Maude White Katz

Maude White Katz (1908–1985)[1] was a communist activist for the Communist Party USA and wrote about Black women in America. Katz's work helped the party gain insights into the Black working class and their labor conditions. Katz was a worker from a working-class family, and the CPUSA assigned her to several unions during her time with the party. Her input and organizational skills were instrumental to the Party's ability to reach out and organize for the Black working class. Her critiques of the Party gave rise to internal campaigns against white chauvinism.[2] Her party organizing spanned many years over several states and included union organizing and demonstrations. Party leaders saw Katz as a leader in organizing early on, and she was selected by the party to go to the USSR for three years at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East.[3]

Biography

Early life

Maude Katz was born in Pennsylvania. Her parents and grandparents were originally from Virginia.[2]

Her father worked in the mines after moving to Pennsylvania, then shifted to general construction work, laying pipe, and cleaning outhouses. Facing hard work for little pay, Katz's father developed a drinking problem. Her mother did laundry and other types of work for white families.[2] Katz had 14 brothers and sisters. She was the middle child of all the other children.[2]

Education

Katz went to school in McKeesport, Pennsylvania.[2] While in school, she was a domestic worker for white families and taught on the side. Katz was introduced to radical political ideas in by a communist high school English teacher.[2] The teacher gave Katz books to read and introduced her to other communists. Her teacher also took her to meetings in Pittsburgh, where speakers would speak against the oppression of Black people.

Life in Chicago

Katz moved to Chicago, Illinois where she lived with her sister, who had an apartment in the city. Katz worked as a domestic laborer in Chicago. Outside of working hours, she would engage in communist party activities, such as handing out leaflets and speaking at open air meetings.[2]

Travel to USSR

Katz was elected to go to the Soviet Union under an exchange program offering scholarships for travel even though she had been a member of the Communist party for less than a year.[2]

Katz's was able to get a university education and also travel during her three year[3] stay at the Soviet Union. She attended the Communist University of the Toilers of the East[3] with other anti-imperialists from across the world, including Harry Haywood.[2]

Katz's studies included Marxism-Leninism, history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the National Question, and Imperialism.[2][3] She also sat in on official discussions around "The Negro Question" in the U.S. regarding self-determination of Black people in the states.[2]

Return from Moscow to New York

Katz returned from the Soviet Union in 1930 and picked back up party work for the CPUSA. She wrote articles and organized/took part in demonstrations.[2]

Katz career as a lead member of the Needle Trades Industrial Union started after being assigned to a leadership position by the Communist Party. Her main job in the union was to organize Black workers.[2]

Katz solidified her political position on "white chauvinism" both in and out of the party during her time in the Needle Trades Industrial Union. This was one of the positions that her and Ben Gold[2] took to the Communist Party USA politiburo to discuss.

As a result of the politburo meeting, party campaigns against white chauvinism were introduced as well as a call for unity for Black and white workers. The Yokinen Show Trial was also created from this meeting.[2]

Katz worked with William Z. Foster in the Trade Union Unity League.[2]

The Harlem Liberator

Katz served as the editor of The Harlem Liberator,[4] which was an official organ of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights.[2]

Book

She wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois about her book on the oppression on Black women in America.[5] He declined to review it because he said he had no way to publish it and was busy.[6]

She was interviewed not long before her death.[7] She wrote about the horrors of lynching.[8]

References
  1. Burden-Stelly, Charisse; Dean, Jodi (2022). Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing. erso. p. 322. ISBN 978-1-83976-497-4.
  2. Tamiment Library - Interviewer: Ruth F. Prago - Maude White Katz 1 (OHAL) - Link
  3. Hribar. (2013). "Radical Women in the Struggle: A Review of Recent Literature on the Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movements". Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 29(2), 95. doi:10.2979/jfemistudreli.29.2.95 
  4. Gore, Dayo (2011). Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York and London: New York University Press. p. 25. ISBN 9780814732366. Retrieved October 6, 2023 – via Internet Archive.
  5. "Letter from Maude White Katz to W. E. B. Du Bois, September 7, 1952". University of Massachusetts Amherst. Retrieved October 6, 2023.
  6. "Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Maude White Katz". Digital Commonwealth: Massachusetts Collections Online. Retrieved October 6, 2023.
  7. https://books.google.com/books?id=bhNgEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA198&dq=maude+white+katz&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwje4LKa0t-BAxXsTTABHcV_DRUQ6AF6BAgEEAM#v=onepage&q=maude%20white%20katz&f=false
  8. Harris, Trudier (1984). Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 206. Retrieved October 6, 2023 – via Google Books.
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