2 - All Over This Land, 1949–1959

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.”