Sojourner Truth Organization - Truth and revolution: a history of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986

As time passes, and events that one participated in decades ago have become the stuff of history, one often faces the reality that too many accounts by younger scholars bear scant resemblance to ones memories. Too often scholars ignore the recollections of participants that do not buttress their own preconceived conclusions. I am pleased that Michael Staudenmaiers Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) breaks from that mold. I was active in Chicago Black and left politics during the 1960s. I knew or worked with several of the key figures discussed in this study, and met others of them during subsequent years. Staudenmaiers account as far as possible gets it right.

Staudenmaier recounts how the STO attempted over a decade and a half to hold on to their principles while confronting an increasingly inhospitable environment. Staudenmaier makes a case without rancor, but with great care and sympathy, that their efforts to achieve any lasting change was a failure and that the organizations demise was a tragedy, though largely, it is hard to see how the outcome could have been otherwise.

The political and economic trajectories taken by the United States and capitalism on a global scale during the past four decades have made a shambles of any simplistic teleology positing inevitable passage through stages of history. Who can say with any certainty how to characterize the current era or its place in some larger historical process?

The STO, like many of the most prominent left organizations, grew out of the specific circumstances of the 1960s. None survived as the country moved steadily to the right and the ruling class worked to smash, intimidate, or coopt such groups as the Black Panther Party, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, SDS, Revolutionary Action Movement, etc. They all share a story of internal debates especially over issues of gender, family and sexuality, fragmentation, turnover and loss of membership, burnout, and eventual demise. The lesson of the STO may be more in the depth of their commitment to understanding the world in all its complexities than in their relative successes or failures in changing it.

On a personal note, it is good that the lives and works of old friends and comrades not be lost or forgotten. I remember meeting Ken Lawrence (Berg at that time) and his future wife Pat at the sit-in demonstrations at 73 rd and Lowe on Chicagos south side in 1963. They both were in high school I believe and seemed so very young. I was surprised that they became active in Facing Reality. It was to their apartment that I brought C.L.R. James to meet with a group of young Black activists so that James could take the measure of their goals and beliefs. One of the achievements of the Black student movement at Northwestern University was to hire James as one of the first faculty in a budding Black Studies Department and we helped to fulfill all of his requests to meet with youth and activists in the Chicago area.

Macee Halk I knew through organizing efforts among the students and street gangs on the South and West sides. We both were members of the Revolutionary Action Movement. Like Malcolm X, Macee evolved beyond an earlier life that had resulted in his incarceration and transformed himself into one of the smartest most courageous persons that I have ever encountered. My memory of talks with Macee about his work with the STO confirm Staudenmaiers account. In fact, I met Carole Travis when she made a trip to Amherst, Massachusetts to see Macee whom I had invited to participate in an anti-war, anti-imperialist conference. Noel Ignatiev I had known through various audio tapes he sent me from time to time. I respected him as a fellow admirer of the Marxism of C.L.R. James, and I later accepted his invitation to serve on the editorial board of Race Traitor . Staudenmaiers portrayal of Noel again seems accurate and fair.

The STO has left behind important traces of their thoughts and practice. The special issue of Urgent Task s on C.L.R. James: His Life and Work is still a useful antidote to the flood of new works that have tried to redefine James as a founder of cultural studies, postcoloniality, and the like. Noel Ignatiev and John Garveys Race Traitor stands as an approach far beyond the platitudes of multicultural dialogue, etc. The STOs emphasis on popular culture as sites of resistance was thoroughly Jamesian. After the publication of Beyond a Boundary , the left, as Staudenmaier relates, was free to break loose from the strictures of folk music and the elitism of Frankfurt School theoreticians, and to engage with the sights and sounds of the world they lived in.

Staudenmaier offers a valuable cautionary account of the STOs difficult and complex attempts to struggle against male supremacy in both its institutional and interpersonal manifestations. It is a welcome relief from the often over generalized and not very useful accounts in most histories of the left. The discussion on parenting and the role of children by members of the STO is insightful and unique. Many of the internal struggles are an indication of the strong influence on the U.S. left of Leninist forms of organization dictated by the conditions of Czarist Russia. The contrast with the very full, interesting, chaotic lives of Karl Marxs family is telling. The letters of Marxs daughters portray Marx as a loving and supportive father, and the Marx household as a place not without fun and laughter. The fight for socialism does not have to be boring.

Staudenmaier has done a great service in walking past the obvious big game targets on the left and has given us an extremely valuable history of how one can be of the left, yet not live in despair. There was much work to be done and many ways to do it. The value in this study is not to present formulas or to engage in nostalgia. It is to document the experiences of a group of people who, acting on a clearly defined set of ideas, engaged in a variety of forms of struggle that were in concert with their ultimate goal of the empowerment of working people and a transition to socialism. When, how, or even if this takes place, knowledge of past experiences can provide both insights and inspiration as well as caveats and warnings. Future generations, not us, will decide what use will be made of the history of the STO. Staudenmaier has done his part by preserving and analyzing that experience so that it will be there if wanted and needed. My experience in watching the impact of lectures by Noel Ignatiev and Selma James on youthful audiences, the popularity of Race Traitor , and the interest excitement generated by a seminar on James writings among students active in the Occupy movement indicates that the ideas and efforts of the STO still have resonance.

As capitalism (not neoliberalism, whatever that is) continues the relentless expansion across the globe that Marx outlined in the Communist Manifesto , it well might be that the actions of workers in China, India, Nigeria, and Brazil will have a greater impact on the prospects for socialism than that of workers in Europe and the United States. The study of the STO demonstrates that the site of struggle is in our everyday lives, against the obtsacles that working people face there, not in books about their lives. To do that for over a decade, to involve real people in real struggles is never a lost cause. That activity and those experiences are part of human history and are worthy of our attention. There is a Black Gospel hymn that says I may never reach perfection, but I tried. That is the story of the STO that Michael Staudenmaier has told so well in the book you hold in your hands.