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Over fifty years ago, Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) members made their debut with the first women-of-color-focused newspaper of the New Left movement in the United States. The name of their newspaper, Triple Jeopardy, also reflected these activists' political standpoint and theorization of power-how it is constructed, maintained, and eradicated. In a telephone interview, cofounder and leading Triple Jeopardy editor Frances Beal reflected on the group's ideological contributions, explaining, "A lot of the academic people just talk about it in terms of identity, racism, sexism, and classism, and the intersection of those things. Well, we talked about it in terms of the struggles against racism, against sexism, and against imperialism, and the intersection of those struggles "(Frances Beal, pers. comm., October 3, 2022). The idea of triple jeopardy operated as a framework, a lens for understanding structural oppression on a national and international scale. Members also utilized it as a tool to connect Black, Latina, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native American women's domestic issues to a larger movement against colonialism and global capitalism. Their newspaper thus served as a political education platform for members to map these intellectual and material linkages. As articulated from the very first Triple Jeopardy issue published in 1971, studying "revolutionary theory and tactics" was the primary avenue to changing women of color's socioeconomic conditions in the United States and abroad (TWWA 1971, 16).
More recently, scholars have begun to critically engage with the content of Triple Jeopardy, its internationalist, feminist, and revolutionary components. However, few explore the creation story of the newspaper and how members produced and disseminated copies. Examining the "behind the scenes" activities of the TWWA's newspaper launch contextualizes the group's pioneering efforts to envision a socialist society with women of color struggles at the forefront.
In my telephone interview with Fran Beal, she graciously shared her early memories of the newspaper and recalled names, events, locations, and dates of important and influential forces that shaped the TWWA's decision to develop Triple Jeopardy. Recovering the process of making the newspaper, especially its first issue, offers insight into the ways Black, Asian, and Latina women worked together under one collective to empower themselves and voice their concerns in national and international discourses of revolution and liberation.
Beal accredited two...