Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing

By Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean

Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete materialist analysis of the conditions of Black workers, these women argued that racial and economic equality can only be achieved by overthrowing capitalism.

The first collection of its kind, Organize, Fight, Win brings together three decades of Black Communist women's political writings. In doing so, it highlights the link between Communism and Black liberation. Likewise, it makes clear how Black women fundamentally shaped, and were shaped by, Communist praxis in the twentieth century.

Organize, Fight, Win includes writings from card-carrying Communists like Dorothy Burnham, Williana Burroughs, Grace P. Campbell, Alice Childress, Marvel Cooke, Esther Cooper Jackson, Thelma Dale Perkins, Vicki Garvin, Yvonne Gregory, Claudia Jones, Maude White Katz, and Louise Thompson Patterson, and writings by those who organized alongside the Communist Party, like Ella Baker, Charlotta Bass, Thyra Edwards, Lorraine Hansberry, and Dorothy Hunton.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839764998

Charisse Burden-Stelly

Charisse Burden-Stelly is the 2020-2022 visiting scholar in the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago. She is currently assistant professor of Africana studies and political science at Carleton College. A scholar of critical Black studies, political theory, political economy, and intellectual history, she is coauthor, with Gerald Horne, of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Life in American History.