CHAPTER SIX

Building Correspondence

The first issue of Correspondence appeared on October 3, 1953, exactly three months after Grace’s opening speech at the Convention of Correspondence Committees, where the group formally committed itself to launching the paper. In those three months the group secured the equipment required to produce the paper, opened its headquarters in a basement office at 5050 Joy Road on Detroit’s west side, and established the Correspondence Publishing Company as the legal entity responsible for the paper. By the release of the inaugural issue, the organization and newspaper had essentially become indistinguishable. The group in effect became the Correspondence Publishing Company. The group’s “chairman,” Raya Dunayevskaya, said as much in a speech to the Detroit membership just two weeks after the convention when she described the paper not just as a project of the organization or a stage in its life, “but as the organization itself. We breathe the paper all over the place now as our way of life, and all else follows.”1 Correspondence was to be the center of their activity and the full expression of their politics.

Dunayevskaya made the speech during the first meeting of the Detroit membership since the convention, but this was also the last meeting that she would attend for several months, as she would soon be leaving on an extended trip. She used the occasion to “deputize” Grace as the group’s “chairman” in her absence. Dunayevskaya said this would ensure “that the continuity of theoretical and practical work can go on.”2 This was an affirmation of Grace’s leadership role in the organization over the preceding decade, and it was also a projection and forecasting of her coming role in Correspondence. Likewise, Dunayevskaya highlighted Jimmy’s role in building the paper. While she did not identify him by name, she easily could have been speaking of him when she described the group’s early efforts—in the two key spaces of the factory and the neighborhood—to garner readers and generate interest in the new publication. “Concretely, we do not go knocking on strange doors for two bucks as hucksters and the old radicals did. We go, first and foremost, to our own shopmates, and we go not as salesmen but as builders,” she said. “When we do knock on doors, [we go] not to strange neighborhoods where no one saw us before or will after we have collected the buck, but to our own neighbors, friends, housewives.”3

Jimmy, as much as anyone in the organization, embodied this builder persona. Throughout the life of the paper, he actively undertook all four of the main tasks involved with its publication: securing subscriptions, which the group called “subgetting”; soliciting submissions, articles of all lengths and types, for the paper from coworkers, neighbors, and others; writing articles himself; and editing. His earnest and consistent interactions with his coworkers and neighbors, engaging them with and through Correspondence, contributed both in spirit and in practice to the life of the paper and proved essential to its existence. And in throwing himself fully into building the publication, Jimmy received as he gave. “Jimmy loved Correspondence,” Grace recalled many years later, because “it gave him the opportunity to write, which he loved to do[, and] it gave him the opportunity to get stories from workers, which he loved to do.”4 Grace and Jimmy also regularly went door to door in their neighborhood, visiting people “to get subscriptions and sit around and talk to them,” which she described as “a way of linking up with the community.”5 This fusion of politics and community, where the work of building the paper drew upon, merged with, and even helped to reinforce neighborhood connections, epitomized Jimmy’s political identity.

Correspondence, then, played a formative role in Jimmy’s intellectual and political development. Writing for the paper gave him an early outlet for his ideas and a venue to develop himself as a writer and political thinker while he simultaneously made the paper a vehicle for connecting with people in ways that engaged political and social questions on a personal basis. Additionally, he deepened his organizational and political skills as a member of the paper’s editorial board as it took on repeated crises surrounding readership, finances, and organizational capacity.

The experience of working on Correspondence also shaped Grace’s intellectual and political identity, though the roles she assumed in publishing the paper were different from Jimmy’s. She initially took responsibility for two parts of the newspaper’s layout: the lead news story on the cover of each issue, which the group called the “front-pager”; and the “Readers’ Views” section, essentially a reworking and expansion of the traditional letters-to-the-editor section. She also served as a silent (unnamed) assistant editor for much of the first few years before becoming the editor in 1957. At the same time, she carried on a heavy correspondence with C. L. R. James about the paper and the group. They discussed the paper’s day-to-day operations, with C. L. R. at times giving instructions but also receiving from Grace her assessments of the paper’s problems and prospects. The letters between Grace and C. L. R. also contain ongoing theoretical and political discussions that reveal Grace’s active role in shaping the group’s politics. In an organization that conducted much of its business through voluminous letters between members, this constituted a significant conduit for C. L. R.’s involvement in the paper. Through these activities Grace developed the habits of mind and patterns of practice that she would carry with her in subsequent organizations and movements for the rest of her life.

Correspondence also played a formative role in the development of Grace and Jimmy’s relationship and partnership. Their courtship unfolded during the second half of 1953 and the opening months of 1954, that is, at the same time as they were working together in publishing Correspondence. Thus, they were building their relationship and building Correspondence simultaneously, and their shared commitment to the paper occupied a prominent place in their relationship. The paper served as their primary political activity throughout their first decade together.

“The Search for New Human Relations”

Three closely linked ideas formed the ideological foundation of Correspondence: affirming the role of the working class as the agent of revolutionary change; rejecting the concept of the vanguard party and instead celebrating the self-activity and spontaneous mobilization of the working class; and standing in full opposition to all forms of bureaucratic control. Like other Marxists, the group held that workers—particularly those in the mass production industries—were the one social force in society who, in confronting their exploitation in the capitalist system and in taking action to force the system to meet their needs, could effect a revolutionary transformation of society. But the group self-consciously and proudly distinguished itself from other Marxists in emphasizing and encouraging the creativity, spontaneity, and self-activity of the working class. It argued that the working class had the capacity to act on its own behalf without the leadership of labor unions or radical parties, and that such spontaneous self-organization was in fact crucial to the creation of a new society. As a corollary to this, it stridently spoke against all forms of bureaucratic control and management—a position derived over the preceding decade from the leaders’ reading of Marxists texts, their analysis of the labor movement, and their experiences in, and sharp critiques of, Trotskyism—whether that management came from capitalists and institutions of civil society or from labor unions and leftist political parties.

Accordingly, Correspondence set out to record and amplify the interior worlds of “ordinary people.” The group believed that ordinary people wanted and needed a space to share their experiences, express their thoughts, and voice their opinions about society. As they had decided at the launching convention, the paper focused in particular on four groups or segments of society they identified as most marginalized: rank-and-file workers, Negroes, women, and youth.

Of the four groups, rank-and-file workers enjoyed pride of place in the group’s conceptualization of Correspondence. The layout afforded nominally equal coverage, and the organization expressly sought to include members of all four groups in the work of the paper. However, labor-related articles tended to find a more prominent place in the pages of Correspondence than other articles, and the experiences and contributions of members like Jimmy who were factory workers often garnered greater weight or attention. The group quickly came to describe Correspondence as a “workers’ paper,” by which they meant a publication that workers would genuinely and uniquely recognize as their own. It was to be a novel publication in that it did not just speak to or for workers, but rather allowed them to speak for themselves and see their full selves reflected. It was to be distinct from traditional labor papers that revolved around unions or the activities of workers in the plant and in relation to the company. So too did they seek to differentiate Correspondence from rival publications that sought to educate workers, instruct them in the correct political line, or organize them into a union or radical party. By contrast, Correspondence would consider the totality of workers’ lives, giving them the space to share their experiences beyond the plant or union hall and to explore their social and intellectual worlds.

Curiously, Correspondence did not explicitly disclose its Marxist orientation. While the paper announced in multiple ways its fealty to workers, consistently championed the working class as the agent of change, and openly stated the need for “a new society,” the words “Marxism” and “socialism” almost never appeared in the paper. Only in cryptic passages found in editorial statements did the Correspondence Publishing Company vaguely hint at its roots in the organized Left. The group’s motivation was likely not so much to hide or deny its Marxism as to keep the pages of Correspondence free from strong ideological language or positions. It could thereby welcome into its pages the voices and thoughts of “ordinary people” for whom Marxism had no resonance but whose ideas in fact expressed the same political convictions that motivated Correspondence.

To be sure, the group may have been making a strategic decision to downplay its roots in the organized Left. Launching a radical newspaper at the height of McCarthyism not only courted persecution for the individuals involved, but virtually ensured that the fledging paper would confront the charge of communism. The organization’s own vocal anticommunism—they staunchly opposed the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of the United States, and nearly all things associated with official Communism—plainly and regularly appeared in Correspondence, but this could not shield it from the harsh winds of Cold War politics.6 Indeed, suspicion first came from some of the paper’s early potential readers who perceived Correspondence as a communist paper and therefore inherently anti-American and dangerous. Then, after little more than a year of publication, the Office of the Attorney General placed Correspondence on its subversive list. Still, the paper positioned itself as a counterweight to this repressive environment in which dissent was silenced and open expression curtailed.

The form and content of the paper proudly announced its politics. A twelve-page newspaper published every two weeks,7 Correspondence took no advertisements, instead financing itself through subscriptions and contributions from members of the organization (particularly Lyman and Freddy Paine). The paper devoted a separate section to each of the four social groups that the organization hoped to attract to the paper—workers, youth, women, and African Americans, whose section was called “Special Negro News” (SNN). This format was intended to afford each group its own unique and independent significance within the paper’s larger focus on “ordinary people.” As mentioned previously, the labor section was the largest of the four and clearly received the greatest emphasis in the organization. Nonetheless, each section treated readers to a lively and varied array of content relevant to that particular group, including news stories, first-person accounts of events, columns, and the ruminations of readers on all manner of subjects (from topical matters to personal experiences). The front page prominently featured the “Worker’s Journal,” a column written by Simon Owens under the pen name Charles Denby. Three other members of the organization also wrote regular columns: Jimmy in the “Special Negro News” section, Selma Weinstein in the women’s section, and Dunayevskaya on the editorial page. Appearing opposite the “Worker’s Journal” was the front-pager, which usually dealt with a national or international event.

Three other regular components of the paper rounded out the format. The aforementioned “Readers’ Views” section on the editorial page very much reflected the spirit and purpose of the paper. This section appeared prominently in the middle of the newspaper and carried the comments, suggestions, and exhortations of various readers, some as short as one sentence, others as long as several paragraphs.8 These statements presented a wide spectrum of opinions about and responses to the paper, including praise and approval, dissenting views, and sharp critique. Items ranged in subject matter from commentary on specific articles in past issues, to reflections on an individual’s experiences helping to publish the paper, to ideas for improving the paper as a whole. The political cartoons, many of them with recurring characters and themes such as the corruption of unions, the problem of unemployment, and the day-to-day challenges of child rearing, proved an effective way not only to foreground the experiences of ordinary people but also to signal the power of their perspectives on the social worlds they inhabited. Finally, a section called “Viewing and Reviewing” provided another dimension to the paper’s engagement with the lives of ordinary people with short pieces discussing television, movies, music, sports, and other elements of American popular culture.

The appearance of Correspondence’s inaugural issue marked a milestone for the group, but journalistically it did not much impress. Much of the writing was flat, the design was unimaginative, and the crowded layout gave the paper an amateurish feel. Still, this first issue made a bold declaration of the paper’s intervention into radical politics. A “Statement of the Editor” on the front page unambiguously located the paper’s commitments: “Correspondence is a paper in which ordinary people can say what they want to say and are so eager to say. Workers, Negroes, women, youth will tell in this paper their own story of their lives, in the plant, at home, in school, in their neighborhoods, what they are doing, what they are thinking about. All that they have to say, about everything that interests them, will fill our pages.” The statement also made clear that Correspondence would hold “a total hostility to all forms of bureaucratic domination, anti-Communist as well as Communist,” while helping to advance “the search for new human relations” in every corner of society, “between a worker and his work, between races and nations, between men and women, between youth and adults.”9

Expressions of these two strivings—to be free of bureaucratic domination and to craft new social relations—could be found throughout the first issue. For example, several pieces by Detroit factory workers described their experiences with machines in the assembly line, their interactions with foremen and with other workers, and a recent fire in a General Motors plant. Other labor articles presented the reflections of a West Virginia coal miner and a report on German workers. The front-pager, “The Beria Purge,” issued a lengthy critique of Soviet Communism, while another front-page article reported on Lucille Ball’s recent appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Two workers wrote about racial dynamics—particularly between white women and black men—in their respective plants, while a cartoon titled “Up from Under” on the front page added a comic commentary on race relations. It depicted two women, one African American and one white, awaiting the arrival of their coal miner husbands. As the men approach, both covered in black soot, one woman remarks to the other, “Do you think that we’ll get them mixed up again?” The recently released Kinsey Report garnered brief statements in “Viewing and Reviewing” and an analysis on the women’s page.

Jimmy’s contribution to the inaugural issue anchored the “Special Negro News” page. He wrote the lead article, “I Talk about What I Please—To Whom I Please,” about an incident in his factory, the Chrysler Jefferson Avenue assembly plant, involving a conversation between a white woman and a black man. The woman, an assembly line worker, went outside during her break and asked the man, a jitney truck driver, for the time. The man and woman learned that they were both from Tennessee and struck up a lively conversation. Her foreman, however, took exception to this transgression of racial and gender conventions, rounding up other white men in the department, who rushed outside with him to intervene. “You can’t talk to this woman,” they told the black man. “You got no business talking to her. You just go on with your truck.” The black man, “being very mild,” simply replied, “OK,” and returned to work. But the matter did not end there, as the foreman spoke to the black man’s foreman, seeking to get him fired. Word spread through the plant, and many black workers became upset, saying, “This foreman’s trying to start trouble here, and we got to do something about him. He’s the guy that needs to be punished.” The black worker did nothing wrong, they insisted, so the company “better not say anything to him.”10 He was called into the office, but no action was taken against him because the black workers, demanding that the union get involved, forced the chief steward to talk with the foreman, leading ultimately to the matter being dropped.

The main point of the article was to highlight in this series of events the assertion of black male workers (and secondarily the muted response of the union), but Jimmy also pointed to some of the gender implications of the story. He closed the article by explaining how the white workers who had gone with the foreman to stop the conversation also came “under pressure” from the black workers in their department who “were giving them hell” for the stance they had taken. This led one of the white workers, who “wanted to get in right with” his black shopmates, to say, “Look, I didn’t know this girl was going to start all this trouble. I’ll take her back down to Tennessee.” This, of course, was an unsatisfactory and unsettling response to the situation. It placed the blame for the incident on the woman, not on the foreman and white male workers in her department, and thereby reinforced the racist and sexist precepts that led to the altercation in the first place. The article does not say how the black workers responded to the man’s statement, but it does report the woman’s response: “You ain’t taking me no place.” Jimmy closed the piece with a brief comment on the depth of the man’s patriarchal presumption: “The peculiar thing about it, this girl was no relation to him, no wife or nothing, he was just going to take her back to Tennessee.”11 With this, Jimmy hinted at the type of analysis that readers found in abundance in the women’s section.

The lead article in that section in the first issue, “A New Relationship,” presented an especially forward-looking approach to gender dynamics.12 It also articulated, perhaps better than any other piece in the issue, the paper’s vision of a new society coming into being. The article begins with the author relating a story told to her by a friend about a “time that her husband took off his belt and was going to beat her.” The friend sat down on the bed and told him, “O.K., go ahead, beat the hell out of me. But sometime you’re going to have to go to sleep. And when you do, I’ll butcher you.” In the face of this threat, the man “put his belt back on.” The article cites this as an example of changing patterns that were “breaking up old thoughts, attitudes and feelings of women toward men and men toward women.” The article discusses the meaning of marriage, which the writer distills down to consideration and sharing, and presents an egalitarian ethos for marital life not frequently articulated in the early 1950s: “When a woman says … she wants to share things with her husband, she doesn’t mean she has half and he has half. She means much more than that. She means that they must share their lives and their experiences together; that they must work together for the things that they want; that they must share the decisions of the family and nobody is to be boss.”13 This, the article explains, reflects that women are increasingly coming to clarify their ideas about what a marriage should be, their determination to work toward realizing this, and their willingness to leave unsatisfactory marriages.

This article illustrated the key function of Correspondence’s women’s page, namely, to expose the tensions and antagonisms that arise as new ideas clash with old ones and as new social relations replace old ones. The writer asserted, “Divorce rates will not be statistics but the struggles of men and women to live together in a new way.” Indeed, the article concludes with a statement reaffirming the vision of social transformation upon which Correspondence was founded and the paper’s intended role in realizing that vision: “Over a cup of coffee, in the factory, during the daily workday of a housewife, and her husband’s eight hour day—here is where new attitudes, a whole new way of life is emerging. Our newspaper is part of this. And this is where these new ideas, attitudes, and a whole new way of life will appear.”14

Correspondence solicited responses from readers to the paper’s debut and published them in the second issue under the banner “Readers Say What They Think of the First Issue.” Reflecting the importance that the paper assigned to the thoughts of its readers, these comments appeared on the front page and continued in the middle of the editorial page (the space that “Readers’ Views” would occupy in coming issues). Signed with descriptions such as “Woman Reader,” “Negro Housewife,” “A Young Guy,” “Ford Worker,” or simply “Reader,” many were short, some just a sentence or two. They offered a mixture of criticism and praise, with some finding fault with specific features or aspects of the paper—a few of them offering concrete suggestions for future issues—but on balance the response was positive. For example, “Woman Reader” from Morgantown, West Virginia, offered praise that surely gave the organization confidence that they were realizing their objective: “What struck me about the paper,” she wrote, “is that there was hardly a section that you could not turn to with any person and say, ‘Here is your life.’ ”15

The organization placed a high value on this commentary. The significance of these responses rested not so much in what readers said about the paper as in what the comments revealed about readers’ level of engagement with the paper. Members of the organization solicited comments, and some responses likely came from people who were friends of the organization or in some way loosely affiliated with it. Therefore, these were not, in the main, the spontaneous and random reactions of anonymous readers, as in more traditional letters to the editor. Rather, the comments in “Readers Say What They Think of the First Issue” resulted from and reflected a more direct interaction between the paper (through members of the organization) and its readers. This was a direct effort to build precisely the type of dialogic process—in a word, correspondence—hoped for by the organization. As one of the group’s internal documents asserted, “The form of the paper is correspondence, that is to say: dialogue.”16

To deepen readers’ participation in the paper, the organization created a section called “Building Correspondence,” designed to convey the process by which the paper was published, highlight the role of readers within that process, and engage the widest possible segment of the readership in solving the problems of maintaining and strengthening the paper. The first installment of “Building Correspondence” appeared in the third issue of the paper. It declared, “Correspondence is a paper written, edited, and circulated by its readers.”17 This statement—which by the beginning of 1954 graced the masthead of every issue—subtly misrepresented the actual dynamics behind the paper, downplaying the fact that an organization conceived of the paper and remained primarily responsible for its publication. It nonetheless highlighted a crucial fact of Correspondence’s existence: readers participated in the production of the paper by writing for it, participating in local editorial committees, distributing it among their neighbors and coworkers, supporting it through subscriptions, and soliciting new subscribers. In the coming issues, “Building Correspondence” carried reports on many of these activities—particularly efforts to increase the circulation and distribution of the paper, but also things such as fund-raising parties—thereby ensuring that some discussion of the week-to-week functioning of the paper appeared in every issue. “Building Correspondence” also addressed problems such as securing subscriptions, increasing circulation, and financing the paper, problems that a paper predicated, as Correspondence was, on the active and increasing participation of the readership, would predictably encounter. Indeed, the paper’s relationship to its readers proved to be at once it most unique feature and the source of enduring debate and difficulties.

These difficulties contained both practical and philosophical dimensions. As to the former, the organization consistently struggled to attract people in large numbers to write for the paper and participate in the editorial committees. “The fact is,” they had to admit after ten months of publishing, “that despite its intentions Correspondence is not really being written and edited by its readers.”18 The editor reported 3,000 to 4,000 regular readers, but “no more than 100” of them “are seriously writing for the paper.” Thus, approximately 3 percent of readers actively wrote for the paper—a much smaller yield than the organization envisioned, to be sure. Among those who did write for the paper, some voiced reservations about or objections to the paper’s political projections and journalistic choices, thereby heightening the philosophical dimensions of the paper’s difficulties. From the organization’s belief in the self-activity and self-organization of the working class followed the paper’s determination not to put forward any particular program or plan but instead to be an organ for the unencumbered expression of workers and ordinary people. “We are not out ‘to lead,’ ”19 the editor, Johnny Zupan, explained in one issue. Yet, many readers found the absence of a clear program or political line in the paper to be problematic. This was true as early as the fourth issue. Its front page carried a “Statement of the Editor” responding to readers who complained that Correspondence was filled with grievances or griping and questioned the paper’s utility. “What good does it do to just write?” asked one reader. “It’s just a beef if you are not ready to do something about it.”20 Drawing on the history and authority of the early Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Zupan reasserted the value of workers’ articulating their grievances and the political ends to which the paper was committed:

Workers in the modern mass production industries went for years living under abuses before they finally were able to do something about it. But the organization that they established to do something about it didn’t spring from nowhere. A large part of that struggle was workers letting each other know how they felt about their conditions and what they thought should be done about it.

The function of Correspondence is to provide a framework in which these dissatisfactions can be expressed freely. Out of this freedom to express dissatisfactions will crystallize ideas. When enough are agreed on what ought to be done, then there will develop the organization that will correspond to the needs and necessities of the day. That was the way of the CIO; that will be the way of any serious workers’ organization that is determined “to do something about it.”21

Zupan’s response by no means settled the matter. He addressed these criticisms again in the very next issue, and they continued to arise over the ensuing months. In April, with six months of publishing the paper behind them, the editor reported that “in almost every issue” readers had issued “repeated complaints” about Correspondence: “What is the purpose of the paper? What good does it do to write for the paper? Or, what is all the griping about?” Zupan responded to these challenges in “Our Aim and Our Program,” an editorial that defended the paper’s vision and in the process articulated its politics. “Yes, it is true we propose no program,” he wrote. “It’s also true that we don’t tell workers, Negroes, and others, how or for what to struggle. On the other hand, we do have ideas. What are the ideas that we have? The main and most important one is that no one, absolutely no one, except the workers and the millions of others who go along with the workers, can settle the questions of war, depression and totalitarianism.” Emphasizing the point, Zupan added, “The paper considers that what the workers have to say is what is decisive.”22

This full devotion to workers produced a wide-ranging and often engaging look at the American working class. Pieces by and about workers appeared throughout every issue, including the “Worker’s Journal” on the front page, the labor section (which usually covered two and a half pages, nearly a quarter of each issue), and “Readers’ Views.” In addition, labor-related articles or pieces by workers regularly appeared as the front-pager and on the editorial, “Special Negro News,” and women’s pages. This material showcased the experiences and perspectives of people working in a wide range of industries and geographic locations. Not surprisingly, Detroit autoworkers figured frequently and prominently among them, as nearly every issue related firsthand accounts of life in auto factories (particularly Chrysler and Ford) and ruminations on speed-up and other work conditions, the threat of layoffs and the pall of unemployment, the foibles of foremen, or the weaknesses of the union. This gave the paper grounding in the rich cultural experience of working-class Detroit. At the same time, the experiences and observations of workers in other places and industries also filled the pages of Correspondence, giving the paper something of a multiregional and multi-industry, if not fully national, scope. For example, the Correspondence committee in West Virginia produced a regular feature appearing in the labor section on miners called “Coal and Its People.” More broadly, any given issue might contain articles from a New York waterfront worker, railway workers in various cities, an oil worker in Los Angeles, or a Pittsburgh steel mill worker.

While industrial workers such as autoworkers and coal miners—the type of workers who had formed the foundation of the CIO in the 1930s and who in the 1950s constituted the center of the working class, both ideologically and practically—enjoyed pride of place in the pages of Correspondence, the paper’s commitment to “ordinary people” and its fierce opposition to bureaucracy ensured that it also gave voice to a much wider spectrum of workers and people from various walks of life. This included articles from people employed in such diverse occupations as cab driver, waitress, dishwasher, bus driver, New York City transit worker, office worker, and private secretary. Women identifying themselves as housewives frequently wrote for the paper. Occasionally even small business owners (such as an “Owner of a Barbecue Shop”) contributed articles to the paper. Some people wrote first-person narratives relating personal experiences on the job or at home, in the process sharing aspects of their lives. Some wrote about their experiences (and struggles) with layoffs and unemployment. Others contributed to one of the paper’s features, such as the “Family Budget,” a series appearing in the labor section in which families of different types reported their weekly income and expenditures. Examples included the budgets of “An Average Worker’s Family,” a “Miner with Five Dependents,” a “Working Couple,” and a “Skilled Worker.”

Correspondence also attempted to incorporate the experiences and voices of people of color. A “Special Mexican-American Feature” on the youth page of an early issue included several articles by and about Chicano youth in Los Angeles.23 Another issue carried a feature on “Puerto Ricans in America” that addressed the Puerto Rican nationalist movement and related the experiences and perspective of a Puerto Rican migrant to New York.24 In the spring and summer of 1954, the paper ran a five-part series by a Japanese American on “Life in an American Concentration Camp.”25 The author, a Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) who was a school child in San Francisco at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, gives an engaging and informative account of internment, taking readers through the many steps in the process and recounting the experience as endured by him and his family.

The women’s page of another issue carried a compelling if disturbing article titled “They Wanted Only Boys,” about a woman with striking similarities to Grace’s mother. An unidentified narrator tells the story of a Chinese woman who came to the United States around 1910:

Her husband, who had made some money in America, came to China and bought her. She didn’t want to leave her sick mother, but with the money there was a chance her mother could recover. On the American ship her first daughter was born, but her husband wanted to sell it, or give it away. She refused and started to yell. Her husband allowed her to keep it as he was afraid of what the other passengers, some Chinese but mostly Americans, would think, say, or do.

She said that in China, at that time, the women would have their babies while helping their husbands in the fields, plowing, digging, and so on. If it were a girl, they would sometimes bury it rather than see it given away or sold into slavery. The men wanted only boys so they could help in the fields or get out to work to bring money in.26

The husband retained these “old fashioned Chinese ideas” as the couple made their lives in the United States. Yet, the woman increasingly identified with her new country and came to see herself as an American. After their children were grown, she left her husband. This article shows how Correspondence sought to draw out political meaning from personal experiences and narratives. Most of the short piece detailed the alienation and dehumanization that the woman felt as an immigrant bride, but it ended with an affirmation of her determination to go beyond these confines. For Correspondence, the woman’s embrace of an American identity and decision to leave her husband made hers a story of self-actualization.

This story paralleled that of Grace’s own family, as discussed in chapter 3. Like the husband in the story, Grace’s father came to United States, earned money, then returned to China for a wife, bringing Grace’s mother back to the United States with him at the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century. In the story, the husband bought his wife; in the case of Grace’s parents, the marriage was arranged by her mother’s “evil” uncle, who had previously “sold her as a slave” to wealthy people in their village.27 Grace’s mother and the woman in the story each gave birth to their first child, a girl, on the ship bringing them to the United States. While Grace did not report that her father wanted to give this child away, as the husband in the story does, Grace did later recount an anecdote from her own experience that reflected this disregard and dismissal of girls: “I was born above my father’s Chinese American restaurant.… When I cried, the waiters used to say, ‘Leave her on the hillside to die. She’s only a girl.’ ”28 Grace’s mother also developed a relationship to America and American identity mirroring that of the protagonist of the story. “She fell in love with America,” Grace said of her mother, who started “dreaming of the day when her children would be grown so that she could go to school to learn how to read and write enough English to become an American citizen in her own right.”29 Finally, Grace’s mother left her husband after Grace and her siblings grew to adulthood, just as the woman in the story did.

It is not clear what, if any, role Grace played in producing the article or if she had any connection to the woman whose life it chronicles, but she surely would have recognized the struggles and decisions described in the piece. As a child of Chinese immigrants, Grace watched and later analyzed the dynamics of her parents’ relationship to their new country and to each other. Of course she faced a parallel but unique set of questions, those that confront the second-generation immigrant regarding nationality and ethnic identity. When this article appeared in 1954, Grace was thirty-eight years old and practiced in, if still not fully comfortable with, negotiating her presumed Chinese and American identities. In the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT) she had forged a political identity that downplayed and in some respects superseded her ethnic and racial identity. Over the coming decade, through working on Correspondence and through her relationship with Jimmy, she would solidify this transmutation of her identity, where her Chinese American ethnicity was secondary to and overshadowed by her identity as an American revolutionary.

By contrast, Jimmy’s racial identity directly motivated his political engagement and shaped his emerging identity as an American revolutionary. His background and early life experiences had laid the groundwork for his racial consciousness, which in turn served as a foundation upon which he forged his political identity during the 1940s. While Correspondence helped Grace construct a political identity that was largely independent of her ethnicity, for Jimmy the paper facilitated the inverse, providing him with a space where his racial and political identities not only reinforced each other but merged seamlessly together. In the pages of Correspondence as well as in editorial meetings, he sharply articulated his interpretation of black politics and in the process shaped the paper’s approach to the black struggle and its position on race in American life. Jimmy was the strongest and most active force directing the paper’s attention to black history and politics, though his contributions to the paper went well beyond this; as important as he was for the SNN page and the paper’s approach to black history and politics, he was instrumental in nearly every aspect of the paper.

Living and Breathing the Paper

Everyone involved with Correspondence took notice of Jimmy’s deep commitment to the paper and his immense contributions to it. In May 1954, Jimmy’s comrades elected him to the paper’s Resident Editorial Board (REB), bringing him into the leadership of the organization.30 In the eight months of the paper’s existence to that point, he had been fully engaged in all dimensions of the paper, embodying the dynamic interaction with readers that the group called “going out and writing in.”31 As described in an editorial board meeting, “going out means going back to our subscribers and asking them to renew their subscriptions and ask their friends to subscribe, establishing a relationship with them, living our lives with them and having them live their lives with us, encouraging them to involve their social groups in the activity around the paper.”32 Jimmy emerged as one of the most active and successful members of the group in soliciting subscriptions, developing a consistent string of coworkers and neighbors with whom he discussed the paper and who submitted material. According to one of the informants who tracked Jimmy’s activities for the FBI, Jimmy “was doing the bulk of the work in passing out the Correspondence, obtaining subscriptions and making contacts.”33 Other informants reported specific numbers illustrating this: during one week in January, Jimmy sold 38 issues and secured two subscriptions to the paper; between January 10 and March 28, he sold 285 single copies and brought in twenty-six subscriptions.34

He was also an energetic contributor. In addition to his column on the “Special Negro News” (SNN) page, Jimmy wrote several other pieces, particularly on the labor page. He also brought in submissions from his coworkers, neighbors, and other readers. These appeared throughout the paper, such as in the SNN section, the labor section, and the “Readers’ Views” section. Johnny Zupan called the “Readers’ Views” installments that Jimmy assembled the best because they presented “just what the workers say,” and he identified them as the kind of material “that will make the paper.”35 Jimmy was responsible for multiple submissions for each issue of the paper. For example, he had twenty-three items and articles in the issue published at the time he joined the REB. This number and the heavy responsibility it represented came up for discussion at the next REB meeting, during which Dunayevskaya pressed for some relief for Jimmy, “whom we have so overburdened with work.”36 Whatever the burden he felt, Jimmy continued to devote himself to the paper. “I can’t put my finger on any one particular thing,” he said, talking about the reason for this devotion during another REB meeting. “I just know I feel proud as hell of the paper.”37

Dunayevskaya singled Jimmy out for praise in May 1954. In a report assessing the paper, she said that Jimmy “has lived and breathed the paper” from the moment they began publishing it. She called him the group’s “professional subgetter,” not only because he “chalked up the most” subscriptions, but because he did so in an integrated and holistic way that made “no distinction whatever between subgetting, eliciting articles for the paper, writing himself, and being on the local editorial board for labor and Negro sections.” She held him up as an exemplar for his efforts in every sphere of the paper, “from the column he writes for the Negro page of which he is also an editor, to the Reader’s Views he gathers in the shop and in the neighborhood … from the labor articles he writes to the dozens of people he brings to socials.”38 The socials to which she referred were informal gatherings and parties that the organization held to broaden its social interactions and deepen the paper’s community ties.

Jimmy articulated his politics and those of the organization in his regular column on the “Special Negro News” page written under the pen name Al Whitney. The most strident and consistent themes of his column were his critical assessment of established black leadership, the changing relationship between these leaders and the black masses, and the relative roles of leaders and masses in the rising black struggle. He also frequently wrote about organized labor, particularly in relation to black workers and the black struggle. He combined all of these in the first installment of his column, which appeared in the January 23, 1954, issue of the paper. Titled “Talent for Sale,” it chastised Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and labor leader Walter Reuther, for typifying the status-conscious and prestige-seeking leader. He said such leaders “are actually individualists” more focused on maintaining their lofty positions than on leading the Negro or class struggle. “They would sell anybody out just to stay in that atmosphere.”39 His next column, “Wasted Energy,” took aim at the Detroit branch of the NAACP for its plans to hold a march to city hall to save the job of a member of the local black elite who served as a representative of the city’s Negroes on the mayor’s interracial commission. The NAACP, Jimmy said, so valued this type of position that it would mount a protest march “to fight for the job of this one person” but not for jobs for the larger black community. “That’s the way these Talented Tenth act,” he scolded, drawing on his own experience in the organization to make his point. “I remember the time we were having elections in the NAACP and they said they needed more lawyers and doctors and others who could speak with more authority rather than so many workers who always wanted to do something. I am quite sure they really want Negroes to get their rights,” Jimmy wrote, but it was clear that the branch’s leaders “want their rights too, and that is the right to speak with authority.” The lesson for the masses was clear: “They not only have to fight white society; they have to fight this Talented Tenth bunch of Negroes who are also part of official society.”40

Such criticism of the black elite and established black leadership appeared in nearly all of Jimmy’s columns in the paper’s first year of publication. For example, in “Negroes and Negro Organizations,” he said that Negroes across the country were leaving organizations such as the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the CIO’s Fair Employment Practices Committee because “they recognize that these organizations no longer satisfy their needs.” These groups were actually “the first ones who [tried] to head off any Negro mass action,” instead pushing more gradual approaches. However, “the Negro masses are aware of all the conditions in society and want no part of passive action. Mere words will not satisfy them, even when uttered by Negroes.… The era of ‘Uncle Tom’ is gone. A search for human needs and relations is the struggle of Negroes today.”41 In another column, Jimmy addressed what he saw as the futility of Negro leadership in the union: “Every year, just before election time, the white union leader comes around and gets some Negro to put on his slate.” The mass of black workers will support him and vote for him because this represents an advancement, but when they go to him after he is elected, it becomes clear that he can or will do little. “After the election they will go to him and ask him to see what he can do about certain things concerning Negroes in the shop and he will say I’ll talk it over with the other union leaders in the local. When they (the workers) ask him again (and they always have to ask him again for he doesn’t come back himself) he always answers by saying that they’re going to do something about it.” This goes on for two or three months but then, after he has been in office for five or six months, “this same leader will begin to talk down to the Negroes and defend the union. This Negro leader may have been ever so sincere when he was running for election for this position, but he has to yield to the other union leaders and thus becomes corrupted in the process.” Jimmy explained that he was not opposed to black leaders; rather, “what I am opposed to is the corruption that takes place when these leaders capitulate to this society.… When can a Negro leader take a position for Negro equality and remain a leader? From past experience, I can think of only a few. All I know is a new method has got to be worked out in regard to these leaders. This we are trying to do in Correspondence.”42

Jimmy also used historical figures or the broader topic of Negro history to expose and examine the development of black leadership and the assertion of the black masses. He began a column titled “Negro Challenge” with a reference to Margaret Garner, who in 1856 escaped from slavery in Kentucky with her family. Facing imminent capture and a return to enslavement, Garner chose to kill her two-year-old daughter, “giving [her] back to [her] Maker,” Jimmy wrote, “rather than give [her] to slavery.” Jimmy found in Garner’s act of infanticide a dramatic antecedent to the current resolve among black people to finally end the subordination that lingered on from Garner’s day. Today, among black people everywhere, he wrote, there was a common refrain: “I’m fighting and working that my son will not have to go through what I had to endure.” He described this simple statement as “the expression of a fighting race, not to be subdued under the footsteps of slavery and servitude.”43 Thus, Jimmy sought to link the historical resistance to slavery to an emergent sensibility and determination among black people one century later to challenge and uproot the contemporary mechanisms of black subordination.

Months before this column, Jimmy used the occasion of Negro History Week to engage his readers in a consideration of the political uses of black people’s historical experiences. The pioneering black historian Carter G. Woodson and his organization, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, launched Negro History Week (the forerunner to Black History Month) in February 1926, three months before Jimmy reached his seventh birthday. Designed to counter the elision and denigration of African Americans in the standard narratives of the nation’s past by celebrating the group’s exceptional individuals, group achievements, and collective contributions to the country, this annual celebration concentrated the dynamics and contradictions of race in Jimmy’s early years. “I’ll always remember my school days, when on this week there would be much preparation, just as there is for Christmas,” he wrote. “This was the only time I had an opportunity to really find out about Negro people, their accomplishments, and their struggles for recognition of their human dignity. But somehow, after this week I never noticed any change in Negro and white relations.” Instead, Negro History Week seemed to reinforce the way things were. The celebrations at his school followed a familiar format: “There would be two or more speakers who were invited to speak on Negro history that week, generally one was a Negro and one was white. Each speaker would go back into history and pick out some Negro figure and praise him to us. Most of the time it was Booker T. Washington or George Washington Carver.” Jimmy felt pride hearing about the accomplishments of these historical figures, but he was also “much upset over” the way that the speakers emphasized the personal behavior of these figures. “I would be very confused when it was all over,” Jimmy explained.44

The column goes on to describe how later, as a young man, Jimmy experienced this same frustration in relation to boxing champion and hero Joe Louis. “I had a swelling pride in him as a fighter, especially when he was in the ring fighting a white. I would be so nervous, I would be trembling until the fight was over. I felt proud of him for he was a Negro and he was disproving everything that was said about Negroes’ inability to do things and proving Negroes were equal to all in every way.” But white people sought to uphold a different image of Joe Louis. “Whenever he was talked about by white society for what he meant to Negroes,” Jimmy complained, whites praised Louis as a model of “Negro behavior” who “advanced his race from his personal conduct.” White people sought to define and restrict Louis’s meaning for black people, just as was done with the historical figures presented during the Negro History Week celebrations of Jimmy’s youth. By focusing on Louis’s behavior and personal conduct—and not his powerful refutation of black inferiority or the racial pride he generated—white people were essentially praising the boxer for staying in his “place,” Jimmy said. “Negroes detest the idea that they have a ‘place,’ ” Jimmy demanded, but “capitalist society has a standard policy to never mention any Negroes who do not accept its idea that they have a ‘place.’ To me a Negro’s ‘place’ is any ‘place.’ ” The lesson to be gleaned from “Viewing Negro History Week,” as Jimmy titled his column, was the duality of black history. It could be used to instill racial pride, or to reinforce racial subjugation; it could challenge the idea of black inferiority or justify it. Jimmy closed the column by saying: “I am proud of Negro History Week and what it is supposed to represent. It is the corrupt way of white society that I detest, which uses certain Negroes to portray what they would like Negroes to be.”45

Jimmy’s identification of the duality and conflicting uses of Negro history reflected a dialectical understanding of the Negro struggle. He presented this understanding in his December 11, 1954 column, “Tension and Social Change.” It does not use the word “dialectic” (or the related terms “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis”), but it clearly articulates a concept of change driven by the resolution of internal conflicts. “What has seemed to be progress for the Negro in America, better housing and job opportunity, has been just the opposite,” he wrote, “for the better job and housing has been the basis for the ever-increasing demand by Negroes for a better life. Pressure from Negroes which once came only sporadically, is constant now and the tension is constant also.” Here, as in the title and throughout the piece, Jimmy’s use of “tension” might be read as capturing the Marxist “contradiction” at the heart of the dialectical process. “What do I see in this tension?” Jimmy asked. “Somebody has to yield in any tense situation. And that is what makes change take place in any society, whether people like it or don’t like it. It breaks down the old ideas and opinions and leads to the new.”46

Jimmy’s column helped set the tone for the “Special Negro News” (SNN) page, which ensured a constant presence of African American voices in the paper.47 The page also encouraged readers to grapple with the problems of race relations and segregation. While the SNN drew material from across the country, printing articles on such topics as police brutality in Pittsburgh, housing and “the Negro’s living conditions” in Chicago, and segregation in Los Angeles, it carried many pieces on Detroit. They spoke to a range of experiences and topics, with common themes being social and political issues of the day. For example, in one issue readers found commentary on the recent congressional primary victory of Detroit businessman and politician Charles C. Diggs Jr., soon to be Michigan’s first black congressperson. The same issue ran a first-person account of police brutality. “I was lying in bed in my own home. It was about 11 P.M.,” the article began. “The police woke me up by slapping me in the face. They asked me where the gun was at. I said ‘What are you talking about? What are you doing in my house?’ ”48 Another issue carried an article titled “Housing Shortage—They Move You with Bulldozers,” giving the author’s personal experience with the displacement caused by urban renewal and highway construction that was then impacting thousands of families. “I was living in a house where the new highway was supposed to come through. They gave me three months to move. But we couldn’t find a place and we had to go to court to see how much longer they would let us stay in the house. The judge told us that he would give us one more month to stay there, and if we would not be out by the end of that time, he would send bulldozers out to each house and let them be mowed down.” The family was forced to “get a place that we didn’t want” that charged an exorbitant rent. This expense, combined with “high priced food” and other expenses, posed an acute but sadly familiar hardship. “The cost of living is now so high,” the author lamented, that it “takes up each week’s pay and leaves not one cent to reach from one pay to the other. We just can’t see no way out.”49

Contributors to the SNN regularly ridiculed or chastised the racial attitudes and racially coded practices of white Americans, including the mechanics of segregation in both the North and the South. This was sometimes expressed with humor, such as in a cartoon depicting a black man in a boat fishing while a white man on the nearby dock, standing next to a sign that reads “Boats Reserved for Whites Only,” angrily shakes his fist. The caption to the cartoon says, “Reserved? But I don’t see a sign on the water.”50 In more direct ways, too, the SNN expressed African Americans’ determination to expose and thwart segregation, such as an editorial on segregation that asserted freedom was the heart of the matter: “The freedom to do what [the Negro] wants to do, when he wants to do it. It’s not that he wants to be with whites, it’s not that he thinks he’s white and not that he wants to marry whites.”51 Particularly strong language occasionally punctuated such sentiments, as in a short piece titled “Americanism” that told of one person’s anger with the interconnected and contradictory logic of the Cold War, racial antagonism, and urban transformation in 1950s American political culture. He had watched televised images of “the first Negro family moving into a new housing project in Chicago” where “a crowd of whites [was] throwing stones and other things. They were standing there booing and shouting. Then they have the nerve to tell me about Communism. The Communists aren’t doing this to me. They are. When things like that happen, I feel like killing all whites I see.”52

The “Special Negro News” page occasioned debate among readers in the pages of Correspondence. This is perhaps not surprising given the paper’s interracial audience. Nonetheless, it posed a conundrum. While the organization saw the SNN as a vital component to its political project and journalistic mission, readers raised sharp questions about its content and usefulness. Criticism came quickly. In just the fourth issue, Correspondence printed a full page of readers’ comments under the banner “Say Negro News Dominates Paper.”53 Many of those writing in complained that the paper devoted too much space and attention to African Americans. “I noticed that about two-thirds of the paper had something about the Negroes,” wrote one reader, with some exaggeration. “I wouldn’t like to see the Negro question dominate the paper.” Others challenged the utility or purpose of the page itself, as this sympathetic but no less skeptical reader did: “I can understand why some of the colored people from the South write letters that express hatred for the whites. It is something that has embedded itself deep in the minds of the writers. I don’t doubt in the least that all this is true, but what does living in the past profit us? We should all strive to understand each other and unite in the cause for freedom.” There were also outright detractors who voiced clear opposition to the very idea of a Negro page and the promotion of racial harmony. “Colored people don’t need any pillows to rest on,” railed one letter. “They are doing all right on their own. We needn’t make it our business to promote this Negro-white relations.” This reader exhibited a white racial defensiveness that others shared: “It’s not my fault that I’m white. Whatever color people are, they are the same. I thought that’s what we were trying to say all along, but these articles just try to divide people.” Predictably perhaps, the racial anxieties of the times led at least one reader to detect in the paper’s racial politics a more sinister motive: “All the paper wants to do is promote sex relations between Negro men and white women.”54 Such rhetoric soon yielded to more reasoned debate, as discussions of the merits of the SNN page continued in subsequent issues.

A month later Correspondence ran on the front page an editorial statement, “On the Negro Discussion,” to address the “considerable criticism from our readers protesting the dominance of the Negro question in the paper and the reduction of the question to a non-political level.”55 The editor acknowledged the validity of the criticism, yet at the same time assured readers that the paper recognized the importance and complexity of the Negro Question. “We believe that the Negroes have an independent role to play in their own emancipation, and a double role, both as workers and as Negroes, in the emancipation of the American workers and the great body of American people.” He also defended the paper against some of the criticism: “It is not a question of ‘sympathetic treatment’ of the Negro question. The Negro is not out for sympathy. He is engaged, every day, in the factory and out of it, in a struggle for equality, from upgrading to housing to politics.… The point is that his continuous struggles bring into question the whole capitalist system. The question therefore is: what is your attitude to these independent struggles.56

The SNN carried letters from readers in subsequent issues that continued to discuss and debate the page’s merits. These letters, which primarily were from black readers, appeared under a banner labeled “What Do You Think?” that functioned as a smaller, SNN-focused version of “Readers’ Views.” While some said that having a separate Negro page was akin to segregation, many more expressed support for the page. “I like to see a Special Negro Page,” wrote one, “because Negroes are in a special category in American society.” Another reader wrote, “Everybody must know that Negroes say things to each other that they don’t say to whites. I see the Special Negro Page as a place where Negroes can say what they don’t ordinarily say to whites, and where they can talk to each other, straight.” Some black readers supported the existence of the page, but thought the word “special” should be removed. As a reader identified as a “Young Negro Woman” put it, “What goes on every day in Negro life is not special. It would be special if it were a race riot or something.” She drew a distinction between Correspondence and the mainstream daily press, in which the only articles on Negroes “slander them or show in some form that they are inhuman.”57 The strongest rebuttal to this line of thinking came from a member of Correspondence, Simon Owens, writing under his pseudonym Charles Denby. In the June 12, 1954, edition of “What Do You Think?” he took exception to those who “say there is nothing special about Negro life, Negroes do not have special problems,” and who therefore wanted to change the name of the page. This was a slight misrepresentation of a previous reader’s position, but it served as a useful point of departure for Owens’s spirited defense of the page and its name. “I would like to ask those who say this, is there one Negro in the U.S. that has all the freedom privileges, without any form of segregation that the least white has? That makes it special; and the Negroes did not create it, they do not want it, but it is forced upon them. And in many instances they alone, or leading the way, have carried out tremendous struggles combating it down through history and at present. When they are fully integrated into American white society, then you can change the name of this page.”58

The strongest criticism of the SNN came from a “Firm Supporter” in New York who wrote a letter challenging the page to capture “the Negro struggle and its social implications for the country as a whole.”59 The SNN carried the letter with an accompanying editor’s note explaining that they took very seriously this “fundamental criticism of the Negro page.” They decided to print the letter in its entirety “because of its importance … and ask our readers to study it and write us their opinions on the points raised.”60 “Your Negro page is in a serious mess,” the letter began. “All you are showing is the Negroes suffering from prejudice and oppression. But the fact that Negroes suffer from prejudice and oppression compels them to organize themselves and live in a way which is a positive contribution to the struggle of the American people as a whole. These struggles frequently show others how to meet their own problems. That is what your page has not got.” According to the writer, this unique character of the black struggle—that African Americans experienced a unique form of racial oppression, but their response to it had a universal quality—held the key to the debate over the usefulness of the paper. “If your separate section emphasizes ways and means Negroes have developed in the struggle against the common oppressor, everybody would read it, and feel himself vitally involved.” The writer affirmed the “undoubted need for a separate Negro section,” but urged the paper not to fall in the pattern of highlighting oppression and then citing historical examples “of how Negroes struggle.” “You have not got to go back to history,” he continued. “The Negro is carrying on historical struggles today. But the whole point of his struggles is that today they have a deep social significance. It is these struggles and their significance that you have to put forward and your Negro page will be a great success.”61

“Firm Supporter” offered the issue of housing in Detroit as an example of where the “Special Negro News” page fell short of its potential. Citing the article “Housing Shortage—They Move You with Bulldozers” (described above), the writer says the SNN had amply shown “the fact that Negroes are being pushed around,” but the page showed nothing of their response. The result was a story of discrimination, which was “sad indeed,” but “that is only half the story.” The missing half was how African American communities, forced to buy houses at elevated prices, regularly held “note parties” to help each other meet their monthly house payments. “In this way they have organized their social life not just for recreation but as a means of coping with prejudice cooperatively. Without any fuss or leadership Negroes have simply organized themselves to meet a concrete political situation.”62 While ostensibly a critique of the SNN, this letter actually articulated quite well the paper’s emphasis on spontaneity and self-activity. Moreover, the analysis was consistent with the paper’s approach to the Negro Question.

The paper’s commitment to the black struggle also found expression in occasional references to historical figures. A short piece on Crispus Attucks, “the first well known Negro in American history,” chronicled his contributions to revolutionary-era Boston and labeled him the very embodiment of the idea of freedom that the new American nation gave “to the 18th century world.”63 Dunayevskaya drew on the historical authority of David Walker and his famous “Appeal” in a column asserting the paper’s revolutionary potential. Linking Walker’s widely distributed antislavery tract with Correspondence’s own political project, she wrote that the “pamphlet gave the reader back his own feelings and experiences in a form that he could recognize as changing history in a fundamental way.… Walker’s pamphlet is part of our history and Correspondence is part of that proven method, which enables all the insignificant and obscure people in the world to clear their own minds from the hypnotism of the plans and programs put out by the elite, and trust only themselves to change their conditions of life in a fundamental way.”64

Commentary in the pages of Correspondence tended to champion the Negro struggle for democratic rights as an especially powerful force in American life, touting in particular the potential of grassroots perspectives and initiatives of this struggle to transform not only the American racial landscape but also its political and social structures as well. The front page of the March 6, 1954, issue—the same issue in which the letter from “Firm Supporter” appeared—illustrated this perspective. The front-page lead article, “American Politics and the Negro,” argued that the black struggle was helping to change “the whole face of American politics” by forging a crisis in—and even threatening to break up—the Democratic Party. “The politics of the continuous and always growing protests of Negroes against discrimination,” the article declared, was “the most conspicuous example of that type of politics in the United States today” that can clear “away the old rubbish and [change] the fate of nations.”65 Accompanying the article was a cartoon titled “Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride,” depicting the two political parties as male suitors, each with flowers in hand, courting a smiling woman in a dress bearing the word “Dixiecrat.” Falling off to the side of the “liberal Dem” is a tearful woman identified as “Civil Liberty” who is being rejected in favor of the more desirable companion. The cartoon caption reads, “She was just a harmless flirtation. You are the one we cannot do without.”66

Two months later, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, handed down on May 17, 1954, refocused and intensified national attention on the place of black people in American life and politics. Coming just eight months into Correspondence’s publication history, the case elicited considerable commentary, analysis, and discussion in the paper. The Correspondence Resident Editorial Board (REB) had a “lively and broad” discussion of the political significance of the decision during its May 25 meeting, out of which they agreed to immediately send out letters to friends in the South to solicit their reactions and opinions on the case as well as prepare other material on Brown for the June 12 issue.67 This included Owens’s “Worker’s Journal” discussing the implications of the case (and thus departing from its usual first-person and labor-focused format), a letter from Kentucky describing how black communities in that state had already begun mobilizing to make the court’s decision real in practice, and an editorial on the SNN page asserting that the decision—and “the determination of the Negro people” that animated it—had “shaken this old America from end to end.”68

In addition, the “Readers’ Views” section of that issue included fourteen comments on Brown. They presented an eclectic mix of opinion, though nearly all of them expressed support of, praise for, or gratification at the decision. “The struggle of the Negro people is solely responsible for the decision of the Supreme Court,” wrote a Detroit autoworker. “I never did want to volunteer for any army or any fighting, but if anything starts in Georgia I will … go defend the rights of my people.” A very different but complementary enthusiasm came from a “University President” in Washington, D.C. (an interesting identity given that the legal strategy behind Brown owed so much to Washington’s Howard University), who proclaimed the case “the greatest intellectual gain made by the Negro in the past fifty years.” Some readers saw clearly the Cold War context and international implications of the decision. A West Virginia miner, for example, called Brown “the best thing that could have happened. We go telling other people to clean their linens and we got our own homes dirty.” A reader identified as an “African Student” from Washington, D.C., similarly opined, “I was amazed that in this 20th century when people talk of equality and liberty, discrimination still exists in the United States despite the fact that the U.S. shouts loudest in the United Nations against Communist tyranny.” And a few predicted the hostility and resistance to come. “I’m not prejudiced,” wrote an “Old-Timer” in Detroit, “but I’m from the deep South and I know the white people won’t stand for it. There will be Civil War first.” Even the very young, who would in time be cast as central characters in a violent and angry drama, received the message. “My principal was against [the Brown decision],” wrote a “Nine-Year-Old” from West Virginia. “He said when they come, if they give any trouble to grab a ball bat and hit them over the head.”69

Jimmy devoted his SNN column to the Brown decision in each of the three issues immediately following its announcement. He addressed what he saw as the larger politics of the decision: its impact on the broad struggle against segregation, its relationship to grassroots mobilization, its implications for African Americans’ evolving position relative to the national polity, and its meaning for black internal class dynamics. His columns dissented from the widely held view that Brown was a landmark decision, that it was a great victory with a clear and immediate impact, and that it alone signaled a major change. “The average Negro isn’t excited about this decision,” he wrote. “They figure it had to come. They figure passing the law won’t be the last word anyhow.”70 Jimmy also argued in his columns that popular protest—“the power of the Negroes … in their day to day struggles demanding their rights”71—remained the most powerful force in the black struggle, in the wake of Brown no less than leading up to it. In the title of his June 12 column he labeled the verdict the “Supreme Court Indecision” because of the unspecified method of enforcement and still-uncertain impact, and in the column’s title in the next issue he called it “A Decision of Necessity” in the face of domestic and international pressures. “They can ‘if’ and ‘but’ in the most backward part of the South,” he wrote, “but the rolling tide of the Negroes in pursuit of their civil rights will not falter.”72 This “rolling tide,” plus the rising pressure created by the independence struggles taking place throughout the colonial world, had compelled the unanimous Supreme Court ruling. Thus, Brown was properly understood as “another concession by the United States,” designed “not to rectify the injustice of the past, but to justify their claim that they are a democracy. The average Negro knows this wasn’t a decision of sympathetic feeling, but a decision of necessity. Just as Abraham Lincoln said, if he could save the Union and still keep slavery he would do that, but if to save the Union, slavery would have to be abolished, he would do that—so is the Supreme Court decision.”73

Jimmy also wrote an editorial that boldly declared that Brown “was no gift to the Negro people.”74 Rather, the decision was simply “the rulers of America” yielding “in the face of the mounting rejection by millions of Negroes in the South of the old white supremacy doctrine.” Titled “Talented Tenth Are Retreating,” it took aim at “the so-called Negro leaders” with a critique in particular of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP for their willingness to wait until September 1955 for the ruling to take effect, thus accommodating the nation’s stalling in enforcement of the decision. By contrast, Jimmy said, actions and sentiments at the grassroots revealed a readiness to move faster and further than established leaders. “Since the decision, the southern Negroes have shown that they are preparing for non-segregated schools as soon as possible. At the same time the northern Negroes are watching what their southern brothers are doing. Should the southern Negroes start enforcing the Supreme Court decision, the northern Negroes will pour into the South to help their brothers.” The editorial ends with a quip that, coming just two months after the ruling, would have surely been read by many as an irreverent if not completely unfair analysis of Brown’s driving force: “It looks as if Thurgood Marshall and the rest of the Negro professional people are more afraid of the Negro people making a law more than a piece of paper than of continued segregation and second class citizenship.”75

The Brown decision continued to receive attention in Correspondence through much of the summer. The major theme of these pieces was that the case in and of itself did not mean much, that despite the initial (and continuing) enthusiasm and sense of victory surrounding the ruling, its actual impact and thus its true meaning for African Americans depended in the first instance on enforcement (which was very much an open question in the months following the ruling) and, more broadly, on the continuing mobilization of black communities. An article in the July 10 issue titled “Labor Struggles and Negro Struggles” argued that Brown (like legal victories more generally) was the beginning, not the end, of the struggle. It drew parallels between the labor movement during the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s, highlighting the relationship between legal victories and popular struggles in each movement. The writer analogized Brown to the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, which ended injunctions against strikes and boycotts. This law served as an early victory for workers’ right to organize, but “it didn’t follow automatically that the unions became a reality,” the article explained. “It took much more than a law to establish unions. It was only by long serious and violent struggles that workers were able to establish the CIO and make a reality of legal rights.” Similarly, “the struggle to end segregation in schooling will not end with the Supreme Court ruling. The struggle of the Negroes against segregation, like that of workers to establish unions, only begins.”76 The next issue carried a letter from a “Negro Housewife” that expressed little faith that the decision would be enforced.77

Grace in London

During the spring and summer of 1954, while Jimmy anchored Correspondence’s coverage of the Brown decision and domestic racial politics, Grace engaged the transnational political space of anticolonial agitation, nationalism, and African independence. Since leaving the United States and resettling in England in the summer of 1953, C. L. R. had maintained constant contact with his American comrades through frequent letters while also reconnecting with individuals, networks, and movements with which he had been associated during his first stay in England during the 1930s. It was during that initial six-year stay, when he worked with George Padmore and others in the International African Service Bureau, that C. L. R. first agitated for African independence and started developing his extensive Pan-African networks. Two decades later, he was again operating within this London-based network, but this time the agitation had grown to full-blown independence movements in several African countries. C. L. R. had direct contact with key African independence figures and leaders, particularly in the Gold Coast (soon to be Ghana) and Kenya, such as Mbiyu Koinange, a Kenyan nationalist leader living in London. Early in 1954, C. L. R. and his Correspondence comrades began planning a writing project with Koinange that would support the Kenyan struggle and serve as an intervention into an international debate created by the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. They decided that Grace and another Correspondence member, Filomena Daddario, would go to London to work with C. L. R. and Koinange on this project.78 In March 1954, Grace left Detroit for New York and from there sailed to London.

Grace’s four-month stay in London was an extension of her Correspondence work, much like her 1948 trip to Paris had been for the Johnson-Forest Tendency. In this case, she was deploying her writing and editing skills in collaboration with Koinange to produce an account of the Kenyan independence struggle to be published by Correspondence. Her presence in London also gave her and C. L. R. the chance to approximate the type of political collaboration they had shared in the United States before his forced departure the previous year. C. L. R. “subscribed to all of the newspapers,” including the London Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Manchester Guardian, “and we read them religiously,” Grace recalled. They also went to cricket matches, met with some of the new activists with whom C. L. R. had recently made contact, and made two or three trips to Manchester to see the Pan-Africanist T. Ras Makonnen, his old comrade who, along with George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah, had organized the famed Fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945.79

The FBI took notice of Grace’s trip to London, just as it had with her trip to Paris six years earlier. The Detroit office learned of her plans to travel in February and alerted the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, as well as the New York and Washington, D.C., offices.80 The FBI agents tracking Grace knew that she had been in touch with C. L. R., and they correctly suspected that she would be connecting with him in London, but they apparently were unable to learn details about Grace’s trip or track her activities while there. Indeed, the FBI seemed to be unaware that the purpose of Grace’s trip was to collaborate with Koinange in producing an account of the Kenyan independence movement.

Koinange was, however, well known to U.S. (and British) officials.81 The son of a chief who helped spark the Kenyan nationalist movement, Koinange traveled a path that was similar to that of other African independence leaders—his fellow Kenyan Jomo Kenyatta, Nigeria’s Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Ghana’s Nkrumah—who studied, agitated, and organized in the United States and Britain before returning home to lead nationalist movements. Koinange came to the United States in 1927 and attended Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) and then Ohio Wesleyan University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1934. He continued his education at Columbia University Teachers College, earning a master’s degree in 1936 (his first year there overlapped with Grace’s final year as an undergraduate at Columbia’s Barnard College). Koinange spent the next two years studying at Cambridge University in England, where he met Kenyatta and other African nationalists. In 1938, he returned home and helped to found Kenya Teachers’ College, for which he served as president. This pivotal institution helped stimulate intellectual debates and political consciousness and attracted nationalists such as Kenyatta, who served as a teacher and administrator after he returned to the colony in 1946. Koinange also helped to found what became the Kenya African Union (KAU), a political organization that put forward a program of African self-government and eventually became the ruling party under the leadership of independent Kenya’s first president, Kenyatta. In the fall of 1951, the KAU selected Koinange to lead a two-person delegation to London to petition the British government and the United Nations and to put the case of the Kenyan Africans before the British public. The next year, the colonial government issued a state of emergency in Kenya in response to an offensive of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, labeled by some as the “Mau Mau.” Colonial authorities used this as an opportunity to round up and detain many opponents of the white settlers and the colonial regime, including Koinange’s father and other family members. Authorities also declared Koinange subject to arrest if he returned to the colony. He thus remained in London as the KAU representative.82

When Grace arrived to work with Koinange, he had earned the reputation for being “an uncompromising nationalist,” in the words of the author of a book on Kenya just published in London. “Next to Kenyatta,” the author explained, Koinange “is the most influential of the Kikuyu leaders.”83 Like much of the mainstream reporting on Kenya, this book sought to explain to a British audience the meaning of the Mau Mau Uprising, its “campaign of terrorism to drive the Europeans off the land that had once been African,” and the resulting state of emergency declared by colonial authorities. Grace and Koinange’s collaboration, by contrast, aimed to spread among American readers an awareness of the Kenyan people’s long-simmering and now irrepressible struggle against a brutal colonial regime and its white settlers. Grace helped Koinange tell a story that proceeded not from his standing as a leader but rather from his relationship to the Kenyan masses and his knowledge of their actions. “What I want to tell here is how before the Emergency the Africans were trying to help themselves and make themselves part of the best that is in civilization,” he wrote in the preface to the document they produced. “I want to tell people what my people were doing, of their own energies, how they were doing for themselves what the Government should have been doing for them. It is when you suppress these energies, which are the driving force of any civilization, that you have barbarism.” Moreover, the story of Kenya’s anticolonial revolt, he insisted, “concerns the whole of Africa.”84 Indeed, Grace, C. L. R., and their Correspondence comrades sought with this project to elevate and inspire support for the cause of African independence. The anticolonial uprisings and nationalist movements across the continent were for them further examples of the masses in motion and proof of global revolutionary activity.

When Grace left London in July, C. L. R. gave her a book as a parting gift. Inside, he wrote the inscription, “We know, we hope our friends know, the world outside will know.” Many years later Grace would recall C. L. R.’s words as “typically enigmatic.”85 Cryptic as it was, it also reflected his confidence in the group’s political vision. It captured the shared sense of political purpose that had animated Grace’s trip to work with Koinange. When C. L. R. penned those words in the summer of 1954, Grace likely understood and agreed with the sentiment.

Kenya Sundays

Grace returned to Detroit in July 1954, bringing with her not only the manuscript that she and Koinange had completed over the preceding months, but also the determination to resume building the new life she had started making for herself in Detroit. The four months she spent in London amounted to roughly half the time she had lived in Detroit, and Grace was anxious to pick up where she had left off. This included her relationship with Jimmy.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Jimmy and Grace had likely discussed marriage before her departure for London. It is not clear what if any plans were set, but Jimmy and Grace were married very soon after her return to Detroit. They traveled to nearby Toledo, Ohio, where they were married by a justice of the peace on July 17, 1954. Their courtship had emerged out of their shared political work, and their continued political engagement would have the effect of deepening their relationship. Now, as a married couple, their personal partnership would come to be inseparable from their intellectual and political partnership.

Correspondence remained their primary political activity, but for the next several months, Grace and Jimmy took on the additional task of publishing, distributing, and promoting Koinange’s manuscript, which they released in January 1955 as a booklet titled The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves. Grace was the driving force behind this effort, though Jimmy, who continued to work full time at Chrysler on top of his political activity, joined her at crucial points. Her first task was to raise money for publication, and to do this they formed the Kenya Publication Fund. While separate, this fund was of a piece with the Correspondence organization. The group had been chronicling the Kenyan struggle throughout the year by running pieces in Correspondence, most of them appearing in the paper’s “News and Views of the World” section. The first of these ran in the January 9, 1954, issue, before Grace left for London. Titled “Murder Inc.,” it told of British soldiers killing Kenyan Africans for sport. “The units compete with one another and keep scorecards of ‘kills,’ ” the piece reported. “There is the barbarism of the Mau Mau and there is the barbarism of the settlers and the Government,” it continued. “But one barbarism is for freedom and the other for the perpetuation of oppression, race prejudice, and slavery.”86 This set the tone for the subsequent stories that described the treachery of the colonial regime, exposed the British empire’s attempt to use the “white man’s burden” argument to justify its “violent tenacity in Kenya,” and extolled the mounting push for self-government among Africans in Kenya and elsewhere on the continent.87 In September, Correspondence devoted the entire “News and Views of the World” section to printing a letter from Koinange to British prime minister Winston Churchill.

An article titled “The People Are a Mighty Fortress in East Africa” in the November 27, 1954, issue gave perhaps the strongest statement on the Kenyan struggle of all those appearing in Correspondence. “It has become the fashion, in the powerful English language newspapers of the Western world,” the article began, “to call the Kikuyu people barbarians because they now fight for what is rightfully theirs in Kenya. They are called backward and uneducated, heathen and ungodly.” The writer took exception to this misrepresentation of the Kenyan situation, and thus set out the purpose of the article: “It is necessary to brand the lie and tell the truth.” This truth, the writer said, was to be found in the story of African education in colonial Kenya. The story begins with the government’s failure to provide for compulsory education for Africans, prompting them to create African independent schools. When the government closed these schools, citing a lack of trained teachers, the Africans responded by founding Kenya Teachers’ College, which was sustained and made to flourish through the many material sacrifices and collective efforts of the people. The writer stressed that this story of how the Africans of Kenya thwarted the ruling whites’ efforts to deny their children education reflected a determined people pushing toward their liberation. “In such fashion did the children of Israel build their Temple when they fled from bondage in Egypt. For this is the way people build who have the mark of civilization upon them.” Building upon this dramatic language, the piece closed with these strong words: “In the face of such a remarkable outpouring of cooperative human endeavor, the white settlers of Kenya took fright. Far from welcoming this advance of civilization, they accused the Africans of anti-European activity. They declared the Emergency in 1952 which precipitated the bloodshed in Kenya. They are the ungodly ones.”88

By the time that this piece appeared in Correspondence, Grace had devoted several months to raising funds for the Koinange booklet, and she was very close to having it published. The article did not mention the booklet or identify Koinange by name, but it clearly augmented the organizing work that Grace was doing around the booklet. Indeed, the story of Kenya Teachers’ College and its place in the people’s anticolonial struggle that readers found in “The People Are a Mighty Fortress in East Africa” would be told in greater detail in The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves.

Grace’s efforts included meetings with black church and social groups to tell them about the soon-to-be-published booklet. She also met with Charles Wartman, the executive editor of the city’s influential black weekly the Michigan Chronicle, who agreed to help promote the book in his newspaper.89 She spread the word through another local weekly publication as well, which in December published a letter she wrote to one of its columnists. In it she stated, “Today in Kenya, nearly a thousand people are being killed every month” under the state of emergency imposed by the white settlers. She said that while many people think “these Africans are backward,” Koinange shows in the booklet “how advanced his people are” as they work to build the society they need and deserve. “I believe that you and many of your readers will want to read and spread this story of the progress that Africans have made and can make if allowed to speak for themselves,” she wrote. The article told readers that “contributions, requests for speaking engagements and advance orders (25¢ each) can be sent to Dr. Grace C. Lee, Executive Treasurer, Kenya Publication Fund, 14832 Parkside, Detroit, Michigan.”90 The next week this same publication ran an article titled “Works for Freedom for All Africans—Introducing Dr. Grace C. Lee Humanitarian” that reported, “Dr. Lee, since her return from England last spring, has made it one of her projects to raise funds for the publication of a book about Kenya in Africa. This book is to be called ‘The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves’ by Mbiyu Koinange, whose father and brothers are today in concentration camps in Africa.”91

The author of this article also thought it important to note that “in private life Dr. Lee is Mrs. James Boggs, the wife of a Chrysler employee, but in her writings and lecturing she continues to use her maiden name.” The reason, he explained, was that it was as “Dr. Grace C. Lee” that she wrote her Ph.D. dissertation and as such that she “has pursued her scholarly and professional activities for more than a decade.”92 In fact, Grace had rarely used “Dr.” in her name during the nearly fifteen years since earning the Ph.D. However, her strategic usage of the title in this case established a practice of using it on rare occasions in which it would lend legitimacy or garner attention, such as one decade later, when she would help to organize the all-black Freedom Now Party.

Grace’s organizing for the Kenya booklet also brought attention to her ethnicity, another facet of her identity that she usually downplayed. When she spoke about the booklet, she noticed “the tremendous interest which audiences showed” in the fact that she, a Chinese American living in Detroit, “was so concerned with Africa.” This curiosity made Grace uncomfortable. “I try to ignore it but the pressure put upon me to talk personally about myself was enormous,” she recalled.93 Over the next decade, as she immersed herself in black political networks and communities of Detroit, this curiosity would subside. She left no record of what precisely she said while she was still new to Detroit and felt compelled to explain how and why she came to be engaged in this activism, but it is clear that as she solidified her identity as an activist in the black movement, she no longer faced this curiosity about her presence or the expectation to explain it.

Though Grace appeared to some an unlikely agitator for African independence, her work around the booklet contributed an important strand of activity to the larger effort to support, defend, and raise awareness about the Kenyan anticolonial struggle. The efforts mounted by Grace and Correspondence coincided with the activity and writing of a network of black radicals—among them George Padmore, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson—concerning Kenya and the larger project of African liberation.94 As a primary task, they faced the need to counter the standard reporting on Kenya and the official Western interpretation of the struggle, which tended to reduce the anticolonial movement to a distorted picture of the Mau Mau. White and black liberals, including the black press, repeated the charge that the Mau Mau were terrorists and that the Kikuyu people were primitive, with much of this reporting and analysis coming through a Cold War, anticommunist frame.95 As we saw above, Grace’s statements in local publications and the Correspondence articles on Kenya refuted this picture and offered an alternative. Padmore similarly issued a corrective in his essay “Behind the Mau Mau,” published in the African American journal Phylon at the end of 1953. The influential Pan-Africanist activist and theorist (and longtime comrade of C. L. R.) implored readers to recognize the historical significance of the Kenyan struggle for its people and all across Africa, where “the indigenous races are struggling to throw off the yoke of colonialism and achieve their rightful place as free nations of a free world. This agitation for self-government is nowhere more dramatically manifested than in Kenya, where the violence of the struggle of the African peoples against alien domination has captured the attention of the entire world.”96 Padmore ended his essay by insisting that as the Kenyan struggle “goes on, all the races of Africa and Asia are watching and making their own conclusions,” which he offered as dramatic confirmation that Du Bois (who founded Phylon in 1940 to be a vehicle for politically engaged intellectual work) was correct in his famous declaration that the problem of the century would be the color line.97

Du Bois also directly engaged in African independence as a driving force in the Council on African Affairs (CAA), a major organization involved in anticolonial politics.98 With Paul Robeson (also a comrade of C. L. R. from the 1930s) as its chairperson, and Mary McLeod Bethune, Eslanda Robeson, W. Alphaeus Hunton, Max Yergan, and Charlotta Bass among its active members, the CAA undertook a range of activities in support of the Kenyan struggle, most of them centered in New York. In April 1954, while Grace was in London working with Koinange, the CAA held a conference in Harlem titled “A Working Conference in Support of African Liberation” and created the Kenya Aid Committee with the goal of raising $5,000 by August. The money would be used to deliver dried milk, vitamin pills, and first aid supplies, with Koinange serving as the contact person. The CAA also moved to form local aid committees, held monthly educational forums, and presented a series of summer street-corner rallies in New York during which activists distributed news from Kenya to pedestrians and motorists while speakers detailed the connections between colonialism and Jim Crow and the necessity of linking the two struggles.99

In Detroit, parallel efforts by Grace and Correspondence resulted in the publication of The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves. The 115-page booklet presented perhaps the fullest account available to an American audience of the unfolding Kenyan struggle told from the vantage point of the KAU, the nationalist movement, and Koinange’s direct knowledge of the people of Kenya. The booklet also reflected Correspondence’s core political belief in the revolutionary potential of the masses and their capacity for self-mobilization. This belief is signaled in the booklet’s title as well as in the first words the reader encounters, the acknowledgments, which report that the publication “was made possible by the help of thousands of Americans, white and colored, of all walks of life, who feel a kinship to the Kenya people in their strivings to build a new Africa and who believe that the Africans should be free to speak for themselves, go to school, work, trade, build their own organizations, and take their place in the modern world.”100 Throughout the booklet, readers could learn of the ways in which the Kenyan people arose in rebellion against the colonial order, mobilized to meet their needs, and brought forth leaders of their own, such as Njeri, the leader of the African Women’s League imprisoned by colonial authorities, to whom the booklet it dedicated.

Correspondence’s orientation toward the power of mass action is also present in “A Letter from American Clergymen,” the last document in the booklet’s appendix. Grace wrote the letter and sent to various religious leaders in Detroit seeking their signature as part of the effort to promote the booklet. The letter said of the booklet, “chapter after chapter is testimony to the tremendous creative powers that rest within people who are trying to develop themselves and which once released, would be of such great value to people everywhere.”101 Dated January 10, 1955, the letter announced the publication of The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves five days later and signaled the intention of all the undersigned to bring the booklet to the attention of their congregations during their service on the last weekend of the month. Moreover, these Detroit clergy members were urging others all over the country to do the same: “Will you join us in this demonstration of the brotherhood of man … and share in this welcome of the African people to their place in the modern world?”102

This invitation was to participate in what Grace and Jimmy called “Kenya Sundays.” Building upon their meetings with church groups over the preceding months, they now enlisted several preachers to select a designated service—a Kenya Sunday—on which they might talk to their congregations about the Kenyan struggle and encourage them to purchase the booklet. Among those participating were prominent Detroit black ministers such as Rev. A. A. Banks of Second Baptist Church, Rev. Robert L. Bradby of Greater King Solomon Baptist Church, Rev. Horace A. White of Plymouth Congregational Church, and Rev. Jos. Lawrence Roberts of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, all signatories of the letter, and Rev. C. L. Franklin of New Bethel Baptist Church, who did not sign but was an enthusiastic supporter and participant in the Kenya Sundays project. As Grace recalled, she and Jimmy sold more than 400 copies of the booklet to members of Franklin’s church during New Bethel’s Kenya Sunday.103

Organizing the Kenya Sundays project was the first political activity outside of working on Correspondence that Jimmy and Grace undertook as a married couple. As such it served as an early opportunity for them to begin working out the effective and mutually supportive political style that they developed in the coming years. Their work around The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves also proved to be an important model and experience upon which they would draw seven years later when planning and organizing around a pamphlet by Robert Williams detailing his battles with white supremacists in Monroe, North Carolina.104

Correspondence in Crisis

At the same time as the group successfully organized around The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves and Kenya Sundays, the group experienced a multilayered crisis that would ultimately result in a split in the organization. Government interference generated one dimension of the crisis. First, the U.S. Postal Service labeled the July 24, 1954, issue of Correspondence “nonmailable” based on a section of the Postal Manual “prohibiting the mailing of matter tending to incite murder and assassination.”105 Nothing in this issue, the first to be published after Grace’s return from London, advocated murder or assassination, and the Postal Service did not identify specific articles or passages. Then in December 1954 the U.S. attorney general placed the “Johnson-Forest Group” on its subversive list. While no such group existed, and Correspondence was not put on the list, it was clear that Correspondence was the intended target.106 Suddenly made acutely aware of their vulnerability, the group discussed what they should do in response to the possibility of being swept up in a still potent McCarthyism. A major fault line emerged when Dunayevskaya proposed that the organization go underground, which Jimmy, Lyman Paine, and other members firmly opposed.107

These differences compounded existing disagreements surrounding the viability of Correspondence. The problem of “subgetting” continued to plague the group, contributing to its difficulty in financing the paper, and their inability to consistently acquire new subscriptions from industrial workers in particular reflected the larger difficulty they had in attracting more workers to participate in the life of Correspondence. While various workers did read the paper, submit submissions for it, or talk to members such as Jimmy who wrote up their thoughts, these engagements with the paper were often uneven and generally fell short of what the group envisioned and believed necessary. Workers’ level of involvement in the paper posed a significant problem, as it threatened the very purpose of the paper and called into question its aspiration of being a “workers’ paper.” By the spring of 1954, this problem had become a frequent topic of discussion in the paper itself. For example, an installment of “Building Correspondence” written by Correspondence member William Page posed the question “Can we build a workers’ paper?” to which he answered, “Frankly, we do not know. We are making an effort. We are putting every ounce of energy that we have, every dollar that we can find, every waking moment into making Correspondence into the first newspaper that can be truly called a workers’ paper.” If they were successful, Correspondence would “become the true expression of the thought embodied in the minds of the mass workers,” but this could only happen if a wide range of workers joined in the work of putting out the paper, with each of them “freely expressing himself in the pages of Correspondence.”108

Jimmy had been successful in getting workers to subscribe and either write or relate something to him that he then wrote up, and he saw such efforts as an important aspect of the paper’s current stage. Now, in the pages of Correspondence he stressed that the next step was to get workers to participate in the weekly editing meetings. “Take the Polish worker I saw the other night,” he wrote. “He was ready to buy the sub when we got there. He made up his own mind—just found the paper on his porch, nobody sold him nothing. He read that copy, and when I got there, he just reached in his hip pocket.” The man told Jimmy the he liked the things he read in the paper, and Jimmy invited him to attend a meeting. The man declined, replying, “I think the paper is good. If it gets wrong, then I’ll write something.” This demonstrated the challenge before them: workers must want to assume the responsibility of being part of the group putting out the paper. He offered as the means to this end “a new form or association” that would be created “with the people that you know to let them know that what they have to say is so important that you feel they have to be there or the paper won’t continue to exist.”109

In October, Jimmy addressed these lingering challenges and made a stronger plea for readers’ participation in the life of the paper, this time in a front-pager titled “The Paper and a New Society.” Whereas previous discussions emphasized workers in particular, here Jimmy addressed readers and subscribers generally. By now the mounting conflict in the organization meant that not just Correspondence’s identity as a workers’ paper but its very survival was at stake. He first touted what they had achieved and hoped to preserve, boasting that in Correspondence “people who never thought that what they said meant anything are saying it. It’s being read by thousands of others. We who put out the paper have gained strength. Those we have met have gained strength. They found out that what they felt and thought mattered.” The paper only had about 1,000 subscribers, but Jimmy encouraged them to see themselves and their shared connection to the paper as remakers of society. “If what Correspondence has published could be put into action, it would be the basis of establishing a new society, a society based on what the majority feels.” He then made his appeal directly to the subscribers to become involved, take responsibility for growing the paper, and help it realize this potential. “The only way it can be done is if you, one of our thousand subscribers, yourself begin to take the steps of coming to meet us at our editing meetings and at our parties, sending Correspondence to your friends, shopmates and neighbors in your community, sending in your own dimes, quarters, and subscriptions and asking your friends to send in theirs.… You are in 1,000 neighborhoods and have thousands of friends and shopmates which we 75 will never be able to reach.”110

The “we 75” referred to the number of members of Correspondence—a number that would soon be halved. On top of the problems with the paper, the group was experiencing internal turmoil that raised questions about Dunayevskaya’s leadership. These involved the debate over whether the organization should go underground in the face of McCarthyist repression, the state and handling of the group’s finances, and philosophical divergences among the group. Another factor was the relationship between Dunayevskaya and C. L. R., who maintained a heavy involvement with the group from London. While they had shared leadership, albeit unevenly, throughout the life of the JFT and Correspondence, and she had held the title of “chairman” since his departure, C. L. R. had always been the group’s strongest figure, and he continued to see himself as such while in London. Early in 1955 open conflict erupted, pushing the existing organizational crisis to a breaking point. In March, Dunayevskaya, Zupan, Owens, and about half of the organization’s members left the group. They formed their own organization, the News and Letters Committee, and published a periodical, News and Letters. C. L. R. took this as an act of “shameful apostasy”; Dunayevskaya, on the other hand, said she had freed herself from “the rottenness” of Johnsonism built upon C. L. R.’s sense of himself as “the measure of all things.”111

The split forced the remaining members of the organization to regroup and to reevaluate the form and function of Correspondence, as well as its future. They ceased publication during April and May of 1955, and when the paper resumed in June it appeared in a drastically different format. For the next two years, Correspondence was in effect a journal of commentary and political theory rather than a newspaper. Carrying the designation “Discussion Bulletin” in the masthead, these issues appeared only every other month, were four or eight pages in length, and consisted of theoretical or historical pieces (most written by C. L. R.), examinations of factory life in various industries, and articles by or about European workers, radical organizations, and political developments. This interim phase in Correspondence’s publishing history lasted from the summer of 1955 through the summer of 1957.

Jimmy and Grace emerged during the interim period as the group’s new leadership. The membership elected Jimmy to be Dunayevskaya’s replacement as the organization’s chairperson, and Grace became the editor of Correspondence, which returned to its regular publication as a newspaper in October 1957. The return of the paper marked a new phase of the group’s organizational history, which they entered with optimism and a sense of renewal, having finally regrouped following the split with Dunayevskaya. They were also energized by significant world political events of the past year that they believed validated their vision of revolutionary transformation. The three words appearing on the masthead of the October 1957 issue of Correspondence captured the excitement the group felt about its ability to contribute to this world revolutionary moment: “The Future—Today.”112

Yet this moment of renewed political activity contained within it the makings of new organizational fissures. The group’s engagement with the world political situation in 1957, which they all believed was a moment of great revolutionary potential, revealed subtle political divergences between the Boggses and C. L. R. Seemingly small differences in emphasis and interpretation eventually grew into competing conceptions of the current political situation and, ultimately, of what should be the political direction of the group. This became apparent at the end of the 1950s as Jimmy and Grace began to push Correspondence beyond its origins as a workers’ paper, forging a shift away from workers’ struggles and toward a greater focus on the black struggle. This shift reflected ideological divisions in the organization and generated tensions that would result in a split between the Boggses and C. L. R. in 1961. These tensions and divisions developed through the organization’s response to three major political events in 1956 and 1957: the Hungarian Revolution, the independence of Ghana, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.