Think how many fascinating human documents there would be now, if all the great poets had written of what happened to them personally—and of the thoughts that occurred to them, no matter how ugly, no matter how fantastic, no matter how seemingly ridiculous!
—GWENDOLYN BROOKS, 1938
WE CAN ONLY wish that Gwendolyn Brooks had heeded her own words and allowed some of the ghosts of her Cold War past out of the closet. When she and the others of her generation of black leftist activist-artists looked back on the history they helped make, they were reluctant to tell the story of their part in creating it. Some were communists and some weren’t, but if they stood up against McCarthy’s witch-hunts, HUAC investigations, and Smith Act and McCarran act reprisals against the Left, or even if they merely supported causes identified with the Left, they could count on being blacklisted and harassed. Even though African American artists on the Left produced many of the major themes and forms of African American cultural production from the 1930s to the early 1950s—a radical protest tradition—African American cultural histories have often helped obscure their contributions by erasing or evading Left history or by foregrounding the negative stories of the Communist Party.
The new scholarship on the black Left, deeply researched and theoretically smart, has advanced our knowledge and understanding and begun to reverse those practices of erasure, but what is still missing, and what I long for, are the personal testimonies of black leftists who were there in the midst of the activist 1940s and the Cold War 1950s, the kind of eyewitness testimony and private reflections that they tucked away to protect themselves from further intimidation and reprisals.
1 The editor and left-wing activist Esther Jackson writes, “People wonder why these things aren’t known,” but she, like many others, also hesitated to admit her communist ties, in part because red-scare tactics can be and still are used to menace them and their families (interview, March 30, 1998). In an effort to correct what she calls “this silencing of history,” the historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall wrote me an e-mail blistering the
New York Times for denying the communist affiliations of the visual artist Elizabeth Catlett in their 2012 memorial tribute:
That NYTimes article [April 3, 2012] about Elizabeth Catlett’s ties to the Communist Party is absurd claiming she was persecuted because her ex-husband was a member of the Communist Party but she was not. I knew her very well when we lived in Mexico between 1959 and 1964. She was a member of the Communist Party throughout her life in both the USA and Mexico. She is all over my FBI files as the liaison between the US refugees from McCarthyism (including Dalton Trumbo) living in Mexico and the Mexican Communist Party which is absolutely true. In fact, she helped me get articles about Robert F. Williams’ flight from the FBI in Mexican newspapers, which helped Rob and Mabel Williams and their two sons escape to Cuba via Mexico. She was not only a great artist she was a very influential Communist. Her husband Francisco (Pancho) Mora was also a Communist as were most of the great artists and muralists of Mexico. It is past time to put a stop to this silencing of history and accept what communists did to empower the exploited of the earth during the twentieth century.
The exasperation we hear in Hall’s insistence on Catlett’s leftist history underscores the reason there are only a few autobiographical accounts of the black Left and so few willing to allow us access to the personal, intimate, and multivalent stories of their experiences of being on the Left during the Cold War. Such imaginative narratives of the self might help undermine the knee-jerk reaction that paints communism as demonic and communists as traitors, but we also see the dangers of such revelations—consider the red-baiting discourse that continues alive and well in 2012, with ridiculous attacks on the current U.S. president as a “socialist” or, worse, “a communist.”
2 Nearly every figure I interviewed for
The Other Blacklist was hesitant about using the word “communist,” including Catlett herself.
3In this epilogue, I return to a figure who appears briefly in
chapter 6, Julian Mayfield, one of the speakers at the 1959 AMSAC Black Writers conference and the most outspoken about his radical affiliations. Mayfield left several autobiographical sketches, among them an unpublished interview and a semiautobiographical 1961 novel,
The Grand Parade, both of which describe Mayfield’s radical life and serve as an alternative vision of communism that counteracts those of disaffected communists like Richard Wright. As a thirty-year-old novelist and radical activist living in New York City, Mayfield joined the Party in the late 1940s because he considered it “the most powerful, radical organization” he could join, even though he felt that he had missed the great moment of the Party’s power in the 1930s. In a seventy-five-page interview given to a young student, he brilliantly evokes the passion that Party involvement inspired and honestly explores his disappointments. He says the Party attracted people like him “who were young, idealistic, and who were looking for a place in which to change American society as drastically as possible.” Nothing, in his estimation, came close to the Party for that kind of revolutionary change (1970, box 552-21). He was proud of the work he did in the Party on the big campaigns to free the Martinsville Seven, Willie McGee, and Mrs. Rosa Ingram and in trying to fight the execution of the Rosenbergs.
4 In contrast to most communist conversion narratives, Mayfield says that he was disappointed with the Party because it was “not revolutionary enough.” When the Party leaders were arrested and pleaded innocent, Mayfield says the tragedy was that they were indeed absolutely innocent—“we never conspired to overthrow the government” (552-18). “Our energies went into trying to reform American society as it is constituted now,” and, in the end, Mayfield believed, “we had no—no real effect on the black community” (552-17).
Like many other black leftists, including Jack O’Dell and Ossie Davis (see
chapter 5), Mayfield left the Party because he felt that his black nationalism would always exist in uneasy tension with his leftist affiliations, and he felt compelled to switch his energies and loyalties to black struggles. That break from the Party is reimagined as the central event in the life of his main character, Alonzo (Lonnie) Banks, in
The Grand Parade. There are several reasons for the importance of this novel. First, it spotlights the moment in the 1950s when the black Left, including Mayfield, moved away from communism and toward the emergent civil rights movement. Another reason for its importance is its delineation of the emotional and psychic cost of renouncing the Party, a move that is fraught, for a dedicated radical like Lonnie, as it was for Mayfield, with a sense of failure and loss. In its representation of the Party as a flawed but critical and effective organization,
The Grand Parade recalls and revises Wright’s version of leaving the Party and shows how caricatures of the Communist Party and anticommunist censorship narrowed the range of black political critique. The novel is also unique in its examination of the political maneuverings of the 1950s integration movement. In
The Grand Parade the integration movement is depicted as a collision of political interests vying for power: liberal politicians, black political activists, white racist groups, and, of course, government spies, renamed in the novel, with intentional irony, the BS, or Bureau of Security. Finally, the novel performs something rare in autobiographical accounts of black ex-communists: it very specifically cites the example of Soviet oppression under Stalin as a reason for Lonnie’s departure from the CP, a critique that radicals were often reluctant to raise because it played into the anticommunist discourse. As Alan Wald notes in his review essay “‘Triple Oppression’ to ‘Freedom Dreams,’” “Even among those African Americans who departed the Party, in 1956 if not earlier, the horrible facts of Stalinist oppression are never cited as a reason for the separation—the books report only grievances around lack of attention to anti-racism or personal gripes” (
Against the Current, January/February 2013, 25).
We get a rare view of the Communist Party in
The Grand Parade. Lonnie describes his life in the Party as rich, full, exciting, exhausting, and intellectually challenging. Above all, it is a meaningful life in community, with Lonnie serving in the important position of educational director. Signaling 1956 and the Khrushchev revelations about the Stalinist regime, the novel begins with Lonnie’s ouster from the Party for refusing to retract a report called “The Americanization of the Communist Party of the U.S.A.” Citing the Khrushchev report on Stalin’s atrocities, the report urges the CPUSA to call for “ideological and tactical independence from the Soviet Union” and to “repudiate the Russians whenever they were wrong just as it did the United States.” Lonnie’s report is considered anathema, and he is ejected from the Party for refusing to retract it (147). Though he stands on principle, he understands the enormity of his decision. He is relinquishing his dream of rising in the Party to become a member of the National Committee and ending a long-enduring relationship to a community of comrades: “
He was out of the Party. The realization struck Lonnie with full force as he opened his eyes. The knowledge was so awful in its enormity that he was certain he would never be able to live with it” (121). I know of no other narrative that describes with such emotional power and honesty the pain of being “cast out of the Communist family,” of losing what the Party had meant to someone being absorbed in struggle, invigorated by the Party’s intellectual demands, and supported by one’s comrades.
Despite the nuance and power of Mayfield’s narratives, the communist conversion narrative we are most likely to encounter is Wright’s 1944 autobiographical “I Tried to Be a Communist,” which was reprinted in 1948 in the CIA-financed volume
The God That Failed.
5 The CP that Wright describes is composed of venal, distrusting, anti-intellectual blacks jealous of his intelligence. When he is eventually brought up on trumped-up charges of being an “unhealthy element” (134), Wright “stands alone” before a Party that is secretive, underhanded, corrupt, domineering, and vicious. In the end Wright is thrust out of the Party and feels the sense of isolation and loneliness that Lonnie experiences, but Wright concludes that he must follow his own path—to “hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.” Wright’s self-portrait, the writer with the singular ability “to send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life,” is an image of the “exaggerated self”—to paraphrase the literary critic Robert Stepto’s term—alienated from the Party hierarchy but woefully unconcerned with the rank and file.
In contrast to Wright’s noble solitariness, Lonnie is standing at the end of
The Grand Parade in the midst of a crowd of black demonstrators prepared to engage in a fight for the right of black children to integrate the public schools. In what is clearly an elegy for the Left, Lonnie remembers at this point in his life the ability of the communists to organize and lead mass struggle and the example they set of courage. Lonnie’s greatest regret is knowing that the loss of the Communist Party insures that some of the greatest organizers and fighters will not be a part of the civil rights struggles: “
At last there was a real mass struggle among the Negroes but the Communists had been scattered to the four winds” (366–367).
The novel’s examination of the school integration struggle ends with another scene that illustrates the value of the radical traditions I’ve identified throughout The Other Blacklist. Focused on the young girl Mildred as the central figure in the integration struggle, this scene pays tribute to the way a leftist perspective could spot the tricks played by race liberalism’s ostensible benevolence. Mildred is depicted at her new school listening intently to the principal’s welcoming address. She sits among her classmates silently promising herself that she will earn A’s in all her subjects so that she can prove her ability. In the final line of the novel—“and Mildred sang with all the rest”—Mildred is shown standing and singing with abandon, along with all the other students, “My country ’tis of thee / Sweet land of liberty” (448). This is clearly a scene Mayfield intended not to champion the nation’s grudging acceptance of the Mildreds of America but as bitter political commentary on integrationist ideology. One can only understand this scene if we see it as Mayfield’s critique of race liberalism: the black girl, studying and singing for legitimacy, has been assigned her role as the newly racialized and restigmatized integrated subject, now retooled for the modern integrationist narrative.
This scene and this novel constitute the ending of
The Other Blacklist. Like Mayfield, the five artists of
The Other Blacklist countered the conservative integrationist narratives of the 1950s that reinforced rather than subverted white supremacy. They were able to do so because their art and activism was rooted in the militant discourses of the 1940s civil rights movement and in the values of the Left that gave priority to a vision that emphasized class consciousness and the struggle against economic racism. Whether they were ambivalent communists, reluctant radicals, wary fellow travelers, and/or committed leftists, they linked themselves to the passion and power of a radical vision and a radical activism. Their work was animated by and enabled by a vision that refused the terms of race liberalism promoted by the U.S. mainstream. They critiqued the Left even as they believed in many of its goals. In the end they were
artists on the Left on their own terms, experimenters and protestors in both their activism and their art.