The “Mother of the Southside”: Romania Ferguson and Chicago’s Black Working Class
Romania Ferguson had a dilemma. She was a young labor organizer out of the Southside of Chicago, trained at a labor college, and energetic and capable. However, in 1929, the labor movement was splintering; unionists were increasingly separating into communist or non-communist camps. Even those sympathetic with the communist cause distanced themselves from the Communist Party and the radical left. Romania, or Romey, as she was known, had to make a choice. She expressed her decision in a letter to A.J. Muste, a friend, mentor, and director of Brookwood Labor College. “I have established myself with the Left Wing,” she told him, “and intend to carry out its principles to the best of my ability, because I always have and still maintain that a worker can not sit on the fence.”[1] Muste, a radical political activist and passivist, understood, and though he did not agree with her decision, he wished her well.[2] Thus began Romey’s decades-long commitment to the Communist Party.
Romania Ferguson’s work with the Party offered her incredible opportunities, from a free education at the International Lenin School in Moscow to leading Chicago’s first successful strike among Black women workers to running for state-wide political offices. However, her membership also inflicted great frustrations, as she was often overlooked for her work on the Southside. Her marriage to Ray Hansborough, a leading author and theoretician in the Party, did not help when it came to recognition of her contributions. When Hansborough died in 1950s, Romania felt abandoned and alone, and little is known about her life after. American Communist histories do not mention her, Chicago labor historians forgot her, and only a scattering of written works remember her at all. Ironically, the federal government seems to have paid the most attention to her, with over 1000 pages of surveillance records. However, the waiting list for those records are years and years, and so available historical records are tantalizingly scant.
And yet, Romania Ferguson’s life offers great lessons in dedicating a life to a political ideology. Romania “towed the line” when it came to Party doctrine and discipline. While this led to her Black comrades labeling her an “Uncle Tom”, she remained steadfast in her beliefs that the Communist Party was the best vehicle for working class liberation. Her dealings with Party teachings, leaders, and politics reveal the complexities of being a Black woman in the Party, yet she never succumbed to indifference.
Romania’s Story: To Be Continued?
After Raymond’s death, Romania disappeared from public communist records. Hansbrough continued to be commemorated; in 1974, the 55-year anniversary of the CPUSA, general secretary Gus Hall listed Hansbrough among those he “saluted,” members of the Party who had “left their mark on our Party’s development and on the course of United States working-class history.” In the 70s, the local Milwaukee communist Party was known as “The Ray Hansbrough Club. The Illinois Labor History society website lists Hansbrough as a notable Illinois Labor Leader, who was married to “Amelia Ferguson, a civil rights leader.” They could not even get her name right.[3]
In 1953, an FBI informant described Romania as “one of the top Negro women communists in the country”.[4] Ironically, those accolades from a federal government informer were more than any she ever received from the Communist Party. Yet Ferguson never sought out accolades nor recognition. She steadfastly defended the CPUSA and its policies, eloquently arguing for increased attention towards Black Chicago workers. She was one of the first to publish theories on the special oppression of Black women workers, identifying their marginalized status not as a barrier, but an opportunity. She helped organize tone of the first successful strikes in Depression-era Chicago, working with women who had never seen a union before. She helped forge more just, response, and equal Party. That she has been forgotten by the Party she served loyally for decades speaks more about the Party than her.
[1] Romania Ferguson, letter to A.J. Muste, October 22, 1929, Brookwood Labor College Records, Series 4: Correspondence with Former Brookwood Students, “Romania Ferguson,” Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University Libraries (hereafter WRL-WSU). My thanks to Ani Mukherji for sharing this research with me.
[2] A.J. Muste, letter to Romania Ferguson, October 28, 1929, Brookwood Labor College Records, Series 4: Correspondence with Former Brookwood Students, “Romania Ferguson,” WRL-WSU.
[3] Gus Hall, “At 55, Well and Fighting,” Daily World, September 7, 1974.
[4] Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Report: Subject Morris Childs,” 1953, File #134-46-1B1, n.p.
Melissa Ford, Phd 