Interview with Rosemari Mealy on the Life and Legacy of Vicki Garvin

In this interview, Rosemari Mealy reflects on the extraordinary yet often overlooked life of Vicki Garvin, a Black radical anti-imperialist internationalist whose work spanned labor organizing, Pan-Africanism, Marxism-Leninism, and global struggles from Harlem to China and Ghana—including with Malcolm X. She highlights Garvin’s humility, her ability to connect local and global fights, and her enduring significance, further illuminated by her 1972 speech "Red Star Over China," republished in this AISC blog issue.

Corinna Mullin: How did you first learn about Vicki Garvin and her work?

Rosemari Mealy: I actually knew about Vicki before I ever met her. I did not live in New York, however comrades in the left movements, which I was also part of, would make reference and would say to me, “You need to talk to Vicki Garvin—she lived in China.” Just the idea that there was this African American sista who had lived and taught in China was unheard of. Once I got to learn more about who she was—I realized she was a Black radical internationalist. She had been forced out of the United States during the period of McCarthyism, but she went on to live in Africa and to meet so many leaders who were part of the broader struggle against colonialism. She was always there, always present.

When I moved to New York in about 1977 or 1978, I was a member of a grassroots Harlem organization known as the Black New York Action Committee. They did housing organizing in Harlem in buildings where landlords charged exorbitant rents, did little repairs and tenants were often left without heat and hot water. They were creating conditions for community members to be forced to leave, paving the way for gentrification. Our work focused around 116th Street and what was then known as Central Harlem. For those who understand Harlem, that was a very intense and important area of organizing. We organized tenants to reclaim their buildings, clean them up, and make them liveable again. It was in this context of grassroots struggle that I first encountered Vicki. She was a good friend of Bill Epton of the Progressive Labor Party, and she too was involved in housing struggles. Our first conversations were practical, about the challenges of organizing and the needs of Harlem residents, but even then it was clear that she carried with her a lifetime of experience and knowledge.

At that stage, I didn’t think of her as someone to interview or as a historical figure. She was simply part of our movement family—like a sister or elder you could turn to for advice. She lived out in Queens and that is where a lot of us were just getting together and having long conversations about our personal and movement work. Over time, though, as I learned more about her history, I began to understand the depth of her contributions. By the later 1980s, when I was working at WBAI Radio, I began to formally interview her, especially during programs devoted to Malcolm X, whom she had known personally.

What struck me then, and still strikes me now, is the humility with which she carried her extraordinary life. She never positioned herself as exceptional or demanded recognition, but she was always willing to share stories, lessons, and reflections. Meeting her in Harlem grounded her in my mind as both a neighbor and a global figure. She embodied that duality—deeply rooted in local struggles while simultaneously belonging to an international movement.

Vicki was active in the labor movement throughout the 1940s. She served as National Research Director and co-chair of the Anti-Discrimination Committee of the United Office of Professional Workers Union, a remarkable role for an African American communist woman at that time. In 1949, when the CIO expelled eleven progressive unions for being “too red,” Vicki was right in the middle of that storm. Rather than retreat, she stepped forward: she became Vice President of the Distributive, Processing and Office Workers’ Union of District 65, and was also one of the founders of the National Negro Labor Council, established in Cincinnati in 1951. She went on to serve as Executive Secretary of the New York City chapter.

This was a period when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) put tremendous pressure on the labor movement to purge communists. HUAC’s anti-communist witch hunts made life unbearable for many radical organizers, and in time, smaller unions like the ones Vicki led were forced to dissolve. That experience had a profound impact on her.

Vicki was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) as well as the National Black United Front where she was in the forefront of the organization’s Women Committee and traveled to Kenya for the U.N.’s World Conference on Women in 1985. She was a member and mentor in organizations such as Sisters Against South African Apartheid, Black Workers for Social Justice and the Black Radical Congress. She was a vital force in the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners.

Dr. Mullin: You mentioned your own internationalist experience in Cuba. How did that connect with Vicki’s time in China?

Dr. Mealy: I lived in Cuba during what is often called the “special period.” This was during the period of the collapse of the Soviet Union, meaning that they were unable to continue economically supporting the country, resulting in immense economic hardship. There were blackouts that plunged entire neighborhoods into darkness, food shortages that forced families to stretch every ration, and endless lines for basic necessities. Yet in the midst of this hardship, the resilience and creativity of the Cuban people shone through. They found ways to endure, to organize, and to continue building their revolution despite immense pressure. For me, it was a formative experience, one that shaped my political outlook and my sense of what international solidarity really means.

When I shared these experiences with Vicki after returning from Cuba, she immediately connected them to her own time in China. She had lived through the Cultural Revolution, a period of upheaval marked by scarcity and political campaigns that shook society to its core. She described shortages, restrictions, and the challenges of everyday life, but also the sense of commitment and revolutionary purpose that kept people going. Just as I had witnessed in Cuba, she saw in China a people determined to create something new out of hardship, a society willing to endure sacrifice for the sake of liberation.

Our conversations often revolved around these parallels. We would compare notes, me speaking of Cuba’s resilience under blockade, and her reflecting on China’s resilience under internal upheaval and external pressure. As Black women internationalists, we also shared how it felt to live in societies so different from the United States, yet united by their defiance of imperialism. We talked about how these experiences shaped not only our politics but also our sense of ourselves as part of a global community.

What those years taught both of us was that revolution is not an abstract concept. It is lived in the details of daily survival, in the willingness of people to stand in line for hours or to endure power outages because they believe in a larger project. Vicki and I connected deeply around that truth. It gave us strength, and it reinforced our commitment to continue struggling here in the United States.

Dr. Mullin: Both of you worked locally as well as internationally. How did Vicki connect the two?

Dr. Mealy: Vicki had a remarkable ability to connect the struggles of working people in the United States with the broader anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the world. Her background as a labor organizer meant that she was deeply grounded in the history of Black workers in the South and the long fight for labor rights. She knew that exploitation in the factories and fields of the U.S. was part of a global system of oppression.

In her international work, particularly in China, she drew on this history. She didn’t just teach English—she gave lectures about the Black freedom struggle in the United States, explaining to Chinese audiences how our struggle was tied to theirs. She brought in the stories of labor battles, civil rights campaigns, and the broader fight against racism and capitalism. Even though she missed much of the U.S. civil rights movement while abroad, she never lost touch with its spirit or its lessons.

Her ability to weave the local and the global together is what made her such an extraordinary internationalist. She never treated internationalism as something abstract or detached. It was always about the lived realities of people, whether in Harlem or in Havana, in Mississippi or in Shanghai. That, I think, is one of her most important legacies.

Dr. Mullin: Given all that, why isn’t Vicki Garvin more widely known?

Dr. Mealy: The truth is that Black women, especially those who were communists, have been systematically erased from history. Unless you were in front of cameras or embraced by mainstream institutions, or legible to academia, your contributions were often ignored. Vicki was no exception. Despite her extraordinary life—spanning the U.S., Africa, and China—she was not widely celebrated or remembered.

This erasure is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate attempt to marginalize communists, and especially Black communist women, who posed a particular threat to the status quo. They challenged racism, capitalism, and imperialism all at once, and that made them dangerous in the eyes of those in power. That is why their names and stories were often left out of official histories.

At the same time, Vicki did everything she could to preserve her legacy and archive. She wrote her own bios, prepared her speeches carefully, and kept records of her interviews and talks. She entrusted her papers to the Schomburg Center, ensuring that future generations would have access to her story, knowledge and experiences. She understood that she was part of history, and she took responsibility for documenting her own life.

Today, thanks to her foresight and the work of scholars committed to recovering these histories, we can piece together her contributions. But it is also up to us—activists, writers, educators—to continue telling her story, to make sure that she and others like her are remembered not as footnotes but as central figures in the struggle for liberation.

Dr. Mullin: You’ve described her as both a Pan-Africanist and a Marxist-Leninist. Can you discuss her ideological formation?

Dr. Mealy: Vicki was absolutely both. She identified as a Pan-Africanist, committed to the liberation of African people globally, but she was also a dedicated Marxist-Leninist, grounded in class analysis and revolutionary theory. For her, these two identities were not contradictory but complementary. They allowed her to understand the Black struggle in the U.S. as part of a broader global fight against capitalism and imperialism.

She supported armed struggle and self-defense. Her close friendship with Robert and Mabel Williams reflected this commitment. She admired their willingness to stand up to racist terror with armed protection, and she saw this as an essential part of the Black liberation movement. She was not someone who romanticized struggle—she knew its costs—but she believed in the necessity of self-defense against violent repression.

At the same time, she engaged deeply with debates within the left about the “Negro Question” and Black nation theory. She was influenced by Harry Haywood and others who argued that Black people in the South constituted an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination. While she may not have agreed with everything, she took these debates seriously and incorporated them into her thinking.

Her teaching in China reflected this synthesis. She developed curricula outlining the history and class character of the Black liberation struggle in the U.S., using it to show how the Black liberation movement was not just a national issue but a global one. She insisted that the Black struggle was central to world revolution, not peripheral. That conviction shaped everything she did.

Dr. Mullin: She also had a close relationship with Malcolm X. Could you share more about that?

Dr. Mealy: She knew Malcolm before, when he was a bartender—before his Detroit Red days. Then she met him again when she was in Ghana, where she was recruited by the Chinese ambassador to teach American English in China. She was the only African American woman in that role, which was significant.

In Ghana, she lived and worked from 1960 to 1964, teaching conversational English to embassy staff—not just the Chinese, but also the Cubans and Algerians. She wasn’t just sitting idle; she was very busy. It was there that she met Malcolm again after his trip to Mecca. Along with Maya Angelou and Shirley Graham Du Bois, she helped to set up Malcolm’s itinerary in Ghana, and then, on her way to China, she encountered him once more in Egypt.

It was Malcolm who told her, as she later wrote, to teach the Chinese about the experience of Black people in the U.S., to learn whatever she could from the Chinese Revolution, and to bring that knowledge back home. Not only did she influence him, but he was quite influential for her.

To really understand her ideological formation and her views about the Black struggle in the U.S.—or the “Negro struggle,” as it was called then—you can look at the curriculum she used in teaching conversational English. One of her teaching outlines was titled Outline of the Negro Liberation Movement in the United States. She began with the political, economic, and social plight of Black people, setting the foundation for her lessons.

In 1964 she went to China, where she remained until 1970. She taught English in Shanghai, worked as an editor at the Beijing Review.

Dr. Mullin: What about her later years, when she returned to the U.S.?

Dr. Mealy: When Vicki came back to the United States, she threw herself into organizing again. She was active in housing struggles in Harlem, in labor work in Newark, and, later, she got involved with the Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People (CEMOTAP). CEMOTAP fights against racist and stereotypical portrayals of Black people in the media. Vicki believed the bourgeois media was a battleground for consciousness, and she worked with others to challenge its racist distortions and propaganda. She took the same discipline she had developed abroad—her insistence on political education and internationalist analysis—and applied it to these local struggles.

She settled in Newark and became the director of the Tri-City Citizens Union, a community organization focused on youth and civic engagement. She also worked with Columbia University on community health projects, addressing the needs of working-class Black communities. Later, she organized with Black Workers for Social Justice in the South, continuing her commitment to labor and grassroots struggle.

Garvin moved to Chicago in the late 1970s, where she joined the Revolutionary Communist Party and served as a mentor to its inexperienced members. She moved back to New York in the 1980s, where she joined the National Black United Front (NBUF). This was around the time when I met her.

In the early 1990s, when I began programming as a producer at WBAI, I counted Vicki among the core group of people that I could call on at the last minute for astute commentary and incisive analysis of the pressing issues of the day. I especially would call on Vicki when we had programming related to Malcolm X.

Dr. Mullin: What do you see as Vicki Garvin’s enduring significance for today’s movements?

Dr. Mealy: For me, Vicki represents continuity. She lived to be 92 and remained politically engaged until the end. Her life encompassed so many dimensions—labor organizing, housing justice, internationalism, Pan-Africanism, Marxism-Leninism—and she never abandoned any of them. She showed that you could live a life rooted in struggle without compromising your principles.

Ultimately, her enduring significance lies in the connections she made—between Harlem and Accra, between the Black Belt South and Shanghai, between the U.S. labor movement and African national liberation struggles. She showed us that liberation is global, that our struggles are interlinked, and that we are part of a continuum that stretches across time and space. That is Vicki Garvin’s gift to us.

Dr. Rosemari Mealy, JD, PhD, is an activist-educator, author, and longtime internationalist whose work spans academia, community organizing, and global human rights advocacy. She has taught at institutions including CUNY, Florida International University, and the University of Havana, and has been recognized for her scholarship, artistic innovation, and defense of U.S. political prisoners, gender equality, and nations targeted by U.S. sanctions, including Cuba. A former member of the Black Panther Party’s Philadelphia and New Haven chapters, Mealy is the author of several influential books, among them Fidel and Malcolm X: Memories of a Meeting and Activism and Disciplinary Suspensions/Expulsions at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUS): A Phenomenological Study in the Black Student Sit-In Movement, 1960-1962. Her honors include proclamations from the U.S. Congress, the Brooklyn Borough President, and the New York City Council, as well as Cuba’s prestigious Friendship Medal for her solidarity work. She has served on the boards of IFCO–Pastors for Peace and “While We Are Still Here,” and is currently collaborating on The Next Chapter: An Intergenerational Discourse on Fidel and Malcolm X.

Corinna Mullin is a member of AISC.