The Sojourners for Truth and Justice: Radical Black Women and the ‘Cold War’
Note: Continuing the Miami Institute’s forum on Shirley Graham Du Bois, MaryLouise Patterson offers a compellingly rich Cold War context and narrates important events through which she herself lived along with her parents— Louise and William ‘Pat’ Patterson— and Shirley Graham Du Bois. As Patterson concludes in this essay: “Shirley Graham Du Bois and my mother, Louise Patterson, were important, often crucial participants and leaders in so many liberation struggles both in the US and abroad. Shirley especially had international impact. They were also invaluable mentors to many in subsequent generations of Black women. We picked up their baton and carried it forward.” This forum on Shirley Graham Du Bois, curated by Philip Luke Sinitiere and Tionne Alliyah Parris, is part of the Miami Institute’s series of forums on “Learning from Their Lived Experiences during the Cold War.”
It was 1945, and World War II was officially over. The second war to end all wars had ended. I was all of two years old, and the world was on the cusp of change. Fascism and genocide had been vanquished but at an unimaginable cost. Those were the best of times— little did we know they were heralding the worst of times. Yes, the people had won some great victories on the international front: Freedom was in the air, liberation from colonialism now topped the agenda for Africa, Asia, Latin America and for African Americans in the USA. In September 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence. In October 1945, the United Nations (UN) was brought into existence. Then in October 1946, the Nuremberg Trials closed with the verdicts on twenty-four indicted Nazi leaders for war crimes, especially that of genocide. By December 1948, the UN General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. In December 1951, Libya declared its independence. And in July 1952, Colonel Abdul Nassar overthrew King Farouk, then establishing sovereignty over Egypt including over the Suez Canal. Ethiopia continued to remain ‘“free”’ of colonial domination.
Meanwhile, US reaction started winning victories at home: GIs returning home from fighting against fascism and racism expected the defeat of fascism abroad would have advanced the struggle against racism back home. They had heard about the Double V For Victory slogan and campaign promoted by the largest Black newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier. It meant that the Black liberation fight was on double fronts: against fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home. They assumed the victory over fascism, with its resounding denunciation at Nuremberg, would increase the recognition of the imperative to improve the socioeconomic conditions of African Americans as well.
But back on the home front, little had changed. In fact racial violence against returning Black GIs was so pervasive, brutal and intentional, including lynchings of some while in their military uniforms, that in 1946 a National Emergency Committee Against Mob Violence formed to lobby President Harry S. Truman to pass federal anti-lynching laws that would more fully enforce the rights of African Americans. Truman established a committee to investigate the situation and propose ways to mitigate it. They did, but nothing came of it. Besides, in the US, the political winds had drastically changed.
In 1947, Truman’s multimillionaire advisor, Bernard Baruch, popularized the term, “the cold war,” stating that “our enemies are to be found abroad and at home”. This changed the course of the war’s winds, bringing a frigid cold front that froze the progressive political movement in the US and its colony, Latin America, for over a decade. That decade inaugurated what would become the heyday of a new witch hunt, this time for “dirty reds” and their stooges. It’s often referred to as the McCarthy period, or simply McCarthyism.
This national context is crucial for understanding the Sojourners for Truth and Justice as well as Shirley Graham Du Bois’s impact during the Cold War.
The short-lived war alliance of the U.S. with the Soviet Union against Adolf Hitler became yesterday’s news. Overnight our former, albeit tenuous, ally, became our most dreaded, our Number One demonic antagonist: communism. It was now the real, the true enemy. Loyal Americans had to close ranks around capitalism and defend it, no matter the costs! Anyone pointing out its faults was now anti-American. It was now every patriotic American’s duty to join the government’s newly revived relentless hunt for Reds: communists and their sympathizers had to be found, exposed, denounced, caught, incarcerated, stripped of the right to work and travel, deported, socially ostracized, shamed into suicide, even legally murdered by the government.
In 1947 Truman signed Executive Order 9835. It established a loyalty program in the executive branch of government. As a result, by 1956, some 2,700 persons had been dismissed and 12,000 had resigned from the government. In 1948 in Los Angeles ten Hollywood writers, directors, and producers were jailed for contempt of Congress after refusing to disclose their possible affiliations with the U.S. Communist Party.
In 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy was catapulted into national notoriety and grabbed limitless power to ruthlessly hunt down communists and their sympathizers after he claimed that numerous communists had infiltrated the State Department. In 1950, after a 10-month trial, 11 defendants were found guilty of violating a 1940 U.S. federal law criminalizing the advocacy, teaching, or organizing for the purpose of overthrowing the government by force and violence. They were sentenced to prison in New York.
It was in the midst of this hysterical anti-Black, anti-red, Cold War storm, that the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), in 1951, presented a book-length petition to the UN, titled We Charge Genocide, charging the US government with documented acts of genocide against its Black citizenry. It exposed the US’s most vulnerable weakness, its Achilles heel: a vicious codified, systematized and institutionalized racism based on the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of the indigenous people, the cultural and psychological indoctrination of white supremacy all of which was also applied in varying degrees to all people of color within its borders and beyond. All of which contradicted its global image as the beacon of democracy atop the hill.
My father, William “Pat” Patterson was the petition’s primary author and editor. Black and white men and women signed it, including Shirley Graham Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois, Howard Fast, Eslanda Robeson, Paul Robeson, Mary Church Terrell, Jessica Mitford, aka Decca Treuhaft, and Louise Patterson, my mother. The Genocide petition fingered Congressman Henderson Lanham, a Georgia Democrat, as the epitome of the legitimization of openly white supremacist ideology and violence by its representation in the U.S. government. The year before, in April of 1950, Pat, who was head of the CRC, appeared before the House Lobby Investigating Committee, Lanham was its acting chair. During Lanham’s questioning of Pat, Lanham’s racism spewed out in a pique of rage. He lost total decorum calling my father a “God-damned Black son of a bitch” as he jumped up and raced around the committee table trying to lunge at Pat. Breaking past the chamber’s guard he was finally restrained by the Capitol police. Later, he cited Pat for contempt of Congress although Lanham was the only person who exhibited contemptuous behavior. In 1951, the first contempt trial was deadlocked. In 1952, a second trial acquitted Pat.
In December of 1951 the CRC assigned Paul Robeson to take the Genocide petition to the UN headquarters in New York. Simultaneously, my father attempted several times to present it to the UN Committee on Human Rights meeting in Paris.
As a result of the CRC and Pat and Paul’s audaciousness , an even larger repressive hammer came crashing down on them: Paul paid dearly for that attempt in December 1951 to expose the US government’s hypocrisy by finding his passport revoked and himself, until his death in 1976, subjected to unrelentingly vicious hounding by the FBI and local police Red Squads, this time ramped up to a fevered pitch.
Meanwhile, my father had his passport confiscated upon his return from Paris and was then jailed twice in 1954, ninety days each time, for ‘“contempt’” of Congress, byfor refusing to hand over the list of names of the donors to the Civil Rights Congress which he headed at the time. By then, I was only eleven years old,
Similarly, in February 1951, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois was accused, indicted and arrested in handcuffs for allegedly being an unregistered foreign agent of the Peace Information Center, a formation of peace activists opposing nuclear war. Dr. Alpheaus Hunton, Dr. Du Bois’s assistant, iwas jailed for six months for refusing to give federal investigators the names of donors to the Civil Rights Congress’s bail fund.
So the US was in the proverbial cauldron, which was boiling over with the admixture of opposing forces: heightened political and racist repression, anti-communist Cold War hysteria and Jim Crowism with heightened anti-colonial resistance in places like Sharpville, South Africa and The People’s Republic of China.
Yet, a post-war hope was emerging and a new generation of fearless, radical, militant, and brilliant Black women activists was arising. Some were communists, some prominent social and anti-racist veteran activists, some were celebrated cultural figures. They called themselves “The Sojourners for Truth and Justice - STJ.” Within their ranks were community organizers, cultural workers, writers, a newspaper publisher and Progressive Party vice presidential candidate, and several widows of racial terror. All were inspired and determined by both the legacy of Sojourner Truth and by Beulah Richardson’s recent powerful poem, “A Black Woman Speaks of White Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of Peace.” Beulah opened her poem electrifyingly:
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.
These women were determined to sojourn and struggle for truth and justice and, for the short time they existed, that is exactly what they did. They called themselves “The Sojourners for Truth and Justice” (STJ). They were on the offensive at a historical moment when many activists and their organizations were under attack and tactically retreating. This, and the fact that they were Black women, made them stand out all the more, immediately drawing unwanted and ultimately destructive attention from the US government’s surveillance agencies.
The STJ clearly understood and boldly articulated in their manifesto the outcome for Black women forced to live in a violent, racist, sexist, and economically oppressed society. They underscored their understanding of Black women as key agents for human rights, justice, fulfilling lives, and world peace. Although short lived (the organization lasted from 1951 to 1953), their efforts anticipated the Black feminist movement of the 1970s and beyond. Their profoundly radical analysis of the triple oppression of Black women commingled with the bold action of strategic solidarities across the lines of race, class, and nation— crucial actions informed by the important international experiences and connections of members like Shirley Graham Du Bois and Eslanda Robeson among others.
My mother, Louise Patterson and her dear friend, Beulah Richardson (aka Beah Richards), conceived of the STJ. She and Louise had become the best of friends, “thick as thieves.” Beulah lived with us in New York City at the time of the STJ’s creation. She and my mother stayed up all night writing the STJ’s manifesto, their “Call.” In it they wrote in part:
We die of poverty, loneliness, drudgery, and disease. We have watched our husbands and fathers burned, quartered, hanged and electrocuted by hooded and unhooded mobs. We have seen our brothers beaten, shot and stamped to death by police...We have seen our daughters raped and degraded, and when one dares rise in defense of her honor she is jailed for life....Dry your tears, and in the spirit of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, Arise….Come to Washington to demand of the President, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the Congress absolute, immediate, and unconditional redress of grievances.
Twelve other Black women joined them, becoming the initiating committee. Among the twelve were Shirley Graham Du Bois, Angie Dickerson, Mary Church Terrell, Eslanda Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Frances Williams, Dorothy Burnham, Esther Cooper Jackson, and Charlotta Bass. In September 1951 they published their proclamation: “A Call to Negro Women.” Their collective alliance voiced their grievances as women, mothers, wives, and sisters against state sanctioned racial violence and terrorism targeting Black men and Black communities, highlighting the violence against and institutionalized rape of Black women as a specialized weapon of white supremacy and symbol of Black oppression.
At the STJ’s inaugural 3-day convention held in late September, early October 1951 in Washington, DC, Lorraine Hansberry read the association’s proclamation to the 132 women gathered. Lorraine Hansberry stated:
Dear Negro Sisters everywhere in the United States. We cannot, must not, and will no longer in sight of God or man sit by and watch our lives destroyed by an unreasoning hate that metes out to us every kind of death it is possible for a human being to die… In the spirit of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth—we demand the death to Jim Crow.
They called for an end to: the Korean War, government attacks on Dr. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, my father - William L. Patterson, Alphaeus Hunton, Claudia Jones. They demanded the immediate release of Rosa Lee Ingram, widowed mother of 12, along with two of her teenage sons, only 14 and 16 years old, who, after just a one day trial, of course before an all-white male jury, were wrongfully sentenced to death in the electric chair for the self-defense killing of a white sharecropper neighbor as he attempted to beat and rape Ingram, in 1948, in Ellaville, Georgia. They also became involved in the case of Henry T. Moore, an NAACP activist from Mims,. Florida. On Christmas night of 1951 the KKK bombed Moore’s home, murdering him and his wife Harriette. The couple left behind two daughters. The Sojourners’ passionate involvement in the Ingram and Moore cases created a level of melodramatic fury and fear within the FBI.
By March 1952 the Sojourners STJ called an Eastern Seaboard Conference. They drafted a constitution, and subsequently twelve chapters were formed around the country. Next, the Sojourners called for 5,000 women, veiled and dressed in black if possible, to March on Washington in “a day of mourning for the death of Harriette Moore” demanding that President Truman “stop genocide of Negro people and guarantee civil liberties to all Americans. Since they had managed within only two weeks to bring 132 people to Washington, the FBI shuttered at the thought of 5,000 veiled Black women descending on DC. Due to the repressive political climate, the march never happened.
The Sojourners also called for a Mother’s Day visit to Rosa Lee Ingram at her prison in 1952. Again, the possibility of large numbers of Black women organizing and marching in the South panicked the FBI such that they quickly concocted a fantastic scenario. One that imagined the Sojourners, in the thousands, marching on the jail, where Ingram and her sons were being held where they would actually attempt to physically free them.
Their FBI file is filled with dozens of frenzied communiques between the Washington, DC central office and their regional offices in Georgia, New York, and a few other states that reinforced this implausible notion, urging immediate action on the ground in Georgia. It’s hard to know if they really believed their invented scenario or cynically used it to justify constant surveillance, hounding and infiltrating the Sojourners. But they’d used those same tactics over and over again as they found that these repressions contributed to the destruction of many a militant, progressive political and/or community organization such as the Black Panther Party, another Black casualty of the Cold War period.
So, the FBI, in a real or feigned self-induced frenzied state of alarm, contacted the governor, the prison warden, and the mayor of the small Geogia town where officials had incarcerated Ingram and her family. The governor was urged to take ‘“full measures” to secure the prison, including the calling out of the National Guard if need be. Plans were made for setting police barricades on the roads leading to the prison, assigning extra police around the prison grounds, and getting a local judge to issue an injunction against the STJ visiting Ingram on that day. They also increased their already massive surveillance of the Sojourners. Although a large contingent of Black women never visited the Ingrams, a few women were able to.
The Sojourners weren’t daunted by the inability to carry out some of their larger plans, as they continued to act locally. For example, the STJ’s New York branch demonstrated against apartheid in front of the South African consulate. All the chapters inaugurated a writing campaign to Rosa Lee Ingram and her two sons as well as to their Parole Board and governor.
In June 1952, the STJ joined with the left-wing Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs and issued a joint statement to the Fifteenth International Conference on Public Education in Geneva urging the passage of a resolution in support of Ingram’s freedom. They reached out and developed ties with South African women in the anti-apartheid struggle. They received a warm response, as they established a groundbreaking transnational tie with women in the Global South..
The demise of the Sojourners was one of the US’s home-front victories during the Cold War. Undoubtedly other factors contributed as well, including internal disputes within the Communist Party. But for almost two years the STJ was a bright beacon of Black women’s brilliance, strength, capability, determination, and vision. They were exceedingly democratic - every member had equal voice in the thrashing out of ideas, strategies and tactics. They had limitless potential. Had they survived, they certainly would have had a huge impact on the struggle by African Americans for their liberation, on the struggles of their international sisters and brothers as well but especially on the struggles of oppressed women everywhere.
Shirley Graham Du Bois and my mother, Louise Patterson, were important, often crucial participants and leaders in so many liberation struggles both in the US and abroad. Shirley especially had international impact. They were also invaluable mentors to many in subsequent generations of Black women. We picked up their baton and carried it forward.
—MaryLouise Patterson
Dr. MaryLouise Patterson is a retired pediatrician in NYC. Her parents, Louise and William Patterson, were members of the US Communist Party and Civil Rights activists their entire lives. Her medical degree is from Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow, USSR and she has a master’s in public health. She is the coauthor of the book, Letters from Langston (University of California Press, 2016), which is the almost forty-year edited correspondence between her parents, her coauthor’s parents, and Langston Hughes. She is a mother and grandmother. She is committed to, and an activist for, a free health care system available and accessible to all, to efforts ending institutionalized racism in medicine and in society at large, to increasing the number of Black, Latinx and women health providers, to an equitable socioeconomic system and to peace with justice everywhere.
