"They Are Not So Political, But They Do Mean a Great Deal:" The Comradeship and Intimacies of Women Radicals in New York, 1930-1960

Dayo Gore

“They Are Not So Political, But They Do Mean a Great Deal:” The Comradeship and Intimacies of Women Radicals in New York, 1930-1960

This paper will exam the personal and political intimacies that forged the life long friendship of Communist Party-affiliated black women activists Thelma Dale and Vicki Garvin. The paper will trace the women’s bonds of friendship and politics that developed in the early 1940s, as these two women organized in among a vibrant network black leftists in New York City and negotiate life as single black women in the post World War II period. Their connection sustained well into the 1980s outlasting many of their shared organizational affiliations if not each of their commitments to black liberation. The paper will also seek to be attentive to the ways each of the women negotiated their desires and efforts to create sustaining intimate relationships and marriages, while serving as central leaders and strategic architects among a network of black women radicals who articulated a left politics attentive to the intersections of race and gender as well as economic politics and working class solidarity efforts.