{"id":172,"date":"2019-07-22T12:07:58","date_gmt":"2019-07-22T11:07:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/?p=172"},"modified":"2020-06-16T19:30:28","modified_gmt":"2020-06-16T18:30:28","slug":"holding-up-three-quarters-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/whit\/2019\/07\/22\/holding-up-three-quarters-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Holding Up Three Quarters of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Dr. Sarah C. Dunstan<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking in 2005<\/a>, the celebrated African American civil rights activist and politician, Horace Julian Bond, reflected \u201cThere\u2019s a Chinese saying, \u2019Women hold up half the world. In the case of the civil rights movement it\u2019s probably three-quarters of the world.\u201d With the exception of icons such as Rosa Parks, most of the women involved in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States are not well known today. Fewer still are recognised for their efforts to link their struggles for racial equality in the United States to internationalist projects, although this is beginning to change through the work of historians such as Keisha Blain<\/a>, Imaobong Umoren<\/a> and Jennifer Scanlon<\/a>. In today\u2019s blog post, I am going to briefly sketch out the internationalist thought and activism of five African diasporic women linked by their involvement in the United Nations and their commitment to racial and gender equality on the world stage: the African American lawyer and diplomat, Edith Sampson; the Martinican activist and journalist, Paulette Nardal, the African American educator and founder of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), Mary McLeod Bethune; Bethune’s colleague and fellow activist at the NCNW, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and the African-American lawyer and activist, Pauli Murray. In so doing, I will also gesture towards the way that their contributions were belittled and elided in their own times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Edith Sampson became the first\nblack woman appointed to the permanent U.S.\ndelegation to the United Nations, the sociologist and activist St Clair Drake dismissed her appointment as an act of propaganda\non the part of the U.S. State Department, an effort \u201cto offset communism\u201d by\npainting the nation as racially progressive. It was not, he felt certain, a\nreflection of Sampson\u2019s expertise.[i]<\/a> Sampson and other African Americans\nwho believed in the potential of American democracy were commonly labelled \u2018the\nleft wing of McCarthyism,\u2019 and thinkers such as St Clair Drake and W.E.B. Du\nBois refused to take their political work and thought seriously. Whilst\nhistorians have made strides towards recovering the political trajectories of\nless radical male activists, the work and careers of women such as Sampson seem\nto have been doubly tarnished by their relative conservatism. One such example\nof this can be found in the work of historian Gerald Horne, who writes that Sampson was used to \u201ccover\nup racism and barbarism at home,\u201d and describes her as both a \u201chired gun,\u201d and\na \u201cstooge.\u201d[ii]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 6 April 1949. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Regardless of the propagandist intent behind Sampson\u2019s UN appointment or\nher more conservative political inclinations, the work she did at the United\nNations and her conception of the international order still needs to be taken seriously. Moreover, Sampson was hardly an apologist for American racism\nnor an inexperienced candidate. Although she had certainly had a scant presence\nin the male-dominated civil rights organizations of her local Chicago, her\nexperience fighting for civil rights and racial justice were far from\ninconsequential. Born to a launderer in Pittsburgh, she had become a social worker\nbefore retraining as a lawyer in her twenties. After graduating, she\nestablished a successful private practice and by 1934 had been admitted to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court. That same year,\nSampson had been one of the founding members of National Council of Negro Women\n(NCNW). An organization dedicated to \u201cthe complete integration of Negro women\ninto the American commonwealth, with all normal rights and privileges,\u201d the\nNCNW was active on both a domestic and international scale. [iii]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From\nits inception, the NCNW\u2019s founders and leaders \u2013 women such as Sampson and Mary\nMcLeod Bethune \u2013 had grounded the organisation\u2019s domestic political goals in terms\nof the international struggle against racism. To this end, the group had sought\nrelationships with women of colour worldwide and, particularly, put great\neffort into crafting links with women\u2019s groups in India. As one of the organization\u2019s members, a\njournalist called Toki Schalk, put it in the Pittsburgh Courier<\/em>, \u201cthe world has closed in around us and we are\nonly just so many hours away from every section of the globe. We may as well\nrecognise that what effects Timbuctoo [sic], affects us and vice versa.\u201d[iv]<\/a> For Sampson, this went\nbeyond acknowledging cause and effect to understanding racism in the United\nStates as a local iteration of a global problem. She came to her position at\nthe UN determined to combine her work for equality with an intellectual\ncommitment to the international project of the institution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attempts to undermine Edith Sampson\u2019s\ncontributions to the international arena were characteristic of a broader\ncontemporary pattern of undermining African diasporic women involved with the\nUnited Nations. One example can be found in press reactions to 1946 appointment\nof the Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal as a specialist on the French\nWest Indies Division for Non-Self-Governing territories. The Chicago Defender<\/em>, one of the largest and\nmost influential African American newspapers,ran with the headline \u201cMartinique Girl Given High\nPost With UN Body.\u201d[v]<\/a> Dismissing\nNardal as \u201ca Martinique Girl\u201d was ignorant at best and undeniably patronising. At\nfifty years of age, Nardal had already had a distinguished international career\nin journalism and political organisation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Paulette Nardal. Unknown photographer. (Nombreux sites Internet et ouvrages divers) Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

One of the first black women to be admitted to the Sorbonne,\nNardal had been one of the co-founders of the important interwar publication Revue du Monde Noir<\/em> where she had\npublished on questions of race and imperialism.[vi]<\/a>\nIn the late 1920s and early 1930s she had also been the secretary to the Martinican Deputy to the French National\nAssembly Joseph Lagrosili\u00e8re and a key player in activist organising against\nfascism in France and world-wide through her work with groups such as the Comit\u00e9\nMondial contre la Guerre et le Fascisme <\/em>and the Union des travailleurs n\u00e8gres.<\/strong><\/em>[vii]<\/a> When she had returned from Paris to\nMartinique during the Second World War, she launched a journal, La femme dans la cit\u00e9<\/em>, designed to\neducate Martinique women in their new role as voting citizens. Far from \u2018a\ngirl,\u2019 she was an accomplished intellectual and activist who knew all too well\nthe pressures of nation, race and sex in proscribing the limits of female\nbehaviour and rights. Nonetheless, she was committed to the potential of\ninternational organisation and, particularly of the United Nations to be an\ninstrument for \u201cthe liberation of all Mankind.\u201d[viii]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Women of the African diaspora like\nPaulette Nardal and Edith Sampson were a rare sight at United Nations\nconferences in the organization\u2019s early years. In 1945, for example, Mary\nMcLeod Bethune was the sole African American woman \u2013 and one of only three\nAfrican Americans \u2013 to act as a consultant to the US State Department at the U.N.Conference on\nInternational Organizations which established the United Nations Charter.\nBethune had found it difficult to achieve even this position, only gaining\naccess via her work with the National Association for the Advancement of\nColoured People at the last minute. Nevertheless, she took full advantage of\nthe role, bringing fourteen African American women along with her as observers.\nAs far as she was concerned \u201cNegro women, like all other women must take part\nin building this world, and must therefore keep informed of all world-shaping\nevents.\u201d [ix]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One\nof Bethune\u2019s friends, and the Executive Director of the NCNW, Anna Arnold\nHedgeman, took this sentiment to heart. By the mid-1940s, Hedgeman had already\nhad a great deal of experience in political activism and community organizing\non a national level and she was committed to the spirit of internationalism\nembodied in the organization of the United Nations. When the apartheid regime\nin South Africa was passed into law in 1948, however, she began to connect her\nefforts against segregation and racism in the United States to the struggles\nagainst racism occurring internationally.[x]<\/a> Hedgeman became\nparticularly vocal about her understanding of these links in the 1950s and\n1960s as countries in Africa gained their independence from empire. In a 1959\narticle for the black weekly, the New\nYork Age, <\/em>she mapped out her understanding of the relationship between\nblack Americans and Africa: \u201cWe are America\u2019s major link with that ancient\ncivilization, and we also have the opportunity to serve Africa as she develops\ncontinuing relationships with the West.\u201d[xi]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Image Ownership: Public Domain , via Black Past<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For\nHedgeman, this link was primarily constituted by a shared political stance of\nanti-racism rather than a shared racial identity. This was particularly\napparent in her keynote talk for the First Conference of the Women of Africa\nand of African descent held in the newly-independent Ghana in 1960. She was\nreluctant to affirm her solidarity with the women there on the basis of race\nbut it seemed to her that there was great potential in an international\nmovement grounded in a shared gender identity and shared experiences of\ndiscrimination on that basis. To an audience of over one hundred conference\ndelegates, and over one thousand public attendees, she declared \u201cIt occurs to\nme that women have always been in public life, but the men have not always\nknown it.\u201d[xii]<\/a>\nHedgeman meant this both in terms of women\u2019s contributions to international\nthought and national politics and in relation to more traditional women\u2019s\nroles. She asked, \u201cWhat is more important in the world than a housewife?\u201d After\nall, such a woman \u201ccarries the major responsibility for what happens to the\nrest of us.\u201d[xiii]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many ways, this integrated\nunderstanding of the relationship between domestic and international spheres\nwas reminiscent of the thinking Sampson had espoused a decade earlier, whilst\nan alternate US delegate to the United Nations. Outlining her strategy for\npeace in 1950, she wrote: \u201cWorld security begins at home, where children who\nare born without racial or religious prejudice either learn it from parents and\nneighbors or are taught, according to the words of the United Nations’ Charter,\n‘to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good\nneighbors.’\u201d[xiv]<\/a>\nFor both women, concerns around international security and access to rights had\nto connect the micro-concerns of family and community to the macro-concerns of\nglobal order. Their male colleagues, they felt, were too quick to overlook\nthese so-called \u201cwomanly arenas\u201d in favour of discussions revolving around\nweaponry and military defence. Nardal, too, had published similar opinions in\nthe 1940s, contending that women had an\nimportant role to play in ensuring world peace because it was the \u201cfeminine\nvocation\u201d to exercise \u201ca calming influence\u201d upon the warlike tendencies of men.[xv]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither Nardal, Sampson nor Hedgeman\ntook this analysis quite so far as Pauli Murray who, in her own speech at the\n1960 Ghanaian conference, argued that women of all races and nations shared\ncommon ground with Africans because they had all known a history of\nenslavement. \u201cFrom these beginnings,\u201d she declared, they could move together \u201ctowards\nequality.\u201d[xvi]<\/a>\nMurray dedicated her life to achieving this vision of an internationalist\nmovement united by shared experiences of discrimination on the basis of gender\nand race. When she returned to the United States in 1962 to play an active role\nin the Civil Rights movement she loudly criticised the African American male\nleadership for not acknowledging women\u2019s contributions. In one particularly scathing\nletter to A. Philip Randolph, a leading organizer of the 1963 March on\nWashington, she lambasted him for failing to include \u201ca single woman leader.\u201d[xvii]<\/a> This kind of exclusion\nwas typical of the period despite the large number of black women at the\nforefront of the struggle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the aftermath of World War Two, women like Edith Sampson, Paulette Nardal, Mary McLeod Bethune, Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Pauli Murray sought to make sense of their struggles for against racism within an international framework. In different ways, all five women believed that their identities as women, and women of colour gave their understanding of the world a unique depth crucial to the world-wide fight for equality. Although their expertise and efforts to put their ideas into practice through institutions such as the United Nations were often undermined by their contemporaries, it is imperative that we take their thought and contributions seriously. It is only then that we will gain a fuller picture of the ways that gender and race operated to shape international thinking in this period.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[i]<\/a> St Clair Drake, \u2018The\nInternational Implications of Race and Race Relations,\u2019\u202fJournal of Negro\nEducation<\/em>\u202f20, 3 (1951): 267.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ii]<\/a> Gerald Horne, Who\nLost the Cold War? Africans and African Americans, <\/em>20 Diplomatic History<\/em> (1996):\n613; 623. For commentary on the way \u2018mainstream\u2019 African Americans were\ncharacterised see: Manning Marable. Race, Reform, and Rebellion<\/em>, 33; Helen Laville<\/a> Scott Lucas<\/a><\/em>,\n\u2018The American Way: Edith Sampson, the NAACP,\nand African American Identity in the Cold War,\u2019 Diplomatic History<\/em>,\n20: 4, (1 October 1996): 565\u2013590.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[iii]<\/a> Edith Sampson, Council History 1, <\/em>Edith Sampson Papers, Box 9,\nFolder 188.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[iv]<\/a> \u201cToki Types,\u201d Pittsburgh Courier<\/em>, April 21, 1945, 10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[v]<\/a> Chicago\nDefender<\/em>, December 21, 1946.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[vi]<\/a> See for example Paulette Nardal,\n\u2018L\u2019Eveil de la conscience de race chez les \u00e9tudiants noirs,\u2019 La Revue du\nmonde noir<\/em>, 6 (April 1932): 26.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[vii]<\/a> A pacifist\norganisation with international reach, the Comit\u00e9 was dedicated to protesting\nthe Italian invasion of Ethiopia from 1935 through 1939.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[viii]<\/a> Paulette\nNardal, \u2018United Nations\/Nations Unies,\u2019 La\nFemme dans la cit\u00e9<\/em>, 26, (January 1947), 4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ix]<\/a> \u201cMrs Bethune Added to Frisco\nAdvisors,\u201d Chicago Defender, <\/em>April\n28, 1945, Mary McLeod Bethune Vertical File, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center,\nHoward University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[x]<\/a> Anna Arnold Hedgeman, \u201cOne Woman\u2019s\nOpinion,\u201d New York Age, <\/em>April 25,1959.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[xi]<\/a> Anna Arnold Hedgeman, \u201cOne Woman\u2019s\nOpinion,\u201d New York Age, <\/em>April 25,1959.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[xii]<\/a> Anna Arnold\nHedgeman, \u201cWomen in Public Life: Keynote Address in Ghana,\u201d July 18, 1960, Box\n127, as cited in Jennifer Scanlon, Until\nThere is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman<\/em>, (Oxford, 2016), 131.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[xiii]<\/a> Anna Arnold Hedgeman, \u201cWomen in\nPublic Life: Keynote Address in Ghana,\u201d July 18, 1960.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[xiv]<\/a> Edith Sampson, World\nSecurity Begins at Home <\/em>5 (Oct\n19, 1950) Edith Sampson Papers,\nBox 5, Folder 109, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe\nInstitute, Harvard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[xv]<\/a> Paulette\nNardal, \u2018From An Electoral Point of View\/Optique \u00e9lectorale,\u2019 La Femme dans la cite<\/em>, 5 (March 1 1945),\n3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[xvi]<\/a> Pauli Murray,\n\u201cSpeech, Conference of Women of Africa and of African Descent,\u2019\u201d July 18, 1960,\nBox 40, as cited in Jennifer Scanlon, Until\nThere is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman<\/em>, (Oxford, 2016), 132.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[xvii]<\/a> Pauli Murray, \u2018Letter to A. Philip\nRandolph, 1963\u2019 as cited in Johnetta Betsch Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women\u2019s\nEquality in African-American Communities <\/em>(New York: Ballantine Books,\n2009), 89.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Dr. Sarah C. Dunstan Speaking in 2005, the celebrated African American civil rights activist and politician, Horace Julian Bond, reflected \u201cThere\u2019s a Chinese saying, \u2019Women hold up half the world. In the case of the civil rights movement it\u2019s…<\/span><\/p>\n

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