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Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971

1971-01-29 "Ain't I a Woman?" Page 10

THREE 
The Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention was called by the Black Panther Party for November 27-29 in Washington DC and people from all over the country came. At the last minute James Cheek, President of Howard University refused to allow the people to use the buildings at Howard for the convention. Cheek had agreed to rent facilties at Howard to the Black Panther Party with a $1,000 deposit and the balance of $7,000 to be paid later. When Cheek received the deposit, he wanted all of the money in one payment by Tuesday morning and denied the Panthers the space. 
   All Souls Church and Saint Stephens Church were used as a last minute substitute, but their facilities were inadequate for holding the workshops and larger assembly meeting. The women also had a center at Trinity College, a Catholic Women's College, where space for workshops, meetings, and sleeping was provided.
   LNS women went to the convention unclear about what to expect. They returned with new questions are a long way from being resolved. 
The following discussion focuses on three women's experiences at the Convention:
BARBARA: Friday night on the way to St. Stephens Church we met a lot of movement people we knew who seemed to be wandering around--they told us that the agenda we were looking for wasn't there. Sure enough, when we got there, there wasn't any agenda--there were old Huey movies and other Newsreel flicks. That was pretty grim, so went back to All Souls Church to register.

[hand drawing of 3 girls]
REVOLUTIONARY

SALLY: But when we got there registration had closed so we went to eat at a fried chicken place. And at dinner we ran into other problems--of white people being in a Black community and being very unconscious of that while they were there.
   Black people lined up behind us to eat. And we were sitting at the counter laughing and talking and we didn't even realize that those people were there until we turned around and they said, "We've been waiting here for 45 minutes."

KAREN: I think it's typical of the situation over the weekend that while we were sitting there talking about the revolution we didn't even bother to think that there was a whole room full of Black people who regularly ate there who wanted to sit down and have their meal. Same goes for all the trash people threw around the sidewalks and lawns around the church neighborhood.

BARBARA: Then we walked over to the rally and the first nice thing happened. We met some women who told us that there were lots of women rapping at the women's center at Trinity College. They told us to go over there. At the rally, nothing happened for a long time and then, finally, the Panther band, "The Lumpen," played. We started dancing and singing songs and continued to wonder when the convention would start. A lot of gay women and men danced in a snake dance and shouted "Ho, Ho, Homosexual, the ruling class is ineffectual."

WOMEN
SALLY: Big Man spoke finally and said we were all supposed to go to St. Stephens Church at 9 in the morning. He intimated that it might be a good idea if some buildings could be liberated; he also said we were going to stay in Washington as much as five months to have the convention. We all stared at each other in disbelief because we knew we weren't going to do that. The implication was that we whites were to liberate Howard, a Black school. That would have been a political disaster.

TALK ON THE
BARBARA: I finally got over to the women's center after the rally. The atmosphere was a cheerful change. People were sitting around on sleeping bags, rapping and getting to know each other. Some women were hanging around a literature table, and others poured themselves coffee and tea, and made sandwiches in one corner of a huge meeting room. It would have been pleasant and politically productive as well to have continued the evening that way; or perhaps to have broken into small random groups to find out where other people were coming from. 
   Instead people decided to have a meeting to discuss "What to do about the Convention." I knew there was going to be trouble. Most of us bitterly remembered Huey's preamble in Philadelphia where he never mentioned womankind--just mankind. Lots of us are turned off to calling Huey the "Supreme Commander" especially when the whole movement is so disorganized--it sounds absurd. We remembered that women had been promised a lesbian speaker at the final meeting in Philadelphia, and that the speaker had never materialized. Some women felt that the Panthers were so hopeless we should not be part of the convention at all, but should simply have a women's conference. Though most of us agreed with their criticisms of the Panthers, still we had come to Washington to help write the Revolutionary People's Constitution and we did want to show our support for the Panthers--200 of them are now political prisoners. Most of us were planning to go to the church the next day as Big Man requested and see what could be done to pull the weekend together.
Finally, it was decided that those who wanted to go to the church would and those who wanted to stay at the women's center would do that. Next morning most of us went to St. Stephen's church

SALLY: When we got there in the morning, there was nothing to do--people were just wandering around. Black and Brown people were signing up for community organizing and leafletting but it was hard to figure out how whites were supposed to do that in the middle of a Black community in a strange town. Nothing else was scheduled until fine that afternoon, when according to a leaflet the constitution wo would be read. That seemed weird to me--I thought we were supposed to be writing the constitution. We went back to the women's center where people were breaking into workshops. 

KAREN: When I got to the women's center in the afternoon, there were a number of workshops going on, as well as a lot of women milling around. There seemed to be no organized way to find out who was discussing what. I finally found Barbara at the imperialism workshop.

BARBARA: We were talking about specific actions women could take against imperialism which would pull out a lot of women and educate people--we had just split from a group who were into a more theoretical discussion about women and imperialism. People described their plans for celebrations around December 20, the 10th anniversary of the founding of the NLF, and a women's march against imperialism on International Women's Day.

KAREN: For me, the projects workshop was the best moment at the convention. I got a sense of women all around the country who are beginning to think about and plan concrete actions. In addition to the things that Barbara talked about, other people are doing work on organizing women to go to the Canadian conference in March to meet with the Vietnamese women. Some women from Chicago have been working on plans for day care and medical facilities for women and children. Some women from Vermont are working on setting up a loan company for women.
   The projects workshop was just gathering steam when someone came up to our group to announce that there was going to be a mass meeting to decide whether or not to try and liberate Trinity College and give it to the Panthers. On our way downstairs we thought about how groovy it would be to liberate Trinity--a ritzy Catholic girls school on a beautiful campus--which we had gotten only because the priests thought we were all harmless middle-class white girls.
  There must have been close to 1,000 women in the hall. I had never seen so many women in one place--it was an up, visually, to see throngs and throngs of us. But before most of us got any information at all about the feasibility of liberating Trinity, the discussion broke down with people shouting at each other and not letting each other speak.
  Some women from Trinity tried to point out that the building was too small to hold all the people at the convention and that the Panthers had rejected it the night before. But other women felt that the Panthers might have changed their minds by now, since they hadn't been able to get any other building. This was one point where if the Panthers has sent someone over to talk to us we could have avoided a lot of hassle. But no Panthers ever came to the women's center all weekend.

PEOPLE'S
BARBARA: But obviously the hostility wasn't just about tactics. Some women who were angry at the Panthers for all the reasons they laid out at the Friday night meeting didn't want to turn over the women's center to the Panthers, whether it was a practical action or not. And some women who felt committed to supporting the Panthers despite their fuck-ups weren't willing to listen to anything from these women, even perfectly logical reasons why taking the building wouldn't be cool--mainly, that it was too small.

SALLY: One depressing thing about the argument at Trinity was that so many women viewed it so much as turning the building over to the Panthers--not to the People's Convention. A Black sister pointed out that women tend to view the Panthers as the only group of third world revolutionaries. And then when we have disagreements with the Panthers the tendency is to feel at opposite poles from the whole third world liberation struggle.

Page 10    Volume 1 No 11            Aint I

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THREE The Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention was called by the Black Panther Party for November 27-29 in Washington DC and people from all over the country came. At the last minute James Cheek, President of Howard University refused to allow the people to use the buildings at Howard for the convention. Cheek had agreed to rent facilties at Howard to the Black Panther Party with a $1,000 deposit and the balance of $7,000 to be paid later. When Cheek received the deposit, he wanted all of the money in one payment by Tuesday morning and denied the Panthers the space. All Souls Church and Saint Stephens Church were used as a last minute substitute, but their facilities were inadequate for holding the workshops and larger assembly meeting. The women also had a center at Trinity College, a Catholic Women's College, where space for workshops, meetings, and sleeping was provided. LNS women went to the convention unclear about what to expect. They returned with new questions are a long way from being resolved. The following discussion focuses on three women's experiences at the Convention: BARBARA: Friday night on the way to St. Stephens Church we met a lot of movement people we knew who seemed to be wandering around--they told us that the agenda we were looking for wasn't there. Sure enough, when we got there, there wasn't any agenda--there were old Huey movies and other Newsreel flicks. That was pretty grim, so went back to All Souls Church to register. [hand drawing of 3 girls] REVOLUTIONARY SALLY: But when we got there registration had closed so we went to eat at a fried chicken place. And at dinner we ran into other problems--of white people being in a Black community and being very unconscious of that while they were there. Black people lined up behind us to eat. And we were sitting at the counter laughing and talking and we didn't even realize that those people were there until we turned around and they said, "We've been waiting here for 45 minutes." KAREN: I think it's typical of the situation over the weekend that while we were sitting there talking about the revolution we didn't even bother to think that there was a whole room full of Black people who regularly ate there who wanted to sit down and have their meal. Same goes for all the trash people threw around the sidewalks and lawns around the church neighborhood. BARBARA: Then we walked over to the rally and the first nice thing happened. We met some women who told us that there were lots of women rapping at the women's center at Trinity College. They told us to go over there. At the rally, nothing happened for a long time and then, finally, the Panther band, "The Lumpen," played. We started dancing and singing songs and continued to wonder when the convention would start. A lot of gay women and men danced in a snake dance and shouted "Ho, Ho, Homosexual, the ruling class is ineffectual." WOMEN SALLY: Big Man spoke finally and said we were all supposed to go to St. Stephens Church at 9 in the morning. He intimated that it might be a good idea if some buildings could be liberated; he also said we were going to stay in Washington as much as five months to have the convention. We all stared at each other in disbelief because we knew we weren't going to do that. The implication was that we whites were to liberate Howard, a Black school. That would have been a political disaster. TALK ON THE BARBARA: I finally got over to the women's center after the rally. The atmosphere was a cheerful change. People were sitting around on sleeping bags, rapping and getting to know each other. Some women were hanging around a literature table, and others poured themselves coffee and tea, and made sandwiches in one corner of a huge meeting room. It would have been pleasant and politically productive as well to have continued the evening that way; or perhaps to have broken into small random groups to find out where other people were coming from. Instead people decided to have a meeting to discuss "What to do about the Convention." I knew there was going to be trouble. Most of us bitterly remembered Huey's preamble in Philadelphia where he never mentioned womankind--just mankind. Lots of us are turned off to calling Huey the "Supreme Commander" especially when the whole movement is so disorganized--it sounds absurd. We remembered that women had been promised a lesbian speaker at the final meeting in Philadelphia, and that the speaker had never materialized. Some women felt that the Panthers were so hopeless we should not be part of the convention at all, but should simply have a women's conference. Though most of us agreed with their criticisms of the Panthers, still we had come to Washington to help write the Revolutionary People's Constitution and we did want to show our support for the Panthers--200 of them are now political prisoners. Most of us were planning to go to the church the next day as Big Man requested and see what could be done to pull the weekend together. Finally, it was decided that those who wanted to go to the church would and those who wanted to stay at the women's center would do that. Next morning most of us went to St. Stephen's church SALLY: When we got there in the morning, there was nothing to do--people were just wandering around. Black and Brown people were signing up for community organizing and leafletting but it was hard to figure out how whites were supposed to do that in the middle of a Black community in a strange town. Nothing else was scheduled until fine that afternoon, when according to a leaflet the constitution wo would be read. That seemed weird to me--I thought we were supposed to be writing the constitution. We went back to the women's center where people were breaking into workshops. KAREN: When I got to the women's center in the afternoon, there were a number of workshops going on, as well as a lot of women milling around. There seemed to be no organized way to find out who was discussing what. I finally found Barbara at the imperialism workshop. BARBARA: We were talking about specific actions women could take against imperialism which would pull out a lot of women and educate people--we had just split from a group who were into a more theoretical discussion about women and imperialism. People described their plans for celebrations around December 20, the 10th anniversary of the founding of the NLF, and a women's march against imperialism on International Women's Day. KAREN: For me, the projects workshop was the best moment at the convention. I got a sense of women all around the country who are beginning to think about and plan concrete actions. In addition to the things that Barbara talked about, other people are doing work on organizing women to go to the Canadian conference in March to meet with the Vietnamese women. Some women from Chicago have been working on plans for day care and medical facilities for women and children. Some women from Vermont are working on setting up a loan company for women. The projects workshop was just gathering steam when someone came up to our group to announce that there was going to be a mass meeting to decide whether or not to try and liberate Trinity College and give it to the Panthers. On our way downstairs we thought about how groovy it would be to liberate Trinity--a ritzy Catholic girls school on a beautiful campus--which we had gotten only because the priests thought we were all harmless middle-class white girls. There must have been close to 1,000 women in the hall. I had never seen so many women in one place--it was an up, visually, to see throngs and throngs of us. But before most of us got any information at all about the feasibility of liberating Trinity, the discussion broke down with people shouting at each other and not letting each other speak. Some women from Trinity tried to point out that the building was too small to hold all the people at the convention and that the Panthers had rejected it the night before. But other women felt that the Panthers might have changed their minds by now, since they hadn't been able to get any other building. This was one point where if the Panthers has sent someone over to talk to us we could have avoided a lot of hassle. But no Panthers ever came to the women's center all weekend. PEOPLE'S BARBARA: But obviously the hostility wasn't just about tactics. Some women who were angry at the Panthers for all the reasons they laid out at the Friday night meeting didn't want to turn over the women's center to the Panthers, whether it was a practical action or not. And some women who felt committed to supporting the Panthers despite their fuck-ups weren't willing to listen to anything from these women, even perfectly logical reasons why taking the building wouldn't be cool--mainly, that it was too small. SALLY: One depressing thing about the argument at Trinity was that so many women viewed it so much as turning the building over to the Panthers--not to the People's Convention. A Black sister pointed out that women tend to view the Panthers as the only group of third world revolutionaries. And then when we have disagreements with the Panthers the tendency is to feel at opposite poles from the whole third world liberation struggle. Page 10 Volume 1 No 11 Aint I