Gandhi's India and Beyond

Previous articleNext article FreeGandhi's India and Beyond: Black Women's Religious and Secular Internationalism, 1935–1952Dennis C. DickersonDennis C. DickersonPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAfrican American women encountered Mohandas K. Gandhi in India in the 1930s and 1940s and influenced others whom they mentored to engage with nonviolence as a strategy both to liberate African Americans and to emancipate colonized peoples. Specifically, they advocated female empowerment in India and defined it as intrinsic to decolonization. Unlike African American male religious intellectuals who singularly engaged Gandhi about nonviolence, these black women internationalists created a discourse of solidarity with Indian women that expanded beyond their traditional activities of missionary activity in Africa. This shift away from race elevation to black women's empowerment was the derivative effect of interactions in India between Gandhi and a cadre of African American religious intellectuals. These intellectuals believed that Gandhi's successful deployment of nonviolent techniques in the fight against British colonialism had much to teach African American activists. Accompanying these scholars, Howard Thurman and William Stuart Nelson, in 1936 and 1946, respectively, were their wives, Sue Bailey Thurman and Blanche Wright Nelson. Though they heard Gandhi articulate his views about nonviolence, their takeaway from their sojourn in India was a sense of urgency for women's empowerment in the Asian subcontinent and for harnessing the energy of African American women to support this project. Additionally, Sadie T. M. Alexander, though she traveled to India in 1952, discovered possibilities for cohesion between African American and Indian women. Alexander and other African American women who had been exposed to India envisaged themselves as activists in these interreligious and transnational contexts.1African American religious intellectuals, all men, after meeting Gandhi in the 1930s and 1940s, developed principles and a praxis about nonviolence that influenced a succeeding generation of leaders and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Howard Thurman, who met Gandhi in 1936, understood nonviolence as a methodology as "some form of shock, by organizing a boycott or widespread non-cooperation." Benjamin E. Mays reflected on his deep conversation in 1937 with Gandhi about nonviolence as "an active force" that must be practiced "in absolute love and without hate." William Stuart Nelson credited Gandhi for "the persistent and wise employment of those instruments of power available to his people—mass organization, mass resistance, political solidarity, (and) economic leverage." Nelson added that "the use of (these) pressures" required practitioners "to employ those pressures" in ways "not to hate, not to want to do injury, (and) not to destroy the possibility of reconciliation." These Gandhian ideas, conveyed by these black male intellectuals, mainly through their overlapping affiliations with the School of Religion at Howard University, educated and energized students such as James Farmer and Kelly Miller Smith as well as other leaders in the civil rights struggle.2African American women, especially in the historic black denominations, long had been involved in transatlantic ministries within the African Diaspora. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and African Methodist Episcopal Zion bodies established women's missionary societies in 1874 and 1880, respectively. A second AME women's missionary society started in 1893, and the Women's Convention of the National Baptist Convention, USA, was founded in 1900. Women in the Church of God in Christ in 1911 and in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in 1918 followed with their own organizations. All inaugurated projects in the Caribbean and Africa. Though they often adopted the language of Western white missionary groups, they poured Pan-African meaning into what was superficially described as "a civilizing mission." In Pittsburgh, for example, two AME women in 1894 founded the "first magazine published by the Woman's Missionary Society." Their masthead proclaimed "Woman's Light and Love for Heathen Africa." They belonged, however, to the Women's Parent Mite Missionary Society, whose 1874 founding document linked them to AME founder Richard Allen and to the Haitian insurgent Toussaint L'Ouverture. Though we should rightly recoil from their use of the term "Heathen Africa," it should not obscure their Pan-African consciousness and their support for ending European colonialism in Africa. They also endorsed an indigenization that showed familial cooperation with African women, who in pursuing common Pan-African objectives, functioned as full partners in pushing for continental self-determination. Charlotte Manye Maxeke, Amanda Mason, and Europa J. Randall, within a transatlantic religious body to which they and their African American "mothers" and "sisters" belonged, mobilized institutional resources to advance African autonomy.3Maxeke, from South Africa, discovered the AME Church while a part of a singing troupe traveling in the United States. Because of financial hardships, a sympathetic pastor, Reverdy C. Ransom, arranged matriculation for Maxeke and others at the denomination's flagship institution, Wilberforce University. Maxeke, exposed to such professors as the young W. E. B. Du Bois and the legendary African emigrationist and bishop Henry M. Turner, spearheaded a merger between the US-based AME Church and South Africa's dissident Ethiopian Church that a family friend, M. M. Mokone, had founded in 1892. The Women's Parent Mite Missionary Society (WPMMS) viewed Maxeke as a partner in strengthening a black religious presence in a region where white settlers had subjugated indigenous Africans. Hence, Maxeke, with a Wilberforce degree in hand, started a coeducational school in 1903 with a special emphasis on girls. She lamented, for example, that some African fathers "lashed" their daughters for wanting an education and preferred "to sell them for so many head of cattle," a possible reference to a "bride price" or payment from the family of a potential bridegroom. "It would have made your heart ache to see their backs," said Maxeke in a letter to her African American "mothers." This familial relationship was reaffirmed in 1909 when the WPMMS planned a trip back to the United States for "our African daughter" to raise funds for the Wilberforce-Lillian Derrick School. Educator Maxeke, however, became increasingly politicized as South Africa's white minority government intensified restrictions on the rights of indigenous tribes. In response, she joined a succession of organizations that fought these injustices, including the African National Congress and the Bantu Women's League, an ANC affiliate. She fought the sexism espoused by settler whites and indigenous blacks.4Just as Maxeke moved back and forth within the black Atlantic, Amanda Mason and Europa J. Randall forged Pan-African solidarity across national and colonial boundaries on the "mother" continent and resisted the hegemony of white settler and European power. Mason emulated Maxeke's route through Wilberforce University and a partnership with African American women. She returned to her native Liberia to teach and then moved to the Girl's School in Sierra Leone. When she married the physician-nationalist A. B. Xuma and joined him in South Africa in 1927, she became a leader in the WPMMS branch in that region. Tragically, Mason died in childbirth in 1934 at age 38. Europa Randall built an educational and congregational infrastructure for the AMEs through her diverse movements within West Africa. Born in Sierra Leone, Randall, in the 1930s, settled in the British-controlled Gold Coast and established a congregation in Essa Kado and several schools in the colony. Like Maxeke and Mason, Randall affirmed a peer cooperation with the WPMMS as a delegate to its 1939 convention in Chicago. These ties proved problematic for male clergy in the Gold Coast, because funding from these African American women provided her with an independence that they clearly eschewed. When Ghana gained its independence from Great Britain in 1957, Randall and other denominational officials agreed that the schools that she and others founded would be aligned with the educational system of the new African nation.5This heritage and precedent of black women's internationalism framed how other African American women pursued solidarity and empowerment for colonial peoples elsewhere in Africa and India. These church-based Pan-Africanists, however, differed from their India-focused successors. While Maxeke, Mason, and Randall drew funds from the religious organizations of African American women, travelers in India tapped into a network of interracial and international groups such as the YWCA and the American Friends Service Committee. Their alliance with these and other organizations facilitated their opposition to sundry structures of hegemony.As important as the longevity of religious women in establishing Atlantic ties between the United States and Africa were leftist women who opposed white supremacist practices realized in global colonial and capitalist exploitation. A critical mass of African American women of diverse backgrounds both in the United States and the Caribbean affiliated during the 1930s with the Communist Party (CP). They were impressed with the CP because it aggressively addressed the devastating economic impact of the Great Depression on poor and working-class African Americans and the continuing racial injustices perpetrated against African Americans throughout the decade. Communist credibility in taking seriously the black struggle for racial equality persuaded crucial cadres of African American women to become leaders and operatives in the CP-sponsored League of Struggles for Negro Rights, the Unemployed Councils, and the International Labor Defense organization (ILD). The ILD, which vied with the NAACP to defend the Scottsboro Boys, attracted black women to CP efforts to exonerate the nine African American males who were wrongly accused of raping two white women in Alabama. One of the African American women activists, Audley Moore, formerly affiliated with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), credited the ILD with getting "a civil rights movement going." Because the CP, like the UNIA, promoted black self-determination, Moore easily transferred her loyalties to the ILD. "If they've got a movement like that, and they're conscious of this thing that Garvey had been speaking about," Moore remarked, "then this may be a good thing for me to get in to help free my people."6Notwithstanding a de-emphasis on "respectability" as foundational to the activities and aspirations of middle-class black women involved in their own philanthropic, social, and religious organizations, their counterparts in the CP shared with them a heightened international consciousness. Each group of black women had an expansive awareness of parallels between the condition of African American women and that of other women in both colonized and socialist societies. As representatives of their African American club and denominational institutions, "respectable" women disbursed health and educational funds to and interacted with mostly colonized peoples in the Caribbean and Africa. Christine S. Smith, long active in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, also served as president of the AME Church's Women's Parent Mite Missionary Society. In the late 1930s, Smith, the widow of an AME bishop, sailed to West Africa with the prelate of the jurisdiction and the denomination's secretary of missions. They visited churches and schools, several of which Smith's group financed, in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast. Leftist African American women, during this same period, were similarly internationalist but mostly traveled to the Soviet Union.7Most communist African American women congregated in Harlem and identified with the Soviet Union because of the stubborn persistence of American racism and what Erik S. McDuffie cited as the "search of the Soviet promise of a better society." He added that "the Soviet Union served as a political terrain where black Communist women forged their 'New Woman' sensibility and a 'black woman's international' that was committed to building transnational alliances with women from around the world." Hermina Dumon Huiswold, a native of British Guiana, with her husband lived in the Soviet Union for three years starting in 1930. She matriculated at the Lenin Institute and learned both Russian and German. Her proficiency landed her a position as an interpreter at the school, where she engaged an international network of communist activists. For Huiswold, Maude White, Williana Burroughs, and other African American women, a Marxist-Leninist society without race and class distinctions and in which freedom for women seemed to be realized became a goal worth achieving in the United States. As a result of these experiences, leftist African American women, McDuffie argued, "challenged the bourgeois variants of respectability espoused by the church, Garveyites, and clubwomen" and envisaged "black women as a global vanguard" that deployed Marxist-Leninism to re-imagine their "collective identity." These leftist interactions for African American women became foundational for the daring intellectual explorations of such thinkers as Claudia Jones. Jones, born in Trinidad and a journalist and theoretician for the black Atlantic, mobilized her Garveyite and communist sensibilities for regular contributions to the Daily Worker. She talked about the exploitation of the "overworked and underpaid black women" as deserving the targeted attention of serious radicals.8The global alignments of leftist African American women were realized through their involvements in protests against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and in their support for the antifascists fighting for the republican government in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. Both Claudia Jones and Esther Cooper, through communist connections to the Popular Front, became opponents of Italy's attack on Ethiopia, one of two independent African nations. Louise Thomson, a founder of the Soviet Friendship Society and a member of the International Workers Order, shared with her Marxist associates the antipathies toward a fascist overthrow of Spain's elected government. When Thompson went to Europe with the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, she included a three-week trip within Spain. She met Langston Hughes and other black intellectuals from the Americas, Moors who fought with Francisco Franco's fascist forces, and African Americans who volunteered for the interracial Abraham Lincoln Brigade that supported the republican army. She interacted with Salaria Kee, an African American nurse working at a loyalist hospital near Madrid. Though Thompson was rooting for the triumph of democracy in Spain, she also hoped that a republican victory would weaken Franco's ally, Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini, whose grip on Ethiopia would be weakened. While in Spain, leftist African American women met international allies who shared with them a determination to aid both African American liberation and women's emancipation. Such leftists as Claudia Jones challenged the "dominant definitions of black womanhood and the interconnected force of white supremacy and gender oppression."9Eslanda Robeson and Pauli Murray bridged the separate spheres of international activity that characterized African American women in club and denominational pursuits and those involved in leftist affiliations. Both groups intersected with a cadre of influential black women who emphasized ties to Indian women and viewed Gandhian nonviolence as an effective methodology to dismantle European colonialism. Robeson, wife of singer and actor Paul Robeson, emerged in the 1930s as a recognized writer and anthropologist in her own right. While living in London during her husband's European performances, she met in Paris with Caribbean and African intellectuals. Also, she traveled within Africa, became a cofounder of the International Committee on African Affairs, and visited Spain to identify with the antifascists. Additionally, she nurtured leftist associations in the Soviet Union where she enrolled her son in a school that offered a "racist free education." Moreover, her two brothers were Soviet residents, and one remained in Russia permanently.10Robeson, notwithstanding these African and leftist associations, became intrigued with Gandhi and other anticolonialists in India. While both were in London in 1931, Robeson interviewed Gandhi, who in the previous year had led the Salt March to protest British taxation of this important commodity. This mass mobilization of 80,000 Indians was an unprecedented display of civil disobedience and a demonstration of widespread resistance to British hegemony. Gandhi, who came to Great Britain to lecture and mobilize support for Indian anticolonialism, recently had been released from an eight-month incarceration as a result of his insurgent activities. Robeson and Gandhi agreed that any defeat of white supremacy should yield equality for all peoples. Robeson's biographer concluded that her meeting with Gandhi provided her with a better "understanding of colonialism" and broadened her "interest in India." Her encounter with Gandhi also spurred a relationship with future Indian leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Vijaya Lakshmi (Nan) Pandit, his sister, and sparked in Robeson "a lifelong interest in the cause of Indian freedom."11Unlike Robeson, Pauli Murray never met Gandhi but adopted his techniques toward protest against antiblack discrimination. In this pursuit, Murray was among the first African American activists to deploy Gandhian nonviolence in the black freedom In a strategy that the Salt March of A. in a mass mobilization of African Americans in a on to the of antiblack in the and the March on Murray had adopted the use of Gandhi's in the Civil Rights Murray a published on Gandhian War without A of Gandhi's and a 1939 by a Salt March Murray these in a her and a female a of movements to a for on a through the two travelers landed in the white Though the and Murray the the the with the black women. were a second and Murray and her were for and The of the NAACP and the national and the the and drew to the where the was a Gandhian Murray the by it away from the to the and of racial discrimination. Also, the Gandhian of without was in to the against her and her The the of the and them Moreover, the the to a that the two not and returned them to funds for their Like Gandhi, whose protests included Murray came to her as this same In she was to support of by the Congress of which nonviolent activists who like the one in that in and in the spheres in which leftist black women and their counterparts showed the solidarity between the two groups in Western white in racial in the United States or in the of a term that to Louise also to other leftist black women with the Communist Because of a common against racism and similarly characterized African American women who advocated the use of Gandhian techniques for the black freedom struggle and to the elevation of African American and Indian in Colored and in The of have African Americans and Indians and their and discourse from the into the War W. E. B. Du of as meaning "a against and other of from the of African and others in the of the of transnational that linked African Americans and emphasized the of to racism and that African Americans and Indians encountered to the of independence from Great Britain in The takeaway for African Americans in Indian as a part of the and struggle that and with their on global alliances among of racial and colonial an intellectual discourse that framed the and of African American women who identified with the of Indian women. Both groups from their interactions with African American women learned much about the and gender of Indian Indian women were similarly about the condition of African Americans and gained from the sundry that African American women and their organizations provided to African American women, who by both and in their traveled to India from the 1930s through the at a when Gandhian nonviolence was against British colonial power. to this force to the African American freedom black religious intellectuals to first about Gandhi's methodology of Moreover, African American women and in these but their to Indian women and how colonialism and the indigenous were to and religious interactions and to projects to the racism and colonialism that both African American and Indian Bailey Thurman and her the and Howard Thurman, African American into discourse with principles that affirmed black freedom Hence, Howard Thurman, impressed by Gandhi's praxis of nonviolence as a for aligned with the and of and The result was his and the which an insurgent of heritage who hegemony. African diverse religious resources to mobilize against and structures in the United States. Sue Bailey Thurman, on with nonviolence, Gandhi for for the African American freedom that, she drew from her India trip possibilities for between two groups of women who racism and colonialism in their Sue Bailey Thurman Bailey Thurman Howard born in in was the and of Baptist Her who served in the during founded with the Baptist in at and Thurman at where she endorsed a protest against a that at a she became the second wife of the Howard Thurman in she was an in the a and of at Howard University and a and Howard Thurman an to in 1935 and 1936 to and on the of The International Movement emerged in the of the and missionary of and of whom were affiliated with the who believed that were the for of and among diverse peoples. Because of A. of the Movement of and the organization of a black to these Asian to between peoples living within Accompanying Thurman were and and Sue Bailey to India for Thurman was because Amanda Smith, an AME in and whom she at the had to in to a Movement India for all African Americans was Though Howard Thurman the both and Sue Bailey Thurman, at and also to female the of a Methodist Episcopal and a of about at a YWCA meeting and at the in in India. Thurman in on in at a women's at at the and School for and in at the YWCA on and Religious in the met Gandhi, the Indian leader them about African American and to the of African Americans preferred they were Gandhi religious equality with their while the same seemed in and notwithstanding black and to the of their societies this of with a of what Gandhi would to as the of She would to the Black of the where this would be into Gandhi because the of had Indians to Moreover, had to be addressed and the between and to be these interreligious led to a of India and by widespread Gandhi's efforts at became for him a of This at these religious to Gandhi's in by a Though would not to the United States these were Gandhi that through the of nonviolence would be to all Bailey Thurman India with a about Gandhi and his of Gandhi, she was "a but as one of those who had his As she and her husband with the Indian leader When They Gandhi believed these the meaning of in the She Gandhi because as poor as the in to this with their of Thurman was in her in nonviolence after a to the which to the she said in on his without we had to or the of Bailey Thurman returned from India that African

Colonialism · Decolonization · Empowerment · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Indian History and Philosophy · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies

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