We’re living in dangerous times. The Black Lives Matter movement — involving perhaps the largest protests in US history — dragged the systematic violence facing black people under twenty-first century US capitalism back into mainstream global consciousness. The concurrent rise of the far right in the United States and Europe has seen a savage escalation of antiblack and anti-communist rhetoric.

The newly published book Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing helps makes sense of the ongoing connections between red-scare politics and racism in the United States. Edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, the collection spans three decades of US communist history, from the early days of the Communist Party in the 1920s to the brutal days of McCarthyism at home and imperialist war abroad in the 1950s. It brings together previously uncollected works of writers and leaders like Claudia Jones, Williana Burroughs, Grace P. Campbell, Louise Thompson Patterson, Marvel Cooke, Yvonne Gregory, and Charlotta Bass.

The collection confounds decades of obfuscation and contemporary misconceptions, uncovering a hidden history of black women’s leadership of and struggle within communist parties and movements in the twentieth century. Debates around theory and strategy take on a new vibrancy in these writings and paint a picture of left-wing party building that challenges stale caricature.