{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.027327935222672066, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0020242914979757085, 'mean_word_length': 5.634228187919463, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Forgotten Radicals: Black Left Feminists and American Communism

Scholars of the American Left are finally devoting overdue efforts to investigating black Left feminists as major historical agents in 20th century American history. The result is a virtual explosion of scholarship about these forgotten radicals. Indeed, recent historians have revealed that these remarkable women of color were important militant public intellectuals who worked out a bold, uncompromising global social justice program: black liberation, women’s rights, decolonization, economic justice, peace, and international working class solidarity. This program amounted to much more than idealistic rhetorical mantras or stirring perorations. It was, in fact, an inspiring guide for political activism utilized by Left intellectuals of both genders in various global regions, from the Caribbean to Africa, to Asia, to North America, and to Europe. The history of 20 century black Left feminists is also part of a usable past for present-day scholar-activists who employ some version of Paulo Freire’s ‘‘pedagogy of the oppressed’’ model in history, political science, journalism, and other similar academic disciplines. Furthermore, in the overall history of the American Left, reformers, radicals, and idealists who have struggled for a more just and caring society, from Frederick Douglass to Noam Chomsky, must now also include the names of African American feminists such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Esther Cooper Jackson, Claudia Jones, and Angela Davis among others. Likewise, in a recent book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, scholar-activist-journalist Melissa V. Harris-Perry reveals how black Left feminism informs contemporary understanding of race, gender and class among the black intelligentsia. Young historians of radicalism and the black freedom struggle in the United States are constructing a new social and political history that contextualizes the