Imagining Revolutionary Feminism: Communist Asia and the Women of the Black Panther Party

Abstract

Using newspapers, autobiographies, and interviews, this article examines the ways in which women of the Black Panther Party imagined the women of Vietnam, China, and North Korea as radical archetypes during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Using Judy Wu’s theory of “radical orientalism” in conversation with Ashley Farmer’s concept of the “gendered imaginary,” I argue that the Panther women imagined the women of “the East” as pioneers in world revolution and women’s liberation in order to protest against gendered injustices within the Party and broader U.S. society. This article also investigates the realities on the ground for the women of Communist Asia and the ways in which the patriarchy preserved itself despite the social revolutions of these three Marxist–Leninist governments.

Keywords:

• Asia
• Black Panther Party
• Black internationalism
• China
• feminism
• North Korea
• Vietnam

Notes

1 Sean Malloy, Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).

2 Robyn Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 89.

3 Tracye Matthews, “‘No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Role in the Revolution Is’: Gender and the Politics of The Black Panther Party, 1966-1971,” in The Black Panther Party (reconsidered), edited by Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 167–304; Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest, “”The Most Qualified Person to Handle the Job”: Black Panther Party Women, 1966–1982,” in The Black Panther Party (reconsidered), 305–34.

4 Samuel Josephs, "Whose Revolution Is This? Gender's Divisive Role in the Black Panther Party," Georgetown Journal of Gender & the Law 9, no. 2 (2008): 403–26; Robyn Spencer, "Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California," Journal of Women's History 20, no. 1 (2008): 90–113; Spencer, The Revolution Has Come; Mary Phillips, Robyn C. Spencer, Angela D. Le-Blanc Ernest and Tracye A. Matthews, “Ode to our Feminist Foremothers: The Intersectional Black Panther Party History Project on Collaborative Praxis and 50 Years of Panther History,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 19, no. 3 (July–September 2017): 241–60; Linda Lumsden. "Good Mothers With Guns: Framing Black Womanhood In The Black Panther, 1968-1980," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 86, no. 4 (2009): 900–22; Mary Phillips, “The Feminist Leadership of Ericka Huggins in the Black Panther Party,” Black Diaspora Review 4, no. 1 (2014): 187–218.

5 Karen Lewis, “Wife, Mother and Revolutionary,” The Washington Post, January 5, 1970.

6 For more on the black radical imagination, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

7 Keisha Blain, Set the World on Fire Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Robeson Taj Frazier, The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Fred Ho and Bill Mullen, Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 1, no. 4 (1999): 6–41; Vijay Prashad, Vijay, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Judy Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).

8 Benjamin R. Young, “Juche in the USA: The Black Panther Party’s Relations with North Korea, 1969-1971,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 13, Issue 12, no. 2 (March 2015), https://apjjf.org/2015/13/12/Benjamin-Young/4303.html (accessed February 9, 2019); Young “‘Our Common Struggle against Our Common Enemy’: North Korea and the American Radical Left,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars- North Korea International Documentation Project (NKIDP) e-Dossier no. 14, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/north-korea-and-the-american-radical-left (accessed February 9, 2019).

9 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

10 Wu, Radicals on the Road, 4.

11 Interview of Elaine Brown, The Black Panther 5, no. 14 (October 3, 1970).

12 Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 4.

13 “The Role of the Black Revolutionary Woman,” The Black Panther, May 4, 1969.

14 Blain, Set the World on Fire; Brandon Byrd, “To Start Something to Help These People: African American Women and the Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934,” Journal of Haitian Studies, 21, no. 2 (2015): 127–53; Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); McDuffie, “‘For the Full Freedom of…Colored Women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States…’: Black Women Radicals and the Practice of a Black Women’s International,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender and the Black International 1 (2012): 1–30.

15 Ernest Allen, Jr. “‘Waiting for Tojo’: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932-1943,” Gateway Heritage 16 (1995): 38–55; Gerald Horne, “Tokyo Bound: African Americans and Japan Confront White Supremacy,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 3, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 16–28; Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013; Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

16 Keisha N. Blain, “‘[F]or the Rights of Dark People in Every Part of the World’: Pearl Sherrod, Black Internationalist Feminism, and Afro-Asian Politics during the 1930s,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 17, no. 1–2 (2015), 90–112; Shailaja Paik, “Building Bridges: Articulating Dalit and African American Women’s Solidarity,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 42, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2014): 74–96.

17 Huey P. Newton, “Letter to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam,” August 29, 1970 in Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1972), 90–93.

18 Bay Area Revolutionary Union, Red Papers 3: Women Fight for Liberation: Black Panther Sisters talk about Women’s Liberation, Reprinted from THE MOVEMENT newspaper, September 1969, https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/red-papers/red-papers-3/doc8.htm.

19 Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Women’s Story (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 136–37.

20 “Hanoi Hannah,” The Black Panther, February 17, 1969

21 Brown, A Taste of Power, 231.

22 Ibid., 214

23 Kathleen Cleaver, “Memories of Love and War,” (Unpublished Memoir, 2011), 571. I am grateful to Kathleen for sharing her memoir with me.

24 Wu, Radicals on the Road, 154.

25 Ibid., 5.

26 Sandra C. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).

27 Karen Gottschang Turner, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (New York: Wiley, 1998).

28 Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War.

29 Brown, A Taste of Power, 137.

30 Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 97.

31 Safiya Bukhari-Alston, “On the Question of Sexism in the Black Panther Party,” Black Panther Community News Service, Fall/Winter 1993, 3. http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/BPP_Women/513.BPP.women.panther.sisters.womens.liberation.1969.pdf (accessed May 20, 2019).

32 Brown, A Taste of Power, 231.

33 Ibid., 296.

34 Kathleen Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969-19720,” in The Black Panther Party (reconsidered), 244.

35 Ross Terrill, Madame Mao: The White-Boned Demon (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 184–185.

36 Quote found in Kelley and Esch, "Black Like Mao,” 25.

37 Bukhari-Alston, “On the Question of Sexism in the Black Panther Party,” 14.

38 Wenqi Yang, “The Annihilation of Femininity in Mao’s China: Gender Inequality of Sent-down Youth during the Cultural Revolution,” China Information 31, no. 1 (2017), 63–83.

39 Weiwei Cao, “Restricted to Half the Sky: Unwanted Girls, Battered Wives and Inglorious Women,” Feminist Legal Studies 25, no. 3 (Nov 2017), 365–73.

40 From "On Some Problems of Our Party's Juche Idea and the Government of the Republic's Internal and External Policies," September 17, 1972, in Kim Il Sung, On Juche in our Revolution (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages publishing House, 1975), 429.

41 "We Must Rely on Ourselves," The Black Panther 4, no. 13 (February 28, 1970).

42 “Defines: Juche (Joo-che),” The Black Panther 4, no. 9 (January 31, 1970).

43 Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987), 220–221.

44 Shakur, Assata, 220.

45 Cleaver, “Memories of Love and War,” 572.

46 Tania Branigan, “How Black Panthers turned to North Korea in fight against US imperialism,” The Guardian (June 19, 2014), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/black-panthers-north-korea-us-imperialism (accessed February 8, 2019).

47 Interview of Elaine Brown, The Black Panther 5, no. 14 (October 3, 1970).

48 Branigan, “How Black Panthers turned to North Korea in fight against US imperialism,” The Guardian (June 19, 2014).

49 Robert Collins, Marked for Life: Songbun North Korea’s Social Classification System (Washington, DC: the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2012), https://www.hrnk.org/uploads/pdfs/HRNK_Songbun_Web.pdf (accessed March 21, 2019).

50 Cleaver, “Memories of Love and War,” 555.

51 Kyung Ae Park, "Women and Revolution in North Korea," Pacific Affairs 65, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 533.

52 "Statement from the US Peoples' Anti-Imperialist Delegation to Korea," 1970, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library, BANC MSS 91/213 c, The Eldridge Cleaver Papers, 1963-1988, Carton 5, Folder 4. Obtained for NKIDP by Charles Kraus. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114495

53 Elaine Brown, “Elaine Brown and Andrew Truskier, Members of the Anti-Imperialist Delegation Speak Before a War Crimes Tribunal at the University of California,” The Black Panther (December 14, 1970).

54 Cleaver, “Memories of Love and War,” 562.

55 Fyodor Tertitskiy, "Cults of the Forgotten Wives: Kim Song Ae and Ko Yong Hui," NK News, March 2, 2018, https://www.nknews.org/2018/03/cults-of-the-forgotten-wives-kim-song-ae-and-ko-yong-hui/?c=1526010949516&utm_content=buffer7706c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer (accessed March 20, 2019).

56 Kim Song-ae, Let Us Women Become Revolutionary Fighters Infinitely Loyal to the Party and Reliable Builders of Socialism and Communism by Revolutionizing and Working-Classizing Ourselves (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1969).

57 Cleaver, “Memories of Love and War,” 565–66.

58 “N. Korea: Birthday Party for Maceo Cleaver given by Madame Kim Il Sung, 1970,” Eldridge Cleaver photograph collection, Bancroft Library, BANC PIC 1991.078—NEG box 2, roll 98, frames 25-30 cited in E. Rafael Perez, "Viewing History through Photographic Negatives: One Chapter in the Travels of the Black Panther Party International Section," Berkeley Library Update, January 29, 2019, https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/2019/01/29/viewing-history-through-photographic-negatives-one-chapter-in-the-travels-of-the-black-panther-party-international-section/ (accessed March 20, 2019).

59 Cleaver, “Memories of Love and War,” 566.

60 Ibid., 568.

61 Ibid., 572.

62 Sonia Ryang, “Gender in Oblivion: Women in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea),” Journal of Asian and African Studies 35, no. 3 (2000): 323–49.

63 Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung, North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 60–63.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benjamin R. Young

Benjamin R. Young, PhD, is an assistant professor in Cyber Leadership and Intelligence at Dakota State University. His research interests include North Korean foreign relations, Marxism in the Third World, and Cold War studies, and his works include “Juche in the USA: The Black Panther Party's Relations with North Korea, 1969–1971” (The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 2015) and “Not There for the Nutmeg: North Korean Advisors in Grenada and Pyongyang's Internationalism, 1979–1983” (Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2018). He is finishing a book on the history of North Korea–Third World relations.