@article{THESIS,
      recid = {4247},
      author = {Candee, Daniel},
      title = {A Pair Against Oppression: June Croll, Eugene Gordon,  Communism and the Forging of American Anti-Racism},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {M.A.},
      address = {2022-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {The twentieth century was long, and—despite its best  efforts—so were the lives of June and Eugene Gordon. That  they were a pairing of a Jewish woman and a Black man alone  would have raised eyebrows, but to make matters worse, they  were both Communists. Throughout their lives, the pair  found themselves confronted by mass anti-semitic and racist  violence, state surveillance and repression, and social and  financial pressure, which oppressed them through identity  and class. Though their personhood and partnership came  under assault by legal regimes, backward social convention,  and material deprivation, June and Eugene held onto each  other and shared visions of a free humanity. These visions  were at once profoundly universal and doggedly  particularistic. Their intersecting and sometimes diverging  paths towards freedom carried them through the life-world  of the Communist party, the material and cultural  battlefields of the twentieth century, and to one another.   	The pair’s participation in the labor movement, the Black  liberation struggle, and the fight for Jewish freedom spans  half a century. Raised in cultures of opposition, they  never gave up the fight and took their place in the radical  vanguard of civil society, the labor movement, and the  literary world. They fought for justice on the battlefields  of the Great War, in the pages of Harlem Renaissance  publications, the picket lines of the Great Depression, and  in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. June  and Eugene Gordon’s lives reveal a great deal about the  successes and failures of the interconnected Black radical  and European revolutionary traditions. Their experiences as  activists in the long civil rights movement, as members of  oppressed groups, organic intellectuals, and communist  cadres provide a unique window into a period of intense  political struggle. This struggle brought about a  transition in the world history of race, empire, and  capitalism, from the era of white dominion to the era of  multiracial liberalism.  Neither Eugene nor June  fundamentally changed the trajectories of the cultures of  opposition or political organizations they operated within.  However, the length and breadth of their engagement with  these oppositional cultures and the Communist movement mark  Eugene and June as representatives of a greater whole. They  are the Communist everyman and everywoman, fleeting  representatives of those who lurk in single sentences  within more famous radicals’ memoirs, in brief  acknowledgments of their actions or arrest in newspapers,  in FBI files, and in the corners of photographs. Through  them, we develop a better understanding of the internal  workings of the Communist Party of the United States of  America (CPUSA); and, more importantly, the conjunctural  and organic forces guiding the uneven transformation from  the  19th-century world of white Dominion into the one we  recognize today.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4247},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4247},
}