"Radicalism and Intersectionality" gives a preview of what the collection has to offer. People with all types of backgrounds supported radical movements to fight for an equitable society that would benefit all people. In the collection there are hundreds of works told from many perspectives not just limited to the one's introduced here.
Video transcript
Radicalism refers to the movement to change society at its root. While it is popularly known as a political concept, many social causes allowed radical movements to progress throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The overlapping of social and political systems of oppression create various levels of privilege and discrimination at the level of identity. This is referred to as intersectionality. Radicalism in the 20th century is often associated with the rise of Communism and Socialism. A few social categories seen in UMBC’s Radical Literature Collection that shaped this period were gender, race, religion, and age.
Radicalism brought on new leadership by forever changing the role of women. Women were encouraged to share their stories and lead movements showcasing their role in radical change as worthy and necessary. A couple notable women in this collection are Dorothy Healey from the 1920s to 70s and Angela Davis from the 1960s to today. Not only were women leaders with passion and courage but they were also being recognized as equals by their male counterparts. While some women fought against sexism through a women’s revolution, men discussed how they could support women as Communists based on theory.
The literature collection displays how significant race was to the radical movements of the 20th century. This resulted in various liberation movements and most famously sparked what became the Civil Rights Movement in the United States of America in the 1950s and 60s. Other movements that went against the norm of white supremacy were the Native American Indian Liberation movement and releasing Puerto Rico from US imperialism throughout the 1970s. Select movements targeting oppression concerned the freedoms of places around the world under British rule such as Indian workers in revolt and Angola’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 70s. People of color used their voices to band together and fight against governments in order to create policies that supported people who looked like them.
With radical political and social change also came spiritual change. Concerning the rise of Communism, the documents of the collection suggest Catholics guarded their religion while Communists didn’t promote religion, but were not against their religious counterparts. A popular Communist leader, Earl Browder, sent a message to Catholics in 1938 to “extend the hand of brotherly cooperation” and empathized with the working class Catholic struggle in America. This message of cooperation was not reciprocated. In a 1936 pamphlet by an unknown passionate Catholic father, he advocated to turn away all Communists and Communist ideals as they claimed “all communists are atheists.” With people feeling their religion threatened by the government it altered how politics and spiritually became intertwined.
While radicalism focused on the change of politics, people targeted younger generations in order to inspire them that an ideal free society was attainable while others tried to ensure a promising and stable future in a society just as they were living in. The collection displays how colleges and high schools were hot spots to shape the minds of impressionable young adults and were targeted by both communists and their opponents. The former pushed the youth to use their boldness to gain freedom, end poverty, and release from facist conditions, while the latter claimed corruption and infiltration by radicalists leading to academic failure. Youth organizations such as the Student League for Industrial Democracy assisted college students from working class families. This showcased a demographic taking action for what they believe in without focusing on political ideologies. Even children in Communist Russia were reported by the Soviet government to be preparing for their future freely. The collection shows different ways children and young adults were exposed to a variety of social and political concepts, influencing them to care about their futures and take action for a world they want to live in.
People were able to use their various identities to show how diverse their community was in order to relay that it is not justice for certain groups of people to prosper and other groups to face lawful discrimination purely because of their background. It is the experiences caused by these intersectionalities that create the levels of oppression and privilege on social and structural levels. Multiple levels of oppression called for the revamping of political and social structure that radicalism brought in the 19th and 20th centuries and is seen throughout the collection as a whole.
