26 results
ACHIEVING THE AMERICAN SOUL
- HOWARD BRICK
-
- Journal:
- Modern Intellectual History / Volume 14 / Issue 2 / August 2017
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 19 October 2016, pp. 619-629
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
In 1963—as good a date as any to serve as a pivot between “fifties” and “sixties” America—James Baldwin remarked, “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace.” It was a bracing declaration, a bit gentler than Malcolm X's designation of Negroes as “victims of Americanism” and perhaps by now, as historians focus ever greater attention on the nationally constitutive role of slavery and white supremacy, almost a commonplace. Yet Baldwin's idea remains challenging to plumb and to fully inhabit. For at that moment, which both Kevin Schultz and Andrew Hartman suggest was preoccupied with “the very question of America and its meaning,” Baldwin's little book, The Fire Next Time, upended the whole debate. He was no black nationalist and, notwithstanding his expatriate life in France, no “emigrationist,” for he believed that blacks in the United States were, socially and culturally, wholly of, if not in, this country; and yet, given the deep corruption in the national past, there was no “meaning” to return to, reclaim, realize, or vindicate as a promise of black freedom. The verb Baldwin chose, in a determinedly existentialist vein, was to “achieve our country”—to create a viable moral meaning for national identity where none as yet existed. If Schultz's subjects, William F. Buckley Jr, and Norman Mailer, were “vying for the soul of the nation” and Hartman's warriors fighting “for the soul of America,” they were—in Baldwin's perspective—chasing a chimera. Such a thing wasn't there; it was yet to come, if at all.
Robeson Taj Frazier, The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
- Howard Brick
-
- Journal:
- Comparative Studies in Society and History / Volume 58 / Issue 3 / July 2016
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 14 July 2016, pp. 839-840
-
- Article
- Export citation
Conclusion: Radicalism's Future
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 311-322
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Radicalism becomes invisible, paradoxically, in its victories. When the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in 1992 by Republican President George Herbert Walker Bush, few thought back to Helen Keller, the socialist and early deaf advocate. Few remembered the bohemian radical Randolph Bourne, who penned the pathbreaking essay “The Handicapped” in 1911. Few recalled the “Rolling Quads,” a band of sixties-era Californian quadriplegics led by Ed Roberts who repurposed power wheelchairs meant for hospital use and took them out into the streets, showing up en masse at a Berkeley city council meeting in 1969 to demand that the city cut ramps in its five-inch curbs, making the City's sidewalks wheelchair-accessible for the first time. Few recalled Black Panthers bringing soul food to the disabled occupiers of the San Francisco offices of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1977. But disability rights were won by a mosaic of such alliances, which mobilized people facing a range of adverse conditions, from multiple sclerosis to cerebral palsy. In 1988, protests broke out at Gaulladet University, a federally chartered institution serving the deaf since 1864, to demand appointment of its first deaf university president, with thousands signing “Deaf President Now” and marching on Congress, successfully. Two months later, the ADA was introduced in Congress. In 1990, members of Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) abandoned their wheelchairs for a “crawl-up” of the Capitol steps to demand access as a right, each carrying a scrolled Declaration of Independence. Once objects of disgust or pity, the disabled had overcome stigma and shame to imagine a world of access and wrest a transformation that affected resource allocations, not just sensibilities – changing, in fact, the very physical design of American life.
Although the radical left has occupied very few positions of high office in American politics since the Second World War, it has had a catalytic role in American life. Dwight Macdonald once distinguished liberals who see themselves as “the left opposition within the present society” from radicals who seek a new society altogether. If radicals have not obtained a wholly new society on the scale some have dreamt, the past seven decades have in many instances seen a mutually reinforcing dynamic at work, with radicals pushing for sweeping, previously unthinkable alterations until liberals – or even conservatives, once the outré passes into the ocean of common sense – enact reforms.
4 - The Revolution Will Be Live, 1965–1973
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 121-172
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
in four parts without commercial interruptions…
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers.
The revolution will be live.
– Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1970)In spring 1968, the “Americong” – an inversion of Viet Cong, as Americans called the National Liberation Front in Vietnam – shocked the University of Pennsylvania by announcing a rally at which “home-made Napalm” was to be applied “on the flesh of a dog.” The Ivy League campus had already seen A. J. Muste address 1,200 at a 1965 teach-in, historian Gabriel Kolko lead a campaign of faculty and students that persuaded trustees to end secret chemical-biological weapons research in 1967, and protesters object to recruiting by Dow Chemical, napalm's manufacturer. Four years later, a photograph of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked down a road with burnt skin hanging from her back would epitomize the effects of the flammable jellied gasoline, but even in 1968, to napalm a dog was understood as appalling. At the appointed hour, two thousand people turned out to object – only to receive this message: “Congratulations, anti-napalm protest! You have saved the life of an innocent dog. Now your efforts should turn to protesting Dow Chemical and the U.S. government's continued use of this genocidal weapon against the civilian population of a tiny country 10,000 miles away.”
“The Americong” was 25-year-old Steven Kiyoshi Kuromiya, a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who early in the decade had taken part in Student Peace Union picketing against nuclear testing, a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sit-in on Maryland's highway, the 1963 March on Washington, and the 1965 Selma, Alabama, civil rights march. In 1966, Kuromiya started the Free University of Pennsylvania, making use of empty classrooms to offer radical classes. By 1968, he was growing his hair long and experimenting with psychedelics. Soon he would drop his first name and be known only by his Japanese names as his Asian American pride increased. His napalm dog fantasia showed a rare apprehension that consciousness is a matter of perspective, not just information, perhaps a function of his outsider status. Born in a relocation camp in Wyoming during the Second World War, he had known since he was nine, living in California, that he was attracted to other boys.
6 - Over the Rainbow, 1980–1989
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 218-262
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
When Benjamin Linder graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington in 1983, he had no intention of becoming a “yuppie,” the popular eighties term for a young urban professional pursuing consumer gratification, so he declined opportunities to work for Boeing or any other military contractor. As revolution swept the Central American isthmus, Linder admired the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which in 1979 overthrew a Nicaraguan dictatorship supported for decades by the United States. Nicaragua seemed to be forging a revolution of a new type: pluralistic, democratic, favoring neither total state control nor free market, and led collectively rather than by a strongman caudillo. “We have not reproduced the sociopolitical mechanisms of the United States or the Soviet Union,” a Sandinista leader told Playboy in 1983. “We're not following any form. What we are doing is seeking a profound solution. To what? To the poverty of this country.”
Linder moved to Managua, Nicaragua's capital city, as one of the first of tens of thousands of American internacionalistas – analogous to the brigadistas of 1930s Spain, although in developmental rather than combat roles. North American visitors were sponsored by groups in the United States such as the Nicaragua Network, whose volunteers joined in coffee harvests; TecNica, which sent welders, lathe operators, and computer programmers; and the Quixote Center, a Roman Catholic relief organization. Thousands of co-operantes, most in their twenties, had long-term stays as teachers, doctors, nurses, veterinarians, and architects. American conservatives labeled them traitors, but the United States was not officially at war with Nicaragua even if Reagan accused the Sandinistas of trying to establish a “Soviet beachhead” while the CIA covertly armed the contras, the bands of counterrevolutionaries whose core came from the former dictatorship's National Guard.
Ben Linder was more radical geek than radical chic. Short, skinny, his beard a scraggly red, and never without a pen in his pocket, he did not fit reporters' image of the “Sandalista,” a frivolous, Birkenstock-wearing revolutionary tourist. One friend described Linder as “wry about the country's problems and the revolution's shortcomings, unlike other starry-eyed, dogmatic internationalists.” Unable at first to find work as an engineer, he juggled, clowned, and acted the part of Uncle Sam in street theatre. “I go to some godforsaken country to save the world with my newly acquired skills,” he wrote his parents. “And what happens?
Contents
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp ix-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Acknowledgments
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 323-324
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
3 - A New Left, 1960–1964
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 88-120
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
When the Movement came to town in 1961, Gloria Richardson was a 39-year-old single mother of two working in her family's pharmacy. Her 16-year-old daughter Donna was first to become involved when two young organizers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one black, one white, first arrived in Cambridge, Maryland. SNCC – pronounced “Snick” – arose out of the sit-ins that swept the South after four black students requested a cup of coffee at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. Its subsistence-pay field secretaries, fervent believers in “black and white together,” were already at work in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia when Reginald Robinson, a Baltimore native, heard that Maryland's Eastern Shore was Dixie, psychologically speaking, despite its proximity to Washington, D.C. He and William Hansen arrived to find a white-dominated town of 12,000, with the 4,200 blacks packed into a ramshackle Second Ward demarcated from the white district by Race Street. “More hostile than Mississippi” is how the 22-year-old Hansen, son of an Ohio steelworker, who had spent 43 days in a Mississippi prison as a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Rider in 1961, described Cambridge after a mob beat him in the head during the first interracial attempt to enter a whites-only bar on January 14, 1962.
As a lull set in while city officials promised progress, the SNCC-affiliated Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC, or “C-Nack”) watched and waited under Gloria Richardson, its chair. In spring 1963, CNAC resumed direct action when the town's segregated movie theater announced it would confine blacks to a small area at the back of the balcony. High unemployment in the Second Ward aggravated by a packinghouse collapse in the 1950s led CNAC, which had a welfare recipient and factory worker on its executive committee, to believe economic justice as important as “integration,” the goal most liberals took to be the movement's point. CNAC's demands included not only an end to school and public accommodations discrimination but low-cost public housing and hiring of blacks by all-white firms. As locals filled churches for mass meetings, dozens of college students, black and white, arrived each weekend from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York to fill the jails.
1 - War and Peace, 1939–1948
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 17-48
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In January 1946, a council of 240 delegates in the Philippines representing more than 10,000 U.S. soldiers chaired by Sergeant Emil Mazey (Sub-Base R, Batangas, Luzon) lodged a protest with the War Department against the slow pace of troop demobilization. The war was over. American troops had clasped hands with Red Army soldiers at the River Elbe in April 1945; Berlin fell in May, Japan in August. Why were they not yet home? Continued occupation of the Philippines was needless, for the Filipinos were friendly. Guerrillas in the Hukbalahap – the People's Anti-Japanese Army – had helped secure the islands. Since the Huks were initiated by the Communist Party of the Philippines, however, the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) was overseeing their suppression by measures including summary execution. In this context, GI resistance was not just about going home; it was an act of solidarity with Filipinos. When two Senators visited Luzon, Emil Mazey stood in a room full of generals risking court martial to testify that the Army had burnt surplus shoes, blankets, and jackets that could have gone to Filipinos. The occupation, he held, was laying the groundwork for peacetime conscription and a permanent military presence in Asia.
As part of a worldwide U.S. troop “bring us home” movement, the Philippines rebellion was connected in myriad ways to a 1945–1946 working-class upsurge in the United States, where pent-up resentment about an inflation-pinched standard of living and vast wartime corporate profits resulted in the largest strike wave in American history. Millions struck in one sector after another: oil, coal, lumber, glass, textiles, trucking, meatpacking, and steel. The epicenter was auto, where the United Automobile Workers (UAW) – whose factory-occupation sit-down strikes in 1936–1937 propelled the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) – walked out at General Motors (GM), the nation's largest corporation. “Open the books!” declared Walter Reuther, director of the union's GM department, demanding that the company boost pay without increasing consumer prices – or lay bare its ledgers to prove it could not. That was a page taken from Leon Trotsky, who had envisioned factory committees saying, “Show us your books; we demand control over the fixing of prices.” Soon GM granted a large wage increase, though without keeping prices down.
Mazey, the son of Hungarian immigrants raised in Michigan, had worked in Detroit's auto plants before entering the armed services.
Dedication
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp vii-viii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Frontmatter
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp i-vi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Radicals in America
- Howard Brick, Christopher Phelps
-
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015
-
Radicals in America is a masterful history of controversial dissenters who pursued greater equality, freedom and democracy - and transformed the nation. Written with clarity and verve, Radicals in America shows how radical leftists, while often marginal or ostracized, could assume a catalytic role as effective organizers in mass movements, fostering the imagination of alternative futures. Beginning with the Second World War, Radicals in America extends all the way down to the present, making it the first comprehensive history of radicalism to reach beyond the sixties. From the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, its coverage extends to the Battle of Seattle and Occupy Wall Street. Each chapter begins with a particular life story, including a Harlem woman deported in the McCarthy era, a gay Japanese-American opponent of the Vietnam War, and a Native American environmentalist, vignettes that bring to life the personal within the political.
Bibliography
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 325-330
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
5 - Anticipation, 1973–1980
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 173-217
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
First in her family to attend college, Julia Reichart was raised in a blue-collar Republican household in a small New Jersey town, her mother a nurse and her father a grocery store meat cutter. At orientation at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1964, she listened as others introduced themselves by their parents' occupations: “engineer,” “professor” – and, flushed with shame, she lied about her own. She wrote a first-year essay defending conservative Barry Goldwater but was impressed by the thoughtfulness of her roommate Amy's parents, who she learned had once been Communists. Feeling out of place at college, Reichart dropped out, only to return two years later. An interest in photography led her to attend the march on the Pentagon in 1967, but as she took pictures of antiwar protesters putting flowers in soldiers' guns and saw a friend's head bloodied, she suddenly felt more a participant than an observer. Back in Yellow Springs, she joined the packed meetings of the Radical Studies Institute (RSI), where Marxist readings were discussed, excitedly making connections between empire, race, and capitalism. “We working class people can be agents in history,” she realized. “We don't need to be embarrassed about the fact that we don't know Sartre or what a metaphor is.” The question was, “How do we overthrow capitalism?”
At the RSI men did almost all the talking, with women struggling to be heard, so after a friend returned from a women's “consciousness-raising” session in Gainesville, Florida, in 1968, Reichert helped her start an Antioch women's center and began a campus radio show called “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers: Listen.” For her senior project Reichert decided to make a film on women with her boyfriend Jim Klein, whose interest in audio complemented hers in visuals. Growing Up Female (1970) was the first film to reflect the values of the new women's movement, examining the lives of six ordinary women and girls, ages four to thirty-five. After a year abroad in Europe, Reichert and Klein returned to the United States in 1971 to find the left hardening and dispersing. Many of her radical friends had joined Marxist-Leninist groups, while her feminist friends were forming lesbian communes. Reichert sought a distributor for Growing Up Female, but Newsreel, a New Left collective, declined to distribute it, instead issuing The Woman's Film (1971), which concluded with a call for revolution.
Introduction: Margin and Mainstream in the American Radical Experience
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 1-16
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
“Please be informed that I am ready to serve in any unit of the armed forces of my country which is not segregated by race,” wrote Winfred Lynn to his local draft board in 1942 after learning of his conscription into the United States Army. The 36-year-old landscape gardener from Jamaica, Queens, New York City, loathed Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan but vowed to go “to prison or to die, if necessary, rather than submit to the mockery of fighting for democracy in a Jim Crow army.” Only when his lawyers concluded that his case against the Selective Service would be stronger were he in uniform did Lynn submit to conscription. He saw duty in the Pacific, made the rank of corporal, and watched his case reach the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it on January 2, 1945, dashing what one black newspaper, proclaiming Lynn “Hero of World War II,” termed “the most important legal battle to challenge segregation in the armed forces.” Only the Second World War's end in 1945 brought him an honorable discharge and the outcome he had sought for three long years: freedom.
Worrying that Lynn's stance was too radical, even unpatriotic, the Nation's leading civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had declined to support his case. His first attorney was his younger brother, Conrad Lynn, who had been expelled from the Communist Party in 1937 for supporting Trinidadian workers' strikes, contrary to the Party's conciliatory Popular Front line. Next to join the defense was another radical, Arthur Garfield Hays, a civil libertarian who had represented anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, evolutionist John T. Scopes, and the Scottsboro Boys. The chief supporter of Lynn outside the courtroom was a militant trade union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, comprised mostly of black train workers inclined to fight for race equality as well as economic gain.
Winfred Lynn's disregard of wartime pressures out of insistence upon equality bore the militancy of the Brotherhood, whose leader A. Philip Randolph was graced with imperturbability, a courteous bearing, and a mellifluous voice. Randolph visited the White House repeatedly as chief race spokesman of the 1940s, striving to prevent a resurgence of the European colonialism and lynching that followed the First World War.
Index
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 331-355
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
7 - What Democracy Looks Like, 1990 to the Present
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 263-310
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
When Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwe from Minnesota, attended the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing, China, in 1995 along with tens of thousands of others, she urged adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. At the China gathering to represent the Indigenous Women's Network, LaDuke was long familiar with global endeavors. She had joined the International Indian Treaty Council after hearing Cherokee organizer Jimmie Durham speak during her first year at Harvard. “There's no such thing as an Indian problem,” Durham had said. “It's a problem with America.” Impressed by Durham's view that American Indians' fate was inseparable from that of aboriginals worldwide, LaDuke had traveled to speak at age eighteen, in 1977, to a UN conference in Geneva, Switzerland. After time spent researching corporate uranium mining on Navajo land in New Mexico, which she called “radioactive colonialism,” she moved in the 1980s to Canada, where she assisted a Cree campaign against a vast hydroelectric development project at James Bay. Long before Winona LaDuke arrived in Beijing, indigeneity and globality to her were one and the same.
From Chico Mendes, defender of native Amazonian rubber-tappers, to Rigoberta Menchú, Guatemalan human-rights proponent, indigenous voices had won global recognition in the prior decade. In 1992, protests throughout the Americas marked the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival, calling his legacy one of conquest, slavery, and genocide. Then came New Year's Day 1994, when Mayans in Chiapas in southernmost Mexico launched a Zapatista Army of National Liberation on the day of implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). “Zapatista” paid homage to Sandinista, with Mexican icon Emiliano Zapata as substitute hero. Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatistas' spokesperson, created a wholly new genre of communiqué In an urbane prose bathed in Mayan allusion, he mocked the top-down politics of the traditional Latin American left, his self-deprecating title “Subcomandante” signifying subordination to the “collective and democratic leadership” of Chiapas's Indians. “We are gauche, stammering, well-intentioned,” he wrote. “We have not come to lead you, we have not come to tell you what to do, but to ask for your help.” No longer would Mexico's marginal be silenced: “Does the country want Chiapan oil, electrical energy, natural resources, labor, in short, the life blood of Chiapas, but not the opinions of the indigenous people of Chiapas about the future of the country?”
2 - All Over This Land, 1949–1959
- Howard Brick, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
-
- Book:
- Radicals in America
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 09 July 2015, pp 49-87
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
I'd hammer out danger
I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between
All of my brothers
All over this land
– The Weavers, “The Hammer Song” (1949)“The bourgeoisie is fearful,” and “for good reason,” wrote Claudia Jones in a 1949 article in Political Affairs, theoretical organ of the Communist Party, entitled “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Despite servile “mammy” stereotypes in film and radio, she wrote, “Negro women – as workers, as Negroes, and as women – are the most oppressed stratum of the whole population” and “the real active forces, the organizers and workers, in all the institutions and organizations of the Negro people.” Jones's account of black female “degradation and super-exploitation” owed much to her mother's death at 37, as well as her own experiences in a dress factory and laundry. Her appreciation of black women's history of resistance sustained her own. On January 19, 1948, Jones was arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the apartment shared with her sisters at 504 West 143rd Street, Harlem. Born in the British West Indies as Claudia Cumberbatch, she had arrived from Trinidad with her parents as a child in 1923, becoming involved with radical causes after encountering the Scottsboro Boys campaign in Harlem as a teenager in 1935. Employed first as educational director of the Young Communist League and then as secretary of the CPUSA women's commission, Jones – a “negress,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported – was now slated for deportation. “Subject was militant. Ridiculed being arrested,” New York's FBI agents cabled J. Edgar Hoover. Released on bail, with hearings pending, Jones embarked on a national speaking tour, excoriating the American “political Gestapo” for its fear of a “dangerous Red Negro woman.”
In that same year, 1948, another Trinidadian, C. L. R. James, was first contacted by immigration authorities anticipating his deportation. By year's end, James would publish “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States” in The Fourth International. James's article was a challenge to left-wing assumptions that class unity would solve racism.“The independent Negro struggle has a vitality and validity of its own,” held James, who saw American blacks as having a “hatred of bourgeois society … greater than any other section of the population in the United States.”
Fortune-Tellers of the Capitalist World
- HOWARD BRICK
-
- Journal:
- Journal of American Studies / Volume 48 / Issue 3 / August 2014
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 11 July 2014, pp. 873-878
- Print publication:
- August 2014
-
- Article
- Export citation
C. WRIGHT MILLS, SOCIOLOGY, AND THE POLITICS OF THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL
- HOWARD BRICK
-
- Journal:
- Modern Intellectual History / Volume 8 / Issue 2 / August 2011
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 28 July 2011, pp. 391-409
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
How are we to grasp the genealogy of the “public intellectual”? When, how, and at whose hands did this term first come into use, framing an ideal of democratic responsibility for those who devote their work life to fostering knowledge and criticism—an image usually raised as a reproach to academic insularity though also sometimes assailed for encouraging an evasion of scholarly rigor? At first blush, the phrase seems redundant: the emergence of “intellectual” simpliciter is usually linked to a particular episode—the Dreyfusards’ defense of the French republic—that already implied a commitment by writers, thinkers, and artists to political or civic action. From that time and place, the term traveled quickly across borders and before long to the United States, occasioning controversies from the start over who represented the “intellectual” as a social type and who did not, what activities or purposes best defined the role, and whether that role deserved respect, derision, or reinvention. To be sure, the social, cultural, and political world of “modern” societies has always featured individuals noted for scholarly, creative, speculative, or critical work that resonates with literate audiences attuned to key issues of the moment—whether such people were known as ministers, philosophes, journalists, poets, men or women of letters, Transcendentalists, or even, in some eighteenth-and nineteenth-century usages, natural philosophers or scientists. Nonetheless, the emergence of the noun “intellectual” (and its plural) from the early twentieth century, and its widening use since the 1920s, spawned a persistent and self-conscious discourse concerning the character, value or virtue of such figures. A skeptic might conclude that the addition of the modifier “public” has perpetuated old, tangled debates about intellectuals as such, without bringing with it much greater clarity. Words nonetheless are signs of historical troubles and social discontents. Excavating the usages of “public intellectual” over time can highlight some of the dilemmas that have confronted writers, critics, citizens, and political actors, past and present.