dare[d] to rise in defense of her honor.”31
The Sojourners charged that Jim Crow and the denial of civil liberties were
inseparable from a U.S. Cold War foreign policy that attacked black humanity. Link-
ing domestic and international imperatives, their call warned the government that it
could not “honestly, convincingly and sincerely spend billions” in the Korean conflict
“and draft treaties for the peace and freedom of other nations while it never has and
does not now protect the lives of and liberties of 15,000,000 of its own Negro citi-
zens.” Only when the government enforced “the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments . . .
then and only then can it speak as a free nation for a free world.” It was to this
struggle that “we, Negro Women of this our land, must and now dedicate our every
effort.” Urging African American women “to dry your tears, and in the spirit of
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, ARISE,” the call summoned black women to
Washington, DC, for the Sojourn for Truth and Justice. There they would “demand
of the President, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the Congress
absolute, immediate, and unconditional redress of grievances.” The Sojourners were
confident that the conference would not only galvanize African American women to
fight for their rights, dignity, and lives but inspire “especially the colored women of
Africa and Asia who expect us to make this challenge.”32
The Sojourn for Truth and Justice
The Sojourn for Truth and Justice held from September 29 through October 1,
1951, signaled the group’s determination to pursue its black left feminist agenda. It
made for an impressive affair: 132 women from fifteen states answered the call for
the inaugural gathering held at the meeting hall of the Cafeteria Workers Union, a
left-leaning union predominantly comprising African American women.33 The con-
vention’s “Proclamation of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice” not only demanded
the “immediate freedom” for Ingram but also issued a plea to “our government” to
work with other nations in realizing “permanent world peace so that . . . women . . .
may live and rear our children in a free, secure, peaceful world.” The people gath-
ered heard stirring speeches by Charlotta Bass, Eslanda Robeson, and others, decry-
ing black left-wing leaders’ persecution and black women’s second-class treatment,
while also calling attention to the connections between the African American free-
dom struggle and those in the emerging third world.34 The Young Lorraine Hans-
berry attended the gathering as a reporter for Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper,
bolstering her internationalist sensibility.

Convention delegations did more than draft resolutions and listen to fiery
speeches. In their effort to speak truth to power, the Sojourners carried out
direct actions for racial justice and peace in the nation’s capital. On October 1,
they attempted meeting with the president and with cabinet members to discuss
black people’s second-class citizenship. (Prior to the conference, Beulah Richard-
son had sent letters on behalf of the Initiating Committee to Attorney General
McGrath, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Alexander Pace,
and President Truman requesting meetings with them.) In addition to the group
who charged into the Justice Department, a smaller delegation led by Bass went to
the Pentagon to speak with the secretary of defense about the racist treatment of
black soldiers in the U.S. armed forces in Korea. While they did not confer with the
secretary, the Sojourners presented their grievances to a dumbfounded army gen-
eral who pleaded ignorance about racism. Five Sojourners called on the black U.S.
representative from Chicago’s South Side, William L. Dawson, at his office. Yet his
secretary informed them that he was out of town. They left demands urging Daw-
son to support calls for a federal inquiry into racial violence in Cicero, Illinois, a
Chicago suburb where an enraged white mob had viciously attacked a small number
of African Americans who had moved into a lily-white neighborhood in July 1951.
(The Sojourners did not contact the Harlem congressperson Adam Clayton Powell,
most likely because he had recently severed ties with the Communist Left.) While
they did not confer with the president, Sojourners that evening held a candlelight
vigil for racial equality and peace in front of the White House lawn. Conference
delegates left Washington the next day energized about the exciting prospects of
building their new organization.35
In the coming months, several leading Sojourners signed the We Charge
Genocide petition delivered to the UN in late 1951 by William L. Patterson, the
CRC’s national secretary, a CPUSA leader, and Louise Thompson Patterson’s hus-
band. We Charge Genocide was the most damning human rights report on Jim
Crow written during the McCarthy period. Comparing the contemporary wave of
white racial terror in the United States to the violence of the Holocaust, the petition
cast a transnational frame as it charged the United States “with institutionalized
oppression and persistent slaughter of [African Americans] on a basis of ‘race,’ a
crime . . . prohibited” under the 1948 UN Convention against Genocide. Although
the document made only passing reference to the rape of black women, it listed the
executions of Willie McGee and the Martinsville Seven and the murder of Robert
Mallard, along with scores of recent black deaths, police brutality, poverty, poor
housing, and unemployment as examples of “domestic genocide.” American diplo-
mats, however, in an imperial move prevented the petition from being taken up by
the UN General Assembly.36

“Our Cup Runneth Over”
No event captured the Sojourners’ belief that racist violence and the denial of civil
liberties constituted violations of African Americans’ human rights more than the
horrific murder of the Florida NAACP leader Harry Moore and his wife Harriet.
The Moores died in their home in Mims, Florida, near Orlando on early Christmas
morning 1951 when assailants threw dynamite through their bedroom window. The
bomb instantly killed Harry Moore and fatally wounded Harriet Moore. The assail-
ants were never found nor brought to justice.37
The Sojourners attempted to build a national movement to protest this mur-
der and to demand racial justice, with a particular focus on Harriet Moore’s death. In
a publicly released statement, “Our Cup Runneth Over,” they passionately expressed
their outrage that the Moores had been ruthlessly killed by a “racist bomb” and that
this heinous act had occurred on Christmas. It added: “Black women the world over
know too well the tireless grief of Mrs. Rose Moore, whose 71 years of sacrifice gave
to the world a fighting son of the Negro people, Harry T. Moore.” The statement
expressed the group’s anguish for Harriet Moore’s mother, who “sat at the bedside
of her dying daughter.” Similar to conclusions drawn by the Ingram Committee,
the Sojourners understood Harriet Moore’s death and the suffering of her mother
and mother-in-law as egregious examples of the daily, violent assaults against black
motherhood and womanhood not only within a domestic context but across national
boundaries. They posited that black women, despite the existence of geographic
borders, not only recognized but also experienced the sufferance wrought by racial
subjugation and similarly unjust attacks on their children’s and families’ lives.38
For Sojourners, the Moores’ deaths were not isolated incidents. Rather they,
along with the executions of the Martinsville Seven and of Willie McGee or such
incidents as Cicero, were blatant examples of a rising, nationwide tide of “legalized
murder” and white racial terror that unarguably not only plagued the United States
but also informed colonial and imperial policies worldwide. As black left women
who laid claim to third world women’s solidarity, they surely had their eyes on white
imperial machinations in the Cold War era. In fact, the group was acutely aware of
how Harriet Moore’s death would play out in the international arena. “The whole
world,” the Sojourners charged, “looked with shocked and angry eye at” the murder.
Determined to resist, the organization called on African American women “to close
ranks, join hands in an unbreakable bond of unity” to keep the struggle for racial
equality and justice alive.39
In an effort to call national attention to the Moores’ murders, the Sojourners
summoned for five thousand African American women to participate in a “March on
Washington” on February 12, 1952, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Instructing protes-
tors to wear veils, the organization intended to use the march “as a day for mourning
for the death of Harriet Moore” and “to ask the President to stop genocide of Negro
people and to guarantee civil liberties to all Americans.” The Sojourners connected

the Moores’ deaths to the repressive Cold War political order. They charged that the
government’s inaction in prosecuting the Moores’ assailants marked the most egre-
gious example of the ways in which black people were the “chief victim[s]” of the
“infamous” Smith Act and the failure of the U.S. government to protect the lives and
civil liberties of African Americans.40 They also cited the persecution of Alphaeus
Hunton, of the black CPUSA leader James E. Jackson Jr., and of Claudia Jones as
further proof of how the U.S. government trampled on the Constitution and African
Americans’ human rights. But since authorities refused to prosecute the Moores’
assailants, Sojourners called on African American women to “sit on the White
House steps until some action is taken by our government against this dynamite
reign of terror that threatens our lives and our liberties.” Despite their passionate
calls, the Sojourners never staged the protest. Logistical problems of organizing a
major demonstration within only a matter of weeks and in such a repressive political
moment may explain why it was not held. But the call to dramatize Harriet Moore’s
death by summoning thousands of veiled black women to Washington illustrated
the Sojourners’ intentions to use direct action and provocative, socially recognized
symbols of women’s distress to garner worldwide support in ending racist violence
and injustice.41
The Eastern Seaboard Conference and the Ingram Case
The Sojourners’ Eastern Seaboard Conference held on March 23, 1952, in New
York, the group’s first (and last) major gathering following its Washington conven-
tion, set the group’s black left feminist agenda until its demise. Describing the group
as “a new freedom movement of Negro Women,” the conference announcement
referred to U.S. officials’ failure to prosecute the Moores’ assailants, enact antilynch-
ing legislation, and improve black living standards as “crimes of government against
15,000,000 of its own nationals.” In addition, the statement blasted the government
for finding a way to “persecute every Negro man and woman who fearlessly fights . . .
genocidal practices.” For these reasons, the conference’s call urged African Ameri-
can women to join this “freedom movement . . . for life, peace, and security of their
families.”42
Nearly one hundred women attended the one-day event at the Harlem YMCA
including the group’s national leaders and Claudia Jones.43 Echoing Jones’s writings,
Louise Thompson Patterson exclaimed in an impassioned speech that the Sojourn-
ers could build “the greatest organization in the history of our people because, triply
oppressed as we are, we can lead the fight for our people’s freedom.”44 One report
declared that “Negro women, as women, as Negroes, and as workers are the most
oppressed group of the whole population of the United States.”45 Written in lan-
guage similar to We Charge Genocide, the conference’s “Youth Resolution” declared
that police brutality, educational inequity, lynching, poverty, and “rape frame ups”
amounted to an “attempt of the United States Government to anniliate [sic] Negro

Youth” and a “form of genocide.” In addition, the resolution declared that young
black women faced “special oppression . . . as Negroes, as women, as youth.”46 The
gathering formulated an “Action Program” focused on mobilizing black women for
peace and racial equality. The group pledged to recruit five thousand new members
by year’s end and passed resolutions supporting the unionization of black women
domestics, declaring opposition to the military draft, and demanding that the
Moores’ assailants be brought to justice, Rosa Lee Ingram be freed, the Korean War
be ended, and government spending on schools and social programs be increased.
Attendees also called for sending a massive interracial women’s delegation to Geor-
gia to demand Ingram’s release.47
The spring and early summer of 1952 saw a flurry of Sojourner activity.
Members drafted a constitution. Stating that its objectives were “to unite all Negro
women” in the United States “for the protection of their lives and liberties,” the con-
stitution directed the group to “fight to the death of genocide as it is directed against
Negro people in the homeland.” It also pledged “to wage a ceaseless war against the
persecution on Negro women, such as the case of Rosa Lee Ingram.”48
The Sojourners internationalized the Ingram case. In March, the group
approached the left-wing New York-based Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish
Women’s Clubs about working together in advancing black freedom and black-
white unity.49 In June, the Sojourners and the Emma Lazarus Federation issued
a joint statement to the Fifteenth International Conference on Public Education
in Geneva, cosponsored by the International Bureau of Education and the United
Nations Education, Science, Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Signed by Louise
Thompson Patterson and the Emma Lazarus Federation official Hilda Freedman,
the cable stated that African American women had faced “over 300 years” of “every
form of discrimination and oppression.” Calling for the conference’s recognition of
“guaranteeing the civil liberties of Negro women [as] basic to full educational equal-
ity for all women,” the statement urged the gathering to pass a resolution calling for
the freedom of Ingram and her two sons. The cable not only posited that white wom-
en’s equality was inextricably connected to the status of black womanhood; it also
rejected the notion that “woman” constituted a universal category, particularly when
it came to treatment and concerns. Instead, Thompson Patterson and Freedman
asserted that African American women faced special issues that could be addressed
only by black women themselves and by white women sincerely committed to the
elimination of white supremacy and political persecution.50
The Sojourners and Antiapartheid
The Sojourners’ efforts to forge ties with South African female antiapartheid activ-
ists best illustrates the ways in which the group understood black women’s oppres-
sion in transnational terms, demonstrated its commitment to international solidarity
with third world women, and viewed campaigns for self-determination, the disman-

tling of colonial empires, and racial equality as struggles for human rights. African
American interest in apartheid, especially among the Black Left, increased in early
1952 on the eve of the Campaign of Defiance of Unjust Laws better known as the
Defiance Campaign.51 Cosponsored by the African National Congress (ANC) and
the South African Indian Congress, the campaign organized massive civil disobedi-
ence against the racist government repression of nonwhite South Africans’ human
rights from April 6, 1952, the tercentennial of the first landing of Dutch settlers in
South Africa, through early 1953. Black South African women figured prominently
in leading sit-ins of segregated public facilities and organizing general strikes, which
in some cases led to their arrest and imprisonment.52
The Sojourners discussed the Defiance Campaign at their Eastern Seaboard
Conference. There they approved an antiapartheid resolution written by the CAA,
the “first anti-apartheid organization in the United States.”53 Highlighting the cross-
fertilization of ideas between the Sojourners and the CAA, the resolution — per-
haps written by CAA executive committee members Thompson Patterson and
Hunton — called attention to the connections among freedom struggles of African-
descended women across the diaspora.54 Its opening line articulated this connection
by announcing that “the struggle of black women in America for freedom and justice
is unthinkable as many hundreds of millions of their sisters in the Caribbean, Africa,
and Asia are degraded and enslaved by the same pattern of racist oppression which
we strive to abolish in our own land.” The resolution highlighted how “women are
sharing in the leadership of this campaign for human rights in South Africa.” The
Sojourners recognized the relationship between their domestic human rights claims
and activist struggles and those of South African women, thereby unveiling the ways
in which racist systems of control, while having nuanced formations, operated simi-
larly across geographic boundaries with deleterious effects for all people of color.
The resolution cogently argued that by “supporting the struggle of our brothers and
sisters in South Africa against . . . fascist-like discrimination and oppression,” black
Americans were in effect striking “a blow at Jim-Crow in our land.” The resolution
directed the Sojourners to send a copy to President Truman, picket in front of the
South African consulate in Manhattan on April 6, 1952, and contact black, white,
and Indian women antiapartheid activists.55
There is no evidence showing whether the Sojourners actually contacted
Truman. They did send a letter to the UN South African delegation informing its
members that the Sojourners were in “full support” of the Defiance Campaign. “We
believe that racism,” the letter added, “is the enemy of mankind and that it must
end in South Africa, as well as our own nation so that throughout the world, all men
and women and children can attain freedom, dignity, and peace.” Carrying out the
resolution, the Sojourners joined a CAA-sponsored demonstration in front of the
South African consulate in Manhattan.56
The Sojourners also corresponded directly with women antiapartheid activ-

ists. An April 5, 1952, letter from Charlotta Bass and Louise Thompson Patterson
to Baila Page, a white National Union of Distributive Workers’ official in Johan-
nesburg, expressed their solidarity with the upcoming Defiance Campaign. “We
have been inspired,” they wrote, “by the example of militant action on the part of
African women. We realize that our fight for freedom in the United States is inex-
tricably linked to the struggle against the tyranny of the white supremacists not only
in South Africa but throughout the entire Continent.” They added: “We salute you
women of Africa and hold out our hands to join yours in a solid bond of unity.” In a
statement that anticipated ideas articulated by black feminists of the 1970s, Bass and
Thompson Patterson emphasized “that these struggles for full freedom on the part
of colored women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States must lead to the com-
plete emancipation of women throughout the world.” The letter closed by emphasiz-
ing that “white supremacy is the enemy of all humanity. Its destruction will pave the
way to peace, security, and freedom for all mankind.”57
The Sojourners also contacted Ray (Rachel) Esther Alexander Simons, a
white South African Communist Party leader and the general secretary of the Food
and Canning Workers Union in Johannesburg, as well as the Durban-based ANC
Women’s League leader, Bertha Mkize.58 An elated Mkize answered the group’s
letter: “It is sweet and very encouraging” that the Sojourners “have made it possible
the link [between African American and African women] we have always wished for
[on] this side of the world.” Expressing her hope that they would remain in commu-
nication about their respective struggles, Mkize added: “Please give the love of the
African Women to the Negro Woman in the States.” She closed the note: “In Sis-
terhood.”59 These exchanges bolstered the hope that the Sojourners, as Thompson
Patterson wrote in their newsletter, would stand at the forefront in “the liberation
struggle of [black] people and the fight for peace and freedom in the nation and in
the world.”60
The Sojourners’ Demise
Despite an auspicious start, the Sojourners neither developed into a large national
organization, nor did they galvanize a transnational movement of third world women.
The group never counted more than a few hundred members, most of whom lived in
New York. Even there, there is no record of the Sojourners’ activism, such as taking
part in broad-based, local campaigns focused on school reform, desegregation, and
ending police brutality led by the New York NAACP chapter president Ella Baker.
By the fall of 1952, the group stopped functioning.61
The Sojourners’ equivocal relationship with the Communist Party factored
into the former’s demise. Tension between the groups ironically occurred at the
moment when the CPUSA jettisoned its World War II reformist line and turned
toward the “ultra left,” again calling for class struggle and socialism and placing
renewed emphasis on “Negro liberation” and support for national liberation move-

ments in the nascent third world.62 Despite this stance, the party neither officially
endorsed the Sojourners nor provided the group with the same degree of support
that it gave to the Congress of American Women, a left-wing interracial women’s
rights organization formed in 1946, or to its successor, American Women for Peace.
The party also did not lend as much backing to the Sojourners as it did to other
black-led left-wing groups such as the CAA, the CRC, the National Negro Labor
Council, or Robeson’s Freedom newspaper.63
Multiple factors explain the CPUSA’s ambivalence toward the Sojourners.
Party officials had never before dealt with a left-led, all-black women’s group. Party
officials were always uneasy toward progressive social movements that they did not
create or directly control. The impetus for starting the Sojourners came from out-
side the party, and the Sojourners made it clear early on that they wished to pursue
their own independent agenda. In addition, the Sojourners became entangled in an
internal CPUSA conflict. According to the historian Linn Shapiro, Claudia Jones
hoped that the Sojourners could serve as a platform for advancing her struggle
with CPUSA officials over black women’s place in the socialist struggle. At the
same time, party officials feared that losing one of its most visible black female
leaders to the Sojourners would lessen the CPUSA’s influence in African American
communities.64
The CPUSA’s unease with the Sojourners led to a bitter confrontation among
Jones, Louise Thompson Patterson, and Beulah Richardson. Thompson Patterson
remembered decades later that Jones approached her and Richardson to convey
the discomfort of party leaders with the Sojourners. Whatever Jones said sparked a
physical confrontation with Richardson. “I had to pull Beulah off Claudia,” Thomp-
son Patterson recalled. If this incident happened, it not only contradicts Jones’s pub-
lic support for the organization but also complicates her legacy as an outspoken
black feminist, suggesting that her unwavering loyalty to the CPUSA prompted her
to undercut an all-black women’s progressive organization. The party’s equivocal
stance toward the Sojourners might have made it even more vulnerable to govern-
ment attacks, which may help explain why the group collapsed three years earlier
than its other black left counterparts.65
The acrimony surrounding the Sojourners prompted Thompson Patterson to
rethink the Party’s ability to address effectively black women’s issues. Looking back
on this incident, she recollected: “I think the main problem [between the CPUSA
and Sojourners] was a lack of understanding at that time in circles of the Left move-
ment of how to work in the black community, particularly among women.”66 “I think
there is no organization in a country such as the U.S.” she claimed, “that is not
affected by racism. It takes many forms. I think that it is difficult for white people
to see [black] people organizing separately for anything . . . . In progressive and
Left organizations, it [all-black organizing] is often interpreted as nationalism. And
nationalism is seen as a divisive element.”67

Since the 1930s, black women like Thompson Patterson had expressed frus-
tration — sometimes openly — with racism and sexism within the Communist Party
and with its inability to appreciate African American women’s grievances. Many
believed that the CPUSA’s promotion of interracialism came at their expense, often
leaving them intellectually isolated and without companionship. Thompson Patter-
son made this prescient case in a 1937 article titled “Negro Women in Our Party.”68
Years later, the former longtime Harlem party activist and Sojourner, Queen Mother
Audley Moore, expressed her frustration with the Communist Party’s interracial-
ism more bluntly: White party women “all had black men, black men . . . . A black
woman, if she took her husband in there, he wouldn’t last long, ’cause the white
women would grab him.”69 In addition, some black party women found the Commu-
nist Left’s insularity, secrecy, and sectarianism unnerving, prompting them to bolt
from the party. Concerned to maintain her husband’s standing with the communist
leadership, Thompson Patterson did not act against the party’s ambivalence toward
the Sojourners.70 Nonetheless, her frustration proved that even in the avowedly
racially egalitarian Communist Left, black women radicals had to fight for a voice
and for respect.
McCarthyism also played a key part in contributing to the Sojourner’s
demise. The group emerged at the height of anticommunist hysteria in the United
States. In March 1951, a federal judge sentenced Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a
married communist couple, to death for allegedly passing U.S. nuclear secrets to
the Soviets. Four months later, the Justice Department indicted so-called second-
string Communist Party officials (the national leadership had been arrested in 1948)
for violating the Smith Act. For the party, the “Smith Act trials” confirmed its “five
minutes to midnight” line that the United States was on the precipice of a fascist
takeover, prompting the CPUSA to become even more sectarian and secretive. At
the same time, the Korean War grew increasingly unpopular with the American
public, and the country was in the grip of a recession.71 In the wake of these events,
the NAACP and other mainstream black protest groups adopted what the historian
Mary Dudziak has called “Cold War civil rights,” a narrowing of acceptable civil
rights discourse that “kept discussions of broad-based social change, or a linking of
race and class off the agenda” and that supported U.S. anti-Soviet policy to secure
racial reform in return.72 Moreover, as the historian Gerald Horne has argued,
mainstream civil rights groups retreated from more militant anticolonial positions
and initiated their own internal anticommunist witch hunts in an effort to conform
to the Cold War order. For instance, the NAACP in 1950 passed a resolution barring
communists from its membership. While it had championed taking Jim Crow before
the UN in the years immediately after the war, the NAACP refused to support such
initiatives by the early 1950s.73 In this stifling political climate, the Sojourners found
themselves increasingly isolated within the African American community.
From the group’s very beginning, the Justice Department kept close tabs on

the Sojourners’ every move. Government informants riddled the group, enabling
the FBI to accumulate more than 450 pages of surveillance files in little more than
one year. Convinced that the Sojourners were a “Communist Front,” files detailed
the group’s supposed “Communist Influence and Participation” and its “Subversive
Ramifications.”74 Reports listed Sojourners’ alleged membership in the CPUSA. One
file included an informant’s claim that the Sojourn for Truth and Justice’s primary
purpose was “to start a . . . revolution,” while another purported that the Sojourn-
ers’ Los Angeles chapter “was under complete control of the Communist Party.”75
The Sojourners’ outspoken support for racial justice, and for Ingram’s freedom in
particular, raised alarm in the Justice Department. Several FBI reports detailed
the Sojourners’ alleged “March on Georgia,” a massive interracial women’s action
supposedly designed “to forceably [sic] free ROSA LEE INGRAM from jail” and
“to provoke an incident that will call for bloodshed and spark the flame of revolution
throughout Georgia.”76 Such conclusions revealed the confluence of racism, sexism,
and anticommunism not only in paranoid government officials’ distorted under-
standings of the Sojourners but also in underlying racialized sexual anxieties. For
whites, black conspiracies in the South always conjured fears of black men raping
white women, especially when white southerners believed that northern outsiders
were responsible for unrest.77
In addition, the Sojourners’ strategy to internationalize Jim Crow troubled
government authorities. One FBI report expressed concern with the group’s pur-
ported confidence that “they have Negro representation at the United Nations”
that would support the Sojourners’ cause. This revealing statement suggests that
American officials, who feared that the UN could threaten U.S. sovereignty, worried
that Sojourners would find allies in the international community. In the context of
the U.S.-Soviet rivalry for global influence, the Sojourners’ internationalist strategy
and transnational sensibility only verified its subversive intentions to American gov-
ernment officials.78 Since the UN stood as a beacon for human rights, the group’s
appeals there reverberated.
The Justice Department also kept extensive files on Louise Thompson Pat-
terson, Beulah Richardson, Charlotta Bass, Angie Dickerson, and Alice Childress
that included numerous references to their work in the Sojourners.79 No Sojourner
suffered more than Claudia Jones. Charged alongside eleven other communist lead-
ers in 1948 with violating the Smith Act, Jones endured several wrenching years
of revolving court battles. She served a nine-month sentence in federal prison in
1955 before her deportation to Great Britain. Her health suffered irreversibly dur-
ing these years, leading to her untimely death in 1964 at the age of forty-nine.80
McCarthyism created a climate of harassment and intimidation that prevented the
Sojourners from building the kind of organization they had envisioned. In doing so,
Cold War repression silenced some of the most committed and dynamic antiracist
organizers from the emergent black freedom movement and isolated them, for a

brief but crucial moment, from the global political stage as independence move-
ments in Africa and Asia gained momentum.81
Cold warriors’ concern with the Sojourners illustrates the ways in which the
group and government officials understood the meaning of human rights in dia-
metrically different terms. For the Sojourners, human rights constituted a strat-
egy to protect black people from white racial terror and persecution, to secure the
freedom and dignity of African American women, and to forge ties of international
solidarity with emerging third world nations, particularly with women of color. To
cold warriors, demands for human rights were part of a Soviet-directed plot against
the United States. Similarly, the white South African government viewed demands
for racial democracy and human rights as a sinister Soviet conspiracy in their midst,
prompting Pretoria to suppress brutally the Defiance Campaign by jailing thou-
sands of protestors and leaders of the ANC and the South African Indian Congress.
Anticommunism therefore not only played a key role in shutting down an African
American radical women’s organization. The Red Scare stemmed efforts by African-
descended women left-wing activists on both sides of the Atlantic to establish orga-
nizational ties of international solidarity and to exchange ideas during the height of
the Cold War.82
This is not to suggest that African American women activists stopped think-
ing internationally after the McCarthy period and before the height of the Civil
Rights Movement. Former Sojourners along with the civil rights activists Ella Baker
and Fannie Lou Hamer and the jazz vocalist Nina Simone, for instance, understood
the black freedom movement in global terms. However, no other African American
women’s group until the late 1960s formulated an explicitly left-wing, transnational
feminist program like that of the Sojourners.83
Even if the political climate had been more favorable, the Sojourners still
would have faced considerable hurdles in actualizing their goals. Their black left
feminist program tended to construct African-descended women in essential-
ist, ahistorical terms. They posited African American and third world women as
a class and as uniformly progressive. Sojourners also promoted a heteronormative
discourse that elided the complexities of black women’s sexualities and identities
and their relation to racial, class, and gender oppression. On one level this consti-
tuted a useful strategy for imagining political solidarities among a disparate group
of women of color from around the world whose political and social locations were
shaped by a shared history of and daily encounters with racism, patriarchy, capital-
ism, and colonialism. On the other hand, it did not take into account what the third
world feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty later observed — that “systems
of racial, class, and gender domination do not have identical effects on women in
Third World contexts.” In ignoring such complexities, the Sojourners overlooked the
very real ways in which race, class, sexuality, and colonialism positioned women of
color differently vis-à-vis one another and in relation to their nation- (colonial) state.

Women of color’s divergent political and social locations in this specific historical
moment posed serious challenges for bringing third world women together across
and even within national boundaries.84 An appreciation of social location and of how
systems of domination (white supremacy, heterosexism, colonialism, and patriarchy,
for instance) operated in more relational, historically specific terms may have helped
the Sojourners formulate a theoretical approach better able to capture both the
commonalities and, more important, the particularities of third world women’s lives
and their daily, oppositional struggles as potential grounds for forging international
solidarities among women of color.85
It should be noted that the group’s theoretical shortcomings were hardly
unique to the Sojourners. Rather, their conclusions resembled those drawn by their
contemporaries in the communist movement. The Communist Left had long con-
structed essentialist social categories of “workers” and “Negroes,” and it viewed
women as a kind of class that possessed a similar standpoint due to patriarchal
oppression. Some black feminists in the 1970s would also posit African American
women as homogenous and uniformly progressive. In addition, the heteronorma-
tive framings of black women were also consistent with the time. No contemporary
Communist Left or African American women’s organization took a stand on these
issues. So while they were able to forge contacts among African-descended women,
the Sojourners remained unable to formulate a program that took into account dif-
ferences among women of color.86
The Sojourners’ social composition also prevented the group from build-
ing a broad-based left-wing black women’s organization. Despite their efforts to
reach out to working-class women by supporting initiatives beneficial to laboring
women, the Sojourners were mostly urban, economically middle class, secular, well-
educated women with a radical leftist feminist politics. They were second-class citi-
zens in their own country; but in comparison to their counterparts overseas (and in
the United States), the Sojourners were relatively privileged and in some cases far
removed from the cultural worlds of everyday black women. With links to the secu-
lar Communist Party, the Sojourners surely would have seemed alien to most black
working-class women accustomed to supporting protest movements led by charis-
matic male religious figures. The Sojourners, however, were not completely unaware
of their secularity. At a Sojourner Manhattan branch meeting, for example, attend-
ees discussed the need for membership to attend church more regularly so that they
could win everyday African American women’s support for the left-wing group.87
Still, these efforts were hardly enough to build a mass organization.
Conclusion
The Sojourners formulated a black left feminist politics that incorporated a sophis-
ticated understanding of the African American freedom as a struggle for human
rights, one that had global dimensions, during the Cold War. At the very moment

at which many communist male leaders — black and white — retreated in response
to ever increasing government repression, the Sojourners went on the offensive.
Like their predecessors in the club women’s movement, the Sojourners understood
that no one else but themselves would fight for black women’s dignity and freedom.
The rising tide of racial terror and the violation of black womanhood provoked the
Sojourners to speak out and protest injustice, including Ingram’s imprisonment. In
search of global allies, the Sojourners supported the South African Defiance Cam-
paign and corresponded with female antiapartheid activists. For these reasons, the
U.S. government identified the organization as subversive.
The Red Scare not only stymied efforts of African American women on the
Left from pursing a transnational black feminist human rights agenda, but it also
largely erased the Sojourners from historical memory. It was not until the formation
of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) in 1968 and the Combahee River
Collective in 1974 that black women’s organizations formulated an anticapitalist,
anti-imperialist, (and antihomophobic in the case of the Combahee) transnational
black feminist praxis committed to human rights. Like the Sojourners, the TWWA
and Combahee explicitly rejected the notion of a universal, global “sisterhood”
frequently invoked by second-wave white feminists. Yet few black feminists of the
1970s were aware of the debt they owed to the Sojourners.88 However, the Cold War
did not completely erase the Sojourners’ legacy. The Sojourner and longtime com-
munist Dorothy Burnham shared her memories of the black progressive women’s
group with the Sisters against South African Apartheid (SASAA), a Brooklyn-based
black women’s organization founded in 1986 by the activist Reverend Karen Smith
Daughtry.89
The Sojourners’ black left feminist agenda has important implications for
conceptualizing and promoting human rights today. What would it mean if African-
descended women’s issues were at the center of human rights discussions? How
would it change the way that governments, the UN, and human rights advocates
think and act toward issues such as globalization, underdevelopment, genocide,
reproductive rights, health care, and family and state violence?90 The short-lived
history of the Sojourners provides useful lessons for advancing a more expansive
human rights agenda for the twenty-first century — one that considers not only how
social location shapes women’s distinct and complex histories but also how gender,
race, class, and sexuality operate in intersectional and transnational ways.
Notes
An abbreviated version of this essay was presented at the Berkshire Conference on the History
of Women, June 2 – 5, 2005. I thank James Barrett, Marlah Bonner-McDuffie, Eileen Boris,
Sundiata Cha-Jua, C. L. Cole, Rayvon Fouché, Sara Clarke Kaplan, Mark Leff, Jessica Millward,
Marc D. Perry, Brian Purnell, Siobhan Sommerville, Karen Sotiropoulos, Sharra Vostral, Rhonda
Y. Williams, and the anonymous readers at RHR for their comments and suggestions.

1. “Sojourn for Truth and Justice, Digest of Proceedings,” box 15, folder 26, Louise Thompson
Patterson Papers, Special Collections, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University,
Atlanta, GA (hereafter LTP Papers). Note that I first accessed the LTP Papers before
they were reorganized in September 2002. All materials accessed after this date will be
referenced as LTP Papers 2002; Freedom, October 1951, 6.
2. Freedom, October 1951, 6. Erik S. McDuffie, “Long Journeys: Four Black Women and the
Communist Party, USA, 1930 – 1956” (PhD diss., New York University, 2003), 448 – 49.
3. “Digest of Proceedings”; Charles Martin, “Race, Gender, and Southern Justice: The Rosa
Lee Ingram Case,” American Journal of Legal History 29 (1985): 251 – 68; Dorothy Hunton,
Alphaeus Hunton: The Unsung Valiant (New York: Eppress Speed Print, n.d.), 81 – 92.
4. “Digest of Proceedings”; Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-
American Response to the Cold War, 1944 – 1963 (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1986), 201 – 21; Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988),
381 – 403.
5. Richmond Afro-American, April 19, 1952, in FBI, “Sojourners for Truth and Justice,”
Richmond, VA, Bureau file, 100 – 106886 – 1A7; Gerald Horne, Communist Front? The Civil
Rights Congress, 1946 – 1956 (Rutherford, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1988); Charles
H. Martin, “Internationalizing ‘The American Dilemma’: The Civil Rights Congress and
the 1951 Genocide Petition to the United Nations,” Journal of American Ethnic History
16 (1997): 35 – 61; Charles H. Martin, “The Civil Rights Congress and Southern Black
Defendants,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 71 (1987): 25 – 52.
6. Mary Helen Washington, “Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones:
Black Women Write the Popular Front,” in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and
Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 185, 193 – 98.
7. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth
Century (London: Verso, 1997).
8. In this essay, the noun Black Left refers to a wide range of protest organizations with
ties to the Popular Front. Similarly, the term Communist Left describes a broad array of
organizations and individuals that associated with and to varying degrees supported the
program of the Communist Party.
9. For extensive discussions of the Sojourners, see McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 438 – 60;
Jacqueline Ann Castledine, “Gendering the Cold War: Race, Class and Women’s Peace
politics, 1945 – 1975” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2006), 165 – 75; Dayo Falayon Gore,
“To Hold a Candle in the Wind: Black Women Radicals and Post – World War II U.S.
Politics” (PhD diss., New York University, 2003).
10. Bettina Shell-Duncan and Ylva Hernlund, eds., Female “Circumcision” in Africa: Culture,
Controversy, and Change (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000); Human Rights Watch/
African Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Project, Violence against Women in South
Africa: The State Response to Domestic Violence and Rape (New York: Human Rights
Watch, 1995).
11. It is also a departure from much of the scholarship on African American women’s activism in
the early twentieth century. The Sojourners most resemble the International Council of the
Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR) and the Garvey movement in their internationalist
focus, but both these groups were pro-capitalist. See Michelle Rief, “Thinking Locally,
Acting Globally: The International Agenda of African American Clubwomen, 1880 – 1940,”
Journal of African American History 89 (2004): 214 – 18; Ula Y. Taylor, The Veiled Garvey:
The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2003).

12. In this article, the term black women progressives refers to women who actively took part
in black left organizations. Black communists and noncommunists during the early 1950s
readily used the term progressive to denote their left-wing affinities and in many cases to
protect themselves from being accused communists by cold warriors. I will also use radicals
interchangeably with progressives.
13. The term human rights was still new on the international political scene during the early
1950s. The UN had adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights only a few years
before in 1948. For a useful discussion of the historical development of human rights,
see Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007); Kenneth
Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of
American History 86 (1999): 1231 – 50; Kenneth Cmiel, “The Recent History of Human
Rights,” American Historical Review 109 (2004): 119, 124 – 25; United Nations, Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm; Johannes Morsink,
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Draft, and Intent (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
14. Robin D. G. Kelley, “ ‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision,
1883 – 1950,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1045 – 77; Thomas Bender, Rethinking
American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
15. Minkah Makalani, “For the Liberation of Black People Everywhere: The African Blood
Brotherhood, Black Radicalism, and Pan-African Liberation in the New Negro Movement,
1917 – 1936” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004), 15 – 17; Mark
Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917 – 1936 ( Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 1998).
16. The McGee case involved a black Mississippi truck driver whose white female lover falsely
accused him in 1945 of rape after her husband discovered the affair. Authorities arrested
McGee and sentenced him to death. Reminiscent of the 1930s-era Scottsboro case, the
Martinsville Seven consisted of a group of African American men falsely accused in 1949 of
raping a white woman in Martinsville, Virginia. Despite the international outcry generated
by the CRC to win their freedom, Willie McGee and the Martinsville Seven died in the
electric chair in 1951. Efforts led by the CRC did, however, saved the Trenton Six, a group
of young black men falsely accused of killing an elderly white shop owner, from execution.
Horne, Communist Front? 131 – 54; Martin, “The Civil Rights Congress,” 34 – 52.
17. Amsterdam News, February 7, 1948; Atlanta Daily World, April 10, 1948; Martin, “Rosa
Lee Ingram Case,” 251 – 68.
18. Atlanta Daily World, April 2, 1949; Daily Worker, March 31, 1949; Amsterdam News, April
2, 1949; Pittsburgh Courier, April 16, 1949; Martin, “Rosa Lee Ingram,” 261.
19. The historian Linda Gordon has correctly noted that African American maternalism “had
an even stronger feminist or womanist stance than did the white version.” See her Pitied
but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1994), 127; see also Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare
Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2006); Eileen Boris, “The
Politics of Motherhood: Black and White Activist Women Redefine the ‘Political,’ ” in
Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth
Koven and Sonya Michel (New York: Routledge, 1993), 213 – 45; Rhonda Y. Williams, The
Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004).
20. “If You Would Be Free, Help Free Mrs. Ingram and Her Two Sons,” flyer, Mary Church
Terrell Papers, box 102 – 3, folder 256, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard
University, Washington, DC; Martin, “Rosa Lee Ingram Case,” 261 – 65.

21. “If You Would Be Free”; Atlanta Daily World, April 8, 1949.
22. “If You Would Be Free”; Amsterdam News, April 2, 1949; Atlanta Daily World, April 2,
1949; Pittsburgh Courier, April 16, 1949; Daily Worker, April 1, 1949; Atlanta Daily World,
June 2, 1949; Martin, “Rosa Lee Ingram,” 261 – 66.
23. “If You Would Be Free”; Pittsburgh Courier, April 16, 1949; Atlanta Daily World, May 8,
1949; Atlanta Daily World, September 16, 1949; Atlanta Daily World, August 17, 1949.
24. Daily Worker, April 14, 1950; Atlanta Daily World, December 27, 1952; Atlanta Daily
World, May 11, 1954; Atlanta Daily World, May 13, 1954; Atlanta Daily World, August 27,
1959; Martin, “Rosa Lee Ingram Case,” 266; Horne, Communist Front? 210 – 11.
25. Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Political
Affairs 28 (1949): 51 – 67; Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the
Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 101 – 8;
McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 427 – 33; Rebecca Hill, “Fosterites and Feminists; or, 1950s
Ultra-Leftists and the Invention of the Amerikkka,” New Left Review, no. 228 (1998):
67 – 90.
26. Beah Richards, “A Black Woman Speaks of White Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of
Peace,” Freedomways 2 (1962): 288; McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 443 – 44; Ida B. Wells,
Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells,
1892 – 1900 (Boston: Bedford, 1997); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry:
Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1979).
27. A former social worker and a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Thompson Patterson
joined the CPUSA in the early 1930s due to her interest in the Soviet Union and the
Scottsboro case coupled with observing Depression-era political and economic upheavals.
Her active involvement in organizing party-affiliated movements in Harlem and nationally
helped her gain a reputation as the “ ‘leading colored woman in the Communist movement”
in the United States during the Depression. Louise Thompson, “My Southern Terror,”
Crisis, November 1934, 327; McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 71 – 126.
28. Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, dir. Lisa Guy Hamilton, 2003; McDuffie, “Long Journeys,”
443 – 44.
29. “If You Would Be Free”; Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du
Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 115 – 16, 144; Washington, “Black
Women Write the Popular Front,” 185 – 94; “A Call to Negro Women,” LTP Papers, box 15,
folder 26; McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 443 – 44.
30. “A Call to Negro Women”; McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 445 – 49.
31. “A Call to Negro Women.”
32. Ibid., Freedom, October 1951, 6; Daily Worker, October 7, 1951; McDuffie, “Long
Journeys,” 447 – 49, 452 – 53.
33. Pittsburgh Courier, September 18, 1951; Afro-American, September 22, 1951; Freedom,
October 1951, 6; Daily Worker, October 7, 1951; McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 447; Andrea
Freeman, “The Strange Career of Annie Lee Moss: Rethinking Race, Gender, and
McCarthyism,” Journal of American History 94 (September 2007), 449.
34. “Proclamation of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice”; “Digest of Proceedings”; Sojourner
form letter, October 14, 1951, 1, 2, LTP Papers, box 15, folder 26; Freedom, October 1951,
6.
35. B. Richardson to Harry S. Truman, September 25, 1951; B. Richardson to Alexander
Pace, September 25, 1951; B. Richardson to J. Howard McGrath, September 25, 1951; B.
Richardson to Dean Acheson, September 25, 1951, all in LTP Papers, box 15, folder 26;

Freedom, October 1951, 6; “Digest of Proceedings,” 2; Chicago Defender, July 14, 1951;
Chicago Defender, July 21, 1951; McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 447 – 49.
36. Sojourner signatories included Louise Thompson Patterson, Amy Mallard, Beulah
Richardson, Dorothy Hunton, Eslanda Robeson, Angie Dickerson, Josephine Grayson, and
Rosa Lee McGee. William L. Patterson, ed., We Charge Genocide (New York: International
Publishers, 1970), 31, 3; Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and
the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944 – 1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 166 – 209.
37. Ben Green, Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil
Rights Martyr (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999).
38. “Our Cup Runneth Over,” LTP Papers, box 16, folder 1.
39. Ibid.
40. The 1940 Smith Act banned teaching and advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S.
government. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 97 – 98, 104 – 5.
41. “5000 Negro Women Wanted,” LTP Papers, box 16, folder 1.
42. “Announcing the Eastern Seaboard Conference of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice,”
LTP Paper, box 16, folder 1.
43. “Reservations: Conference and Luncheon,” LTP Papers, box 16, folder 1.
44. Daily Worker, March 25, 1952.
45. Untitled report, LTP box 16, folder 1.
46. “Youth Resolution, Eastern Seaboard Conference,” LTP Papers, box 16, folder 1; “Agenda of
Eastern Seaboard Conference,” LTP Papers, box 16, folder 3.
47. Quoted in “Youth Resolution, Eastern Seaboard Conference”; Untitled speech, n.d., LTP
Papers, box 15, folder 26.
48. Sojourner Constitution, LTP Papers, box 15, folder 26.
49. Joyce Antler, “Between Culture and Politics: The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish
Clubs and the Promulgation of Women’s History, 1944 – 1989,” in U.S. History as Women’s
History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish
Sklar (Chapell Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 267 – 312.
50. Minutes of Meeting of National Organizing Committee, February 16, 1952, LTP Papers,
box 15, folder 26; McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 428 – 29; Weigand, Red Feminism, 97 – 114.
51. Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions: African Americans against Apartheid
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 17 – 20; George Fredrickson, Black
Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South
Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 245 – 52; Amsterdam News, April 5,
1952; Amsterdam News, April 19, 1952; Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black
Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937 – 1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997),
137 – 40.
52. Defiance Campaign organizers demanded that the apartheid government repeal the Group
Areas Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, and the Bantu Authorities Act or face
massive civil disobedience “to defy unjust laws that subject our people to political slavery,
economic misery and social degradation.” The 1950 Group Areas Act instated residential
segregation of blacks, whites, and “coloureds.” The 1950 Suppression of Communism Act
outlawed the South African Communist Party, while the 1951 Bantu Areas Act established
black homelands administered by local and regional councils. Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions,
17 – 20; James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa,
1935 – 1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 90 – 118; Cheryl

Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982),
131 – 38.
53. Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions, 2.
54. McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 436.
55. Ibid.; Louise Patterson to Sojourner membership, April 24, 1952, LTP Papers 2002, box
13, folder 4; “Resolution from the Council on African Affairs to the Conference of the
Sojourners for Truth and Justice, Sunday, March 23, 1952,” box 13, folder 4.
56. Charlotta Bass to South African Delegation to the United Nations, April 5, 1952, LTP
Papers 2002, box 13, folder 4; Amsterdam News, April 5, 1952; Freedom, April 1952, 1, 4.
57. Quoted in Charlotta Bass and Louise Thompson Patterson to Miss Baila Page, April 5, 1952;
Charlotta Bass and Louise Thompson Patterson to Minna T. Sioga, April 5, 1952, both in
LTP Papers 2002, box 13, folder 4.
58. Charlotta Bass and Louise T. Patterson to Miss Ray Alexander, General Secretary, Food
and Canning Workers Union, Johannesburg, South Africa, April 5 1952; Bertha Mkize to
Sojourners, April 20, 1952, both in LTP Papers 2002, box 13, folder 4; Walker, Women and
Resistance in South Africa, 50 – 51, 93, 129, 140, 155.
59. Mkize to Sojourners.
60. Louise Patterson to Sojourner membership, June 12, 1952, box 15, folder 26.
61. Barbara J. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic
Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 148 – 69; Martha Biondi,
To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 222 – 71. The Sojourners neither formally disbanded
nor announced the group’s liquidation. Rather, members seem to have stopped meeting.
McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 457 – 58.
62. James R. Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1999), 226 – 51; Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (New York:
International Publishers, 1948).
63. Amy Swerdlow, “The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in
the Cold War,” in Kerber, Kessler-Harris, and Sklar, U.S. History as Women’s History,
296 – 312; Linn Shapiro, “Red Feminism: American Communism and the Women’s Rights
Tradition, 1919 – 1956,” (PhD diss., American University, 1996), 310; McDuffie, “Long
Journeys,” 458 – 59; Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 263 – 68. Freedom, the CAA, and the
National Negro Labor Council shut down in 1955. The CRC disbanded the following year.
Horne, Communist Front? 354 – 58.
64. Shapiro, “Red Feminism,” 315 – 18.
65. Louise Thompson Patterson, interview, March 18, 1990, LTP Papers 2002, box 26, folder
13, 39 – 40.
66. Louise Thompson Patterson, interview with Margaret B. Wilkerson, n.d., LTP Papers 2002,
box 25, folder 13, 1.
67. Louise Thompson Patterson, interview with Margaret B. Wilkerson, April 13, 1988, LTP
Papers 2002, box 25, folder 13, 2.
68. Louise Thompson Patterson, “Negro Women in Our Party,” Party Organizer, August 1937,
26 – 27.
69. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “Interview with Audley (Queen Mother) Moore” ( June 6, 8, 1978),
in The Black Women Oral History Project: From the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger
Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, vol. 8, ed. Ruth Edmonds
Hill (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1991), 86.
70. Patterson, interview, March 18, 1990, 39 – 40.

71. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 176 – 78, 249, 255, 263, 305; Barrett, William Z. Foster,
235 – 51.
72. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 13.
73. Horne, Black and Red, 105 – 11, 201 –53; Anderson, Eyes off the Prize, 113 – 209.
74. FBI, “Sojourners,” New York Bureau file 100 – 384255 – 57, June 25, 1952, 3; McDuffie,
“Long Journeys,” 457 – 58.
75. FBI, “Sojourners,” Atlanta Bureau file 100 – 4855, June 30, 1952, 1, 7; FBI, “Sojourners,”
Los Angeles Bureau file, 100 – 384225 – 68, August 4, 1952.
76. FBI, “Sojourners,” Los Angeles Bureau file 100 – 384225, November 15, 1951; FBI,
“Sojourners,” Los Angeles Bureau file 100 – 106886 – 47, May 1, 1952, 1; FBI, “Sojourners,”
New York Bureau file, 100 – 106886 – 57, June 6, 1952; FBI, “Sojourners,” San Francisco
Bureau file 106886-85, June 27, 1952; FBI, “Sojourners,” Cleveland Bureau file,
100 – 1384225 – 71, September 9, 1952, 1. The Sojourners never staged the “March on
Georgia,” nor is there any specific mentioning of a campaign by this name in the group’s
records. Small, interracial delegations under the auspices of the CRC did travel to see
Ingram in prison over the Christmas holiday in 1952. They also tried to meet with the
Georgia governor Herman Talmage, who refused to grant them an audience. Atlanta Daily
World, December 27, 1952.
77. Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-communism in the South,
1948 – 1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004); Glenda Elizabeth
Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North
Carolina, 1896 – 1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 82 – 89;
Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 78 – 80.
78. FBI, “Sojourners,” Los Angeles Bureau file, 100 – 1068861 – 4647, May 1, 1951, 4; Anderson,
Eyes Off the Prize, 36 – 57.
79. FBI, “Beulah Richardson,” New York Bureau file, 100 – 388568 – 17, November 19, 1953;
FBI, “Charlotta Bass,” Los Angeles Bureau file, 100 – 2971787 – 47, May 21, 1953; FBI,
“Alice Childress,” New York Bureau file, 100 – 379156 – 4, January 26, 1953; McDuffie,
“Long Journeys,” 460 – 71; FBI, “Claudia Jones,” New York Bureau file, 100-72390-137,
January 19, 1953 15; FBI, “Angie Dickerson,” New York Bureau file, 100-64057, January 14,
1955, 27-29; FBI, “Louise Thompson Patterson,” New York Bureau file, 100-407-934-50,
July 19, 1955, 71-83.
80. McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 457 – 58; Marika Sherwood, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), 30 – 31, 163 – 77. In her insightful new study, Carole
Boyce Davies argues that despite her failing health, Jones carried out some of her most
important political work in London prior to her death. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life
of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 131– 233.
81. McDuffie, “Long Journeys,”457 – 58; Gerald Horne, Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and
Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica (New York: New York University
Press, 2005), 81 – 120, 143 – 292; Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco
Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 413 – 19; Von Eschen, Race against Empire,
141 – 43, 185 – 89; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign
Affairs, 1935 – 1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); 167 – 216;
Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black
America, 1945 – 1990 ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991), 13 – 39.

82. Fredrickson, Black Liberation, 246 – 49.
83. Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx, 131–189; Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom
Movement, 58, 59, 99, 355; Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 103 – 7; Fanon Che Wilkins, “Beyond
Bandung: The Critical Nationalism of Lorraine Hansberry, 1950 – 1965,” Radical History
Review, no. 95 (2006): 191 – 210; Ruth Feldstein, “ ‘I Don’t Want to Trust You Anymore’:
Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960s,” Journal of American History 91
(2005): 1349 – 79. Queen Mother Moore’s nationalist Universal Association of Ethiopian
Women may be an exception to this claim. McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 483; Janet Gornall,
“Audley Moore and the Politics of Revolutionary Motherhood” (paper presented at “Race,
Roots, and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power,” University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, April 1, 2006).
84. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Boundaries: Decolonizing Theory,
Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 55; Caren Kaplan, “The
Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Critical Practice,” in Scattered Hegemonies:
Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren
Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 137 – 52; Joy James, “Resting in
Gardens, Battling in Deserts: Black Women’s Activism,” Black Scholar 29 (2000): 3 – 5.
85. Mohanty, Feminism without Boundaries, 53 – 57.
86. Sandra Harding, “Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophical, and
Scientific Debate,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political
Controversies, ed. Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1 – 15; Nancy M. Hartsock,
“The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for Specifically Feminist Historical
Materialism,” in Harding, Feminist Standpoint Reader, 35 – 53; Lise Vogel, Marxism
and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1983), 73 – 92; Washington, “Black Women Write the Popular Front,” 194.
87. “Minutes of the First Meeting of the Manhattan Chapter of the Sojourners for Truth and
Justice,” n.d., LTP Papers, box 15, folder 26.
88. Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968 – 1980
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Stephen Ward, “The Third World Women’s
Alliance: Black Feminist Radicalism and Black Power Politics,” in The Black Power
Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights – Black Power Era, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 119 – 44; Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and
White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 89 – 93, 121 – 28; Frances Beal, interview by the author, September 12, 2006,
Oakland, CA.
89. Karen Smith Daughtry, telephone interview by the author, June 4, 2007.
90. See, for instance, Kavita Philip, “Reflections on the Intersections of Environment,
Development, and Human Rights in the Context of Globalization,” in Constructing Human
Rights in the Age of Globalization, ed. Mahmood Monshipouri et al. (Armonk, NY: Sharpe,
2003), 55 – 88; Saba Bahar, “Human Rights Are Women’s Rights,” in Global Feminism since
1945, ed. Bonnie Smith (New York: Routledge, 2000), 265 – 89; Julie Peters and Andrea
Wolper, eds., Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives
(New York: Routledge, 1995).

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