I HAVE LIVED with this book for such a long time (twelve years, at last count) that the list of people who have sustained me has grown long, but remembering the generosity that has been constant over these years is a great and humbling pleasure. The support of my colleagues at the University of Maryland, College Park—Theresa Coletti, Kent Cartwright, Christina Walter, Bill Cohen, Bob Levine, Howard Norman, Jackson Bryer, Randy Ontiveros, John Auchard, David Wyatt, Martha Nell Smith, Zita Nunes, Merle Collins, Joshua Weiner, Michael Collier, Edlie Wong, Keguro Macharia, Shawn Saremi, and Barry Pearson—has been critical in reminding me that it only counts when you turn your ideas into a physical object. The university has generously supported my work with numerous research grants from the College of Arts and Humanities, including the Distinguished Faculty Research Fellowship and travel grants from the University’s Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora. My wonderful year in Los Angeles (2000–2001), supported in part by a fellow ship from the UCLA Institute for American Culture, enabled me to jump-start this project.
My UCLA crew was there at the beginning of The Other Blacklist and supplied great moral and intellectual support: Richard Yarborough, who has always been my best scholarly mentor, friend, supporter, and reader, and Harryette Mullen, who surely knows how important she has been as inspiration, cheerleader, generous colleague, model scholar, and excellent LA cultural tour guide. Gerard Maré led me on several hikes through the mountains of LA, which helped ground me for periods of silent, butt-to-chair work. He and King-Kok Cheung provided me with a beautiful LA retreat house that year, overlooking the canyon, a perfect place to work. I am very grateful for the people at the many institutions where I conducted research, especially to the UCLA institute, the staff at the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, Diana Lachatanere, and Colin Palmer. I have also received support from the University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library (especially Susan Snyder), the Moorland-Spingarn Library of Howard University (especially Joellen ElBashir), the Cleveland Historical Society, Western Reserve Historical Museum, Chicago Art Institute, the Chicago Public Library (especially Michael Flug and the staff at the Vivian Harsh Collection), and the Cleveland Public Library.
Thanks to the “bunch of radicals”—Bill Maxwell, Jim Miller, Jim Smethurst, Alan Wald, Barbara Foley, Brian Dolinar, James Hall, and Bill Mullen—who encouraged, critiqued, read drafts, kept me going, and did the research that made mine possible. Mark Pascale (Chicago Art Institute) and Daniel Schulman, art scholars extraordinaire, shared their work on Charles White and made that chapter possible. Doug Wixon steered me to the important relationship between Gwen Brooks and Jack Conroy and shared his research generously. Peter Clothier graciously sent me all of his biographical and critical material on Charles White. Thanks to my excellent readers: Richard Yarborough, Zita Nunes, Cheryl Wall, Christina Walter, Harryette Mullen, Jim Smethurst, Alan Wald, Bill Maxwell, Jean Sammon, and Ponchita Argieard. Cheryl Wall may not even remember, but she read early drafts of the Lloyd Brown chapter and gave invaluable advice. Paul Lauter has been there as a friend and mentor since he roped me into the Yale conference in 1976, and he encouraged and sustained my early work on black women writers. The art historian Professor Patricia Hills read and commented on the Charles White chapter with honesty and brilliant suggestions. The writers Paule Marshall and Alice Walker have always been my friends and supporters, the inspiration for my work on black women writers, and examples of women who take their lives and work seriously.
Many thanks are due my Books98 crew for their deep respect for the literary word and loving responses to what must have seemed like an interminable writing process: Shirley Parry, Elizabeth (Ginger) Patterson, Jerome (JP) Patterson, Dominique Raymond, Kent Benjamin, Sherry Weaver, Mari Matsuda, Chuck Lawrence, Karen Outen, Yvette Irving, Jim Miller, Shaun Myers, and Kaylen Tucker. To my Dissertation Crew: you are the reason I entered this field back in the 1970s and the reason I am still here: Laura Williams, Shaun Myers, Kaylen Tucker, Shirley Moody-Turner, Schuyler Esprit, Scott Eklund, Christopher Brown, Robin Harris, Daniel Hartley, Anne Carroll, Roberta Maguire, Kathlene McDonald, Nazera Wright, and Kevin Meehan.
For the example and high standards they set by their superb scholarship: Lawrence P. Jackson, Doug Wixon, Gerald Horne, Penny Von Eschen, Kevin Gaines, Stacy I. Morgan, Nikhil Pal Singh, Barbara Foley, Michael Denning, Judith Smith, Jacqueline Goldsby, Robin D. G. Kelley, Dayo Gore, Erik McDuffie, Alan Wald, Jim Smethurst, Bill Mullen, Edmund Gordon, Sterling Stuckey, and Bill Maxwell (who introduced me to the art of trading FOIA files). I am surrounded here in my study with your books stacked up on all sides, urging me to finish.
For moving this project into digital shape, I owe so much to my research assistant and newly minted Ph.D., Dr. Laura Williams. There were others in this past ten years that moved this production along with their scholarly, editorial, and technological expertise: Anne Carroll, Schuyler Esprit, Scott Eklund, Cecelia Cancellaro, T. Susan Chang, and Robin Evans.
For giving me total access to the Charles White papers and thus making the Charles White chapter and the cover of The Other Blacklist possible, I owe Ian Charles White big time.
Of the many people I interviewed, none was more inspiring than those intrepid activist-scholars of the Left: Joseph Kaye, Lloyd L. Brown, Phillip Bonosky, Esther and James Jackson, Dorothy Sterling, Ernest Kaiser, Herbert Aptheker, Ruby Dee, Elizabeth Catlett, and Jack O’Dell. Those precious hours interviewing this crew helped me formulate this project. From 1996 until his death in 2001, writer-activist and friend Lloyd Brown sent me weekly letters, talked with me on the phone, sat for long interviews, and retrieved every piece of data I asked for, giving me a much appreciated tutorial in leftist literary and political history. Evelyn Brown Colbert answered every query about her husband, Frank London Brown. William Branch and Ruby Dee gave me valuable information and cautioned me about romanticizing the Left. Ernest Kaiser wrote many letters, all in longhand on yellow legal paper, filled from top to bottom with cautions, critiques, and directives. Thanks to the Chicago folks, Bennett Johnson, Oscar Brown Jr., and Michael Flug, who gave me invaluable direction and help.
To my Detroit crew, David Rambeau, Woodie King Jr., and Ed Vaughn (of the famed Vaughn’s Book Store), and Dudley Randall, who pushed me to the left when I was still in the kindergarten of political thought. I still remember the support of my Detroit writing group, Jill Boyer, Toni Watts, Betty de Ramus, Frenchy Hodges, Melba Boyd, and especially Paulette Childress for friendship over the years and the miles. Many thanks also to my Detroit Marygrove College crew for their wise and generous support of the literary arts and often for their spare bedrooms: Sister Barbara Johns, Lillian and Don Bauder, Kathy Tkach, Kathleen Kirschenheiter, Lorraine Wesley Tyler, Frank Rashid, and Rose Lucas. Many thanks to the Boston crew, my mentors in teaching, scholarship, and life: Mary Anne Ferguson, Linda Dittmar, Lois Rudnick, Evelyn Moore, Genii Guinier, Monica McAlpine, and Carolyn Cavenny. And, especially for my dear friend Bob Crossley, who named this book The Other Blacklist.
To Alice Walker, for living the principles she writes about. Many years ago, she insisted that I write the introduction to the Zora Neale Hurston Reader, arguing, against my resistance, that I was the perfect choice for that project, and her encouragement has made all the difference.
I am sure my editor at Columbia, Philip Leventhal, knows how much I appreciate his warm, wise, and energetic support as this manuscript began the process of becoming a book. He answered every e-mail, even the slightly hysterical ones on Saturday nights, and kept me on track when things seemed to me very uncertain. Whitney Johnson came on board and joined Philip in urging me on to the end.
To my Cleveland crew, my sisters and brothers—Beverly, Myrna, David, Byron, Tommy, Bet, and Bernadette—whose ubiquitous question, “Aren’t you finished with that book yet?” prodded me back to my desk many times. Many thanks to my friend and earliest feminist model, Lois Horn: She was my Sula when I was growing up in Cleveland, a woman with agency, power, generosity, and a mind of her own. And to my beloved friend Ponchita Argieard, whose professional training as a social worker, resistance to official institutions, and willingness to explore opened both of us to a love of art, music, and literature. My mother, Mary Catherine Dalton Washington, did not get to see this book come to life, but she was, for all of her eight children, the first and best model of how to stick to a hard project. She gave us unquestioning love, gentle discipline, and an example of extraordinary courage. To Darionne, Cordell, Denzel, and Cordajah Washington: for getting me out of my head and into countless swimming pools, libraries, tobogganing trails, ice-skating rinks, museums, parks, baseball fields, and PTA meetings—I hold you in the deep heart’s core.