“She Who Would be Free”: Maude White Katz and the Many Fights for Freedom
Maude White Katz did not usually stand down. She had gone up against the roughest cops of New York and Philadelphia and did not go down without a fight. However, in 1954, she was in Atlanta, Georgia as a part of a delegation to free Rosa Lee Ingram and her two sons, who had received life sentences for killing a white man in self-defense. Maude led a group of women to Georgia’s capitol building to address the Board of Pardons and Parole, and once they reached the rotunda, she pushed forward to into the conference room. “Don’t go in there, girl, until I tell you,” a uniformed guard told the fifty-year old, seasoned activist, placing a restraining arm on her. From the Daily Worker’s coverage: “It was a new experience for this cultured Negro woman reared in Pennsylvania. But she merely bit her lip and remained silent. She was in Georgia, and there for one purpose, to free the Ingrams.”[1] Though the Ingrams suffered in prison for several more years, this episode illustrates how Maude White Katz remained an activist for over six decades. She knew her battles and when to fight them.
For most of her activist career, Maude aligned with the CPUSA, and in Harlem, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, she made concrete gains for working-class African Americans. She was trained by Soviets in Moscow and had extensive on-the-ground experience organizing communities. By the time the uniformed guard stopped her in Atlanta, she was one of the leading Black women in the CPSUA. Though Maude White Katz’s name and accomplishments appear in every decade of radical literature from 1920-1970, she has not yet received full biographical treatment. This is not due to lack of information: she left a long and public “paper trail” that is ripe for historical interpretation. This oversight is an injustice: her legacy spanned six decades and her involvement in and dedication to civil, labor, and human rights knew no bounds. This chapter seeks to inspire more work on Maude White Katz, amplifying her role and legacy in American radicalism.
A Ways Toward Freedom
In 1979, in one of her last written works, Maude White Katz wrote an introduction to the republication of the U.N. petition to save Rosa Lee Ingram’s life. The title itself was revealing: “Learning from History—the Ingram Case of the 1940s.” In her short introduction, she wrote that the petition gained tens of thousands of signatures, championed by leading Black figures Mary Church Terrell and W.E.B. DuBois, and even attracted international attention. For Maude, the mobilization of Black Americans to save Ingram and her sons reverberated beyond the 1940s, into the 50s and again in the 60s and 70s, with the civil rights and women’s movements.[2] Though she declined to draw that direct line or make specific references to where the human rights battles of the first part of the century translated into the civil rights battles of the second half, perhaps she did not need to. Maude White Katz was already proof of that alone.
[1] “Georgia Parole Board Denies Plea for Mrs. Ingram,” Daily Worker, May 14, 1954.
[2] Maude White Katz, “Learning From History—The Ingram Case of the 1940s,” Freedomways (Winter 1979), 82.
Melissa Ford, Phd 