Johnson RD Child

The Self-Education of Rae Spiegel (Raya Dunayevskaya): Child
Radicalism and Abolitionist Pedagogies at the Crossroads of

Great Migrations
W. Chris Johnson
The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 17,

Number 1, Winter 2024, pp. 127-154 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2024.a916843
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/916843
W. C H R I S J O H N S O N
T HE SE L F - E DUC AT IO N OF R A E SP IEG E L
(R AYA DUN AY E V SK AYA): C HIL D R A DIC A L ISM
A N D A BOL I T IO N IS T P E DAG OG IE S AT T HE
C RO S SROA D S OF G R E AT MIG R AT IO N S
Abstract: This essay explores pedagogies of abolition in the wake of World War I through
the intellectual biography of Rae Spiegel, the child revolutionary who became economist,
feminist, and Marxist-Humanist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya. Anchoring her work in
the tradition of nineteenth-century abolitionists, Dunayevskaya co-constructed schools of
insurgency and outlets for the creative expression of subjugated peoples, including youth,
for over sixty years. Offering critical and contextual readings of Dunayevskaya’s archives of
girlhood, this study locates the roots of her abolitionist pedagogies in Black study, cross-racial
and cross-generational collaborations, and “Baby Red” revolts against schooling across two
empires. It argues that Dunayevskaya deployed story, personal history, and the archive as
pedagogical invitations to self-teaching and radical forms of collectivity.
n June 1927, NAACP field secretary William Pickens welcomed a new literary
critic to the Associated Negro Press, a Jewish immigrant “girl” who had “read
more books by and about the Negro than have the great majority of educated
colored Americans.” The renowned freedom worker painted a swashbuckling
portrait of her early years navigating aftershocks of the Bolshevik Revolution.
“And this child just the other day was a little thing in Russia,” Pickens wrote,
“jumping out of two-story windows in the back of the houses to escape the
invading counter-revolutionists, with her little life scorned by aristocrats.” Five
years after settling in Chicago, and one year after picking up her “first Negro
book,” she became an expert in Black literature through self-directed study. Re-
fusing to disclose her age, lest he incite the “prejudice of older minds,” Pickens
urged readers to “watch our releases and other publications for the name of
RAE SPIEGEL.”1
Drawing from his own voyages throughout Russia, and study of Jew-
ish history, Pickens claimed Spiegel as a qualified interpreter of Black life.
Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (v17.1) © 2024 by Johns Hopkins University Press
128 The Self-Education of Rae Spiegel (Raya Dunayevskaya)
Representatives of “a despised minority,” Pickens and Spiegel connected

through reciprocal articulations of shared sorrows and shared freedom strug-
gles, a circle of comparisons that replenished long-standing affinities across
Black and Jewish diasporas. “With the traditions and the background of a Jew,
an oppressed people,” Pickens explained, “she has interpreted many of these
books in reviews with an astonishing understanding.” Then in high school,
Spiegel drew from her research to challenge white supremacy in Chicago’s
public schools. Mentored by Black intellectuals like Pickens, and trained in
Black radical movements, her autodidactic pursuits humiliated teachers and
demolished their racist lessons.2
This article explores pedagogies of abolition in the wake of World War I
through the intellectual biography of Rae Spiegel, the child revolutionary
who became economist, feminist, and Marxist-Humanist philosopher Raya
Dunayevskaya. Active in omnidirectional freedom movements for over sixty
years, Dunayevskaya remains a neglected historical figure. Sometimes she ap-
pears as Trotsky’s secretary and gun-toting guardian. More often, historians
footnote her collaborations with Grace Lee (later Boggs) and C. L. R. James. A
self-taught intellectual who “hated intellectuals and leaders,” Dunayevskaya
brought nearly two decades of organizing, teaching and writing into the col-
lectives they co-founded. Formed in 1941 at the intersection of diasporas, the
Johnson-Forest Tendency engineered schools of insurgency that centered the
creative expressions and mutinies of “rank-and-file workers, blacks, women,
and youth,” people who battled oppression on simultaneous fronts. Following
the erosion of their philosophical triumvirate in 1955, Dunayevskaya continued
to construct outlets “to listen to the new voices from below,” principally by
co-developing an organization for revolutionary publishing—the News and
Letters Committees—until her sudden death in 1987.3
Like the Johnson-Forest Tendency and its varied offshoots, News and Let-
ters claimed an inheritance from nineteenth-century abolitionists. Positioning
Black insurrections at the vanguard of “the unfinished revolution” of the Civil
War, News and Letters embraced “the full tradition of the Abolitionist move-
ment,” which included “every strand of struggle for freedom.” News and Let-
ters sought to resuscitate “the human force for the reconstruction of society”
by unifying imagination, experience, theory, and political action. Their publica-
tions—including their eponymous newspaper—incited solidarities across race,
class, gender, and generation, as well as synergies between mental and manual
labor, reason and force. Written and edited by workers on the front lines of
the Second Reconstruction, their innovations in “revolutionary journalism,”
like those of their abolitionist ancestors, “insisted that Blacks in America can
Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 129
speak and write for themselves.” In the twenty-first century, David Stovall
envisions “an abolitionist future in education” reminiscent of the endeavors of
Dunayevskaya and her co-thinkers, education as “a political exercise that seeks
to end repression while simultaneously supporting the capacity of historically
oppressed and marginalized peoples to think and create.”4
Rewinding to the 1920s, this article locates the roots of Dunayevskaya’s ab-
olitionist pedagogies in Black study and child revolts against schooling across
two empires. While Dunayevskaya encouraged others to “theorize on their
experience” she guarded her past from the public for much of her life. In the
1980s, Dunayevskaya became confessional as Cold War anti-communism con-
jured memories of earlier Red Scares. Echoes of past in present led Dunayevs-
kaya to decipher philosophy in the instinct, intuition, and affective attach-
ments of Rae Spiegel, a refugee child. Dunayevskaya’s portrait of her child-self
is that of a precocious migrant girl “opposed to everything.” Forged through
the refusal of anti-Semitic schooling in the Pale of Settlement, Spiegel’s oppo-
sitional politics propelled her into showdowns with Chicago’s school system.
Since formal education denied Spiegel the knowledge she craved, she found
classrooms in the streets and radical movements of Chicago. As one refugee
in a city of refugees, survivors of May Laws and Jim Crow, Spiegel gravitated
toward Black people, Black struggle, and Black thought. Spiegel’s yearning for
revolutionary community led to collaborations with Black freedom workers
who inspired and mentored her. These practices of solidarity and co-learning
across diasporas animated her life’s work as an organizer, philosopher, and
teacher.5
Education scholars have excavated “multilayered connections between the
nation’s schools and prisons.” From the late nineteenth century, “child saving”
reformers oversaw metastatic government interventions into the regulation
of children, families, and domestic life, constructing a network of custodial
institutions to civilize and assimilate “extra-American groups,” outliers to
“Anglo-Saxon tradition” that included Black, Indigenous, and “foreign” chil-
dren like Spiegel. Framing the child as vulnerable, dependent, and incapable of
agency, children’s rights advocates denied children actual rights to make their
own decisions. During the Red Scare, the nation’s foundry of patriotism and
good citizenship—the public school—became a terrain of counterinsurgency,
fortification against anarchism and communism. For Spiegel and her comrades,
the public school was a prison governed by racist, punitive despots who de-
manded obedience to the Christian capitalist nation-state. Truants, delinquents,
and “Baby Reds,” child radicals in 1920s Chicago asserted their rights to self-
determination and pursued an “education beyond schools.”6
Beyond one child’s political awakening, then, Dunayevskaya’s origin story

uncovers a generation of young radicals who struggled for autonomy within
and against the public school. Following Dina Georgis’s “turn to story as a
method for thinking about how those affected by colonial traumas and losses
narrate their survival,” and Hannah Dyer’s examination of children’s “queer”
creative agency, this article argues that Dunayevskaya’s narratives of childhood
function as appeals to work for “better futures.” Inspired by the power of story
to incite radical passions and connections, Dunayevskaya reluctantly deployed
her own life narrative as a pedagogical invitation. The scattered memories and
artifacts reassembled in what follows honor the feelings and agency of youth,
the impact of war and violence on their imaginaries and “impossible desires,”
and their contributions to knowledge and politics. Their experiments in self-
teaching, solidarity, and collective action serve as models for the ceaseless rei-
magining of alternative ways of knowing and relating. Rae Spiegel’s story—like
the “continuing, living experience” of Dunayevskaya’s archive—invites future
generations into “a revolution in permanence.”7
“BORN A REVOLUTIONARY” 8
In the summer of 1913, Joseph Spiegel departed Ukraine in search of asylum in
the United States. He left behind his wife, Brana, two sons and four daughters.
Rae, the youngest of the Spiegel children, was three years old. Both of her par-
ents were born near the Dniester River—Joseph in Mogilev-Podolsk and Brana
in Yaryshiv, where they married and started a family. They were still children
in the spring of 1881, when over two hundred pogroms detonated across the
empire. Systemizing these horrors, Tsar Alexander III segregated Jewish people
in the Pale of Settlement. On top of gratuitous taxes, Jewish subjects had to
bribe police and bureaucrats to travel, to open stores, to bury their dead, to es-
cape compulsory military service, and to attend universities and schools. Aside
from their Orthodox faith, Dunayevskaya confides little about her family. This
negative space nevertheless reveals a home life of permissive parenting. Her
mother’s respect for self-discovery provided a nurturing domestic laboratory
for the fledgling revolutionary.9
A principled child, Spiegel declined both religious tradition and the school-
ing of empire. She “broke with God” when World War I stormed into her shtetl.
“I hated it and the world,” she wrote. Incensed by anti-Semitic terror and rico-
cheting shrapnel, Spiegel directed her fury at the local nursery of empire: the
Russian schoolhouse. According to Dunayevskaya, admission to a “Gentile”
school was rare for a Jewish child and required bribes. Her family bought a set
of crystal glasses to secure her enrollment. “The day the official came over,”
a comrade recounted, “Raya smashed all the glasses.” Choosing “illiteracy,”

Spiegel refused “to be among the 1 percent of Jews who gained the ‘privilege’
of being able to sit in the back of the school room.” Dunayevskaya was proud
of her insubordination and her intuitions. “You know nothing,” she said of child-
hood, “but experience a lot.”10
While she had yet to study Hegel or Marx, the school of the Bolshevik Revo-
lution, Dunayevskaya reflected, “swept me into it.” Spiegel was seven years old
when the Red Guard seized Petrograd. A thousand miles away, in “a godfor-
saken Ukrainian village,” the child sensed a shift in “human relations.” The over-
throw of the Romanovs heralded the emancipation of Russian Jews. Ensnared in
the crossfire of occupying armies, Spiegel witnessed ongoing cataclysms of the
war. Militias and mobs set fire to Jewish towns, plundered shops and homes, and
unleashed waves of violence. “The few times the Bolsheviks got to town,” she
recalled, “that’s when life was wonderful. At least it was to me.” The spirit of the
revolution echoed her own rebellions, but Dunayevskaya maintained that her
story was unexceptional. “Your one action of opposition to the system,” she said,
“makes you a part of that revolutionary movement.” The foundational experi-
ence of her life, the Bolshevik Revolution “left an indelible impression on me of
great doings,” she remembered, “like equality and comradeship.”11
Her family, however, saw little difference between White and Red Guards.
“All they cared about was religion,” Dunayevskaya said. “But all I cared about
was that we weren’t raped, we weren’t murdered, there was no pogrom against
us.” Amidst the slaughter of 1919–1920, the Spiegels joined the exodus of mil-
lions of Jewish refugees to western Europe and North America. They spent two
years traveling across Europe before they steamed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence
on May 25, 1922. When they reached Chicago, Joseph Spiegel was living on
Maxwell Street, the center of Jewish life in the city.12
“THE BATTLE FIELD OF THE CHILDREN’S STRUGGLE” 13

The United States, Dunayevskaya said, “reminded me of a pogrom atmo-
sphere.” Fleeing genocide, she entered a climate of political persecution, xeno-
phobia, and white supremacist terror. As his wife and children eluded pogroms
in 1919 Ukraine, Joseph Spiegel lived through “the barbaric race riots” of
Chicago’s Red Summer and the series of dragnets cast by Attorney General A.
Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover against “alien radicals, ‘Reds,’ ‘revolution-
ists,’ ‘anarchists,’ ‘bolshevists’ and all undesirables” later that year. On July 27,
Eugene Williams, a seventeen-year-old Black boy, was murdered for floating
across the color line in the waters cooling Chicago’s segregated beaches. After
police refused to arrest the white man who struck Williams in the head with
a rock, causing him to drown, “full-scale street fighting between Black and
white” erupted. Seven days later, over three dozen people were dead, hundreds
injured. In Chicago, as in Washington, DC, just days before Williams was killed,
“Blacks fought back” against police and white posses that patrolled, pillaged,
and set fire to the city. Based on information leaked by Hoover and other Justice
Department officials, the anti-communist press telegraphed a narrative linking
the Industrial Workers of the World and other “left wing Socialist organiza-
tions” to these “Negro Uprisings.” On July 28, the New York Times attributed
“the outbreak of race riots in Chicago” to “Bolshevist agitation” and published
further reports from anonymous federal officials on “Radicalism and Sedition
Among the Negroes” in the months leading to the Palmer raids. On New Year’s
Day 1920, Chicago police arrested nearly two hundred IWW members, union
officials, and alleged radicals. The raids were “the beginning of a drive,” the
Illinois state attorney announced, “to rid the community of bolshevism and
anarchy.” The following day, more than three thousand people were arrested
by federal agents in a national offensive “to wipe the Communist party out of
existence.” Seized literature, the Chicago Tribune reported, confirmed a commu-
nist plot “to organize the Negroes in support of plans to overthrow the present
political and economic system.”14
In the 1980s, the Red Scare of the Reagan era activated “the vivid memory
of my arrival in the US during the Palmer Raids against ‘Reds’ and Negroes,”
Dunayevskaya wrote. Though she alighted in Chicago in 1922, family narra-
tives, collective memory, and six decades of movement-building inspired a first-
person account of the entangled, transnational “counter-revolutions” of 1919. In
the United States, Rae Spiegel would have encountered other horrors herself:
routine reports of racist atrocities, the stagnation of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill,
and the vicious resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan as a national political power.15
For children, conflicts with Red Scare Americanism were centered in public
schools. In Ukraine, Spiegel thwarted her family’s attempt to enroll her in a
“Gentile” school. In Chicago, truancy was a criminal offence. Compulsory at-
tendance and the abolition of child labor were symbiotic progressive reforms.
Supporters characterized the nation’s “system of free schools” as sanctuary
from labor exploitation and machinery to mold anarchic children into produc-
tive industrial workers and “intelligent and useful citizens.” As the central
government “agency” for “Americanization,” the public school solved “the
problem” of pluralism during an era of great migrations. At the dawn of the
twentieth century, pedagogical theorist and school administrator Ella Flagg
Young celebrated the public school as a global crossroads where difference was
“minimized, obliterated, harmonized in the process of unification.”16
Introduced in the late nineteenth century, Illinois’s knotted compulsory at-

tendance and child labor laws mandated children’s rights through increasingly
punitive methods. Transitioning from “moral suasion” to “law enforcement,”
campaigns to keep poor and “delinquent” children out of sweatshops and in
classrooms blurred boundaries between teacher and “magistrate,” school and
prison. The city of Chicago conscripted an “army of child savers” to surveil and
police children, parents, and employers—this included teachers, social work-
ers, factory inspectors, and probation and truancy officers. The criminalization
of truancy cultivated a circuit of carceral institutions outside the classroom: a
school at the Cook County jail in 1892, the nation’s first juvenile court in 1899,
and a network of correctional schools, farms, and orphanages.17
In 1904, the superintendent of compulsory education, William Bodine,
lauded Chicago’s world-renowned innovations in “child saving” detention.
Chicago “conducts more prosecutions of parents under the compulsory educa-
tion law than any other city,” Bodine crowed. When Spiegel emptied her lug-
gage nearly two decades later, Bodine was still superintendent and his Parental
School was synonymous with scandal. Whispers of torture, solitary confine-
ment, starvation, disappearances, and homicide snuck out of the reformatory’s
campus. The mysterious deaths of two boys led to a grand jury investigation
in 1923. Exposing their bodies as evidence, over a dozen former and current
inmates provided an inventory of injuries. The testimony of ten-year-old Black
boy John Spraggins “was so revolting in details that it was necessary to clear
women and children from the courtroom.”18
At the end of May 1922, it was too late for Spiegel to start school. Afforded
a temporary reprieve from “the machinery of compulsion,” she sought a “real
education” on the streets of Chicago. Apprehensive about her new surround-
ings, Spiegel spent the summer of 1922 exploring the city with older sister
Bessie. One day, the two wanderers spotted a familiar image in a storefront
window: a red flag emblazoned with a gold hammer and sickle. Inside they
met the Luryes, a prominent socialist family. Liaisons for generations of Jewish
newcomers, Max and Anna Lurye were from Russia and spoke only Yiddish.
Their daughters were beginning to curate their own insurgent networks and
welcomed the girls into “the training school for Communism.”19
“CLARITY AND ACTION” 20

Two years after the Palmer Raids sent their nascent party underground, com-
munists resurfaced as a legal political organization—the Workers Party of
America (WP). As the Spiegels departed Europe, “youthful toilers” assembled
for the founding convention of the Young Workers League (YWL). “The time
has come,” the group declared, “when the working class youth of this country
must take the initiative in creating a solid front against their common enemy—
the capitalist class, which oppresses and enslaves them, which dwarfs their
bodies and poisons their minds.” After the convention, the YWL opened their
headquarters in Chicago. The YWL plotted a total revolution in education, but
present nightmares of childhood required immediate reforms. Despite legisla-
tive interventions, the YWL contended, poverty evacuated millions of children
from school and into a labor market that subjected them to “brutal exploitation”
and “competition with their own parents.” Saturated with “vile propaganda of
American imperialism,” schools venerated war, maligned labor movements,
and promoted submission to God, nation, and employers. Teachers practiced
corporal punishment; school buildings were congested, filthy firetraps. “If for
no other reason than to keep the children out of the mines, mills and factories,”
the YWL embraced progressive reforms as conduits to revolutionary ends.
While lobbying for “more and new school buildings,” stronger compulsory at-
tendance laws, free education through high school and free meals, the young
communists also demanded parent and student councils to govern schools,
formulate policy and craft curricula. The YWL encouraged children to abolish
“the capitalist educational machine” from within.21
Rather than suppress their “rebellious spirit,” the YWL wanted to channel
children’s creativity, wisdom, and organizing talents into self-active struggles,
link their lives to Marxist theory, and secure a “united front” with adult work-
ers for a classless socialist future. As the children of workers, and often workers
themselves, young people were experts on unemployment, poverty, and hun-
ger. Children organically organized into street and playground gangs. Drafting
an education program “derived from the actual experience and participation
by the proletarian youth,” YWL leaders resolved to establish schools and
recreational programs. Long-standing Socialist Sunday Schools had a similar
mandate. But those supplementary schools, the YWL claimed, appropriated au-
tocratic methods and hierarchies from the state. Shunning critical thinking and
“creative initiative,” Sunday schools prepared students for class struggle “in the
future.” The YWL enlisted children into “the class struggle now.”22
In the summer of 1923, the YWL mobilized a national network of “Junior
Groups,” semiautonomous collectives of children ages six to fourteen. YWL
activists infiltrated Sunday schools to shift teaching methods from “pure book
learning” to a pedagogy of “self-education” animated by observation, dialogue,
and protest. On playgrounds, in classrooms, and on street corners, YWL orga-
nizers recruited children through games, sports, and lessons guided by their
questions and interests. Mentors advised Juniors on potential actions while
pledging to respect their autonomy. By the start of the school year, Chicago
reported seventy members across three chapters.23
The Juniors’ critical pedagogy attracted rebellious youth like the Rae and
Bessie Spiegel. Hostile to schooling, Rae rode streetcars across Chicago’s seg-
regated borders, where she sensed tremors of an inevitable revolution. Linking
felt politics with theory, the young communist movement invited the “revo-
lutionary sisters” to build knowledge with others. In September 1923, fifteen-
year-old Rose Lurye organized a YWL branch in their neighborhood. Younger
sister Minnie Lurye, “a terrific little activist and organizer,” organized the Ju-
niors at their school. Self-consciously “illiterate” when she moved to Chicago,
Spiegel started her career in radical journalism through the Young Comrade, the
organ of the Juniors.24
“A working class magazine for working class children, written by children
and distributed by children,” the Young Comrade tried to inoculate readers
against “capitalist teachings.” Through short stories, history lessons, poems,
games, songs, and cartoons, contributors marshaled fellow children to author
their own lives and “Fight Against the Public Schools.” The magazine’s me-
dicinal pedagogy included a forum for dialogue through the advice column of
“Comrade Sunny,” Dunayevskaya’s first nom de guerre. A pseudonym likely
shared with other authors, Comrade Sunny published readers’ “questions and
problems” and encouraged kids to practice self-directed learning. “You do a
great deal for the working class,” Comrade Sunny explained, “when you edu-
cate yourself the right way.”25
The Juniors alarmed anti-communists across the country. Playground in-
surgencies of “Baby Reds,” nationalists warned, threatened public safety and
the moral lives of children. By the end of 1923, California police forces tar-
geted an “apparently well-laid Communistic campaign” in schools. New York
City’s bomb squad announced the discovery of a cadre of child revolutionar-
ies organized by “the Boy Trotzky of Harlem,” Junior organizer Leo Granoff.
“Counsellor and friend to the fat, the lovelorn and the sick,” Granoff was an
eleven-year-old nudist, vegetarian, therapist, and community health guru. In
Chicago, an association of retired military spies blamed Comrade Sunny and
the Young Comrade for “poisoning the minds” of children and fomenting school
“insurrections.”26
In March 1924, Comrade Sunny joined an insurrection at her own school.
Cregier School’s six hundred students were mostly Jewish and Italian. Prin-
cipal Mary Tobin belonged to a generation of Irish-Catholic women who en-
tered the teaching guild in the late nineteenth century, many deployed by the
Catholic church to “de-Protestantize the public school curriculum.” During
her half-century career, Tobin built a reputation as a civic and church leader.
Generations of children knew her as a blunt instrument of Americanization.
In 1902, then principal of the Hammond School, Tobin confronted an “uproar”
of student and parent strikers protesting bias against “children of Bohemian
and Polish heritage.” In 1915, when Tobin oversaw the predominantly Jew-
ish Marquette School, the Board of Education held a rare public hearing over
allegations that she had directed staff to beat students. Chicago had banned
corporal punishment in 1880. Though Tobin had renounced “old methods” of
discipline earlier in her career, staff members admitted that they had “resorted
to physical violence to quell the spirit” of children. Superintendent Ella Flagg
Young testified that she had transferred Tobin to Marquette “because it needed
a strong hand.”27
Nine years later, compulsory education and accusations of child abuse
triggered a mutiny at Cregier. In March 1924, over one hundred parents peti-
tioned for Tobin’s removal, providing an audit of “malicious and unduly cruel”
practices: hair pulling and flogging, suspending and banishing children to the
Parental School without cause. “She exacted corporal punishment for so little an
infraction as coming in five minutes late,” Dunayevskaya recalled. When they
had voiced their concerns, parents said, Tobin had directed staff to evict them
from the school. When they safeguarded their children at home, she summoned
Bodine and the juvenile court. Dunayevskaya said that Tobin’s anti-Semitism
provoked student ire. Replaying her rebellion in Ukraine, Spiegel and her class-
mates protested assimilation and anti-Semitism through boycott.28
Adults in the Cregier drama framed it as a conflict over “constitutional
rights.” Tobin characterized herself as a law enforcement officer. Redacting
statements to the Marquette inquiry, Tobin insisted that neither she nor her
teachers had ever employed corporal punishment because “‘corporal pun-
ishment’ is against board of education rules.” Immigrants, she said, failed to
comply with compulsory education laws that she was delegated to execute. “It
is largely a question of Americanization,” Tobin told reporters. “We have many
foreigners in the community, and it is difficult for them to understand and ac-
cept our laws and regulations.” Like many before him, parent leader Bernard
Weil saw state encroachments into “the regulation of juvenile life” as a seizure
of parental, specifically paternal, rights to rear children. Though Weil denied
being a “Socialist,” he credited xenophobic abuse for warming locals to com-
munism. “Mistreated, misused, misinformed, it is no wonder,” Weil grumbled,
“that a community that is 80 per cent Jewish and 15 per cent Italian should be
a hotbed of radicalism.”29
“To test the constitutionality of the compulsory attendance law,” Cregier

parents called for a student walkout. In a seemingly “conservative” turn, “revo-
lutionary youngsters” from the YWL snubbed the proposal. The fight was not
with Tobin alone, they argued, but against “the general state of affairs in schools
thruout the country.” Their enemy in this battle—the City of Chicago—could
deploy police within minutes to smother a strike. The battle with Tobin handed
the YWL an opportunity to organize for “a greater victory”: an alliance of par-
ents, students, and trade unions “to defend the rights of working class children
in public schools.” Formulated to combat illiteracy and abolish child labor, the
YWL’s tactical accommodation of compulsory education reflected what aboli-
tionist educator Erica R. Meiners has framed as a “reform/abolition tension” in
movements for structural change. At Cregier, the YWL’s gradualism collided
with the will of the Juniors.30
After Superintendent William McAndrew dismissed the charges against
Tobin, students and parents resurrected strike demands at a nearby meeting
hall. “Every child in the house voted ‘yes!’ with lungs and hands,” the Tribune
reported, “and popped up the arms of their parents.” On Monday, April 7, as
many as three hundred children picketed outside of the school. Police and tru-
ancy officers sacked the demonstration. Two “jeering lads” were “railroaded” to
the Parental School. Weil and another parent were arrested. That afternoon, the
Juniors hosted a festive rally. “Thus a smile came to my lips,” Dunayevskaya
wrote, “when I discovered that the Chicago Tribune had in 1924 recorded my
strike at Cregier public school, and I could read, ‘Many of the strikers came on
roller skates.’ We were thirteen-year-olds.” Triggered by memories “refreshed”
from a newspaper clipping, Dunayevskaya’s narrative commemorates not only
Spiegel’s ongoing refusal of tyrannies of schooling, but children’s collective acts
of freedom from adult authority: parents, child-savers, and the carceral state.
Strikers failed to overthrow Tobin, but YWL organizers continued to cultivate
student power at Cregier and struggled “to link up our immediate demands
with our final aims.”31
In May 1924, Spiegel graduated from the Juniors into the rank-and-file of
the YWL. As she immersed herself in a life of activism, Spiegel discovered other
troubling tensions in her communist school. She collided with a patriarchal
bureaucracy that belittled Black workers, overlooked the revolutionary poten-
tial of Black freedom movements, and buried Black autonomy under the race-
evasive banner of working-class unity. Fixated on what Black laborers could
learn from white organizers, communists overlooked what “Negroes’ indepen-
dent movement” could teach them. Continuing her search for an alternative
education, she sought out Black revolutionaries and immersed herself in Black
history and culture.32
“THE BLACK DIMENSION” 33

“I took myself from the Jewish ghetto to the Black ghetto in the 1920s,” Du-
nayevskaya wrote of her streetcar expeditions, where she witnessed energetic
Black rebellions against manifold injustices. “These new immigrants from the
South were in revolt not only against the life in the factories,” Dunayevskaya
observed, “but life in their neighborhoods, the crowding, the segregation in liv-
ing quarters, the discrimination and lack of freedom of movement.” Wherever
she traveled, Spiegel met students of the self-taught Jamaican printer, journal-
ist, and entrepreneur, Marcus Garvey. With a membership of at least six million
members worldwide, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
rose from the seismic circulation of people and ideas from the US South and
deeper south of the Caribbean. Spiegel’s arrival in Chicago intersected the
migration of over 100,000 Caribbean people to the United States. Caribbean ar-
rivals encountered anti-Black nativism, stereotypes of political radicalism, and
obstacles to immigration packaged in the national origin quotas of the Johnson-
Reed Act of 1924, exclusions designed in part to “hold down the immigration
that has begun to spring up among the negroes of the West Indies.” Though
headquartered in Harlem, the UNIA’s Chicago chapters rivaled New York in
size and pageantry. In splendid regalia, UNIA legions held marches, rallies, and
yearly conventions in the city.34
In March 1916, Marcus Garvey left Kingston on a pilgrimage to the Tuske-
gee Institute. Garvey sought support for an industrial school in Jamaica mod-
eled on the famed brainchild of his hero, Booker T. Washington. Billing himself
as a London-trained professor, Garvey introduced the UNIA to US Black com-
munities through grassroots lectures, advancing a curriculum of self-love and
self-help, education, and economic self-sufficiency inspired by Washington’s
program for racial uplift. The following year, the Bolshevik Revolution and
Britain’s declaration of support for “the establishment in Palestine of a na-
tional home for Jewish people” germinated bolder visions. At the end of the
war, “Negro workers and poor farmers who had been conscripted to ‘save the
world for democracy’” were rewarded with racist attacks in cities across Britain
and the United States, including Chicago. The pandemic of white suprema-
cist violence convinced Garvey that Black people would never secure safety
in any country other than their own. In solidarity with global independence
movements, the UNIA leveraged Allied overtures to self-determination into
demands for a “United Africa for the Africans of the World.”35
“Though Marcus Garvey wasn’t exactly a Marxist,” Dunayevskaya admit-

ted, her child-self marveled at his transnationalism and talent as an orga-
nizer. “The Garvey movement was the greatest movement America had ever
seen in mass numbers,” she reflected much later. “He really never made a
distinction between Chicago and Africa, or between New York and Jamaica,
or St. Louis and Haiti,” she wrote. “Everywhere in the world is where his vi-
sion led him to.” In his January 1924 eulogy to Lenin, “the world’s greatest
leader,” Garvey honored the late Bolshevik—and comrade Trotsky—as radi-
cal educators. Garvey celebrated the Bolsheviks for overthrowing an empire
that had condemned Russian people to “ignorance.” With an “untutored,
unwieldy mass” of students, they built a system of social democracy that
promised “peace and perfect peace” to the world. Garvey invoked historical
bonds between Black and Russian workers in first-person plural. “We are of
the class that rules in Russia,” Garvey told his followers, “and naturally our
sympathy should be with the people who feel with us, who suffer with us.”
When Spiegel encountered the UNIA, she felt reverberations of the trans-
formative collectivity of the Red Army. Garvey’s analysis of the revolution
evoked her own rebellions in Ukraine. His tributes to the Russian peasantry
reflected her attraction to Africans in the Americas. “The Blacks may have
been speaking Marcus Garvey language,” Dunayevskaya explained. “To me
it was the Russian Revolution.”36
Though Garvey praised Russian Bolsheviks, he had a volatile relationship
with US communists. Socialists A. Philip Randolph and Hubert Harrison gifted
Garvey a pulpit in Harlem and “Black Reds” initially swelled the ranks of the
UNIA. But the UNIA’s contagious popularity among what Harry Haywood
described as “the submerged Black peasantry” sparked corrosive rivalries with
Black Marxists, white communists, and liberal organizations like the NAACP.
A chorus of otherwise adversarial freedom fighters colluded with Hoover and
the Justice Department to deport him. This unlikely alliance led Dunayevskaya
to conclude that Garvey exposed “the gulf that separated the black masses from
the black intellectuals.”37
As Garvey appealed convictions for mail fraud, Chicago communists con-
fronted “curious difficulties” trying to recruit Black workers. The Daily Worker
blamed the “fetish of Garveyism—that curious philosophy that tries to teach
the Negroes not to fight for their rights in their own country, but to leave the
fight and go to another country.” Though Garvey stood in their way, com-
munists “have created a little whirlwind of revolutionary ardor on the South
Side,” the paper claimed, “by distributing literature, by circulating pamphlets,
by speaking to gatherings on street corners.”38
The Spiegel sisters were among them. But there was nothing “curious”
about Garveyism to the rookie organizers. Excluded from racist unions and
marginalized by white radicals, Black workers sustained independent move-
ments for freedom. Like the state and non-state agents that hunted them—in-
cluding Hoover, local Red Squads, and their publicists in the press—white com-
munists clung to narratives of Black ignorance and gullibility when confronted
with autonomous revolts, communal defense, and demands for unconditional
equality. Failing to recognize Black freedom struggles as the “whirlwind of
revolutionary ardor” on the South Side, Spiegel’s comrades translated practices
of self-determination into “the myth” that Black people were “impossible to
organize.” The UNIA, Dunayevskaya argued, “showed that was a lie.”39
Though Spiegel felt kinship with Black migrants, she had yet to confront her
newfound privileges of whiteness. As “emotionally integral” as anti-Semitism
was to her becoming, the oppressions Black people combatted, she learned,
were simply “beyond compare.” Eugene Williams was murdered for drifting
across an aquatic color line, but Spiegel trespassed across Chicago’s warren of
racial, ethnic, and class boundaries freely by streetcar. Indeed, Dunayevskaya’s
accounts of gaining a “real education” in Chicago begin with these transgres-
sive voyages. Her observations of Black Chicagoans’ “lack of freedom of move-
ment” were made possible by the rebellious mobility she enjoyed as a white
youth unencumbered by industrial labor or the “stringent surveillance” that
stalked Black women and girls. According to Dunayevskaya’s self-portrait,
Spiegel put these freedoms to work by supporting processes to center antira-
cism within “the life of the party,” prosecute “white chauvinism,” and surren-
der leadership to “victims of this prejudice.” As an individual, she set out to
build relationships with Black organizations, devote her labors to Black libera-
tion and learn from Black people, particularly Black men.40
“INTRODUCING RAE SPIEGEL”41

In October 1925, when she was fifteen years old, Spiegel attended the founding
convention of the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC). Lovett Fort-White-
man, a globe-trotting Comintern strategist from Texas, envisioned the ANLC as
a transnational movement for interracial solidarity against racism, colonialism,
and imperialism led by Black workers worldwide. Trained at the Communist
University of the Toilers of the East, Fort-Whiteman was a delegate to the
Fifth Congress of the Communist International and recruited Black people to
study in Russia. Rather than “rival” or duplicate existing work, Fort-Whiteman
wanted to unite “ALL organizations of Negro working people and farmers”—
including the Communist Party and the UNIA—into a collaborative network.
At Medill High School, Spiegel wrote editorials for the student newspaper.
After school, she commuted to the ANLC’s national office on Chicago’s South
Side. From 1925 to 1927, Spiegel worked for Fort-Whiteman and augmented her
apprenticeship by helping to produce the ANLC’s newspaper, the Negro Cham-
pion. Fort-Whiteman’s efforts to unify disparate Black organizations introduced
Spiegel to Black workers, artists, and organizers with diverse political ideolo-
gies and visions of liberation, including race men of the NAACP.42
In the summer of 1926, Fort-Whiteman invited William Pickens to serve as
a delegate to the First International Congress against Imperialism and Colo-
nialism in Brussels. Though he was not a communist, Pickens was a party ally.
Fort-Whiteman helped Pickens organize a European lecture tour. As Pickens
prepared for his trip, he posted a signed copy of his memoir, Bursting Bonds, to
Fort-Whiteman. “The stenographer, a very charming young lady pounced upon
the book at the start,” Fort-Whiteman reported back, “and she says that she will
not let it leave her grasp until she has completed it.” The first book by a Black
author Spiegel had read, Bursting Bonds was an expanded, second edition of The
Heir of Slaves, a tale of the son of formerly enslaved sharecroppers who became
a prize-winning Yale graduate. Journeying from a backbreaking boyhood in
Southern plantations to the headquarters of the NAACP, Pickens’s chronicle of
self-teaching captivated Spiegel. Denied formal schooling until he was eleven
years old, Pickens’s tenacious pursuit of education led him to the front lines of
Black freedom movements.43
A Black child’s romance “with school and study,” Bursting Bonds delivered
love notes to grassroots intellectuals. Pickens honored a network of “appointed
teachers” who trained him “in mental and moral discipline” and “vigilant self-
defense”: his mother and older sisters, Black elders in an Arkansas stave factory,
Polish workers in Chicago ironworks and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, poet-laureate
of the Negro race. Picking cotton, paddling ferries across the Arkansas River,
building barrels, and swinging a foundry hammer were as “integral” an educa-
tion “as any other thing I ever did or any book I ever studied,” Pickens wrote.
After graduating from the omniscient heights of academic inquiry at Yale, the
author concluded: “Real living is the great educator.”44
In November 1926, Spiegel published a review of Bursting Bonds in the
Negro Champion. The stenographer-turned–literary critic described the book as a
“breath-taking” story of metamorphosis. Spiegel admired Pickens’s “optimistic
view of life”: a faith in Black folk’s ability to persevere through “hard times,”
overcome “the lashes of life’s whip,” and expand opportunities—particularly
educational opportunities—to future generations. Though Pickens explored
specificities of anti-Blackness, Spiegel read a vision that transcended race. “Just
as life itself continually changes,” Spiegel wrote, “so do we as human beings.”

One change resonated with the young atheist in particular: Pickens’s apparent
abandonment of Christianity since he first published the book.45
In Bursting Bonds, Spiegel glimpsed a universe of Black knowledge that both
public schools and the YWL had ignored, discredited, or otherwise encrypted.
Presenting “the cruel facts concerning the Negro in America” in tactile prose,
Pickens taught Spiegel the power of storytelling in service of liberatory educa-
tion. Through the affective magnetism of self-narrative, Pickens invited soli-
darities across borders of difference. In an inversion of Spiegel’s own encounter
with his book, Pickens described his methodical reading of Latin, Greek, and
German poetry—a literacy that bonded him with Polish co-laborers in Chi-
cago—as “a ‘transmigration of the soul’ through literature and art.” Seeking
her own reincarnations, Spiegel undertook “a more detailed and serious study
of the Negro literature.”46
Weekly seminars at the ANLC’s South Side headquarters enriched Spiegel’s
study. On Sunday afternoons, Fort-Whiteman hosted “open forums” for work-
ers. Featuring interracial cohorts of writers, curators, and artists, the forums
were “centers of enlightment,” Fort-Whiteman announced, co-learning spaces
where Black workers could discuss “the political, social, and economic forces”
that impacted their lives. Showcasing “the imaginative, the emotional and
artistic sides of the Negro,” an early meeting foregrounded Black aesthetics as
an intrinsic part of Black liberation. In the pages of the Daily Worker, Spiegel
published reports on the salons and invited readers to join.47
That December, the Daily Worker published her take on YWL national secre-
tary Sam Darcy’s The Challenge of Youth, a manifesto for workers and students
who “have been organizing in school strikes against militarism, against all sorts
of specialized systems of handing out capitalist dope.” Darcy personalized a
forensic accounting of child labor, poverty, and US imperialism in the narrative
of “John Doe.” An honors student, Doe left school to support parents who had
sacrificed “everything they had to give their boy a better education.” Calling
the recruitment pamphlet “proletarian art,” Spiegel’s review focused on Doe’s
journey to combat his miseducation. After a shop-mate introduces him to the
YWL, Doe guides the reader on a crash course in history and political economy.
Taking his education into his own hands, Doe “woke up and became a rebel.”48
As Spiegel began her study of Black literature, Pickens returned the gaze.
In July 1926, the United Press uncovered a Soviet plot “to convert Negroes to
Communism” by sponsoring Black artists to perform in Moscow. Responding
to the story in the Daily Worker, Pickens mocked journalists and their govern-
ment informants for trembling at Black mobility. “Seeing Russia will doubtless
get American Negroes or anybody else much nearer to the truth about that
country than reading American newspapers about Russia,” Pickens asserted.
With the help of Fort-Whiteman, Pickens not only saw the Soviet Union for
himself, but shared his impressions of Russian society in a series of dispatches
for the Associated Negro Press. After lecturing in Britain, he traveled to Berlin
and onward by rail to Russia. Transcribing his voyage, Pickens compared “color
prejudice” across metropoles. From New York to London to Paris to Berlin,
Pickens mapped the slow retreat of racism until he reached Moscow, where
there was “absolutely none.” Pickens’s Russia was an idyll of boundless liberty,
where “deference and servility” was extinct and “the cordiality of comrade-
ship everywhere.” Reflecting on visits with Jewish communities in Moscow,
Pickens concluded that “the greatest human gain in Russia is the freedom of
the Jews . . . all the terrors of the revolution are compensated for in the freedom
and equality of this people alone.”49
When Pickens returned to New York in February 1927, he found a letter
from Spiegel. Though they had never met, the teenager greeted Pickens with a
comradely salutation: “Dear Brother.” Spiegel applauded the translation of his
books into Russian and expressed her delight at reading his travelogues. “I am
always glad to hear that the Proletariat form of government—the Soviet Gov-
ernment—can rise above the rest of the world,” Spiegel wrote, “show them that
it is above color prejudice, that color has nothing to do with ability.” Enclosing
a clipping of her review of Bursting Bonds, Spiegel confessed that Pickens had
inspired her “venture—into the field of Negro literature.”50
Promoted to literary editor of the Negro Champion, Spiegel continued her
study with Fire in the Flint, the 1924 novel by Walter White, the NAACP’s sec-
ond in command. White examined the psychology of murderous white vigilan-
tes and the dissociative behaviors of “intelligent Negroes in the South.” Surgeon
and war veteran “Doc” Kenneth Harper returns “home” from the trenches to
set up shop in “Central City” Georgia. Reorienting himself to Southern life,
Harper is repulsed by “ignorant and coarse” Black laborers. In turn, “the poorer
classes of Negroes” expose his profound “ignorance” of Jim Crow. Another
teacher—love interest Jane Phillips—accelerates Harper’s transition from naive
racial optimist to “powerful champion of his race.” The Fisk-trained musician
devises a plan to use Harper’s wealth to organize “a National Negro Farmer’s
Co-operative and Protective League.” For Harper, Phillips’s vision evoked the
Bolshevik Revolution. “Hadn’t the co-operative societies been the backbone of
the movement to get rid of the Czar in Russia?” Harper asks himself. “If the
Russian peasants, who certainly weren’t as educated as the Negro in America,
had made a success of the idea, the Negro in the South ought to do it.” As the
co-operative grows, the “‘white, Protestant, Gentile’ citizens of Central City”

lynch him and his brother.51
Like Spiegel’s other chosen teachers, White radiated kinships that collapsed
the distance between Ukraine and the United States, peasants and sharecrop-
pers, Cossacks and lynch mobs. In a letter to White, Spiegel praised the “in-
clusive psychology of human nature” in his prose, “regardless of sex, color,
race, or nation.” She had devoured Fire in the Flint “breathlessly” in one sitting.
The novel was “both educational and interesting,” and like Pickens’s memoir,
“brimming over with the cruel facts of reality.” White thanked Spiegel for her
“very charming review” and confessed that in it he had “poured much of the
pent-up feeling and bitterness against the monstrous injustices perpetrated in
the United States on Negroes.” Like Bursting Bonds, Fire in the Flint was being
translated into several languages. The translations would help teach readers
around the world, Spiegel replied, learners like her, about “the monstrosity of
the conditions under which the Negroes are forced to live under in America.”52
By March 1927, Spiegel had retired from the offices of the ANLC. A change
in guard saw Fort-Whiteman wrenched from leadership and the editorial of-
fices of the Negro Champion exported to New York. With the support of her
comrades at the NAACP, Spiegel continued the project she began in the ANLC,
writing reviews on books about race, the Black experience, and “the Russian
Jew’s attitude toward the Negro” for both communist publications and the As-
sociated Negro Press (ANP).53
That summer, Pickens welcomed Spiegel into the coterie of ANP contribu-
tors. Attached to his adventurous biography of the teenage prodigy was a book
review. “Five years ago she knew not a word of English,” Pickens proclaimed.
“Today see how she can analyze Carl Van Vechten’s rot and the American
soul in the following dissection of ‘Nigger Heaven.’” Panning Van Vechten’s
attempt to represent Black life “as a complete failure,” Spiegel accused the
author of perpetuating myths about “human nature” and racial difference that
defied “logic.” Among the novel’s attempts to define “distinctly Negro traits,”
Spiegel found “CPT (colored people’s time)” particularly vexing. “I, as a Jew-
ess, know that the Jews think Jewish time is synonymous with ‘late,’” Spiegel
wrote. “What have those two races in common?” After sketching a shared
history of subjugation, Spiegel urged readers to dismantle racial taxonomies.
She concluded the review with a rebuttal of Van Vechten’s apparent suggestion
that Black prosperity would lead to “the abolition of race prejudice.” “Wealth
is no solution to race prejudice,” Spiegel argued. “Social equality is, and social
equality can only be acquired by the masses of workers, both black and white,
fighting together their common enemy, Capitalism.”54
Spiegel’s review was a near-carbon copy of a column published under Pick-

ens’s name in the Daily Worker one week earlier. Under the headline “Artistic
Exploitation,” Pickens wrote not as a “Jewess,” but as a Black man “acquainted
with many Jews.” Pickens may have donated the essay to his protégé, but the
review’s ambiguous provenance—coupled with its comparative analysis—sug-
gests co-authorship, a practice of dialogue that reinforces the authors’ pleas for
solidarity.55
Thanks to Pickens, the ANP broadened Spiegel’s audience. She followed
with a tribute to the late Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pickens’s mentor, on what
would have been Dunbar’s fifty-fifth birthday. In a brief scene from the life
of “the Greatest American Negro poet,” Spiegel noted familiar themes: self-
teaching, surmounting “crushing limitations” and—by profiling the relation-
ship between Dunbar and white patron Henry Tobey—co-resistance. That
summer, the Chicago Evening Post hired Spiegel as an assistant literary editor.
The position was short-lived. She clashed with her “white ‘boss,’” Llewellyn
Jones, over a critical review of white physician E. C. L. Adams’s Congaree
Sketches, a collection of Black folklore from lower Richland County, South
Carolina. Sending her draft to W. E. B. Du Bois for comments and potential
publication in The Crisis, Spiegel noted her aversion to “books by whites about
the Negro.” In his brief response to “Mr. Rae Spiegel,” Du Bois graciously de-
clined. His magazine had already reviewed the book, Du Bois replied, but he
assured her that they shared a similar “point of view.” Spiegel’s partnership
with Pickens continued after she proposed to collaborate on a dramatization
of his 1922 short story collection, The Vengeance of the Gods. In his foreword,
Pickens argued that white writers were incapable of crafting Black characters.
“It is not simply that the white story teller will not do full justice to the human-
ity of the black race,” Pickens argued, “he cannot.” Yet Pickens trusted Spiegel
to translate his work to the stage. “Use your head,” Pickens wrote. “You have
a good one.”56
The twenty-year prophecy for the February 1928 graduates of Medill High
School pictured Rae Spiegel as an international correspondent “of great fame.”
By then, Spiegel was already “well-known” in the Black press. When the
Gary American introduced a literary column in September 1928, listed among
the newspaper’s contributors—just after Du Bois—was “Miss Rae Spiegel.”
A few days after she graduated, Trotsky was exiled to Kazakhstan. That fall,
the YWL called a vote to approve the Bolshevik leader’s expulsion. Spiegel
implored comrades to read and debate Trotsky’s critique of the party’s pro-
gram. The spirit of egalitarianism, comradeship, and critical inquiry that had
drawn her into the party had vanished. “Little Raya got treated to a sample of
‘revolutionary socialist democracy,’” Dunayevskaya recalled, “when she was

expelled from the YCL by being rolled down a dirty staircase.”57
Eighteen and politically isolated, Spiegel left Chicago in search of other
dissidents. Working at the center of the Trotskyist movement throughout the
1930s, the itinerant activist edited and contributed to various Trotskyist pub-
lications. Hitchhiking to California, she mobilized Spartacus Youth Clubs, the
youth wing of the Trotskyist movement. At a 1936 conference in Washington,
DC, young Black radical—later filmmaker—Allen Willis met “a small, friendly
white radical literature agent selling Marxist pamphlets.” At the time, Spiegel
had organized an interracial study group in the segregated capital. She was
also collaborating with Howard University professors Ralph Bunche and
Emmett Dorsey in the Washington Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers,
a support group for Black sharecroppers. “Raya’s activity in Washington,”
Willis discovered, “was only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, of her previ-
ous decade-long activity in the labor and Black movements.” After spending
a year teaching herself Russian, Spiegel traveled to Trotsky’s home in exile in
Coyoacán, Mexico. Her help as his Russian secretary, Trotsky boasted, was “in-
estimable.” Though Dunayevskaya considered her work in Mexico the “highest
moment in my life” at the time, “my real development,” she insisted, “began
with the break from Trotsky.”58
THE PEDAGOGY OF THE ARCHIVE

“All history is contemporary, because we always see past history with the eyes
of today,” Dunayevskaya observed at the January 1969 “Black-Red Confer-
ence,” a multiracial, multigenerational gathering of sixty activists represent-
ing over a dozen organizations. She positioned these “new passions and new
forces” of the Second Reconstruction in a genealogy that included enslaved
rebels, abolitionists, and the UNIA. Dunayevskaya condemned the white left’s
enduring racism and mourned ongoing obstacles to communion across differ-
ence. Persistent barriers to co-resistance were, to her, a “tragedy.” Later that
year, Dunayevskaya donated seven thousand pages of materials documenting
a half-century of US Marxism to the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State
University. Securing full curatorial control, she designed the archive for activ-
ists rather than academics. “As we turn to being ‘archivists’ we are also dealing
with the development of today into tomorrow,” Dunayevskaya told comrades.
The purpose of the archive was to nourish future struggles with heritage and
philosophy. Inviting readers to “feel an urgency to get the issues and become
participants in that future,” Dunayevskaya wrote a detailed introduction to
the collection as a whole and forewords to its twelve volumes. Conceived as
“a living history,” the archive would grow, she hoped, with movements for
freedom. Before she died, it had expanded to more than ten thousand pages.59
The author of the archive could not avoid that she was also its protagonist.
Curated to navigate “the life of an idea, not the life of a person,” the collec-
tion’s initial point of departure was 1941, marking her break from Trotskyism
and fourteen-year partnership with Grace Lee Boggs and C. L. R. James. As the
collection grew, Dunayevskaya mapped a fuller spectrum of her life onto this
“Body of Ideas.” In 1985, Dr. Philip Mason, founding director of the Reuther
Library, begged Dunayevskaya to share stories from her childhood at an exhibi-
tion of recently uncovered documents from the 1920s. The request bothered her.
“I wasn’t important then,” she thought. Moreover, Mason’s request threatened
to “betray our principle that the only biography worth bothering about is the
‘biography of an Idea.’” Accepting Mason’s “challenge” as a teaching opportu-
nity, Dunayevskaya shared only a few anecdotes that connected “historic, objec-
tive” moments of geopolitical significance to the subjectivity of everyday life. “I
am doing so to illustrate the difference between an idea in embryo and in full
development,” Dunayevskaya said during her opening address, “between pro-
cess and result, as well as the whole question of a child’s perception, when great
revolutions occur and for how long these impressions last.” Traveling from
the Pale of Settlement to the segregated ghettoes of Chicago, Dunayevskaya
anchored her politics to the chance occurrence of her birth—“the ramifications
of 1917 on a child in Russia that she never forgot”—and the lessons of Black
revolutions underway in the United States. Stretched to an earlier beginning,
Dunayevskaya now rooted her archive, and the history of Marxist-Humanism,
in the 1920s, “the personal,” and “the Black Dimension.” Previously deposited
volumes documented Dunayevskaya’s collaborations with “Negro women” in
later decades, as well as her contributions to what scholars have called “Inter-
sectional Marxism” and “abolition feminism.” But in this prequel chapter to the
collection—“Early Years, 1924–1928”—“the Black Dimension” was embodied
by race men who introduced her to Black radicalism, Black study, and story:
narratives of exile, co-resistance, and self-teaching that reflected her own dis-
obedient pursuits of freedom.60
“My passion is ‘revolution in permanence,’” Dunayevskaya confided to
poet Adrienne Rich in January 1987. “I am forever searching for new begin-
nings,” she wrote months before she died. Championing “the daring, the imagi-
nation, the energy, the rebellious nature of youth,” Dunayevskaya believed that
“new beginnings”—unforeseen forces and philosophies of liberation—were
generated not by political leaders, academics, or “old radicals” like her, but by
the imagination, dialogue and self-development of people who were experts on
their own lives. Practicing what she asked from others, she endeavored to in-
spire self-directed learning and radical collectivity through the perceptions, im-
pressions, and origin story of Rae Spiegel, an ordinary, insubordinate migrant
child who taught herself across tense terrains of ever-expanding solidarities.61
NOTES
1. For their invaluable feedback, I thank Dana Maria Asbury, Khalil Anthony Johnson, and the
anonymous reviewers. This article was made possible in part by the support of the NAED/
Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship program. Since I first consulted the microfilm
edition of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, the News and Letters Committees and the
Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund has digitized the archive. Honoring Dunayevskaya’s
mission of open access, the archive is available at https://rayadunayevskaya.org/. The online
archive retains the microfilm page numbers cited below. William Pickens, “Introducing Rae
Spiegel,” California Eagle, June 17, 1927.
2. Pickens, “‘Bolshevism’ As Seen by Representative of Oppressed American Group,” January
29, 1927, William Pickens Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, micro-
film edition, reel 27 (hereafter Pickens Papers); excerpts serialized in various ANP member
publications; Pickens, “Introducing Rae Spiegel”; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 205–12, 217.
3. Arthur Pincus, “From Exile Trotsky Mocks His Foe,” New York Times Magazine, March
27, 1938; Raya Dunayevskaya, “Our Organization: American Roots and World Concepts,”
July 1953, in Raya Dunayevskaya Collection: Marxist-Humanism: A Half-Century of Its
World Development (Detroit: Wayne State University Archives, 1981–c.1988), microfilm
edition, 2107–2116 (hereafter RDC); “Raya Dunayevskaya videotape interview with Cedric
Robinson,” April 1983, RDC, 15945–15946 (hereafter Robinson interview); Dunayevskaya,
“Dialectics of Revolution: American Roots and World Humanist Concepts,” March 21, 1985,
RDC, 8405; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1998), 67, 87.
4. Mary Hamilton et al., Freedom Riders Speak for Themselves (Detroit: News & Letters, 1961),
10–12, 58; American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard (Chicago: News and
Letters, 1983, 1963), 3–4, 7; Dunayevskaya, “The Heritage and the Challenge,” The Young
Marxist-Humanist (Detroit: News & Letters, 1963), 1–4; Eugene Walker, “News & Letters as
Theory/Practice,” Dialectics of Revolution: American Roots and World Humanist Concepts
(Chicago: News and Letters Committees, 1985), 21; David Stovall, “Are We Ready for
‘School’ Abolition?: Thoughts and Practices of Radical Imaginary in Education,” Taboo: The
Journal of Culture and Education 17, no. 1 (2018): 51–61.
5. Dunayevskaya, Perspectives 1978–1979 (Detroit: News & Letters, 1978), RDC, 5818; “Minutes
of REB Meeting of January 29, 1985,” RDC, 16518; Dunayevskaya, “Introduction/Overview
to Volume XII,” Guide to the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (Detroit: Wayne State University
Archives, 1986), 57.
6. W. L. Bodine, “Child Saving in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1904; Sophonisba
P. Breckenridge and Edith Abbott, The Delinquent Child and the Home (New York: Survey
Associates, 1916), 55–57; “‘Baby Reds’ Expect Raid: Police Disappoint Them,” Chicago
Tribune, May 21, 1923; Dunayevskaya, “Our Organization,” RDC, 2081; Annette Ruth
Appell, “Uneasy Tensions Between Children’s Rights and Civil Rights,” Nevada Law Journal
5, no. 141 (2004): 141–71; Damien M. Sojoyner, “Black Radicals Make for Bad Citizens:
Undoing the Myth of the School to Prison Pipeline,” Berkeley Review of Education 4, no. 2
(2013): 243; K. Tsianina Lomawaima, “History without Silos, Ignorance versus Knowledge,
Education beyond Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2014): 349–55.
7. Dunayevskaya to Eugene Walker et al., October 14, 1969, RDC, 14070; Adrienne Rich,
“Living the Revolution,” Women’s Review of Books 3, no. 12 (1986): 1, 3–4; Dina Georgis,
The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), 1–3, 25,
117–18, 150; Hannah Dyer, The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood: Asymmetries of Innocence
and the Cultural Politics of Child Development (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2020), 12, 16–17, 61.
8. Dunayevskaya, Perspectives, RDC, 5818.
9. “Illinois, Federal Naturalization Records, 1856–1991,” database and digital image s.v. “Joseph
Spiegel,” declaration no. 125317, December 1, 1920 and petition no. 31610, February 21, 1927,
Ancestry.com; “California, US, Federal Naturalization Records, 1843–1999,” database and
digital image s.v. “Brana Spiegel,” petition no. 140722, July 27, 1949, Ancestry.com; Stephen
Franklin, “Portrait of a Revolutionary,” Detroit Free Press, June 12, 1983; Terry Moon, “Raya
Dunayevskaya,” in Women Building Chicago 1790–1900: A Biographical Dictionary, eds. Rima
Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 238; John Doyle
Klier, Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011); Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 30–56.
10. Dunayevskaya, Perspectives, RDC, 5818–5819; Dunayevskaya, “Dialectics of Revolution,”
RDC, 8422; Dunayevskaya to Calvin Brown, June 5, 1985, RDC, 15969; Raya Dunayevskaya:
Biography of an Idea, directed by Alex Fletcher (Marxist-Humanist Initiative, 2012), August
21, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_3tZ7YpO4Y.
11. Dunayevskaya, Perspectives, RDC, 5818–5819; Dunayevskaya, interview with Jonathan
Bloom, March 24, 1983, Box 2, Cassette 75, Oral History of the American Left Collection,
Tamiment Library, New York University (hereafter OHAL); Dunayevskaya, “Dialectics
of Revolution,” RDC, 8422; Dunayevskaya to Brown, RDC, 15969; Dunayevskaya to “K,”
January 8, 1987, RDC, 11272; Gur Alroey, “Sexual Violence, Rape, and Pogroms, 1903–
1920,” Jewish Culture and History 18, no. 3 (September 2017): 313–30.
12. Elias Heifetz, The Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine in 1919 (New York: Thomas Seltzer,
1921); “US, Border Crossings from Canada to US, 1895–1960,” database and digital image,
SS Empress of Scotland arriving at Port of Quebec, Canada, May, 25, 1922, p. 117, lines
10–17, Ancestry.com; Dunayevskaya with Bloom, OHAL.
13. Nat Kaplan, “In the Domain of the Children’s Struggle,” Daily Worker, March 8, 1924.
14. “Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt” and “Race Riots,” New York Times, July 28, 1919;
“Negro Uprisings Part of Communists’ Plot,” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 1919; “Jim
Larkin and 500 Taken in ‘Red Raid,’” Chicago Tribune, November 9, 1919; “Radicalism
and Sedition Among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications,” New York Times,
November 23, 1919; “Raid Reds Here” and “Reds Plotting to Start Revolution, Hoyne
Declares,” Chicago Tribune, January 2, 1920; “Federal Men and Police Nab 200 in Chicago”
and “Aliens Seized in Huge Raids to be Deported,” Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1920; Harry
Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago:
Liberator Press, 1978), 1–4; Dunayevskaya, “Dialectics of Revolution,” RDC, 8422; “REB
Meeting of March 26, 1985,” RDC, 16559; Dunayevskaya to Robert A. Hill, May 11, 1985,
RDC, 15965; Mark Ellis, “J. Edgar Hoover and the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919,” Journal of
American Studies 28, no. 1 (April 1994): 39–59.
15. “Klan Outrages Increase Over Entire Country,” Chicago Defender, December 30, 1922;
“Twenty-Six Lynched in United States this Year,” Chicago Defender, December 29, 1923;
F. Forest (Dunayevskaya), “Palmer Raids,” The Militant, August 23, 1948; Dunayevskaya,
“Introduction/Overview to Volume XII,” 57.
16. Ella Flagg Young, Isolation in the School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1901), 7,
89–111; Edith Abbott and Sophonisba P. Breckenridge, Truancy and Non-Attendance in the
Chicago Schools (New York: University of Chicago Press, 1917), 265–67; David B. Tyack,
“Ways of Seeing: An Essay on the History of Compulsory Schooling,” Harvard Educational
Review 46, no. 3 (1976): 355–89.
17. “Flogging in the Public Schools,” Chicago Tribune, August 5, 1873; “Public Schools as
Reformatories,” Chicago Tribune, October 16, 1873; Bodine, “Child Saving,” 11; Abbott
and Breckenridge, Truancy and Non-Attendance, 17–88; Breckenridge and Abbott, The
Delinquent Child, 66–67; Tyack, “Ways of Seeing,” 363–64, 373–76; Cynthia Kay Barron,
“History of the Chicago Parental School, 1902–1975” (PhD diss., Loyola University of
Chicago, 1993), 11–12, 18–19, 34; Tera Eva Agyepong, The Criminalization of Black Children:
Race, Gender and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 7–69.
18. Bodine, “Child Saving”; “Urges Mercy for Boys,” Chicago Tribune, January 11, 1907;
“Mystery Grows Over Death of Vardeman Boy,” Chicago Tribune, September 4, 1921;
“Parental Girls’ School Cleared in Torture Sift,” Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1923;
Agyepong, The Criminalization of Black Children, 60–64.
19. “The Second Convention,” Young Worker, June 1923, 1; Tyack, Ways of Seeing, 374;
Dunayevskaya with Bloom, OHAL; Franklin, “Portrait of a Revolutionary”; Judy and
Eugene Gogol, “Remembrance of Bess Gogol,” News & Letters, October 1996, 4; Kenneth C.
Wolensky, Nicole H. Wolensky, and Robert P. Wolensky, Fighting For the Union Label: The
Women’s Garment Industry and the ILGWU in Pennsylvania (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2002), 45–49.
20. Young Workers League of America: Manifesto, Program, Resolutions and Constitution
(Chicago: Young Workers League of America, 1922), 16.
21. Young Workers League of America, 22–23; “Convention Call,” Young Worker, March-April
1922, 16; Harry Gannes, “Can Students Be Revolutionary?” Young Worker, May 1922, 13–14;
“Child Workers Increase,” Young Worker, August–September 1922, 14; Kaplan, “Domain”;
Kaplan, “Question of a Slogan,” Young Worker, December 15, 1926, 6; Theodore Draper, The
Roots of American Communism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003, 1957), 176–
225, 327–44; Paul C. Mishler, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps,
and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999), 42–44.
22. Young Workers League of America, 15; Max Shachtman, “Organize the Young Workers!”
and Kaplan, “Towards a Movement of the Workers’ Children,” Young Worker, October 1923,
1–2, 4–5; Kaplan, “Domain”; Dunayevskaya, “Our Organization,” RDC, 2105; Kenneth
Teitelbaum, Schooling for “Good Rebels”: Socialist Education for Children in the United
States, 1900–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Mishler, Raising Reds, 31.
23. “Children’s Week,” Young Worker, July 1923, 15; “With the Junior Groups,” Young Worker,
September 1923, 20; Kaplan, “Towards a Movement,” 4–5; Kaplan, “Domain”; Mishler,
Raising Reds, 15–62.
24. Dunayevskaya, “Our Organization,” RDC, 2055; “And Still They Come!” The Worker,
September 29, 1923; “Junior Groups Locked Out of Meeting Hall,” Daily Worker, November
21, 1924; Dunayevskaya, Perspectives, RDC, 5818; Franklin, “Portrait of a Revolutionary,” 8;
Judy and Eugene Gogol, “Remembrance of Bess Gogol,” 4.
25. “The Young Comrade,” Young Worker, November 1923, 8–9; “Hands Off Workers’ Germany:
Down with Capitalist Teachings,” Young Comrade, December 1923, 1–2; “Comrade Sunny’s
Column,” Young Comrade, December 1923, 8; “Why We Fight Against the Public Schools”
and Comrade Sunny (Spiegel), “Comrade Sunny’s Column,” Young Comrade, January 1924,
1–2, 8; “Comrade Sunny’s Column,” Young Comrade, February 1924, 8.
26. “See Red Net Spread to Catch Children,” New York Times, November 30, 1923; “Red Attempt
to Invade Schools Here Revealed,” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1923; Leo Granoff, “Why
and How I Became a Member of the Junior Section,” Young Comrade, February 1924, 4;
“Red Campaign in Schools Disclosed in Bay City,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1924;
C. B. Hopkins, “The Red Menace,” Chicago Medical Recorder 46 (1924): 342–43; Ishbel Ross,
“The Boy Trotzky of Harlem,” in The Best News Stories of 1923, ed. Joseph Anthony (Boston:
Small, Maynard & Company, 1924), 389–93.
27. 1870 United States Census, Aurora, Kane County, Illinois, database and digital image s.v.
“Mary Tobin,” Ancestry.com; “Corporal Punishment: The Board of Education Pass a Rule
Abolishing It,” Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1880; “Two School Strikes,” Chicago Daily News,
November 7, 1902; “Tells of the Philippines,” Chicago Tribune, March 6, 1904; “Rod Not
Spared in this School, Teacher Admits,” Chicago Tribune, April 16, 1915; “Trials Prompt
School Inquiry,” Chicago Examiner, April 17, 1915; “Mary E. Tobin, Retired School Principal,
Dies,” Chicago Tribune, August 23, 1939; James W. Saunders, The Education of An Urban
Minority: Catholics in Chicago, 1833–1965 (New York: Oxford, 1977), 23–40.
28. “Angry Parents Demand School Principal Quit,” Chicago Tribune, March 21, 1924;
Dunayevskaya, “Dialectics of Revolution,” RDC, 8421.
29. Bodine, “Child Saving”; “‘Cruel? I’m Not,’ Principal Says; Defies Accusers,” Chicago Tribune,
March 22, 1924; “Youthful Reds Spike Plan of School Strike,” Chicago Tribune, March 31,
1924; Kaplan, “YWL Organizes Action Against Brutal Teachers,” Daily Worker, April 1,
1924; Tyack, “Ways of Seeing,” 361–63, 368, Appell, “Uneasy Tensions,” 167.
30. “Youthful Reds”; Shachtman, “Hearst’s Poison Press Spits Out Lies,” Daily Worker, April 1,
1924; Kaplan, “YWL Organizes Action”; Kaplan, “Question of a Slogan,” 6; Erica R. Meiners,
“Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building Abolition Futures,” Urban Review 43, no. 4
(2011): 550.
31. “600 Kids Happy as Parents Vote School Walkout,” Chicago Tribune, April 3, 1924; “Cregier
Pupils Strike Despite Peace Effort,” Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1924; Kaplan, “Parents’ Union
Coming Out of School Strike,” Daily Worker, April 9, 1924; Kaplan, “Question of a Slogan,”
6; “Say Reds Agitate in Chicago Schools,” New York Times, July 29, 1930; Dunayevskaya,
“Dialectics of Revolution,” RDC, 8421; Dunayevskaya, “Theory/Practice: Part III,” News &
Letters, March 1986, 5.
32. Dunayevskaya, “Our Organization,” RDC, 2051–2053.

33. Dunayevskaya to Hill, May 11, 1985.

34. 65 Cong. Rec., April 9, 1924, 5945 (Senator Reed); Dunayevskaya, “Our Organization,” RDC,
2051; Dunayevskaya to Hill, May 11, 1985; Dunayevskaya to Adrienne Rich, September
18, 1986, RDC, 11302; Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean
Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998), 9–49, 122–85;
Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 82–122; Erik S. McDuffie, “Chicago,
Garveyism, and the History of the Diasporic Midwest,” African and Black Diaspora: An
International Journal 8, no. 2 (2015): 129–45.
35. Cyril Briggs, “The Decline of the Garvey Movement,” The Communist, June 1931; Colin
Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford: Oxford, 2008),
95–130, 160–83; The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers,
Volume XI, ed. Robert A. Hill (Durham: Duke, 2011), lxxxii–iv.
36. “Speech by Marcus Garvey,” January 27, 1924, in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro
Improvement Association Papers, Volume V, ed. Robert A. Hill (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986), 549–56; Dunayevskaya, “Presentation by Raya Dunayevskaya to
the Black-Red Conference held in Detroit, Michigan—January 12, 1969,” The Black-Red
Conference (Chicago: News and Letters, 1983, 1969), RDC, 11560; Robinson interview, RDC,
15940; Dunayevskaya, Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1984–85 (Chicago: News & Letters,
1984), RDC, 8228; Dunayevskaya to Hill, May 11, 1985.
37. Dunayevskaya, “‘Black Power,’ Race and Class,” News & Letters, January 1967, 7;
Dunayevskaya, “Presentation,” RDC, 11560; Haywood, Black Bolshevik, 103; Ellis, “J.
Edgar Hoover,” 47–49, 58; Grant, Negro With a Hat, 88–89, 91–95, 141–42, 318–87; Minkah
Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black International from Harlem to London,
1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 103–31.
38. “Negroes Wising Up on Garvey’s Exodus Scheme,” Daily Worker, September 12, 1924.
39. Dunayevskaya, “Our Organization,” RDC, 2053; Dunayevskaya, “‘Black Power,’” 7;
Dunayevskaya, “Presentation,” RDC, 11560.
40. Dunayevskaya, “Our Organization,” RDC, 2051–2053; Robinson interview, RDC, 15943;
Franklin, “Portrait of a Revolutionary”; Helen Fogel, “Wayne State Welcomes Marxist with
Exhibit,” Detroit Free Press, March 21, 1985; Dunayevskaya to Brown, May 17, 1985, RDC,
15968; Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical
Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 741; Micol Siegel, “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the
Transnational Turn,” Radical History Review 91 (2005): 62–90.
41. Pickens, “Introducing Rae Spiegel.”
42. Lovett Fort-Whiteman, “Big Labor Congress Meets October 25” and “Prospects of American
Negro Labor Congress,” Negro Champion, October 17, 1925; The Medillite Annual of 1927
(Chicago: Students of Joseph Medill High School, 1927), 131; Robinson interview, RDC,
15941–15945; Lou Turner, “Origins of Black Marxism,” News & Letters, April 1985, 1, 9;
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New
York: Norton, 2009), 32–61; Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 120–31.
43. Pickens, Bursting Bonds (Boston: Jordan & More, 1923); Fort-Whiteman to Pickens, August
20, August 31 and September 17, 1926, Pickens Papers, reel 1; Spiegel to Pickens, February
24, 1927, Pickens Papers, reel 7; Sheldon Avery, Up from Washington: William Pickens and
the Negro Struggle for Equality, 1900–1954 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989),
112–34; Makalani, “An Incessant Struggle against White Supremacy: The International
Congress against Imperialism and the International Circuits of Black Radicalism,” in
Outside In: The Transnational Circuitry of US History, eds. Andrew Preston and Doug
Rossinow (Oxford: Oxford, 2017), 182–203.
44. Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 17, 35–36, 41, 43–44, 52, 64–65, 113–16, 141, 209–11.
45. Spiegel, “William Pickens’ ‘Bursting Bonds,’” Negro Champion, c. November 1926, Pickens
Papers, reel 27; Spiegel to Pickens, February 24, 1927; Avery, Up from Washington, 93–95.
46. Pickens, Bursting Bonds, 113, 162; Spiegel to Pickens, February 24, 1927.
47. “Art is Used as Weapon, Negro Workers Learn,” Daily Worker, November 16, 1926; Spiegel,
“Negro Labor Congress Invites to Its Forum,” Daily Worker, December 18, 1926.
48. Sam Darcy, The Challenge of Youth (Chicago: Young Workers Communist League, 1926),
2–4; Spiegal [sic], “A Booklet for Young Workers,” Daily Worker, December 23, 1926.
49. United Press, “Reds Organize Negroes,” Brooklyn Daily Times, July 19, 1926; Pickens,
“Russia and the Negroes,” Daily Worker, August 2, 1926; Pickens, “‘Bolshevism’”; Avery, Up
from Washington, 115–18.
50. Spiegel to Pickens, February 24, 1927.
51. Walter F. White, Fire in the Flint (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), 24, 73–74, 77, 117–18,
123, 137–48, 193, 242, 288–89, 297–300.
52. Spiegel to White, February 11, 1927, White to Spiegel, February 28, 1927, Spiegel to White,
March 7, 1927 and Spiegel to White, March 14, 1927, Papers of the NAACP, Part 02: 1919–
1939, Personal Correspondence of Selected NAACP Officials, microfilm edition, reel 10.
53. Spiegel to White, March 14, 1927; Spiegel, “E. B. Reuter’s ‘The American Race Problem,’”
Young Worker, June 1, 1927, RDC, 8518; Spiegel to Chauncey Townsend, June 4, 1928, RDC,
8515; Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 129–32.
54. Pickens, “Introducing Rae Spiegel”; Spiegel, “Carl Van Vechten’s ‘Nigger Heaven,’” California
Eagle, June 17, 1927.
55. Pickens, “Artistic Exploitation,” Daily Worker, June 10, 1927.
56. Pickens, The Vengeance of the Gods: And Three Other Stories of Real American Color Line
Life (Philadelphia: A.M.E. Book Concern, 1922), 7; Spiegal [sic], “Dunbar’s Birthday June
27, One Thought of Suicide,” Afro-American, July 2, 1927; Spiegel to W. E. B. Du Bois, July
28, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections & University Archives
Research Centre, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/
view/full/mums312-b177-i332; Du Bois to Spiegel, August 16, 1927, Du Bois Papers, https://
credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b177-i333; Pickens to Spiegel, August 26, 1927,
RDC, 8512; Pickens to Spiegel, November 28, 1927, RDC, 8513.
57. The Medillite Annual of 1928 (Chicago: Students of Joseph Medill High School, 1928), 25;
“Literary Section To Be Soon Published in ‘The American,’” Gary American, September
7, 1928, RDC, 8516–8517; Dunayevskaya to Herbert Marcuse, March 10, 1961, RDC, 9952;
James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism (New York: Pathfinder, 1995), 57–78;
Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 1928–1935 (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2007), 80–81.
58. Spiegel, “On the Resolution of the National Youth Committee,” The Militant, March 24,
1934; “With the Spartacus Youth Clubs: Los Angeles, California,” Young Spartacus, June
1934; Trotsky to Sara Weber, October 4, 1937, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1936–37) (New
York: Pathfinder, 1978), 479–80; Dunayevskaya, “Two Forgotten Pages of Ralph Bunche’s
life story,” News & Letters, March 1972, 5, 7; “Marxist-Humanism, An Interview with Raya
Dunayevskaya,” Chicago Literary Review, March 15, 1985, 16; John Alan, “Washington, DC,”
News & Letters, July 25, 1987, 8; Moon, “Raya Dunayevskaya,” 239.
59. Dunayevskaya to Eugene Walker, January 24, 1964, RDC, 13883; “Welcome by Charles
Denby” and Dunayevskaya, “Presentation,” RDC, 11554–11563; Dunayevskaya to Eugene
Walker et al., October 14, 1969, RDC, 14070; Dunayevskaya, Marxist-Humanist Perspectives,
RDC, 8227; Dunayevskaya, “Dialectics of Revolution,” RDC, 8395–8398; Eugene Walker,
“Raya Dunayevskaya’s Living Archives,” News & Letters, April 1985, 5–6.
60. Dunayevskaya, “Our Organization,” RDC, 2067, 2079; Robinson interview, RDC, 15945;
“Minutes of REB Meeting of Jan. 17, 1984,” RDC, 16154; “Minutes of REB Meeting of
January 29, 1985,” RDC, 16517–16518; Dunayevskaya, “Dialectics of Revolution,” RDC,
8421; “REB Meeting of March 26, 1985,” RDC, 16559; Dunayevskaya to Hill, May 11, 1985;
“Minutes of REB Meeting of September 13, 1985,” RDC, 16605; Dunayevskaya, “Theory/
Practice: Part III,” 5; Dunayevskaya to Colleagues, April 10, 1986, RDC, 11018–11019; Guide,
63–64; Ndindi Kitonga, “Raya Dunayevskaya on Race, Resistance, and Revolutionary
Humanism,” in Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the
Dialectics of Liberation, eds. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown
(Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 121–40.
61. Dunayevskaya, “The Heritage,” 1–4; Dunayevskaya to Adrienne Rich, January 24, 1987,
RDC, 11305; Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (New York:
Norton, 2001), 84.

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The Self-Education of Rae Spiegel (Raya Dunayevskaya): Child

Radicalism and Abolitionist Pedagogies at the Crossroads of

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 17,

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Representatives of “a despised minority,” Pickens and Spiegel connected

Beyond one child’s political awakening, then, Dunayevskaya’s origin story

a comrade recounted, “Raya smashed all the glasses.” Choosing “illiteracy,”

“THE BATTLE FIELD OF THE CHILDREN’S STRUGGLE” 13

Introduced in the late nineteenth century, Illinois’s knotted compulsory at-

“CLARITY AND ACTION” 20

“To test the constitutionality of the compulsory attendance law,” Cregier

“THE BLACK DIMENSION” 33

“Though Marcus Garvey wasn’t exactly a Marxist,” Dunayevskaya admit-

“INTRODUCING RAE SPIEGEL”41

as life itself continually changes,” Spiegel wrote, “so do we as human beings.”

co-operative grows, the “‘white, Protestant, Gentile’ citizens of Central City”

Spiegel’s review was a near-carbon copy of a column published under Pick-

‘revolutionary socialist democracy,’” Dunayevskaya recalled, “when she was

THE PEDAGOGY OF THE ARCHIVE

32. Dunayevskaya, “Our Organization,” RDC, 2051–2053.

33. Dunayevskaya to Hill, May 11, 1985.

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