Ray Alexander (Simons) Papers
Ray Alexander was a Latvian-born activist who fought for racial justice and the rights of women and union workers in South Africa. She was also a member of the Communist Party and paid special attention to the conditions of workers. Alexander was successful in her activism across the color line at a time when anti-apartheid laws made such work extremely dangerous and difficult. Because of her membership in the Party and work in the liberation movement, Alexander was banned and spent over two decades in exile in Zambia and England.
During my time in South Africa, I had the opportunity to look through some of Alexander’s personal papers at the University of Cape Town archives. I specifically looked through the “Correspondence” and “Women’s Organizations” folders in the Simons collection in order to understand Alexander’s personal beliefs and involvement in women-related issues. The photograph above shows a letter from the Women’s International Democratic Federation expressing its solidarity with South African activists given the violence and inequality resulting from the strict anti-apartheid government. The letter is dated January 17, 1975. During this decade, millions of people of color were forced to resettle in so-called “homelands” and government initiated violence was rampant. Those considered black were also stripped of their South African citizenship. As shown by the letter, some international organizations were getting involved in the fight to end apartheid.
My particular attraction to the letter stems from my interest in transnational women’s and feminist organizing. Throughout Alexander’s personal correspondence papers, I found Alexander to engage with many women’s organizations throughout the world and to treat the women in those groups as sisters. To Alexander, it seems, there were no borders when it came to issues that affected women. This relates to Ray’s overall philosophy which treated all oppression as problematic and which ignored laws that attempted to prevent movement across constructed boundaries.
There is much academic controversy surrounding the issue of whether women in one place can understand and engage with the issues of women in another. However, Alexander’s activism with women around the world shows that during particular times in history, many who are considered women have been united by the common experience of oppression. Like Alexander’s anti-racist work that ignored laws that told her where she could and could not go, her involvement in gender-related issues disregarded differences in place in favor of the larger goal of justice.
-Lauren