Williana Burroughs

Williana "Liana" Jones Burroughs(January 2, 1882 – December 24, 1945) was an American teacher,communist political activist,andpolitician.She is best remembered as one of the first women to run for elective office inNew York.

Biography

Early years

Williana Jones, known to family and friends as "Liane," was born on January 2, 1882, inPetersburg, Virginia.^[1]Her mother had formerly been a slave for 16 years,^[2]her father died when Williana was just four years old. Her widowed mother leftVirginiaforNew York City,bringing Williana together with a sister and a brother (Gordon Jones), where she worked as a cook.^[1]Her mother proved unable to care for her children adequately, however, so Williana spent the next seven years in the Colored Orphan Asylum, located at the time on the corner of 143rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue inHarlem.^[1]Her mother was able to retrieve her three children from the orphanage only when Williana was 11.

Williana attendedpublic schoolin New York, where she was an excellent student. In 1909, Williana Jones married Charles Burroughs, a postal worker and actor.^[3]After graduation, she attended New York City Normal College, known today asHunter College,where she achieved credentials to become a teacher.^[1]In 1910 she obtained her first teaching position, in charge of afirst gradeclassroom.^[1]

In 1926, Burroughs moved toP.S. 48inQueens, New York,where she taught first and second grade children.^[1]She was soon recruited into theNew York City Teachers Union,in which she was active as part of the Communist-led "Rank and File caucus."^[4]

Political career

Williana Burroughs joined theWorkers (Communist) Partyin September 1926.^[5]She became active in the campaign for defense of theScottsboro boysand was chairman of the Blumberg Defense Council, an organization formed to defend Isidore Blumberg, a teacher removed from the New York public schools system due to his political views.^[1]

The Communist Party sent Burroughs to the6th World Congressof theCommunist InternationalinMoscowin the summer of 1928 as a representative of theAmerican Negro Labor Congress,a Communist Party auxiliary group.^[6]Burroughs traveled with her husband and her two youngest sons to the convention, with the boys remaining in theSoviet Unionto attend school thereafter.^[7]Burroughs would not be reunited with them until 1937.^[8]

Burroughs made use of thepseudonym"Mary Adams" in the communist movement during the 1920s and 1930s, publishing an article for the party's daily newspaper under that name forMay Day1928.^[9]She became prominent within the party organization and was selected as an alternate delegate to the 6th National Convention of the Communist Party USA in March 1929.^[5]

Upon returning to the United States in January 1931, she resumed teaching. In 1933 Burroughs spoke out at a meeting of the New York City Board of Education, and in June 1933 Burroughs was dismissed from her post for "conduct unbecoming to a teacher and prejudicial to law and order."^[1]

After loss of her teaching position, Burroughs was the Communist Party's candidate forNew York Comptrollerin the fall of 1933 and the Communist Party's candidate forLieutenant Governor of New Yorkin 1934. She also ran the Harlem Worker's School from 1933 to 1934.

Burroughs was regarded as one of the CP's most effective witnesses during the public hearings over the1935 Harlem riot.

She returned to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1937, the year of theGreat Terror,where she worked as an announcer and editor for the English-language broadcasts ofRadio Moscow,the internationalshortwavenews service of the Soviet government.^[8]Burroughs remained in Moscow for virtually the rest of her life. In the spring of 1940 she made a request to return to the United States together with her sons but was persuaded to stay owing to the lack of capable Americans remaining in the USSR.^[10]The war intervened and Burroughs and her sons remained in Moscow until 1945, when she finally managed to return to New York with the younger boy.^[11]

Death and legacy

Williana Jones Burroughs died on December 24, 1945, at the Manhattan home of her friend Hermie Huiswoud, just two months after her return to the United States and barely more than a week before what would have been her 64th birthday.

Her son Charles Burroughs, the oldest of the boys who had been left in Moscow, retained his American citizenship and was inducted into theU.S. Armyearly in 1945. After his military service he returned to the United States and in 1961 co-founded theDuSable Museum of African American HistoryinChicago,of which he remained curator until 1980. A Chicagohigh schoolis named after him.^[11]

Her granddaughter Carola Burroughs was interviewed by Yelena Demikovsky for thedocumentaryBlack Russians - The Red Experience,about African-Americans who moved to the Soviet Union.^{[citation needed]}

Footnotes

^^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^hPhilip Sterling, "Williana J. Burroughs: Ousted from New York Public School System, Now Communist Candidate for Comptroller,"The Daily Worker,vol. 10, no. 232 (September 27, 1933), p. 5.
^Jeffrey B. Perry,Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918.New York: Columbia University Press, 2009; p. 90.
^Perry,Hubert Harrison,pg. 91.
^Clarence Taylor,Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union.New York: Columbia University Press, 2011; p. 59.
^^a ^b"Files of the Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives," Russian State Archive for Social-Political History (RGASPI), f. 515, op. 1, d. 1599, l. 1. Available on microfilm, reel 122.
^Mark Solomon,The Cry was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-36.Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998; p. 264.
^Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov,The Secret World of American Communism.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995; p. 199.
^^a ^bSolomon,The Cry was Unity,p. 265.
^Perry,Hubert Harrison,p. 437, fn. 45.
^Ross to Dimitrov, September 14, 1942, RGASPI f. 495, op. 73, d. 152. Translated and published in full in Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov,The Secret World of American Communism,pg. 201.
^^a ^bKlehr, Haynes, and Firsov,The Secret World of American Communism,p. 200, fn. 4.

Works

(as "Mary Adams" ): "Record of Revolts in Negro Workers' Past,"The Daily Worker,May 1, 1928.
The Road to Liberation for the Negro People.Contributor with A.W. Berry;Benjamin J. Davis;James W. Ford;Benjamin Carreathers;Angelo Herndon;William L. Patterson;Harry Haywood;Timothy Holmes; Manning Johnson; Richard B. Moore; William Taylor; Louise Thompson;Maude White;Henry Winston;Merrill Work. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1939.