Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: An Interview with Paula Marie Seniors

November 08, 2024

Paula Marie Seniors is a Historian, Ethnic Studies Scholar, and Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech University. She is the biographer of Mae Mallory and The Monroe Defense Committee. Her parents Audrey Proctor Seniors and Clarence Henry Seniors founded the Monroe Defense Committee which bound them together with Mae and Pat Mallory as family.

Paula Marie Seniors book, Mae Mallory, The Monroe Defense Committee and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists 1958-1987, was recently published by University of Georgia Press. In it she explores why working class African American women Mae Mallory, Mrs. Ethel Azalea Johnson of the Negroes with Guns Movement, her mother Audrey Proctor Seniors, and Mallory’s daughter Pat Mallory choose radical activism - Maoism, Trotskyism, Cubanismo, and self-defense to promote civil and human rights and justice in the U.S. It explores why they joined revolutionary governments in Tanzania, Grenada, and Nicaragua and linked the struggle for African American civil and human rights to world revolutions.

Conversations in Black Freedom Studies: What led you to write Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions?

Paula Marie Seniors: Over the years, I have told Denise Da Silva, Sandra Angeleri, Gloria Dickinson, and Carole Boyce Davies of being raised by my parents, who were Trotskyists and Black Nationalist, about my upbringing by my mother. They all told me that my upbringing was not the typical upbringing and that I must write about it. I first dismissed them, but then it was hard to dismiss, so I began writing about our family bond with Mae Mallory and Pat Mallory, and of my parents founding the Monroe Defense Committee to prevent Mae from being extradited to Monroe on kidnapping charges.

Conversations in Black Freedom Studies: How does centering anti-colonialism and internationalism shift our understanding of the Black freedom movement?

Paula Marie Seniors: Well there is a shift in understanding that Black radical women Audrey Proctor Seniors, Mae Mallory, Pat Mallory, and Ethel Azalea Johnson connected and involved themselves in anti-colonialist and internationalist movements in Vietnam, Grenada, Nicaragua, Guyana, and Tanzania. They connected African American oppression with international socialist movements against colonialism and imperialism.

Conversations in Black Freedom Studies: How do these histories help us to make sense of the current political moment, particularly in regard to Black and anti-colonial solidarity movements with Palestine, Haiti, Sudan, and elsewhere?

Paula Marie Seniors: Again, because of colonialism and imperialism overseas and in the U.S. that are connected, we have to draw the connections with what has happened in the past and how it reflects the current anti-colonial movements.