ANGUS REID urges us to understand the persecution of Jason Arday from a political and historical perspective, and to see the victim in human terms
Correcting the record
HELEN MERCER applauds a book that restores the contribution of US communists to the Civil Rights movement
(L to R) Louise Thompson Patterson at the 7th Federal Congress of the Democratic Women's Federation of Germany in Berlin, November 1960; Esther Cooper Jackson addressing a rally in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1968; Eslanda Goode Robeson c1947
[(L to R) German Federal Archives/Public domain/Pic:digital.library.ucla.edu/Los Angeles Daily News/Public domain]
Re-releases of the classics Gypsy Rhumba and Buena Vista Social Club, and a stunning album by Palestinian artist Faris Ishaq
Nothing, says ANDY HEDGECOCK, can rescue this undistinguished amalgam of ponderous melodrama and shallow philosophical speculation
JAMIE BRITTON invites readers to visit 3,500 locals as part of a marathon artistic pub crawl
JOHN GREEN welcomes a valuable and incisive analysis of a world become hyperpolitical but without the mass movement institutions to represent it
Organize, Fight, Win – Black Communist Women’s Political Writing
Edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean
Verso, £19.99
CLAUDIA JONES is well known as the driving force behind the establishment of the Notting Hill Carnival. Morning Star readers will also be aware that she was an American communist, a member of the CPUSA, and deported to Britain in 1955 having been indicted under the Smith Act.
Indictments under this Act, together with the House Un-American Activities Committee, decimated the leadership of the CPUSA as well as ruining the lives of sympathisers.
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PAUL BUHLE recommends an eminently useful book that examines the political opportunities for popular anti-fascist intervention
After Zohran Mamdani’s electoral win, BHABANI SHANKAR NAYAK points to the forgotten role of US communists in New York’s radical politics