The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

Almost everyone I talk to about my project asks why I have chosen to produce a history of the Sojourner Truth Organization.  I offer a slightly different response each time, and here I’ll offer something of a composite of what I’ve said before to others.

First, there are the practical reasons (I almost always prioritize practical reasons, for whatever that’s worth):  I live in Chicago and have been fortunate enough to have gotten to know a number of former members of the group, mostly through my involvement in various anti-racist and anti-fascist organizing efforts through the years.  Through these connections I ended up with a substantial (though by no means complete) personal archive of material published by STO:  pamphlets, magazines, and so forth.  So I had a leg up on this project long before I ever conceived of it as a “project” in any way.

Then, the political reasons:  as I said before, I very much want my work to be a political intervention.  At the risk of exemplifying everybody’s favorite Marx quote about history, (you know, “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”), I believe that there is much to be learned from a critical assessment of past revolutionary efforts.  STO got a bunch of things wrong (or else they would still be around; or, alternately we could all be living under the dictatorship of the proletariat, which, come to think of it, would still be about having gotten a bunch of things wrong, so never mind), but they also got a bunch of things right, things that too many present-day revolutionaries get wrong.  A pre-STO essay by founding and long-time member Noel Ignatin (now Ignatiev) commanded the white left to “Learn the Lessons of US History.”  I hope that my project will be a small contribution to that effort.

In my experience, contemporary revolutionaries I have worked with or known (and I mean here, primarily but not exclusively, anarchists), have consciously or/and unconsciously imported a lot of STO’s analysis into their own outlook.  The most obvious example here is the white skin privilege/white supremacy analysis that has been adopted in one form or another by probably a majority of anarchists in North America — something that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago.  Another example is a particular sort of anti-fascist politics that has had some popularity in some ARA circles.  I hope that my book can extend that process, while also correcting some of the misunderstandings and mis-appropriations (again, some conscious, some unconscious) of STO’s approach. 

[Since writing this, I have had a difficult but provocative conversation with a former member of STO, who challenged me to demonstrate the value of my project to the millions of undocumented workers who have been marching in cities across the US over the last month, or to black teenagers stuck in (or pushed out of) the worst urban high schools.  I maintained that not every book is a how-to manual, and that no book can be all things to all people, but it was good to be reminded in a forceful way that I need to keep contemporary circumstances in mind when I am researching and writing this book about an ever-more-distant past.  On some level I know this already, but if my project is to be a successful “political intervention” as I keep saying, I need to be able to tie it to the actual politics of the present and future, not just to some abstract set of “lessons” from the past.]

…

Almost no one I talk to about my project asks why I have chosen to write history, whether of STO or of anything else for that matter.  A handful of people, at least two of them professional historians, have asked, and I have answered that I love reading history, and that I feel that I personally learn a lot from reading history (again, despite Marx’s warnings), and that I think I’m capable of researching and writing good quality history myself. 

I have taken particular inspiration from my wife’s mom, who is a life-long writer but only recently a historian.  Her efforts to research and write about the life and ideas of Clarina Nichols, an all-but-forgotten 19^th century feminist and abolitionist, convinced me that I too could write history; if she could gather up obscure details from 150 years ago, why shouldn’t I be able to tell a story that is only thirty years old? 

One of the people who asked me about history (himself a historian) was concerned about the possibility that I might submerge the important political lessons of the group’s existence into an academic exercise that would essentially drown the political value of the work in a mess of biographical and “sociological” details.  I understand the concern, but I think the dichotomy is false:  I sincerely believe that I can produce a solid, detailed, complicated history without sacrificing the political aspects.