[News] Mae Mallory: Forgotten Black Power Intellectual

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.aaihs.org/mae-mallory-forgotten-black-power-intellectual/


  Mae Mallory: Forgotten Black Power Intellectual

Ashley Farmer

June 3, 2016

On October 2, 1962 journalists at the /Chicago Defender /interviewed Mae 
Mallory, a prisoner at the Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland, Ohio. 
Throughout their discussion, Mallory offered her thoughts on the current 
state of the black liberation movement. She proclaimed that she was 
“just an insignificant black woman who believes that the tree of liberty 
has to be watered in blood!” and that her “white oppressors” were soon 
going to realize that the “idea of self-defense ha[d] penetrated the 
black man’s thinking.”^1 
<http://www.aaihs.org/mae-mallory-forgotten-black-power-intellectual/#fn-8334-1> 
While Malcolm X was imploring African Americans to seize freedom “by any 
means necessary,” Mallory, all but forgotten from history, was also 
advocating for armed self-defense and black self-determination well 
before it was popular.

(Willie) Mae Mallory was born in 1927 in Macon, Georgia. In later 
interviews she recalled that she had practiced self-defense as a child, 
forcing her mother to “realize that she wasn’t going to make it so good 
in the South.” When Mallory was a teen, she and her mother joined the 
thousands of African Americans who migrated to northern cities in the 
hopes of finding economic and social prosperity. Mallory came of age in 
Harlem amid a constellation of black progressive and radical 
organizations. In the early 1950s, she flirted with the Communist Party 
and joined several grassroots black nationalist organizations.^2 
<http://www.aaihs.org/mae-mallory-forgotten-black-power-intellectual/#fn-8334-2> 


In 1957, Mallory made national headlines when she filed a suit against 
the New York City Board of Education. Three years after the /Brown 
/decision, Mallory found that segregated education was still the norm 
for her two children. With the help of lawyer Paul Zuber, she challenged 
the Board’s zoning policies, arguing that they ensured that black 
children remained in inferior, segregated schools. Eight other mothers 
joined her in the suit and a boycott of several Harlem junior high 
schools. The media dubbed them the “Harlem Nine.” Mallory and the other 
mothers asked for an “open transfer” policy that allowed them to send 
their children to schools outside of their district and community 
control of Harlem schools through parent associations. The Harlem Nine 
eventually won the right to transfer their children. Most importantly, 
they forced the local court and the Board of Education to declare that 
de facto segregation existed in New York City schools.^3 
<http://www.aaihs.org/mae-mallory-forgotten-black-power-intellectual/#fn-8334-3> 


In the early 1960s, Mallory began a friendship with Robert F. Williams, 
a well-known black nationalist who lived in Monroe, North Carolina. In 
August 1961, she agreed to go to Monroe to help him host a group of 
Freedom Riders <http://www.blackpast.org/aah/freedom-rides-1961>, 
non-violent interracial activists who rode interstate buses to test 
local compliance with desegregation laws. On August 27^th , white 
residents attacked the Freedom Riders. Afterwards, bands of armed white 
civilians roamed through black neighborhoods. As they heard about the 
violence, black residents gathered at Williams’s house. Mallory remained 
at his home throughout the day and was present when a white couple—Bruce 
and Mabel Stegall—drove into the crowd to “see what defenses” they were 
planning for the night. Mallory, Williams, and his wife let the couple 
stay in the house until the crowd dispersed. After they returned home, 
the couple told local police that they had been kidnapped.

Sure that the Klan would kill them, Mallory and Williams fled. Williams 
escaped to Cuba and Mallory hid in Cleveland for six weeks before police 
captured her. Once imprisoned, Mallory worked hard to publicize her 
case. She also used the spotlight to advocate for black nationalist 
principles, and critique liberal black leaders. As a working-class 
African American woman, she did not enjoy the same access to the public 
sphere as her male counterparts. However, from 1961 to 1965,  Mallory 
publicized her ideas in the forms and formats that were available to her 
including speeches, press releases, political tracts, and prison letters.

Amid a political climate that included the 1963 March on Washington and 
Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” Mallory consistently supported 
separatism, socialism, and self-defense. In her press releases and 
biographical articles, she insisted that black men and women wanted to 
be “masters of [their] fate” and that they realized that they needed 
“liberation—the same as other oppressed peoples in Asia, Africa and 
Latin America.”^4 
<http://www.aaihs.org/mae-mallory-forgotten-black-power-intellectual/#fn-8334-4> 
She also argued that capitalism caused racial discord. She asserted that 
African Americans “realize[d] that the enemy” was not poor white 
Americans. The problem was that they “still [did] not realize that 
[African Americans] were not [their] enemy.” She complained that 
middle-class African Americans and religious officials were “shook up 
over [her] theory of self-defense” and that they did not support her 
because she was not “fighting for accessibility” but “for freedom.” Most 
importantly, perhaps, Mallory consistently foregrounded the abuses she 
and other black women faced at the hands of white Americans, 
highlighting male-leaders’ blindness to their suffering and arguing that 
male-dominated emancipatory visions were incomplete.^5 
<http://www.aaihs.org/mae-mallory-forgotten-black-power-intellectual/#fn-8334-5> 


Mallory was eventually extradited back to Monroe in 1964, where she 
stood trial for the supposed kidnapping of the Steagalls. An all-white 
jury convicted her and sentenced her to 16-20 years in prison. She was 
exonerated in 1965 after a judge overturned the verdict based on the 
fact that African Americans had been excluded from the jury selection 
process. Once freed, Mallory continued to fight for self-defense and 
self-determination until her death in 2007.

Mallory is often overlooked in the historical record, perhaps because 
expressions of militancy remain associated with masculinity. However, 
Mallory consistently inserted herself into male-dominated discourses 
about the direction of the black struggle and perpetually 
re-contextualized black oppression from the perspective of working-class 
African-American women. She fought against inequality and articulated a 
holistic view of black liberation on multiple fronts, making her 
activism and theorizing a critical part of the black radical tradition.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20160603/37f1d3bc/attachment.htm>