The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

IN ORDER TO reevaluate black Cold War literary production at the end of the 1950s, I turn to a little-known novel, Trumbull Park, by another Chicagoan, Frank London Brown, published in 1959. If Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man was the quintessential black Cold War text of the early 1950s, distinguished for its high modernism and its disillusionment with the Left, then Brown’s novel, a politically engaged and formally innovative form of social protest, might be considered the representative black Cold War text at the other end of the 1950s (Schaub 1991, 94). Deeply immersed in and defined by the cultural and political collisions of that moment—civil rights coalitionism, insurgent black nationalism, Left interracial alliances, and FBI surveillance—Trumbull Park forces an engagement with the literary and cultural politics of the Cold War 1950s.¹

The cultural and literary historian Alan Wald was the first to suggest that, given Brown’s connections with a radical union and the publication of his novel during the period of McCarthyism, Trumbull Park should be read as a black Cold War text (1995, 488). Spurred by this nudge from Wald and by the discovery of Brown’s FBI file, I began to look more closely at Brown’s radical politics and to read the novel not in the limited register of his civil rights activism but in the light of his leftist radical résumé, as a reflection of the tensions of the late 1950s between civil rights, black nationalism, and the radical Left, tensions all too evident in Chicago black politics. As the literary historian Bill V. Mullen reminds us in the conclusion of Popular Fronts, his study of Chicago’s black Left, by the 1950s and 1960s, black/Left alliances were already showing these tensions: “(white) big labor, the Communist Party, and the Old Left were challenged and in many ways superseded by civil rights coalitionism, insurgent black nationalism, and interracial alliances under black political leadership” (1999, 202). As we will see from a close reading of his FBI file, Brown’s political life and his work reflect this eclectic mixture. He was active in civil rights, in nationalist circles, and in radical groups, and all of these elements percolate in his novel, colliding and conflicting in some cases, overlapping and intersecting in others.

Brown’s radical politics probably began as far back as his years at Roosevelt College, known in the 1950s as “The Little Red Schoolhouse” because of the many left-wing activists there, where he met and became friends with the former congressman Gus Savage, Harold Washington (the first black mayor of Chicago), and the community activist Bennett Johnson, among others. The Roosevelt group pursued its nationalistic aims through the Chicago League of Negro Voters, which whites were not allowed to join, although periodically, according to Johnson, they worked with the white Left. The group insisted on calling themselves “progressives” because, Johnson says, “leftist” automatically meant communist, and “we were not Communists. We were progressives.”² Both Johnson and Brown worked closely with communists like Ishmael Flory and Claude Lightfoot, who were staples of the Chicago communist Left.³ Whatever political label he favored, Brown was active in several unions and, most importantly, served for two years (1954–1955) as program coordinator for Chicago’s District 1 of the UPWA, described in all accounts as vibrant and eclectic: a left-wing, communist-influenced, antiracist, black-led trade union that worked on behalf of black women’s equality and was one of the few CIO-led unions that refused to purge communists from its ranks,⁴ consistently producing cooperation between the nationalists and the Left (Halpern 1997, 241).⁵

With this history in mind, we might be able to see Trumbull Park as a cultural, historical, and formal hybrid bearing a complicated mixture of the political traditions that help produce the novel’s aesthetics. Whether or not critics were astute enough to recognize them, the signs of literary and political Left are everywhere in the novel. The novel’s focus on collective political struggle, its documentary-style depiction of racialized violence and black resistance, its focus on and identification with the worker and working-class solidarity, its oblique references to political surveillance, and its call to unite U.S. civil rights battles with global struggles against white supremacy represented by the 1955 Bandung Conference are literary strategies closely linked to the proletarian fiction of the 1930s and to the antiracism of the black cultural front narratives like the short stories Ellison wrote in the 1940s. They display some affinity to the racial and ethnic focus of what Michael Denning calls the “ghetto pastorals.” Denning describes the ghetto pastoral as a form of proletarian literature that was part naturalist fiction, part pastoral tale of the ethnic working class, usually without a focus on topical political events and generally written by writers who had grown up in the working class (1996, 230–258). Thus Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1953 novel Maud Martha fits the pattern of the ghetto pastoral more closely than Brown’s novel, which focuses on political struggle, but both Brooks’s Maud Martha and Trumbull Park bear signs of these cultural and literary traditions of the Left, although neither text has ever been considered within leftist literary traditions. I read Brown’s novel as part of a more expansive and flexible social protest aesthetics, one produced and inspired, at least in part, by his leftist affiliations, which I document through his newly discovered Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) file. What I hope to show is that, even in the late 1950s as the Left was crumbling under the onslaught of McCarthyism and the word “communism” had clearly become a pejorative, black writing continues to be influenced by leftist cultural strategies and ideologies, thus reflecting how deeply the cultural aesthetics of the Left permeated African American cultural production, even as the Cold War critics and those of later generations tried to separate black and red.⁶

The idea for Trumbull Park (1959) was born when Brown and his wife Evelyn moved with their two children to Chicago’s Trumbull Park Housing Project in April 1954, just a month before the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. The historian Sterling Stuckey⁷ says in his review of the novel (1968) that Brown was motivated to write by his experience of the “new militancy in the North,” encouraged by two important Supreme Court decisions, which set the stage for the battle in Trumbull Park.⁸ By 1954, the Chicago NAACP, buoyed by the 1948 Supreme Court decision against racially restrictive housing covenants,⁹ had targeted Trumbull Park for integration. Though the Brown family was motivated by a personal decision to find affordable housing for their growing family, Brown was no stranger to political activism. He was an organizer in the left-wing United Packinghouse Workers Union and active in civil rights and nationalist organizations. Even when he was gravely ill with leukemia in the summer of 1961, he joined the wade-in at Chicago’s Rainbow Beach on Lake Michigan to protest the policy barring blacks from swimming there. In an interview after the publication of the novel, he was explicit about the nationalist aims of his novel, describing his main character Louis “Buggy” Martin as a kind of Everyman who could encourage black political change: “If I could get the Negro reader to identify himself with this man, then, at the end of the novel, the reader would be sworn to courage—if the trick I tried to pull on Negro readers worked” (Brownlee 1960, 29).

The novel is narrated in the first-person by Louis “Buggy” Martin, an airplane factory worker who, as Brown did, moves to Trumbull Park with his wife Helen and two daughters. Motivated by the desire and need to get out of a tenement apartment, and with the assistance of the Chicago Housing Authority, the Martin family (like the Browns) joins several other black families to integrate the project, but they are completely unprepared for the intensity of racist violence. With almost total autobiographical consistency, the events in the novel closely align with the historical facts recounted in Arnold R. Hirsch’s (1995) extensive investigative article “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953–1966.” With the tacit approval of the police and housing officials, who made no arrests and did little to stop the harassment, whites carried on psychological warfare against the black families, throwing bricks, stones, and sulfur candles through their windows; congregating on street corners in hostile groups; putting out hate sheets; and making it dangerous for black families to use any community facilities, including stores, parks, and churches. The mobs were so threatening that blacks were required to sign police logs to get in and out of their apartments and had to be driven by armed police escort, in filthy police wagons, to points of safety beyond the projects, where they could then board public transportation. For the entire three and a half years the Martins (like the Browns) lived in Trumbull Park, white mobs did everything in their power to make life unbearable for the black families and to sabotage the desegregation effort. At night the mobs set off explosive devices, which went off in three-to-five minute intervals with flashes and deafening thunder. The jazz musician Oscar Brown Jr. reported that when he visited the Browns during this time, the only person who didn’t jump at every explosion was the Brown’s newborn infant: “The new baby was so acclimated to the sound that she apparently thought the world exploded every three minutes.”¹⁰ The Brown family fought the battle for Trumbull Park from 1954 to 1957, until Brown’s wife Evelyn was pregnant with their third child, a boy who died forty-five minutes after he was born, which Evelyn blames on the stress of those years. Noting the irony of being called “communists” and “un-American” by the white mobs that assaulted them daily and nightly in the project, Evelyn wrote in her memoir of this period: “We were more American than anyone, and we were being attacked by people wearing long dresses and babushkas, calling us ‘niggers’ in a foreign accent” (Colbert 1980, 1–4).¹¹

Since several other black families joined the Brown family in this struggle, Brown was compelled by the actual experiences of the Trumbull Park protestors to resist the single-protagonist story and to create the novel’s collective narrative focus. The seven real-life couples involved in desegregating Trumbull Park are portrayed in the novel, probably accurately, as a distinctly unorganized, contentious group whose political positions range from not wanting to offend whites to planning to arm themselves and shoot whites on sight. For the first several months, the couples live in terror and shame, all of them reluctant to challenge the mobs, which, with the collusion of the police, gather around their homes at night, chanting racial epithets and detonating explosives. In response, the couples initially board up their windows, eat in silence, and sleep in fear. They are forced to ride in and out of the projects in police wagons and sign log books every time they enter or leave, as if they are the ones guilty of a crime. Finally, with each one of the characters encouraging the others, the men and women together, almost in counterpoint, collectively perform their first acts of defiance: Helen begins, shouting to the police that they will meet whenever they want and without permission. Buggy’s voice follows hers, Ernestine backs Helen up, Arthur and Mona join them, and then Nadine and Terry. These unlikely “soldiers of Trumbull Park” gradually become emboldened: Ernestine leads the way out of the house through “the ring of uniforms and plainclothes,” refusing to sign the log books despite police threats. In the claustrophobic confines of the housing project, the main character and his family learn to stand up to white mob violence, those lessons of leadership and courage enabled entirely through collective struggle.

After Brown’s death in 1962 at age thirty-four, Trumbull Park fell into obscurity. (Brown wrote only one other novel, The Myth Maker, which was published posthumously in 1969.) Out of sync with the literary integrationist moment and too early to be a part of the Black Arts Movement, Trumbull Park remained out of print until its 2005 publication in the Northeastern University Press series edited by Professor Richard Yarborough. Although there are many reasons for Trumbull Park’s obscurity, we must acknowledge that writers who championed social protest, as Brown did, were almost surely writing themselves and their work into obscurity, victims, they would be called, of a naïve faith in ideology and in the efficacy of literature as a political and cultural weapon. The social protest tradition represented by Richard Wright was written off as an “exhausted mode” (Gates and McKay 2004, 1360) contaminated by its relationship to Marx, Lenin, the Communist Party, race, and the absence of high modernist technique. If we understand the 1950s as a Cold War standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, which made acceptable the government repression of liberals and leftists, of thought as well as acts, of speech and the written word, then it is easy to see that it was a short walk to subscribing to the official conservative line (also known as the liberal anticommunist line) that art should be free from any social, political, or historical context. In one of the most moving personal accounts of this period, the author and, more importantly, publisher Andre Schiffrin writes in his memoir A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York that there has never been any real calculation of the extent, damage, and terror of postwar persecution of liberal thought: progressive bookstores were bugged and forced to close, the mail of ordinary Americans was intercepted, J. Edgar Hoover spread a steady diet of (often false) information to newscasters and newspapers, the left-wing press disappeared, writers and filmmakers were blacklisted, unions were destroyed, and nearly every mainstream publication in the United States became wise to what was acceptable to the FBI and the State Department and published accordingly. Schiffrin concludes: “all learned to accept and internalize the lessons of McCarthy” (2007, 98–103).

Those lessons were well learned by the scions of the elite literary establishment, who dominated 1950s literary culture and helped facilitate the 1950s turn from social realism to a conservative modernist aesthetics, a story that has been rehearsed many times and is more complicated than I can present here. Suffice it to say that one of the casualties of Cold War politics was literature or films that too aggressively engaged social, racial, and/or political concerns. Literary productions that rose to the top of the mainstream charts exhibited the qualities approved of by the New Critics—complexity, irony, paradox, and ambiguity—which became the measure of literary value. Social protest was presumed to have none of these, and Trumbull Park’s deep concern with race and civil rights would have marked it as too tightly tethered to political issues and not eligible for consideration by the New Critics.¹² As Harvey Teres notes in his study Renewing the Left: Politics, Imagination, and the New York Intellectuals, ignoring race and the political and cultural life of African Americans was standard procedure “from the 1930s to the 1960s” for a major New Critical literary journal like Partisan Review as well as for “nearly every other white publication in the country” (1996, 213).

Black cultural critics were also of this Cold War cultural mindset. At the First Conference of Negro Writers in 1959 and in the earlier Phylon symposium in 1950, several major black critics suggested that the elimination of black characters and racial concerns was the price of the ticket into the mainstream. In his two early essays, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) and “Many Thousands Gone” (1951), James Baldwin borrowed liberally from the code words of the New Criticism to claim that “only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves” (1949, 1701). Looking for complexity and ambiguity in all the right places, Baldwin established his solid standing in New Critical discourse and helped pound another nail in the social protest coffin (1949, 1699). Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award–winning Invisible Man was measured worthy by its embrace of New Critical aesthetic values and by its distance from social protest. What the cultural historian Andrew Hemingway says in his study of visual artists on the Left applies equally to literary artists of the 1950s: the barrier between critical success in the cultural mainstream and doing socially committed art became “impermeable” (2002, 146).

Still, in the civil rights atmosphere of the late 1950s, the Cold War cultural machines were no longer quite so powerful as they had been in the early and mid-1950s. Brown’s first novel garnered a fair amount of literary attention in important literary and cultural venues and was reviewed in major newspapers and magazines. The New Yorker called it a “vigorous and exciting first novel.” The South African writer Alan Paton, the author of Cry, the Beloved Country, wrote a featured review on the front page of the April 12, 1959, Chicago Tribune Sunday book supplement, claiming that Trumbull Park, though it would shame white Americans, was a story of courage and not hatred. Van Allen Bradley, the literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, praised both the author and the publisher for the courage it took “to bring this book into being” (1959). Even in parts of the South the novel was enthusiastically received. Writing for the Montgomery Alabama Advertiser, Bob Ingram (1959) said that though the story was fictionalized, its “feeling of white against black” was “too real not to be true.”

Langston Hughes (1959) praised the new author in Jet for writing about “his own people”—“their warmth, their humor, their language, their blues”—with love and for documenting racial struggle.¹³ When the Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who knew Brown well, eulogized him in a poem published in Negro Digest, “Of Frank London Brown: A Tenant of the World” (1962, 44), she imagined him in nationalist terms as a religious mystic and a prophet of righteous fury, not unlike Malcolm X. While Brooks dropped hints of a more expansive political view in her description of Brown as a “tenant of the world,” reviews of his novel viewed it almost solely as a civil rights/nationalist text.¹⁴ Indeed, the images in the novel of marching, singing black protestors and white-black integration battles seem to demand a reading of the novel as a civil rights/racial narrative, and such scenes and images inspired the initial swell of critical interest but created something of a critical bind for the novel as well. Along with Brown’s self-proclaimed commitment to progressive black activism and to social protest writing, commentaries about Trumbull Park that could not or would not evaluate the novel as ideologically nuanced and/or formally innovative sealed the novel firmly within the confines of U.S. racial protest fiction.

I suggest that understanding Trumbull Park as a lens through which to read the anxieties and ambivalences produced by the Cold War can help us confront our amnesia about that period. I propose a multilayered reading of Trumbull Park that shows us how to read this and other black texts of the Cold War, which are often submerged under the all-purpose heading of “social protest.”¹⁵ As a text produced at the cultural crossroads when the institutions of the Left were crumbling under the pressures of McCarthyism, as the civil rights activism of the 1950s was struggling to emerge, and as the powerful coalitions of the civil rights and black nationalism were activating, Trumbull Park responds to a complex cultural and political moment. The Cold War mafia was playing a serious game of hardball, and these pressures had serious consequences. After Langston Hughes was chastened by McCarthy’s investigative committee in the spring of 1953, he hurried that following summer to remove all references to the most famous American Negro intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois from his collection of biographical essays Famous American Negroes. In return for his complicity and silence, as we learn from his biographer Arnold Rampersad, Hughes was allowed to “survive on acceptable terms as a writer” (2002, 229–231). Later that decade, the FBI dropped in to review a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play Raisin in the Sun and reported in her file that the play had passed bureau inspection—Raisin was not communistic, the agent reported, but by the time the play opened several controversial scenes had already been scuttled.¹⁶ Paule Marshall, the author of the 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones, was mysteriously summoned to the State Department as late as 1965 for a “briefing” before being approved for a cultural tour of Europe with Langston Hughes. She found herself in a Kafkaesque scene, seated in front of a desk on which the State Department official had placed Marshall’s “extensive” FOIA dossier, containing, Marshall discovered, “a detailed account of my involvement in every political organization to which I had ever belonged” (2009, 5–6). Brown is representative of many politically engaged black writers of the late 1950s—trying to construct a resistant black subjectivity and an oppositional cultural critique but also vying for mainstream acceptance, all while trying to maintain a safe distance from the very left-wing radicalism that inspired their work.

Notwithstanding the FBI’s nefarious record of trying to turn leftists into enemy spies, Brown’s FOIA file, which William J. Maxwell, the pioneer scholar of black spycraft textual studies, generously shared with me, underscores my claim that Brown was a man of the Left. If the leftist cultural front was constituted, as Bill Mullen argues, as a “coalition of liberals, radicals, trade unionists, farmers, socialists, blacks and whites, anti-colonialists and colonized,” (1999, 3) then the only group missing from Brown’s coalition was farmers. Brown’s FOIA file, dating from March 21, 1956, presents an extensive résumé of what the FBI considered his “subversive” activities with peace activists, union organizers, the foreign born, civil rights protestors, communists, and dangerous periodicals. Among those activities cited were his membership in the NAACP, his work as union organizer for the UPWA and later for the progressive Textile Union, and his one-year subscription to the communist paper The Worker. Additionally, the bureau cited Brown’s membership, including his signing of the nominating petition in 1950, in the Progressive Party—a group the FBI considered in league with the Communist Party.¹⁷ The suspicion that Brown may have been a communist was raised several times in his file, with no firm evidence except that the description of “a Negro male, 27-years old, active in the NAACP, member of the Packinghouse Union, and reader of Communist daily paper, ‘The Worker,’ [sic]” listed on the CP registration of the Illinois-Indiana CP District, matched Brown’s.¹⁸

The FBI informant also caught Brown’s speeches at meetings of the Midwest Conference to Defend the Rights of Foreign Born Americans on May 4 and 17, 1955, where he was recorded as stating that his union would work for the repeal of the infamous 1950 McCarran Act that gave the attorney general the power to investigate “un-American” activities. Brown attacked the McCarran Act in particular for its use against those unions whose “most active union members are of foreign birth,” an attack the FBI would surely have considered “subversive” for its support of unionists and foreigners (U.S. FBI, Frank London Brown, 13). The informant added on May 19, 1955, that Brown had stated in his speech that “everyone, whether they be foreign born or native, should enjoy the Bill of Rights and action should be taken to arouse the public and inform them of the dangers within the Walter-McCarran Law [sic]” (14). The peace groups Brown was affiliated with—the Women’s Peace and Unity Club, American Women for Peace, and the American Peace Crusade—were all designated by the FBI as fronts for the CP. Another report shows Brown speaking on March 26, 1957, at the International Women’s Day Dinner and Program at the Kenwood-Ellis Center, sponsored by the “Communist front” WPUC.

The FBI file supports my claim about the links between Brown’s civil rights activism and leftist radicalism, since Brown used this meeting to detail what he called the “unbearable” conditions at Trumbull Park. According to the report, Brown went even further, arguing, in an obvious reference to his Trumbull Park ordeal, “that members of a minority group receive no protection while going to and from work, and that they were insulted and assaulted frequently and [he] further stated that the United States could not condemn other nations for discrimination of races when this nation restrains Negroes, Chinese, and Mexicans under police rule” (28). What is important for my purposes is that this FOIA file, however venal the motivations of the FBI, is the only document that gives us a sense of the extent of Brown’s left-wing radicalism. The FBI even uncovered a politically radical genealogy for Brown. According to the files, Brown’s father, Frank London Brown Sr., was a “Solderer in the Tin Copper Ware Union 758 of the radical Mine Mill Workers Union, CIO Branch South Side-Washington Park; 5th Ward, Cook County.” It asserts that he and his wife, Myrtle L., a factory worker, were CP members for about six years, until 1945, when Brown Jr. would have been eighteen.

What may have been the final straw for the FBI’s security sensitivities was a demonstration on October 7, 1955, at the U.S. Customs House in Chicago, where Brown was “one of approximately 37 persons” protesting a session of the subcommittee of the Senate Internal Security Committee, which was investigating the sending of communist propaganda through the mails. The informant “Chicago T-1” (the twenty informants in Brown’s FOIA file are numbered T-1 to T-20) reveals that Brown was one of the people carrying signs in the demonstration reading, “This committee should investigate Mississippi,” “Mississippi is the real threat to internal security,” and “Senator Eastland, who killed Emmett L. Till?”¹⁹ As these protest signs make clear, Brown was motivated by the racial inequalities reflected in the hypocrisy of a Senate investigative committee powerful enough to mount a national and international campaign of surveillance of communists but unable to end (or even properly investigate) racial terror in the South,²⁰ or, for that matter, in Chicago. This 1950s picket demonstrates the existence of a powerful civil rights/radical Left coalition, but the singular racial focus of the protest signs may also foreshadow the instability of that unity. The FBI, however, did not draw any fine distinctions between radical civil rights activists and radical leftists. Brown’s picketing of the Senate investigative committee led directly to the FBI’s decision on November 6, 1956, that “FRANK LONDON BROWN be placed on the Security Index.”²¹ Another undated report cautioned that the investigation of Brown should be “assigned to mature and experienced agent personnel, and care should be taken so as not to give the impression that the Bureau is investigating the labor union activities of ———,” the names blacked out.

Brown’s FOIA file, dated from 1955 to 1957, was in the works before he began writing Trumbull Park. He might not have been aware of the extent of his FBI surveillance, which prevents me from reading the novel as an extensive dialogue with the “F.B. Eyes,” as William J. Maxwell so effectively reads Claude McKay’s work.²² However, Brown was contacted by the FBI for an interview, and his skillful fencing with the FBI in this particular report may have been the pilot for the scene of FBI surveillance that appears in the novel. On May 22, 1957, with Brown safely out of Trumbull Park, which the FBI considered the potentially embarrassing territory of unleashed black rage, bureau agents contacted Brown near his new home (at 308 West Ninety-Fifth) and informed him that they were interested in “the subversive infiltration of unions as is being conducted by the Communist Party (CP).” Brown invited them into the house, where they questioned him about his knowledge of CP activity; he claimed to have none. They warned him of CP tactics and asked if he would be willing to “aid the FBI.” Brown’s answers are at first evasive, then more direct, but always cagey. At first he says he is primarily concerned with supporting his family through his work as organizer for the Textile Workers Union of America and that his aim is to become “personally wealthy,” for in that way “the color lines fall.” When asked if he could aid the FBI, he refuses, saying that he could not spare the time from his writing and that, furthermore, “the FBI had failed him in 1955” when he “brought to the attention of the FBI and other Federal and local agencies what he thought to be the injustices of the Trumbull Park situation.” Because of that, even if he had felt so inclined to help the FBI, “he was not willing” to do so in 1957. The agents apparently believed that they had explained to Brown’s satisfaction why the FBI could not have intervened in Trumbull Park, and the report blithely assumes that “he could now understand why no aid came to him and realized now that such a situation can only be altered by an act of legislation” (2). Throughout the three-hour interview, Brown was “very cordial and listened attentively.” He was “receptive to the remarks of the agent and was courteous, exhibiting no hostility whatsoever during the interview” (3). The agents do seem dismayed about Brown’s “completely apathetic attitude towards the Communist exploitation of the Negro” and correctly conclude that the fight to desegregate Trumbull Park was a defining moment in Brown’s life: “It is the opinion of the agents that BROWN will always rationalize every aspect of his life henceforth in the light of ‘Trumbull Park.’” The report says that Brown terminated the interview, saying, “He would not appreciate another interview.” The report ends: “BROWN is completely unreceptive to further discussion,” indicating in so many words that he would never be a Communist Party member “inasmuch as the Communist Party could do nothing of value for him in order to help him advance financially or socially or in his fight for equal rights for people of his race” (2). As with comments he made in the Chicago Defender after the publication of Trumbull Park, the FBI interview suggests an ambivalent posture on Brown’s part that makes it difficult to assess whether his anticommunist comments were motivated by desires for upward mobility or were a serious critique of the Left’s problematic relationship to black activism—or if they were simply a maneuver to avoid censure. On the other hand, though these files often supply informative biographical material, one always has to read FOIA files skeptically, as potentially unreliable, biased, and deceptive, but one also has to read Brown as both character and author in the FBI text, a seasoned political operative dedicated to black struggle, bitter about the lack of FBI support for the black families facing white mobs in Trumbull Park, producing for the “F.B. Eyes”²³ his own equivocal, mocking, and subversive performance.

Throughout Trumbull Park, the direct links between black cultural aesthetics and the discourses of the literary Left are always undercut as Brown dances around these signs of the novel’s associations with the Left and the Communist Party. Throughout the novel, Brown uses black vernacular cultural forms—blues, jazz, black vernacular speech—as signs of opposition and as a vehicle for producing class and race consciousness. This fusion in Trumbull Park of black vernacular culture and political struggle might be considered, metaphorically, the soundtrack for what is known as the black belt thesis. Adopted in 1928 by the international Communist Party as “The Comintern Resolution on the Negro Question in the United States,” the black belt thesis argued that blacks in America constituted a “community of culture,” sharing language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup, and this thesis explicitly designated blacks in the American South as “an oppressed nation” with the “the right of self-determination.”²⁴ While the Communist Party’s notion of an African American nation rising up within the American South was never a realistic political goal (and in fact was ridiculed by many African Americans),²⁵ the potentialities of an organized black community—particularly one that celebrated black culture and history—excited many of the leading black intellectuals of this era. African American writers of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Chester Himes, who were affiliated in varying degrees with communism, saw the possibilities for black cultural advancement in this embrace of black cultural forms.²⁶ As part of a leftist effort to embody a unified black community, black artists on the Left increasingly represented black vernacular culture in their texts through the incorporation of folklore and a celebration of jazz and the blues, believing that this kind of collective consciousness, which had its source in black cultural traditions, could create the potential for political action. One example of the influence of the black belt thesis in Brown’s novel is the staging of the final walk-in scene, when the Trumbull Park group refuses to ride in the safety of the police vans but decides to stand up to the white mobs. Narrated as a collective chant, the walk-in scene features its main character—an “ideologically transformed” urban industrial worker—united with the other Trumbull Park protestors, belting out a Joe Williams blues song that enables their political resistance. Thus, while the novel’s credentials as a civil rights text seem never in doubt, Trumbull Park is also invested in producing a narrative born of left cultural values.

But if Brown aligned his work with traditions of social protest, his novel breaks with the formulas of social realism as defined by Richard Wright in the 1930s and 1940s. Despite the similarities with Wright in the novel’s examination of class exploitation and urban racial violence and Wright’s presence in Chicago leftist culture in the 1930s and 1940s, neither Wright nor Native Son appear as anything but faint traces in Brown’s literary and cultural framework, and neither is cited by Brown as a literary or political influence (Graham 1990). In contrast to Native Son’s Bigger Thomas, Trumbull Park’s major black characters are several black working-class married couples based on the original Trumbull Park protestors. Over the course of their desegregation battle, they move from racial shame and fear to their first acts of political militancy, from experiencing blackness as inferiority to manifesting its power to inspire political action—a clear departure from Wright’s bleak naturalism. Brown was conscious of his role as a modern, if not modernist, writer, consulting books on writing and citing artists as diverse as Gwendolyn Brooks, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Thelonious Monk as influences. Brown credits Monk as a modernist model because of the “daring in execution in his work,” specifically citing Monk’s conscious experimenting with combining “traditional blues and abstract bop as two features of a really different music,” a strategy that Brown tried to emulate with “jazz-oriented language” in his fiction (Brownlee 1960, 30). There are several places in the novel where music is an emotional or psychological barometer of a character’s interior life or where it is used to signify or inspire collective action (Graham 1990).²⁷ At other points in the novel, Brown departs entirely from conventional narration. In a remarkable scene about halfway through the narrative, the narrator disrupts his own male-privileged narrative voice, explicitly questioning the way he has represented women up to that point, after which the novel shifts its focus to women as political activists. Like the musical avant-gardist and in contrast to what is typically considered social protest, Brown plays with and occasionally dispenses with conventional realism, a technique he would probably attribute to his lessons from Monk. He often read his short stories on the radio to jazz accompaniment to capture that spirit of improvisation in his fiction because, he said, “I wanted to make it hip to be socially conscious” (quoted in Brownlee 1960, 30).

Let me return here to the four scenes I call scenes of “dueling radical-isms,” each of which juxtaposes black cultural or political nationalism and an image of leftist interracial radicalism but refuses the implications of the latter. In the midst of the racial turmoil the families have endured, Buggy is listening to a church radio program and finds in the exuberance of the black church music an unusual sense of connection with Southern black culture (which seems straight out of the CP’s black nation thesis), a much-needed antidote to the racial hatred he is experiencing in Trumbull Park:

But even as Buggy tries to solidify his somewhat tenuous sense of black consciousness with images of black militancy, the novel shifts abruptly in the next chapter to a meeting between Buggy and Arthur, another black resident, and Mr. O’Leary, a white Trumbull Park neighbor, who, Arthur says, has something they both need: “Knowledge, Daddio, knowledge. Mr. O’Leary’s got it” (234). Mr. O’Leary turns out to be a true white ally, attacked by the Trumbull Park mobs that view him as a “nigger lover,” thus forcing Buggy to revise his feelings about whites: “Here was a man who was white, who had to put wooden boards against his window just as Arthur had” (235). O’Leary gives the two men information about the larger plot behind the Trumbull Park battle, explaining how speculators were manipulating the riots and planning to turn the Trumbull Park projects into a private investment, charge blacks higher rents, and exploit black labor: “There are no accidents in society,” he tells Buggy, and, in his refusal to accept the status of universal (white) American, he too claims his noncitizenship: “where is my America, boys? I’m seventy-three years old. And I’m an outcast, for trying to be an American.” The chapter ends with a moving image of O’Leary as a kind of revised American icon. He is depicted standing in the doorway as Buggy and Arthur leave, holding a kerosene lamp to light their way out into the night, “that lamp lifted high in his old hand—a perfect target for anybody who wanted to throw anything in his way” (244). The image of the Statue of Liberty as a left-wing white radical lighting the way for black civil rights activists does double duty, suggesting the ironic revision of an American democratic icon and the image of interracial solidarity. Mr. O’Leary never appears again, and the courage of the black residents is enabled mainly within the context of the family and the black community; nonetheless, that struggle is affirmed throughout the novel by these gestures of support from allies like O’Leary.²⁸

Buggy’s personal experience with O’Leary is replicated on a larger scale in the novel’s representation of a protest march on City Hall in support of Trumbull Park’s desegregation. Though the novel gives credit to “the Negro Businessmen’s Society” for planning the march, the protest march on Trumbull Park that was organized in October 1955 by the NAACP is described in the investigative article as comprising a broad coalition of activists, attracting five thousand participants from labor, religious, and civic organizations, including thousands of packinghouse workers. Though the FOIA informant may have been conflating the CP and the left-leaning United Packinghouse Workers Union, which was actively involved in the desegregation of Trumbull Park, the FBI reported that the Communist Party “has a project in force now to agitate on the Trumbull Park situation” (U.S. FBI Frank London Brown 14). The march described in the novel has all the elements of this kind of coalitional politics. Several characters applaud the march as an example of mass action from “the old days” (Brown 1959, 337). Singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” and even improvising some of the stanzas, a large diverse crowd of demonstrators marches to City Hall, carrying picket signs, some wearing badges that read “Picket Captain.” Brown’s description of the protestors draws explicitly on images of progressive organizing: “there were people in line who were dressed up; there were people wearing jackets from unions; there were old ladies with cloth coats and babushkas…. Negro men, Negro women; white men, white women, Mexicans; all sorts of people.” Buggy wonders to himself: “Where had they come from? Why were they there? They didn’t even know me. Why were they so concerned?” (339). As a black airplane factory worker in the mid-1950s in one of Chicago’s unionized plants, Buggy would, of course, know who these people were, as Brown obviously did. When someone gives him a picket sign to carry, Buggy says it “seemed like they had rehearsed all this somewhere before,” suggesting that both he and Brown have memories of the sources of this mass protest. Given Brown’s position as a UPWA organizer during this period, and that Brown himself had organized and participated in such protests, Buggy’s naïveté about the political meaning of a demonstration, in which a multiracial, unionized, working-class collective is joined in mass protest against social injustice, is another instance of the text attempting to maintain an ideological neutrality that disguises its left-wing contexts. Moreover, while there were actually two demonstrations against the Trumbull Park mobs during the desegregation effort, one sponsored in May 1955 by the “Negro Chamber of Commerce” and another by the militant Chicago NAACP in October, the novel attributes its march to a fictional “Negro Businessmen’s Society,” which sounds too suspiciously like the “Negro Chamber of Commerce,” as if Brown is again trying to shift his allegiances from leftist political action to black capitalism.

In another instance of the tension between black civil rights nationalism and leftist interracial radicalism, the novel implicitly rejects the latter. One of the women in the Trumbull Park group, Mona Davis, is asked by “some kind of businessmen’s society” to speak at the Greater Urban Church (a stand-in for Chicago’s Greater Metropolitan Church) to enlist community support for the Trumbull Park resistance. This scene frames political anger in a collective, public space that is reminiscent of civil rights imagery with “white-robed men and women sitting in the choir box” and speakers orating in the call-and-response tradition of the black church. The preacher begins the meeting with a sermon about “the evil forces that feed on discord among the working men and women of our great nation!” The sermon shifts, almost immediately, into both Christian and Marxist messages, but it headlines the more obvious rhetoric of left-wing interracial proletarianism. The preacher denounces the forces that would “turn Negro against white,” “brother against brother.” Calling for the congregation to recognize that “our white sisters and brothers” will suffer when “they allow themselves to be fooled into breaking ranks with us” and that they will one day discover “who is really responsible for white slums, white unemployment, white hopelessness, white despair!” (329), the speech reflects the interracial, working-class politics of the leftist cultural front. But the black church crowd and Buggy are unmoved by these images of black and white working-class unity, and Buggy responds: “There weren’t too many amens after these last words. The day this big man talked about seemed too far off for any of us to see, too far off to me to make going back to Trumbull Park any easier. I couldn’t see any of the twisted faces in the mobs out in Trumbull Park waking up and discovering any enemy but me and my folks” (329).

In contrast to the preacher’s failed sermon, Mona’s speech to the church crowd has both men and women crying. She movingly retells the stories of white violence and black heroism in Trumbull Park, ending with a defiant pledge that “it will take more than bombs and mobs to get us out of Trumbull Park,” which sets off an uproar from the church, “Say it louder! Say it louder!” (Frank London Brown anticipating James Brown). The chapter ends with the church audience shouting their support for Mona’s speech, completely upstaging the preacher’s earlier homily on interracial solidarity. While one goal of the dueling radicalisms is to show women as political actors, the main result is to showcase the inadequacy of the Left’s articulations of working-class unity—a signal of Brown’s own reluctance to endorse the Left fully. In this key moment, however, the novel’s internal split becomes obvious: civil rights activism trumps interracial labor solidarity. One has to note, however, the irony of the text’s avant-garde representations of black women, given that it also second-classes the Left, which advanced the most progressive policies and ideas on women’s equality. The CPUSA, the left-wing National Negro Labor Council, and leftist unions like the UPWA produced major initiatives for black women’s equality in the workforce, even while black women’s issues were absent from mainstream 1950s civil rights discourse. In fact, Brown’s friend, the unionist Oscar Brown Jr., reported in an interview that “the resolution to increase black female leadership and to recruit more women into the union [the UPWA]” was “at the heart of what was being done by the Packinghouse Workers Union.”²⁹

The novel ends with the Trumbull Park “walk-in” when Buggy and his friend Harry refuse to ride in the police wagons, choosing instead to walk into TP facing the mobs. Helen initiates the walk-in by singing out the first line of a Joe Williams blues, “Ain’t nobody worried!” and Buggy answers with the next line, “And it ain’t nobody cryin’!” This call and response serves as a counterpoint to the taunts of the white crowd. When Buggy imagines them calling out “We dare you to walk, nigger!”, he sings out a line from the song and imitates Joe Williams’s “long hip strides”: “Noooooo-body wants me. Nobody seems to care!” Finally, when Buggy and his buddy Harry have made their way through the mob without backing down, the words come pouring out, with Harry joining in. These defiant black and blues resistance of the Joe Williams song creates an antiphonal relationship between music and action, much as it did in many civil rights demonstrations. The contrast with the self-induced paralysis of Ellison’s protagonist at the end of Invisible Man³⁰ is significant. The invisible man sits in his well-lighted and newly desegregated underground, high on reefer or sloe gin, contemplating the meaning of his invisibility as he vibrates in his solitary cave to the sounds of Louis Armstrong’s paean to black invisibility: “What did I do to be so black and blue?”³¹ In contrast, Trumbull Park ends with this small, courageous act of resistance, enabled by communal support and the vernacular energy of Williams’s blues. Inscribed in italics on the final page of the novel—“Every day, every day … Well, it ain’t nobody worried, and it ain’t nobody cryin”—the words of the song are unmediated by any character, so that the blues voice, the characters’ voices, and the authorial voice are collapsed into one, an example of the novel’s formal and thematic commitment to collective action.

We must remember, however, the way this antiphonal chant borrows from another feature of left-wing literary experimentation from the 1930s and 1940s—the mass chant popularized by the Workers Theater in the 1930s and 1940s. As the literary critic James Smethurst points out, the mass chant often occurred at the end of a Workers Theater production to represent “a fragmented mass or multiple working class subjectivity [coalescing] into a relatively unified consciousness” (2004, 4). In two prominent Popular Front adaptations of the mass chant, Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty and Langston Hughes’s 1937 revolutionary “poetry-play” Don’t You Want to Be Free, Odets’s play ends with the cast—and generally the audience—chanting together, “STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE,” and Hughes’s ends in a chorus singing “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT.” The singing represents a newly emboldened collective, a resistance to white supremacy, and a new psychological spirit. Thus Trumbull Park represents once again the novel’s investments in simultaneous gestures toward both civil rights and black popular front aesthetics.³²

If we push back to the scene in the novel that immediately precipitates the “walk-in,” we see the pervasive thread of leftist culture continuing to animate the novel’s vision. In the penultimate chapter of Trumbull Park, the novel abruptly and, seemingly haphazardly, inserts a reference to the 1955 conference of African and Asian nations held in Bandung, Indonesia. Trying to encourage Buggy to continue their resistance, Helen tells him that she has heard a radio story about Bandung, where, she says, “a whole bunch of colored people from all over the world—Africa, India, China, America, all over—are getting together to figure out how to keep from being pushed by all the things that are happening in the world … how to do some pushing themselves, how to make the wagon go the way they want it to go” (412). But not only does she connect their struggle to the larger international network of leftist political activism represented by the Bandung Conference; she also connects it to the Southern push for desegregation, by immediately adding that this same kind of “pushing” is going on in the South: “the radio talks about how down South Negroes are pushing, trying to get the Supreme Court to outlaw segregation in schools. Everywhere everybody is doing something—everybody but us, Buggy” (412). Bandung also represents Helen’s refusal to settle for the bourgeois lifestyle that the new postwar prosperity seemed to promise blacks: “I don’t want a Lincoln or even a fur piece like some people have. I just don’t want to sit by and watch life pass me by without doing something about it” (412). Immediately after this conversation, Helen and Buggy begin their plans for the dramatic and dangerous walk-in, as if finally freed by envisioning Bandung as the lifeline enabling them to break from the limited nationalism of a U.S.-based integration struggle.³³

The Bandung reference is thematically important, even though it is included tangentially and even though Helen is allowed to misleadingly include “America” among the invited nations, when the United States was “pointedly” not invited.³⁴ The twenty-nine nations that convened in April 1955 at Bandung were an anticolonial, antiracist coalition representing nearly all of Asia and six countries of Africa; the reference signals the novel’s global awareness of liberation movements. The Bandung allusion also suggests that these Chicago nationalists were concerned with international issues, and, to that end, they formed ad hoc alliances with civil rights groups as well as with the interracial Left.³⁵ Helen’s reference to Bandung, which expressly links “the soldiers of Trumbull Park” to an international, anticolonial gathering of nonwhite people, is even more telling considering that by the end of the 1950s, Cold War politics had effectively disconnected the mainstream civil rights movement from Bandung’s internationalizing focus on the colonization of people of color (see Von Eschen 1997).

Surprising and troubling given Brown’s radical union work, his public defense of Paul Robeson, his collaborations with people on the Left, and his celebration of the Cuban Revolution, the speech echoes the increasingly anticommunist politics of the Defender, which throughout the 1950s began to parrot the FBI’s position on “subversives” and to support the U.S. government’s description of world politics. In 1955, the Defender columnist Louis E. Martin denounced the communists Benjamin Davis and Robeson for being too “intoxicated” by communism to recognize its danger to black Americans. He then explained that communism failed to take root in black communities because “everything the Negro ever dreamed about is right here in the United States and he has always felt that if only racial discrimination were eliminated this would be Utopia.” I italicize this passage not because I think it represents Brown’s politics but to indicate how smoothly anticommunism was being interpolated into civil rights discourse. In contrast to the Defender, the editorials in Robeson’s Freedom throughout the 1950s relentlessly exposed the parallels between U.S. racial violence and South African apartheid as well as the role of the United States in fomenting international racial exploitation. Whether Brown’s anticommunist speech was merely tactical or, less likely, actually represented a genuine political change of heart, it articulated an untenable position for a black radical labor and civil rights nationalist. In another example of Brown trying to juggle his political allegiances, he journeyed to Cuba in 1959 during the height of the Cuban Revolution, and, though he was there ostensibly as a neutral reporter, his friend Bennett Johnson recalls that he spent “his daylight hours with Batista supporters, and his nights with adherents of Fidel Castro” and Johnson maintains quite resolutely that “[Brown] was, without a doubt, sympathetic with Fidel Castro.”³⁸

Bill Mullen describes the end of the 1950s as a moment when the possibilities of “sustained progressive or radical black cultural work” of Chicago’s Negro People’s Cultural and Political Front were also being undercut by the emergence of a growing black entrepreneurial and consumer class” (1999, 202). Adam Green (2007) argues that black Chicago entered into modernity during the 1940s and 1950s, becoming modern market consumers ambitious for and to some extent constituted by their participation in the new consumer economy. As a newly successful writer working for the glossy picture magazine Ebony, posing with movie stars, and contemplating a movie deal for his novel, Brown was firmly positioned to enter Chicago’s black middle class. In the three-page spread in the black picture magazine Sepia celebrating the novel’s release, Brown was shown in shots at home with his wife and daughters; in his study writing; at Chicago’s Val-Jac African art shop, where artists and writers congregated; and at a cocktail party discussing his book, as it was “heading toward the best seller list,” with film star Lana Turner. In the article’s cover photograph, he is standing on the steps of a downtown Chicago federal building, dressed impeccably in a lightweight summer business suit and dark tie, holding a leather briefcase as though about to enter his office. We might recall here the scene from just a few years earlier captured in Brown’s FOIA report, which also describes him standing in front of a federal building in downtown Chicago not with a briefcase but holding aloft a protest sign that denounced the government investigation being held there and, as his file indicates, courting FBI reprisal.

Brown’s friend and his predecessor as program coordinator at UPWA, Oscar Brown Jr., verifies Brown’s strategic political alliances with communists. While he insisted that the union was not communist when Frank London Brown was program coordinator, Oscar Brown said that the UPWA and London Brown “worked well with left-leaning people like Charlie Hayes, Leon Beverly, and Sam Parks.”³⁹ In addition, Oscar Brown himself was sent by the union to organize support for the Trumbull Park families, so there was at least one official and known communist in the Trumbull Park struggle. In the FOIA file on Frank London Brown, the informant, “Chicago T-20 … advised on December 23, 1957, that he had known FRANK BROWN Jr. personally while he was District Number 1 Program Coordinator of the United Packinghouse Workers of America Union, and that the persons with whom he had contact considered him to be a ‘left winger.’”⁴⁰ Oscar Brown confirmed this assessment of London Brown’s leftist political leanings: “[I] tried unsuccessfully to recruit Brown to the Party; he didn’t join but he was very left.”⁴¹

It may be that Trumbull Park is, finally, less about suppressing the Left than about Brown trying, against the odds, as it turns out, to fashion an eclectic leftist, interracial, international black nationalism out of a potpourri of political ideas and practices he felt would advance the cause of black liberation. Weaving back and forth between a black nationalist focus on identity and political resistance and a commitment to the crossracial radical democratic aims of earlier cultural front aesthetics, Trumbull Park, as well as Brown’s life story, might best be seen as acts of negotiation between the conflicting formations of public and counterpublic spheres that included black cultural nationalists; multiracial political and cultural fronts; antiracist, interracial radical unions; the commercial publishing industry; black consumer culture; and the omnipresent F.B.-Eyes. In the final analysis, however, enough of the improvisatory politics and aesthetics and resistant black consciousness of Brown’s Cold War generation, though up against the formidable repressive power of the last three forces on that list, would remain to enkindle some sparks in the next.