Want to Start A Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle
Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (Eds.)
New York University Press (2009)
Reviewed by Ernesto AguilarThe position of women as organizers seems under continuous scrutiny. For women of color, the clashes they face are compounded by questions of loyalty as well as privilege and struggling within communities that have been subjected to historic miseducation and troubles. A new work offers a lively picture of two dozen different women organizers and how their contributions define our present and, possibly, our future.
Want to Start A Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle presents the work and thinking of dynamic women organizers, some you may know and others whose labors are not as remembered. The diverse collection, edited by Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, tells a story of fluid political organizing that universally crossed the boundaries of traditional activism. Whether it was the Black Arts Movement or Black Panther schools, the women profiled in Want to Start A Revolution? gave life to movements. Today, their work can teach new activists about seeing struggles not merely in mechanical ways, but in forms that see the conflicts of the world as intersecting capital, education, work, socialization and norms, and ways women have organized to confront oppression and forecast visions of liberation.
It is a special work that can present a full chapter on activists like Vicki Garvin, the late former Communist Party activist turned globtrotting internationalist whose stays include time in China and postcolonial Ghana. Whereas Garvin got a passing mention in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley’s sublime investigation of Black leftism, her motivations and life are here searched. Much can be said as well of Shirley Du Bois, Esther Cooper Jackson, Florynce Kennedy and Johnnie Tillmon, to whom following chapters are devoted. The editors do well to avoid triumphant revisions of history in all cases. The hardships Kennedy faced, the pain of hopes dashed by a military coup in Ghana, and most evidently, the sexism and chauvinism they endured are laid bare. The book is at points a stomach-churning read, but is instructive as collection of how women have succeeded as organizers and how movements evolve
Another intriguing segue in Want to Start A Revolution? is how those like Yuri Kochiyama, a woman of Japanese descent, Denise Oliver, a Black woman leader in the Young Lords Party, a revolutionary Puerto Rican organization, managed to navigate race, gender and class in their respective worlds. For Kochiyama it was through solidarity involvements that made her one of the Black liberation movement’s most visible allies, and for Oliver, it was putting the Young Lords on the forefront of anti-patriarchy activism. Such initiatives as study pushing men themselves to see their role in women’s oppression, during a period writer Sara Evans acknowledges in Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left was a challenging one for women, were nothing short of remarkable. While many organizing pieces have been written of Kochiyama, Oliver, exposed to Puerto Rican culture at a young age, is an overlooked though leading voice in her own right.
As books like Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. and others are giving the world a new look at women organizers and the involved relationships they navigated, Want to Start A Revolution? is among one of the best and freshest writings on women and movement-building in some time.
Sun, May 9, 2010
Feminism, History, Publication Reviews, Race