Description
In 1959 after the attempted rape of two Black women by white men and the loss of these court cases, the Black women of Monroe, North Carolina compelled NAACP president Robert Williams to found the Negroes with Guns Movemnt. In 1961 Mae Mallory a working class African American woman, a self-defense advocate and devotee of Williams traveled to Monroe to support him. Accused of kidnapping a Ku Klux Klan couple, she spent thirteen months in a Cleveland jail and faced extradition. African Americans Audrey Proctor, Ruthie Stone and Mrs. Johnson members of the banned New Orleans NAACP, Trotskyists Workers World Party, and the Negroes with Guns respectively, founded the Monroe Defense Committee in Cleveland to support Mallory. During the 1960s and 1980s, disappointed with the failures of the U.S. civil rights movement, they joined international revolutionary movements. Mallory worked in the Tanzanian government. Proctor traveled to Grenada and Nicaragua between 1979 and 1984 and participated in these Marxist/socialist revolutions. They connected the fight for civil rights to international revolutionary movements and realized that their hope for equality would come to fruition, despite the U.S. civil rights movements inefficacy. The overarching question in "For Freedom Now" is why these working class African American women chose radical activism, socialism and self-defense as a means of promoting for civil rights in the U.S. It explores why they aligned themselves with Tanzanian, Grenadian, and Nicaraguan revolutionary governments and linked the struggle for Black civil rights to international revolution. Academic Year 2010-2011, Summer 2011, Summer 2016, Academic Year 2016-2017
