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Article

Amado, Jorge  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Jorge Amado, who wrote more than thirty novels during his career, played a significant role in representing African culture in Brazilian literature. Among his subjects are the blacks of Salvador, in Amado's home state of Bahia, and the African religious rituals that sustain them. Although Amado's approach to Afro-Brazilian traditions is sympathetic and exceptionally detailed, his Bahian novels have met with much controversy. A younger generation of Brazilian and non-Brazilian critics have accused Amado of creating overly exotic portraits of black culture and creating simplistic, class-bound character types.

Amado the son of a plantation owner in Bahia attended a Jesuit college at age 12 However after just one year he rebelled against the strict lifestyle at the school and left to live with his grandfather During the 1930s Amado joined the Brazilian Communist Party and his writings from this period reflect his ideological commitment to communism These works such ...

Article

Aptheker, Herbert  

Charles Orson Cook

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

one of the most prolific white scholars of African American history in the twentieth century. Herbert Aptheker was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1915 and was educated at Columbia University in the 1930s, where he took an undergraduate degree in geology and an MA and a PhD in history. His first important publication, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), was based on his doctoral dissertation and challenged the prevailing wisdom that slaves were largely passive victims of white masters. In part an outgrowth of Aptheker's master's thesis on Nat Turner, American Negro Slave Revolts immediately became a controversial work and has remained so since. He was befriended by the influential African American historian Carter G. Woodson and the legendary black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, both of whom encouraged his interest in Negro history. Aptheker's other writings include a seven-volume Documentary History of the Negro People ...

Article

Bishop, Maurice Rupert  

Nicole L. Phillip-Dowe

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born on 29 May 1944 in Aruba to Alimenta (née La Grenade) and Rupert Bishop. The family returned to their native Grenada when Maurice was 7 years old. He attended the J. W. Fletcher Memorial primary school in St. George’s and won a scholarship to complete his secondary education at the Presentation Boys College. In 1963 he migrated to England where he studied law at Gray’s Inn, London. As a law student he was the cofounder of a legal aid clinic at Notting Hill. On completing his law degree in 1969 he took a job in the tax department of the British Civil Service. He returned to Grenada in 1970.

Racism and the economic disparity of rich and poor formed part of Bishop s experience in London The rise of black nationalism and black power made evident by the works of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana Julius Nyerere of ...

Article

Blackman, Peter  

David Killingray

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Pan‐AfricanMarxist and scholar. Blackman was born in Barbados and won a scholarship to the University of Durham, where he studied theology. He was ordained in the Anglican Church and went to the Gambia as a missionary priest, where he clashed with his bishop over differences of pay for white and black clergy. Having resigned from the Church, Blackman returned to Barbados, but then, in 1938, he settled in London. He joined the leftist Negro Welfare Association, of which he became chairman, and also the League Against Imperialism, being a major speaker on both their platforms. He also became a member of the Executive Committee of the more liberally inclined League of Coloured Peoples, and in 1938–9 editor of its then occasional journal The Keys, writing critically on colonial policy; he also gave evidence to the Royal Commission on the West Indies. In November 1938 ...

Article

Britton, Floyd  

Miriam Elizabeth Villanueva

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born on 21 April 1937 in Colón, Panama, the son of Colombian Leland Britton, a mariner, and Nicaraguan Nelly Morrison, a day laborer. Both of his parents were descendants of West Indian families who immigrated to Nicaragua and Colombia in the early twentieth century. Britton senior and Morrison met each other while working in Panama. Britton’s parents raised him and his brother Federico in the neighborhood of Río Bajo, known for its influx of black West Indian families. The neighborhood housed recently arrived or seasoned immigrants from the West Indies who traveled to construct the Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914. It fostered a community that embraced West Indian traditions and the English language. Britton championed and recognized his hybrid ethnicity as a West Indian and Panamanian.

Britton spent his youth in Colón and attended the local elementary school until he transferred to Colombia for three years Britton ...

Article

Bunting, Sidney Percival  

Allison Drew

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

South African solicitor and Communist, was born on 29 June 1873 in London. He was the second of four children of prominent Nonconformists Percy Bunting and Mary Hyett Lidgett Bunting and the great grandson of Dr. Jabez Bunting, the foremost figure of early nineteenth-century Wesleyan Methodism. Bunting’s father, a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, edited the prestigious Contemporary Review and was a leading figure in the Liberal Party; his mother was a social activist on behalf of working-class girls and women. The Buntings hosted frequent overseas visitors representing various social and political causes. Bunting internalized the ideals of moral rectitude and service to others imbued in him by his parents, and carried them with him throughout his life.

Intelligent and musically gifted, Bunting excelled in classics, winning scholarships to University College School and St. Paul’s School. In 1892 he entered Magdalen College Oxford as a classics demy scholarship student In ...

Article

Burnham, Louis Everett  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born in New York City on 29 September 1915, the son of Charles Breechford Burnham and Louise St. Clair Williams Burnham, Afro-Guyanese migrants to the United States. A cousin of Guyana prime minister Forbes Burnham, Louis Burnham stands as a marked contrast to the common stereotype that Guyanese socialists are mostly of East Indian descent, while Guyanese of African descent are more conservative in their politics.

Some sources presume that Burnham was born in Barbados, but census records show that while his Guyanese parents were both born there, his mother immigrated to the United States in 1909, and that his father did so no later than 1914, perhaps before 1910. Neither was a naturalized citizen in 1920, when the family lived at 253 West 139th Street in Harlem. He had an older brother, Charles St. Clair Burnham, born in New York in 1914 ...

Article

Colón, Jesús  

Alexandra Vega-Merino

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Jesús Colón was born in 1901 in Cayey, a rural town near San Juan, Puerto Rico. In a 1917 editorial, which expressed a view that remained consistent through much of his professional life, he wrote about the capacity of words to transform society. A few months later he arrived in New York, New York, where he spent the rest of his life. There, he held multiple menial jobs, such as waiting tables and washing dishes. In 1918 he became a founding member of the Puerto Rican Committee of the Socialist Party; in the following decades he became a relentless organizer of other political and cultural groups. One year after his 1922 graduation from Boys High Evening School, he started writing for Justicia, the newspaper of the Puerto Rican Free Federation of Workers. Regular columns in publications such as Gráfico and the Daily Worker followed.

Colón s essays ...

Article

Colón, Jesús  

Emilio Jorge Rodríguez

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2020

was born Fabián Jesús Colón López, but he would use various pseudonyms, such as Miquis Tiquis and Pericles Espada throughout his career. Born on 20 January 1901 in Cayey, Puerto Rico; his father, Mauricio, was a baker and his mother, Paula, was a domestic worker. During his childhood while working in a tobacco factory near his home, he enjoyed reading literary works and absorbed the intellectual stimulation that the public readers in the tobacco shop offered workers throughout the day. After his family moved to San Juan, he attended school at the Escuela José Julián Acosta, where he directed the student paper ¡¡¡Adelante…!!! (1917) and ran the Manuel Fernández Juncos literary society. During this chapter of his life he began to write poetry. In 1917 he traveled to New York on the S.S. Carolina and settled in the home of his older brother Joaquín in Brooklyn Colón ...

Article

Dadoo, Yusuf Mohamed  

Peter Limb

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

known popularly as “Mota” (Gujerati term of affectionate respect) or “Doc,” South African communist, liberation movement and Indian leader, and physician, was born in Krugersdorp in 1909 to Muslim Indian immigrants Mohamed and Amina, who in 1904 started a business in Krugersdorp. The son of a prosperous merchant, racial segregation soon affected Yusuf as he traveled daily to working-class Fordsburg to attend Indian-only schools.

After early schooling, he left for India, matriculating at Aligarh Muslim College, where Gandhi’s anticolonial movement left a deep impression. Refusing to enter the family business, in 1929 he moved to London to study medicine and got involved in anticolonial politics. His father insisted he move to Edinburgh to avoid politics, and in 1936 Dadoo graduated with Glasgow and Edinburgh medical degrees, but his political involvement with the Independent Labour Party and Indian National Congress intensified as he began to read Marxist literature.

In 1936 ...

Article

Davis, Angela  

Bettina Aptheker

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

A renowned public intellectual, Angela Y. Davis has been internationally recognized as a leader in movements for peace, social justice, national liberation, and women’s equality. A scholar and prolific writer, Davis has published five books and scores of essays, commentaries, and reviews. Since the 1970s she has persevered in struggles to free political prisoners and to dismantle what she was the first to call the prison-industrial complex.

Angela Yvonne Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama. She was the oldest of four children. Her mother, Sally E. Davis, was a public-school teacher, and her father, B. Frank Davis although qualified to teach managed a service station in order to enhance the family s income Davis s parents were deeply involved in their church and community and committed to the struggle for civil rights When Davis was four years old her family moved out of the all black projects ...

Article

Davis, Angela  

Brittney L. Yancy

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

activist, philosopher, Marxist, and professor. Angela Davis was born 26 January 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama, in an area that was so frequently bombed by the Ku Klux Klan it was known as Dynamite Hill. Born to B. Frank Davis, a teacher and businessman, and Sally Davis, who was also a teacher, Angela Davis's political activism started in her early childhood, and by high school, she volunteered for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At the age of fifteen, Davis received a scholarship to finish school at the Elizabeth Irwin School in New York City. Davis's teacher introduced her to socialist ideas that would inform her political participation in the civil rights and Black Power movements. When Davis finished high school in 1961, she moved to Massachusetts to attend Brandeis University, where she graduated in 1965 with degrees in philosophy and French ...

Article

Davis, Angela Y.  

Chike Jeffers

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
27 April 2010
Published online:
30 September 2012

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis (1944), a public intellectual, activist, and iconic figure in the struggle for black liberation, attended high school in New York City and then went to Brandeis University. Here she encountered Herbert Marcuse, the celebrated critical theorist, with whom she began to study philosophy. Upon receiving her BA, she traveled to Germany to study in Frankfurt. Theodor Adorno was going to direct her dissertation research but, by 1967 Davis decided to return to the United States and work with Marcuse at the University of California San Diego The decision was made because of the intense political situation in the United States which Davis felt she could not watch from afar She got involved in an organization that became the Los Angeles chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC After it folded the Marxist inclination she had developed since high school led her ...

Article

Davis, Angela Yvonne  

Lawrie Balfour

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Angela Yvonne Davis was, in several ways, born into the heart of the struggle for civil rights. Her family lived in the middle-class section of Birmingham, Alabama, that came to be known as Dynamite Hill because so many Ku Klux Klan bombings occurred there. Davis attended segregated schools, where children were taught black history but at the same time were denied adequate school supplies and facilities. Her mother and grandmother encouraged Davis to fight for civil rights while she was still in elementary school. As a high school student, Davis helped organize interracial study groups that were broken up by the police.

When she was fifteen, Davis left Birmingham to attend the Elizabeth Irwin School in New York City. Teachers at the politically progressive school introduced Davis to Socialism, from which she gained ideas that informed her later activism. From 1961 to 1965 Davis attended Brandeis University ...

Article

Davis, Angela Yvonne  

Stacy Braukman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

radical activist, scholar, and prison abolitionist, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to Frank and Sally Davis. Her father, a former teacher, owned a service station, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Both had ties to the NAACP and friends in numerous radical groups, including the Communist Party. When Angela was four years old, her family moved from a housing project to a white neighborhood across town. The experience of being the only African Americans surrounded by hostile whites taught Davis at a young age the ravages of racism. Indeed, during the mid- to late 1940s, as more black families began moving into the area, white residents responded with violence, and the neighborhood took on the unenviable nickname “Dynamite Hill.” Davis's racial consciousness was further sharpened by attending the city's vastly inferior segregated public schools.As a junior at Birmingham s Parker High School at the age ...

Article

Dussac, Paul  

Solofo Randrianja

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2014

anticolonialist militant; general secretary of the French Section of the Madagascar Region Communist Party; political director; editor in chief of the journals L’Opinion, Le Réveil Malgache, L’Aurore malgache, L’Opinion de la nation Malgache, Le Prolétariat Malgache; and judicial counselor for the Departmental Union of the General Confederation of Labor was born 15 October 1876 in Simferopol, Russia. Dussac came from a colonial bourgeois family, despite the fact that his father was a communard. On his father's side his grandmother was descended from the Count of Villèle, minister to King Charles X. His maternal grandfather had been an engineer in the silver mines of the Ural Mountains and his maternal grandmother was a wealthy heiress from Coulommiers in north-central France. Dussac's father, however, was a fervent supporter of the French Republic and no doubt introduced him to the ideas of the Paris Commune of 1871 ...

Article

Ford, James W.  

Robert Fay

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

James W. Ford was born in Pratt City, Alabama, on December 22, 1893. In 1913 he entered Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and graduated in 1920 after serving in the army during World War I (1914–1918). Ford then moved to Chicago, where he became a postal worker and joined the Chicago Postal Workers Union and the American Negro Labor Congress, both affiliates of the Communist Party USA.

Ford joined the Communist Party in 1926 and rose rapidly through its ranks. In 1928 he was a delegate to the party's executive committee meeting in Moscow. In 1931 he became vice president of the party's League of Struggle for Negro Rights. He was the first African American on a presidential ticket, running for vice president with William Z. Foster in 1932. They received 102,991 votes.

In 1933 Ford was selected to head the party s ...

Article

Ford, James William  

Sandra Opdycke

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

labor leader and Communist Party official, was born James William Foursche in Pratt City, Alabama, the son of Lyman Foursche, a steelworker, and Nancy Reynolds, a domestic. Not long after his birth the family began to use a new surname when a white policeman questioning his father insisted that “Foursche” was too difficult to spell and changed the name to Ford. The most traumatic experience of Ford's boyhood was the lynching of his grandfather, a Georgia railroad worker. Ford started work at thirteen, joining his father at the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, where he worked as a water boy, mechanic's helper, and then steam-hammer operator. Nevertheless, he managed to complete high school.

Entering Fisk University at the age of twenty, Ford excelled in his studies and in athletics, but when America entered World War I in 1917 he withdrew from college to serve in ...

Article

Fort-Whiteman, Lovett  

Glenn Allen Knoblock

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

a leading black Communist leader in the 1920s, was born in Texas. He attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and also claimed to have been kicked out of the City College of New York for radicalism. In the late teens he was active in organized left-wing politics, including the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Harlem Socialist Party (SP). While the IWW fought for the rights of all workers, including racial and national minorities, the SP was color-blind and refused to champion the rights of blacks specifically, and instead argued that blacks were subject to class, but not-race, oppression. A core of Harlem Socialists, however—including Richard Benjamin Moore, Otto Huiswoud, Cyril Valentine Briggs, A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, and Grace Campbell were active in the New Negro movement of black radicalism and attempted to combine the struggles for socialism and black freedom ...

Article

Gray, Ralph  

Steven J. Niven

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

sharecropper and communist martyr, was born in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, a white majority county in the state's eastern piedmont. One of fifteen children, Gray was born into a family with a strong radical tradition. His father, whose name and occupation are unknown, was the son of Alfred Gray, an African American state legislator in Perry County, Alabama, during Reconstruction who famously vowed to fight for the Constitution “until hell freezes over.” A critic of both white racism and the inadequacy of the Freedmen's Bureau, Alfred Gray recognized that his outspoken militancy came at a price. “I may go to hell,” he told an interracial gathering in Uniontown in 1868 my home is hell but the white man shall go there with me Kelley 39 Ralph Gray who was only one year old when Reconstruction ended in Alabama grew up hearing stories of his grandfather s radicalism But ...