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Such relationships can and often have been extractive and exploitative, as is the case with most if not nearly all colonial archives. Sometimes, however, archives are kept, maintained and guarded with love, care, and friendship in a way that can and should be humbling to academics—like yours truly—whose first instinct in visiting an archive is to glean information suitable for publication, as opposed to assessing what it would mean to do right by the people to whom the documents in question originally belonged. 

I appreciated this lesson most fully when I visited Joyce Moore Turner on May 5, 2024. Turner spent her life as a nutritionist, assistant principal, and teacher. She worked to establish neighborhood health centers in Suffolk County, New York, and was a founding member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Bellport, as well as the Brookhaven Branch of the NAACP. Her father, Richard B. Moore (1893–1978), had been part and parcel of the Harlem Renaissance, and a key organizer of the Communist Party in the United States. Together with her late husband, W. Burghardt Turner (1915–2009), Joyce Moore Turner wrote a biography of Moore and published his collected writings in Richard B. Moore: Caribbean Militant in Harlem. Turner also authored articles on Unitarian minister Rev. E. Ethelred Brown, as well as the book Caribbean Crusaders in the Harlem Renaissance. This latter publication told the story of the aforementioned Hermina Huiswoud, and that of her husband, Otto Huiswoud (1893–1961). 

My visit to Turner was occasioned by the Huiswouds, to whom the upcoming issue of Small Axe dedicates a special section. The Huiswouds were both from the Guyanas: he hailed from Suriname and she did from then-British Guyana. Based for various periods in Harlem, Moscow, Paris, and Amsterdam, the organizing efforts of the Huiswouds took them up and down the Caribbean, the continental United States, and beyond.

David Scott proposed publishing a special section on these understudied radicals back in September 2022. This project got well underway, with Small Axe organizing a symposium on the Huiswouds from September 8–9, 2023 in Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Tropenmuseum, the International Institute of Social History, and The Black Archives.

Originally, I was supposed to only write a short introductory piece for this special section. I thought this would be a good idea, as I am a doctoral student, and the Huiswouds are not directly related to my dissertation topic. Alas, I got carried away, and the short introductory text turned into an essay, not in the least because I read archival documents showing the Huiswouds to harbor political and intellectual vistas that stretched far beyond the doctrinarian Stalinism with which the Huiswouds have often been equated. 

As I was seeking practical information about archival documents I had found at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives of New York University, I got in touch with Polly Levens, who had deposited archival materials of the Huiswouds at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Levens was incredibly responsive and helped me reach Turner, who deposited the documents archived at NYU. In all of this, my intuition was to make sure that my requests for information were not imposing on Turner’s time, but as I would quickly learn, I need not have worried.

As I soon learned from her daughter Sylvia, Turner had been waiting for years for scholarly engagement with Hermina Huiswoud—or Hermie, as everyone called her and as she called herself in all but the most formal of occasions. 

Turner first met Hermie when Turner was still a “tot,” only four years old. They reconnected decades later, when Turner was doing research for the book on her father, Richard B. Moore. Turner was hoping to speak to Hermie about him, as Moore had been a friend of the Huiswouds, and a fellow member of the Communist Party. An initial meeting in 1983 developed into a long and warm friendship, with Turner flying to Amsterdam each year in order to catch up with Hermie. In between visits there was voluminous letter writing.

Hermie was dissatisfied with how historians had written about her husband, who passed away in 1961. She sought to set the record straight by writing a biography of Otto. In light of her own health struggles, she welcomed the help of Turner, to whom she gave her papers. In sum, what begun as an effort by Turner to gain more information about her father resulted in a long-lasting friendship and a new book project, which came to fruition with the publication of Caribbean Crusaders in 2005.

Given her friendship with Hermie, Turner went above and beyond in helping me with my essay on the Huiswouds, including searching for and reviewing the many letters that Hermie sent her. At the same time, she was also protective of Hermie and wanted to know what, exactly, my project entailed. She thus encouraged me to visit her in person.

It was here that it dawned on me that relationships to archives need not just be governed by those of academics.That is, Turner did not just want to avoid me overstating the importance of one text, she also wanted to do right by someone whom I knew things about, but whom she knew.

Turner, to be sure, was herself highly familiar with the norms and practices of academics—her late husband was a historian and so is Franklin Knight, a dear family friend.

Turner nonetheless resisted applying to herself the label “historian” and even that of “writer.” “My writings have never been because I thought I was a writer,” she told me. Instead, she felt her “job was to bring knowledge that [she] had to help the other people who were real historians.” In her view, she “just had some information and [she] wanted to share it so that it could work its way into some of the stories that are not correct.” 

Even as Turner sought to correct mistakes, she strove to keep her distance from historiographical strife. She “would’ve been very uncomfortable,” she said to me, to just be “fussing with the historians who didn’t write like [she] thought they should.” It is not so much that Turner was against those historiographical debates, but that she felt that she did not belong in them. Indeed, on making historiographical interventions, she said: “we have people who can do that and do it well, but I am not one of those. I’m one who just brings you food crumbs [so] that you can then put pieces together a little differently, because you just didn’t know what I know at this moment.” 

There is something refreshingly non-disciplinarian about this approach, even as the approach is rigorous in its own way, seeking as it does to undo misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misattributions. Of course, correcting such errors is part and parcel of what historians do as well, but they often position archival evidence as the (only) standard for establishing factual truths. The problem is that archival evidence often falls short in accounting for the kinds of lives that Otto and Hermie led. 

The limits of the archive are well-known and well-debated, not least in the pages of Small Axe. Such debates on the archive typically concern people who were enslaved or otherwise oppressed and rendered faceless and nameless in the written record. Otto and Hermie do not quite fit in this category, as they did make their way into the written archival record. They both wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, publications like the Daily Worker enthusiastically reported on Otto’s whereabouts, and there are still people around, of whom Turner was one, who knew Otto and especially Hermie personally. What is more, between the 1920s and early 1950s, the FBI spilled much ink on them. Indeed, archival FBI documents obtained through a FOIA request show that the agency had intercepted multiple personal letters that the Huiswouds had sent to each other.

This presence of surveillance also clarifies the persisting difficulties in accessing archival documents on the Huiswouds. They knew they were being surveilled and acted accordingly. 

Otto probably would have considered it an achievement that so few of his personal documents ended up surviving, and Hermie too was always on guard to defeat any surveillance operatives. Even with Turner, she refused to talk about her radical past inside her apartment, insisting that she and Turner talk outdoors. Hermie furthermore would not allow Turner to make handwritten notes on their conversations. Indeed, Turner remembered Hermie telling her to just “listen and remember.” The Huiswouds thus worked quite diligently and successfully to produce, with good reason, an archival silence about themselves.

The archival silences affecting the Huiswouds necessitate a reemphasis on the spoken, as opposed to the written word. And in this case the spoken word is truly such because while it is not uncommon for scholars to engage oral testimony, transcribing such testimony is usually the self-evident first step in integrating oral testimony into historical writing. Yet in the case of Hermie, her refusal to use or allow recording devices or even notetaking by hand imply that some parts of her and Otto’s life can be relayed only through memories of what Hermie chose to share.

To be sure, for Turner, relying on what Hermie shared with her did not mean disregarding archival sources. Caribbean Crusaders is full of citations to archival materials. Yet the way in which Turner interpreted those materials did change thanks to her friendship with Hermie and her access to what Hermie only wanted to share in unrecorded conversations.

One way in which this different interpretation comes through is in the overall framing of Caribbean Crusaders, which positions the trajectory of Otto and Hermie in the context of the Harlem Renaissance. This context was crucial for Turner, and in our conversation, Turner confirmed that she herself “was never a communist. That wasn’t what [brought Turner] to this. It is the Harlem Renaissance.”

In using the Harlem Renaissance as a frame for the lives of Otto and Hermie, Turner pushed the limits of the periodization of the Harlem Renaissance, which typically does not extend beyond the mid-1930s. Yet the frame of the Harlem Renaissance allows an appreciation of the legacy that it left and the self-regard that it imprinted on those who were part and parcel of the movement. 

Indeed, the archival collection of Hermie Huiswoud at the Tamiment Library includes an English translation by her of an obituary of Otto that appeared in De Ware Tijd (“The True Times”), a Dutch-language Surinamese newspaper. Hermie added an annotation to her translation, which specified that the poems read at her husband’s funeral were “The Negro” (1922) by Langston Hughes and “The New Negro” (1927) by James Edward McCall. This latter poem, Hermie added, “depicts” her husband “completely.” 

It feels significant that in looking back at her late husband’s life, Hermie found not some proletarian poem but a quintessential Harlem Renaissance poem the encapsulation of what her husband represented. 

To be sure, none of this is to downplay the continued commitment of Hermie to the Communist cause, which Turner stressed to me in our conversation. It is rather that there were more aspects to the lives of Otto and Hermie than those of international Communism.

∗ ∗ ∗

It is not just with the Huiswouds that Turner was able to use her personal knowledge of her subjects of inquiry to cast a different light on what the archive suggested. Indeed, her two other writings are about people she knew very well: her father Richard B. Moore and Rev. E. Ethelred Brown.

In her essay on Brown, a pioneering Black Unitarian minister who founded the Harlem Community Church in 1920, Turner discussed that she had not been aware of the acrimony between Brown and the American Unitarian Association (AUA) until she “conducted research at the AUA archives in Boston.” Yet rather than conclusive archival evidence that provided the truth of the relationship between Brown and the AUA, the written record in the archive distorted who Brown was. Turner accordingly wrote:

"Those documents [at the AUA archives] were compelling in portraying Brown as a tragic figure struggling to carry out his mission as an Apostle of Unitarianism. They presented him through a limited and limiting lens which failed to reveal his vision, wide interests and contributions to the communities in which he initiated his ministry. It required considerable study to discern that Brown did not see his rejection by the authorities as the focus of his mission but as a personal, private, formidable hurdle he had to overcome in order to pursue his mission."

It is sobering to read of this disconnect between how archival documents present Brown and how Brown is remembered by people like Turner who held the Harlem Community Church as a part of their “earliest memories.” Archival documents, then, cannot speak for themselves.

In the case of Turner’s father, too, the exercise of reconstructing his life came with challenges—as reflected in the motivation of her original visit to Hermie in the early 1980s. And while Richard B. Moore produced enough writings to fill the book that Turner coedited with her late husband, none of Moore’s writings provide a comprehensive biography. As Joyce Moore Turner related to me: “Even though my father had been pushed by a lot of people to write about himself, he never did. Really. And that’s true for a lot of people.”

Moore and indeed many other radicals did not write their autobiography. Nonetheless, their political writings do allow for an intellectual biography of sorts, and they also offer a window into how intellectuals and political activists in the past understood their political present.

For Moore, this political present was marked by the end of empire. Turner accordingly encouraged me to read carefully his 1965 article titled “The Passing of Churchill and Empire.” In this article, Moore called Churchill “the last of the great statesmen of empire of our era.” The actions of Churchill during World War II had to be understood as well, Moore insisted, in an imperial context. For Moore, Churchill’s vociferous opposition to Hitler could be explained by “the agreement at that specific moment and in that particular conjuncture of events, of the vital interests of the British Empire with those of the great overwhelming majority of mankind.” Moore thus asserted the centrality of empire to not just the history of (former) colonies but to that of Europe itself. 

For Moore, the death of Churchill meant that “the system of empire which [Churchill] served so well moves irrevocably into the limbo of the past.” In attaching the end of empire to the death of one person, Moore expressed his appreciation of leadership and its importance in driving political change. Churchill, for Moore, “exemplified and exercised, on behalf of his power group, certain great talents and valuable qualities.” Such qualities, Moore added, “are also requisite for the oppressed peoples and groups, if their complete liberation is to be assured.” 

In writing of oppressed people’s need for leadership, it is likely Moore was thinking about the West Indies Federation. One year earlier, in an article for the Summer 1964 issue of the publication Freedomways, he had reached the following conclusion about the failure of the Federation: 

"Those of us who by enforced economic exile, or through some enlightening experience, have managed to overcome narrow insularity, petty provincialism, purblind prejudice, and smug satisfaction, ought to exercise care lest we stir the ever smouldering embers of disastrous discord. This, then, is hardly the time to identify personalities responsible for the miserable, petty demagogy, strange intellectual weakness, cupidity, insularity, and titled ineptitude, unexplained insistence upon unitary association as yet unrealized, self-centered leadership and opportunist opposition, which even now hinders the fruition of a genuine East Caribbean Federation as a step forward. Let us now simply say that all the chief Caribbean political leaders of that period together bear responsibility, in varying degrees, for the miserable debacle and the distressing setback of the Caribbean liberation movement." 

While it can be hard to capture in print the legendary reputation of Moore as an orator, this passage succeeds in conveying the tremendous felicity that Moore had with language, which he used in this case to convey emotional disappointment as well as analysis. Leadership mattered, he vividly argued, and when it had mattered most, Caribbean leaders fell short. “Favorable conditions do not automatically produce change,” Moore insisted, as one needed “a conscious, devoted and able leadership … to take advantage of favorable conditions.”

On the one hand, the focus on leaders is dispiriting because it suggests that a fruitful historical opportunity was squandered due to self-interested and incompetent leaders who could not bring to the anticolonial cause what Churchill had brought to the imperialist cause. On the other hand, the focus on leaders preserves the idea that change is possible if only one finds a leader who is capable. It suggests that not everything is set in stone, and that opportunities do arise and that one can make use of them to secure a different future.

The aforementioned McCall poem—in which Hermie recognized her late husband—speaks of a New Negro who “foresees new empires rise and old ones fall.” In declaring that this New Negro holds “his destiny within his hands,” the poem gestures toward a regained sense of autonomy, as well as that of a changing world. 

In the present, perhaps, the sense of a changing world is no longer there. In rereading the aforementioned passage in which Moore excoriates Caribbean political leaders, I found it hard not to notice the resonances with what David Scott described in Conscripts of Modernity as a “postcolonial nightmare” characterized by “the acute paralysis of will and sheer vacancy of imagination, the rampant corruption and vicious authoritarianism, the instrumental self-interest and showy congratulation [that] are all themselves symptoms of a more profound predicament that has, at least in part, to do with the anxiety of exhaustion.” 

Was Moore in 1964 sensing the contours of a nightmare that still envelops the postcolonial present, a nightmare that has exhausted the political projects that Moore and the Huiswouds pursued during the Harlem Renaissance? Knowing the answer to that question requires knowing what those political projects were in the first place. And one lesson from speaking with Turner is that to attain even that modest goal, much work still lies ahead. 

∗ ∗ ∗

Turner passed away in peace on August 27, 2024. It is a testament to how extraordinary a person she was that so much of what I was able to write above is based on just one meeting with her. And given her own efforts to do right by Hermie, it is only right that we do right by her and celebrate the lasting and indispensable contribution that she has made in society and in the field of Caribbean Studies. 

Interviewer bio

Mayaki Kimba is a political theorist and historian of political thought, interested in questions of the state and freedom, liberalism and empire, and Black and anticolonial political thought, especially from Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, and his dissertation concerns how state practices in the intimate sphere affected varying perspectives on the state among Black migrants in 1970s Britain, France, and the Netherlands.