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national level, Margaret Sanger, prominent white birth control crusader, launched a major campaign in 1915 to legalize the dissemination of information about birth control methods and founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. 9 The Women’s Political Association of Harlem, founded in 1918 and concerned about all aspects of black women’s leadership, was the first black organization to advocate birth control, though numerous birth control clinics appeared nationwide in the black community from 1925-1945. The Association also supported Sanger’s desire to establish a birth control clinic in Harlem. In September 1919 Sanger’s Birth Control Review published a special issue on “The New Emancipation: The Negroes’ Need for Birth Control, as Seen by Themselves.” This issue included the work of black women writers—a feminist play by Mary Burrill, They That Sit in Darkness, which dramatizes the tragedy of too many children, and a short story, “The Closing Door,” by Angelina Weld Grimke, the niece of the white Grimke sisters who were famous feminist-abolitionists.
    The two most important civil rights organizations in the black community—the National Urban League and the NAACP—supported the use of birth control because they believed that smaller families were more viable economically. This issue sparked controversy, however, within certain circles as nationalist concerns about racial extinction and traditional male views about women’s primary role as mothers clashed with feminist demands for sexual autonomy among black women. There was a range of attitudes among black leaders on this issue. Marcus Garvey felt that contraceptives were retarding the growth of the race. Sociologist and Pan-Africanist William E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, argued in “The Damnation of Women” (1925) that women must be free to choose motherhood, and he repeated this progressive stance in “Black Folks and Birth Control” in the June 1932 issue of Birth Control Review.

    Concern for black working women also fueled black women’s activism during the 1940s and the aftermath of World War II. Because of the labor shortage with men at war, thousands of black women left the rural South again and migrated to the North for better jobs in industry. The promise of a better life remained elusive, however, since they were relegated to the most menial, hazardous, low-paying factory jobs. Poor living conditions in crowded urban settings, job discrimination, the absence of child care facilities, and segregated, substandard housing produced a climate ripe for agitation.
    One of the most radical voices during this era was Claudia Jones, whose family had migrated to Harlem from Trinidad in 1924. Economic hardship during the Depression caused her to drop out of school and get a factory job. At age eighteen, she joined the Young Communist League along with many other working-class Harlemites during the 1930s. During the 1940s, she became one of the most outspoken black Communists on the issue of women’s rights; in a 1947 issue of Political Affairs, a Communist Party journal, she argued that black women, “as workers, as Negroes, and as women,” were “the most oppressed stratum of the whole population” (Jones, 4). In her passionate analysis of the situation of black women historically, the plight of the contemporary worker, and the struggles of militant “Negro women” for peace, civil rights, and economic justice, she anticipated a sophisticated black feminist discourse which was a generation away. Though she applauded women in organizations such as the National Association of Negro Women and trade unionists, she chastised the latter for being insensitive to the misery and urgent needs of domestic workers who were unprotected by labor legislation. She also made an insightful connection between the sexist treatment of black domestics and the