Sign in | Log in

Williamsburg Radicale

Williamsburg Radicale

Joseph Sciorra (May 1, 2013)
Joseph Sciorra

A brief note on the lost world of Italian-American radicalism.

Tools

  • Email
  • Print

I walked by this sign last week in the window of a liquor store on Metropolitan Avenue in the Brooklyn area historically known as Italian Williamsburg. The sign was too easy a target for derision and dismissal: the communist hammer and sickle in a neon advertisement for Russian vodka beneath the name of the neighborhood that is ground zero for hipsterism’s ironic pastiche, commoditization of style, consumption of subcultural cool, and hypergentrification. Yet for me, the sign announced yet another example of the rewriting of social history that epitomizes gentrification practices with the established trope of bohemian colonization of the postindustrial city and the erasure of earlier histories.



May Day rally on Fifth Avenue, New York City, ca. 1930.
Banners include the Industrial Workers of the World,
the Italian Antifascist Front,
and several antifascist and anarchist newspapers.
Fort Velona Papers, Immigration History Research Center,
University of Minnesota.
Caption courtesy of Jennifer Guglielmo.
 
I was instantly reminded of Italian Williamsburg’s radical past, the local struggle for workers' rights and the ending of capitalist oppression that I have come to know through the work of historians. 

In her book Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (1988), Donna Gabaccia (University of Minnesota) notes the presence of socialist workers’ circles in the area. Founded in the early twentieth century, the Williamsburg Socialist circle (no address given) was one of them. 

Another was Club Avanti at 202-204 Bushwick Avenue which Gabaccia describes in this way:
 
Like the Socialist circle, it supported education, sponsoring lectures on peace, religion, and sexual and family questions, on women’s emancipation, nationalism, imperialism, major immigrant strikes, the Mexican revolution, the problems of political prisoners in Italy, and more generally, current events. It gave classes in Italian, the natural sciences, and “social questions.” (p. 139)
 
The club published a small newspaper La Luce, sponsored a theatrical group, and worked together with Jewish and Spanish-speaking groups in the neighborhood.
 
Jennifer Guglielmo (Smith College) shared with me some of her archival research while working on her book Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (2010). Guglielmo uncovered two anarchist study groups active in the neighborhood during the 1910s and 1920s: Il Circolo Studi Sociale Pietro Gori at 321 North 7th  Street and Il Circolo di Studi Sociali of Greenpoint and Williamsburg at 317 and 319 North 7th  Street. Pietro Gori was an anarchist intellectual and activist, known for his creative works of plays, poetry, and song. One tune that entered the canon is “Stornelli d’esilio” (Song of Exile), whose chorus is:
Nostra patria è il mondo intero
e nostra legge è la libertà
ed un pensiero
ribelle in cor ci sta.
Our homeland is the whole world
and our law is freedom
and in our heart are
rebel thoughts.
 

Not much else is known about these two groups. The buildings where they were housed were razed in the construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway after World War II.  
 
On this May Day, as people take to the streets in support of unions, living wages, and safe working conditions, I evoke this lost world of Italian-American radicalism from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

TAGS

activism anarchism Brooklyn hipsters Itaklian American radicals radical politics radicals socilaism Williamsburg

DISCLAIMER: Posts published in i-Italy are intended to stimulate a debate in the Italian and Italian-American Community and sometimes deal with controversial issues. The Editors are not responsible for, nor necessarily in agreement with the views presented by individual contributors.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED - RIPRODUZIONE VIETATA.
This work may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission.
Questo lavoro non può essere riprodotto, in tutto o in parte, senza permesso scritto.
Add a comment
On May 1st, 2013 Robert Oppedisano wrote

Thanks!

Thanks, Joe--look forward to more. It should also be noted that the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, founded in 1974 on Willamsburg's Conselyea Street, still works out of a brownstone on Manhattan Avenue, now as an international advocacy and training group for women. While not specifically Italian American, it brought together (and had as leaders) many local Italian American working women for the first time to organize, advocate, and do noisy and needed community work with black, Latino, and other women and men on a range of issues, from poverty , crime, and education to the micro-local environment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Congress_of_Neighborhood_Women

On May 1st, 2013 Dori Birch wrote

National Congress of

National Congress of Neighborhood Women was very much a part of my mother's life in the 70s. They helped her get her degree, even as she was raising three children as a single, divorced mom. I'm glad to hear they're still around.

On May 1st, 2013 Robert Oppedisano wrote

Thanks!

Thanks, Joe--look forward to more. It should also be noted that the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, founded in 1974 on Willamsburg's Conselyea Street, still works out of a brownstone on Manhattan Avenue, now as an international advocacy and training group for women. While not specifically Italian American, it brought together (and had as leaders) many local Italian American working women for the first time to organize, advocate, and do noisy and needed community work with black, Latino, and other women and men on a range of issues, from poverty , crime, and education to the micro-local environment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Congress_of_Neighborhood_Women

On May 1st, 2013 Donna Gabaccia wrote

Williamsburg Radicale

thanks, joe, for these May Day reminders of lost worlds and another Brooklyn.