Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Author:Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520242012
Publisher: University of California Press

FROM IMPERIAL COURTS TO THE STATE COURTS

The formation of Mothers ROC as a political group seeking justice coincided with the restructuring of the Communist Labor Party, which had organized in several U.S. cities in the 1950s. The African American revolutionary Nelson Peery founded the small party. His consciousness of race and class oppression had developed while he rode the rails as a teenage laborer during the Great Depression and further evolved while he served in the Pacific theater during World War II (Peery 1994). The group was renowned in radical Los Angeles circles for grassroots, issue-oriented organizing with nonmembers.

Francie Arbol, daughter of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants, had joined the party as a teenager in the 1960s. She had always worked on both workplace and community-based issues arising from exploitation and injustice, while raising her two daughters—mostly alone—on a bookkeeper’s wages. She brought to Mothers ROC a systematic analysis of social structures and political economy, cast in colloquial terms, and a keen sense of how to get things done. Unafraid to engage in spirited debate, she also carried through on any group-chosen project, regardless of her opinion of it.

When Francie and Barbara sat together to plan the contours of an action-oriented group of mothers, it was in the garage office of the disbanded Communist Labor Party’s ongoing community organization, the Equal Rights Congress (ERC). The office was about a mile north of the infamous intersection where Reginald Denny and the LA Four had their fateful encounter and seventy-five blocks northwest from the site of George Noyes’s murder. The garage sits on property belonging to the Society of Friends, and the livingroom of the small front house became Mothers ROC’s regular meeting place. The house has long been a location for activists to meet, a surprisingly pacific oasis in a neighborhood in constant flux. People who live in South Central, as well as those from outlying communities, are not afraid to go there because the house is not “of” any particular group’s turf.

By linking Mothers ROC to the other projects of the ERC, Barbara and Francie started out with amenities others struggle long to acquire: an office, a telephone, one of the world’s oldest copiers, and a convenient meeting place on neutral ground. They announced a regular Wednesday evening meeting beginning in November. African American mothers came—six, then ten, then twenty, then twenty-five or more. They came to talk about the injustice of the LAPD case compared with that of the LA Four; they came to talk about their own children’s and other loved ones’ cases; they came because there was someone, at last, with whom they could talk about what concerned and frightened them most.

Most of the women who had so enthusiastically participated in Barbara’s mothering sessions down at Imperial Courts did not come, although Mothers ROC’s central premise had not changed. Barbara remained consistent in her invocation of collective mothering as the practice from which political action springs. However, the outright politics of the formal organization apparently deterred some, especially given its dedication to confronting the state head- on.

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