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

1. The list of scholars I include in the section “Design and Methodology” represents the contemporary Cold War scholars of African American literary history and the Left who have begun to reverse this trend. Even as late as 2001, Cold War scholarship could elide the importance of race. None of the nine essays in Rethinking Cold War Culture (Kuznick and Gilbert 2001) is about race, and race does not surface in its introduction as a feature of this “rethinking.”

2. Esther Jackson, interview with the author (March 30, 1998).

3. While the Communist Party’s notion of an African American nation developing in the American South was never a realistic political goal (and in fact was ridiculed by many African Americans), it was, nevertheless, a powerful paradigm that influenced African American cultural production for decades.

4. The Popular Front is probably best understood as that moment in the history of U.S. communism when the CP formed alliances with other groups sympathetic to the ideals and aims of communism. In the United States, the CP became involved in institutions like unions, civil rights, and literary and cultural organizations and downplayed its sectarian identity. Many of the people on the Left became targeted as “fellow travelers,” meaning that they were on the Left, sympathetic to the ideals of communism, but not members of the Party.

5. The history of this document, as well as its predecessor, “An Appeal to the World,” is exhaustively documented in Anderson (2003).

6. These statements were in stark contrast to the position taken by the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, which, during the 1940s, ensured that American racism would remain a domestic issue. Anderson (2003) brilliantly traces the way that the international struggle for black equality became “Soviet-tainted” and therefore could be “repudiated as subversive, communistic, and even treasonous” (6).

7. For a description of the convention, see Gordon (1953).

8. The most extensive study of the FBI’s war on positive portrayals of blacks in the Cold War is Noakes (2003). According to Noakes’s research, the contest over how blacks would be portrayed in Hollywood films began in earnest during World War II as the Roosevelt administration became alarmed that stereotypical depictions of blacks “threatened to undermine the morale of blacks at a time when their loyalty and labour were needed to win the war.” At the same time, the NAACP began pressuring Hollywood to “depict the Negro in films as a normal human being and an integral part of the life of America and the world.” Despite these efforts, a study conducted in 1942 by the Office of War Information concluded that “black characters continued to be portrayed as ‘basically different from other people, as taking no relevant part in the life of the nation, as affecting nothing, contributing nothing, and expecting nothing.’” When the NAACP stepped up its fight against racial discrimination in film, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover decided to show that such racial militancy was more evidence of CP influence in Hollywood. One FBI report objected to the positive portrayal of the only black character in the 1947 film Body and Soul because it upset the racial hierarchy: “The negro appears as a fine, upstanding individual in comparison to everyone else in the cast.” According to reports by the FBI under Hoover, exploring racial themes was a sign of “excessive criticism of American life” and possibly treasonous. For Hoover and the FBI under his reign, racial progress was purely and simply a sign of “communist agitation,” and they continued throughout the 1950s to monitor, investigate, and censor films with themes of racial protest or that portrayed blacks positively.

9. See Schaub (1991, 91–115) for a thorough analysis of the impact of political and ideological pressures on American fiction produced during the Cold War. Focused on the artistic control exerted by leftist liberals in the 1950s, Schaub examines the New Critics’ disillusionment with the Left and their turn toward the conservatism of the “Vital Center,” in their determination to atone for what they considered their misguided innocence. Schaub argues that Invisible Man was part of this new conservatism: “The close fit between Ellison’s analysis of the black American situation and the analysis of human nature set forth in the conservative discourse of the dominant criticism was at once a major source of the novel’s success and its infamy.” (92).

10. Yet black membership in the Party never exceeded more than two thousand even at the height of its popularity, after its defense of the Scottsboro Boys. The NAACP was initially reluctant to support the nine defendants, poor youths accused of gang rape, for fear that they were unsympathetic; the International Labor Defense, the CPUSA’s legal apparatus, led the defense and garnered impressive international support for the cause. As the fascist threat to the Soviet Union became increasingly apparent in the mid-1930s, the CP abandoned its interest in the black (Southern) proletariat in favor of a broader coalition of blacks from all classes as part of the Popular Front (the international leftist movement opposing fascism).

11. In Renewing the Left, Harvey Teres reports that after one review of Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1945 and the publication of a few essays and stories by James Baldwin in 1949 and the early 1950s, Partisan Review, the major anticommunist leftist publication in the United States, almost completely ignored race and black writing. Teres concludes that the absence of black voices in such publications as Partisan Review is “due only partly to blatantly racist attitudes on the part of whites. It is also the outcome of several decades of white progressive sympathy from afar, which did not involve sustained contact with a representative range of black experience” (1996, 228).

12. Wald, along with the circle of Cultural Front scholars, e.g., Smethurst, Mullen, Dolinar, Duffy, and Gore, among others, would all agree on this formulation.

13. See, for example, Teres’s (1996, 228) comment on Partisan Review.

14. I’ve borrowed the term “race radicalism,” which I discuss in more depth in the epilogue, from Jodi Melamed (2011, xvii).

15. See Dudziak (2002), Von Eschen (1997), Singh (2005), Anderson (2003), and Golubuff (2007).

16. The full title of this book-length petition is Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress (1947).

17. Dudziak (2002, 49) dates this pamphlet as 1950 or 1951.

18. The literary and cultural historian Shaundra J. Myers foregrounds another way that Brown was psychologically and politically limiting: “The decision’s reach would eventually be broad and penetrating. Most Americans have experienced its ideological impact; the social policies spawned by Brown and the implicit ideals it conveys have shaped the very core of our beliefs, values, self-perceptions, and social relationships. Not only has Brown been the dominant ideal of racialization for the past 50 years, it has also been, as I argue here, an inconspicuous but key means of nationalizing African Americans, of containing them within and binding them to the nation” (2011, 8).

19. Most scholars refer to these ideas as examples of 1940s and 1950s race liberalism, rather than racial conservatism, as I insist on naming it. For the post–World War II period, when Jim Crow was still the law of the land, those who advocated racial integration, wanted to end Jim Crow, and supported mild forms of racial reform were considered the “liberals.” Melamed (2011) calls them antiracist race liberals. But even blacks who were not part of the intelligentsia knew that these “liberal” ideas were not efforts at real equality and would not have called these ideas liberal. Among the adults in my family and neighbors, many of whom were union members, they would have been considered at best conservative.

20. These respondents were Hugh Gloster, Saunders Redding, and Alain Locke.

21. Atlanta University was dependent on subsidies from the state of Georgia and money from white donors. Any institution that was indebted to white foundations or white philanthropy was less than willing to critique these “official” policy statements on race progress. Perhaps the most important example of the way race liberals promoted a conservative racial narrative in the 1940s and 1950s (under the name of racial “liberalism”) is the almost universal acceptance of Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 document An American Dilemma. See Singh (2005, 142–151) for one of the best critiques of Myrdal’s study as an example of “mid-century American liberalism” designed “to educate blacks into the acceptable forms of political thinking and behavior within the U.S. context.”

22. The symposium is treated at length in chapter 1. The most conservative voices were the journalist Era Bell Thompson and Professor Hugh Gloster of Hampton Institute.

23. Jodi Melamed’s (2011, 15) formulation is useful here. She shows how “racial liberalism” maintains power through its manipulation of race “as a cultural, psychological, or social problem—as a matter of ignorance, irrationality, feeling, or habit—to be corrected in the name of liberal-capitalist modernity rather than as internal to its political and economic structures.”

24. “Artists on the left” is a reference to the title of Andrew Hemingway’s (2002) study Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956.

25. Robins’s (1992) invaluable documentation of FBI procedures for collecting information exposes the unreliability of FOIA files. Agents revealed that they received conflicting and false information that nonetheless got recorded in the files. As one agent put it: “Reportorial accuracy was seldom a consideration. Almost everyone in the organization was usually afraid to tell Hoover the truth for fear of upsetting him—and for fear of the inevitable punishment. As a result, Hoover often had to rely on information that had been sugarcoated for him” (18).

26. See http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/sep/12/photographer-ernest-withersfbi-informant/.

27. One can never be sure whether a file exists or not, according to Robins (1992, 18). Some are hidden, some listed under “dead file,” and others simply irretrievable for various reasons, some of them bureaucratic mismanagement.

28. Andrew Hemingway is a major exception.

29. The term “discursive marks” is from Mullen (1999).

1. Brown described these essays to me in correspondence that spanned the years 1995 through 2003.

2. Masses & Mainstream, in their 1952 Black History Month issue, printed a list of the black writers published in 1951: Abner Berry, Lloyd L. Brown, Louis E. Burnham, Alice Childress, Edgar Rogie Clark, W. E. B. Du Bois, James W. Ford, Yvonne Gregory, Lorraine Hansberry, Charles P. Howard, John Hudson Jones, William L. Patterson, Pettis Perry, John Pittman, Paul Robeson, Ed Strickland, Roosevelt Ward, Wesley Robert Wells, Charles White, and Doxey Wilkerson. Except for black publications, no magazines or journals, even leftist journals like Partisan Review, published black writers regularly in the 1950s or 1960s. “If we look at the range of African American writing from the 1930s to the 1960s, we see that nearly all of it was ignored by Partisan Review, not to mention nearly every other white publication in the country” (Teres 1996). Teres lists all the mass-circulation magazines and “middlebrow magazines like Harper, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Saturday Review” and finds that none of them “gave any serious commitment to publishing black writers” (212–213). Since Teres did not examine Masses & Mainstream, he does not include its history of publishing black writers. Hemingway (2002) says that Masses & Mainstream often achieved a sophisticated level of cultural critique.

3. See Murray and Callahan (2000). Murray writes to Ellison about The Mark of Oppression in either January or February of 1952: “Personally I find it just about the worst thing on the Negro since, well, since they were justifying white supremacy with the Bible. No time to get into what I think of it now, but I must say that I find myself in complete agreement with Lloyd Brown’s reaction to it in (of all places) Masses and Mainstream, Oct 51, with a few objections of my own” (26).

4. There is a growing body of work on Iron City, including Manning (2009), Smethurst (2004), Lecklider (2012), and Wald’s foreword to the Northeastern University Press edition of Iron City (Brown 1994).

5. Brown, letter to the author, August 10, 1996.

6. In The Negro Novel in America, one of the earliest and most influential African American literary histories, the critic Robert Bone (1958, 159) began the process of dismissing Brown, calling Iron City “a propaganda tract inspired by the Foley trial and written by a Party stalwart.” Not only is Bone’s attack politically motivated, but the events of Iron City have no relationship to the Foley trials of suspected communists.

7. Brown, letter to the author, July 18, 1996.

8. Brown also completed a second novel, Year of Jubilee, that was never published. The novel is a kind of sequel to Iron City, with some of the same characters appearing in new roles. The novel is especially valuable as a fictionalized history of urban renewal in major U.S. cities, exposing the ways those urban plans were designed to eliminate blacks from certain valuable pieces of city land in the cities. Typical of Brown’s fiction, the political and historical events are based on actual stories, including an account of a racial massacre in Arkansas. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel, however, are the references to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which suggest that Brown was intent on extending the critique he had made of Ellison’s novel in his 1952 review in Masses & Mainstream. Like Invisible Man, Year of Jubilee opens with a prologue, a sermon at a church in Iron City. Set in 1952, the novel features a portrait of a man with his blue eyes staring through rimless glasses (like Invisible Man’s Brother Jack), a riot scene near the end, and a series of speeches that the novel shows as designed to manipulate and control. The main character Val is saved from the police during a riot by a man who lives clandestinely in a basement apartment hidden from the police and on the walls of which are lithographs of famous race people. Val is given a talisman, a deerfoot knife, by a man whose son was killed in the Arkansas riot, much like Brother Tarp, who gives the Invisible Man a leg iron to remind him of slavery and of Tarp’s resistant spirit. The similarities to Ellison’s novel were undoubtedly Brown’s deliberate fictional rebuke of what he considered the reactionary politics of Invisible Man.

9. Brown, letter to the author.

10. In the poem Hayden contributed to the symposium, “Theme and Variation,” he speaks in the voice of a narrator called “the stranger,” watching and wondering about all that is being proposed in this symposium and musing on the instability of reality (“sly transience / flickering always at the edge / of things”). In contrast to the attempts of other symposium respondents to theorize about representations of blackness, Hayden’s stranger says that reality is a “striptease” and that God is Houdini, presiding over a world in which the reality they seek to pin down is ever-changing. One senses Hayden’s impatience with the symposium’s catalog of advice for black writers, believing, as he did, that the artist must always confront this “changing permanence.” When Hayden revised the poem for his 1966 volume Selected Poems, he retained the title but made minor changes in the poem.

11. In his biography of Gwendolyn Brooks, the critic George E. Kent presented an astute criticism of the Phylon symposium, which supports my claim that scholars like Alain Locke were employing a set of shifting terms in their attempts to define “universality.” Kent argues that another level of concealment is represented by the symposium’s attempts to formulate a standard for “universality” while refusing to acknowledge that they were negotiating for acceptance with a “skeptical and remote” audience, a white literary establishment with all the powers of judgment and reward. If one has to “transcend racial experience in order to achieve universality,” Kent argues, then being “Negro” is excluded from the realm of universality (1990, 100).

12. In his 1949 book The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, the cultural critic and historian Arthur Schlesinger used the term “vital center” to describe what he considered the necessary balance between the radicalism of the left and the conservatism of the right. Though The Vital Center could pass during the 1950s as a moral corrective to both the right and the left, reclaiming democracy from both communism and fascism, contemporary critics like Thomas Hill Schaub (1991) have examined its moralistic arguments as masks for its own form of conservatism.

13. As Barbara Foley has shown in her 2006 essay “From Communism to Brotherhood: The Drafts of Invisible Man,” before his anticommunist conversion, Ralph Ellison represented the Communist Party (called the Brotherhood in the novel) with an insider’s knowledge of the Party and with a kind of tender respect. One passage about the non-Harlem Brotherhood, which Ellison omitted from the novel, almost perfectly describes Brown’s depiction of Party activists in Iron City: “They were like no other people I had ever known. I liked … their selfless acceptance of human equality, and their willingness to get their heads beaten to bring it a fraction of a step closer. They were willing to go all the way. Even their wages went into the movement. And most of all I liked their willingness to call things by their true names. Oh, I was trully [sic] carried away. For a while I was putting most of my salary back into the work. I worked days and nights and was seldom tired. It was as though we were all engaged in a mass dance in which the faster we went the less our fatigue. For Brotherhood was vital and we were revitalized” (Foley 2006, 169–170, emphasis mine).

14. “The most ambitious collective effort ever attempted in the field of literary studies,” according to Sillen (1949).

15. See also Dudziak (2007) and von Eschen (1992).

16. In chapter 2 of The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania, 1945–1960, Philip Jenkins (1999) gives a thorough description and analysis of the role of the Communist Party in labor politics in Pittsburgh; however, I agree with Jerry Harris (1999), who notes in his review of The Cold War at Home that Jenkins “comes dangerously close to justifying the anti-Communist hysteria.” Treating anticommunism, justifiably critiqued for its scattershot accusations against Americans, its efforts to undermine the New Deal, its thwarting of resistance to American capitalism, and its creation of an atmosphere of terror as somehow not all that consequential, as Jenkins does, is alarming as well as ahistorical.

17. At Brown’s trial, witnesses were intimidated into falsely testifying that they had been misled into supporting communists. Witnesses were asked, “Did you know you signed a petition to put a traitor on the ballot?” and when the witnesses answered “No,” the police had an airtight case against the communists.

18. See Wald’s foreword to Brown (1994), Rampersad (2005), Denning (1996), and Foley (2006).

19. Brown, letter to the author, January 23, 1999.

20. Nadler (1995) notes that even though some black Living Newspapers were actually written, not a single one was ever produced, which he attributes both to conscious and unconscious racism and to Red-baiting, which denounced civil rights activity as communist.

21. The precursor text for this eulogy is Welborn Victor Jenkins’s 1948 epic poem The “Incident” at Monroe, which also features a direct address to the dead victims: “Goodbye, Dorothy, you and Willie Mae, and George, the Soldier-boy, and Roger—.” The similarities between Jenkins’s poem and Brown’s revision of it are striking. Both use direct address, speaking to the victims. Both summon images of the law and the FBI as deliberately impotent and represent a strikingly leftist political viewpoint. Brown might very well have used Jenkins’s book, with its extensive photographs of the area, as sources for his descriptions of the murders.

22. Two years after James Baldwin’s now famous and controversial attack on Native Son in his 1951 essay “Many Thousands Gone,” Brown used Iron City to construct a parody of Native Son far more devastating than Baldwin’s essay in its caricature of both the novel and the main character Bigger Thomas. While Baldwin criticized Native Son because it lacked, in his terms, the quintessential New Critical qualities of complexity, ambiguity, and paradox, Brown found Native Son objectionable because of its dependence on the very modern epistemologies that Baldwin embraces(Morgan 2004).

23. Brown had good reason to feel suspicious of scientific studies, which he felt were often based on unconscious and unexamined beliefs in black inferiority. In a 1951 Masses & Mainstream essay, “Psychoanalysis vs. the Negro People,” he denounced the use of psychoanalysis by liberals as “the New Look in racism.” Published in the same year as Iron City, Brown’s essay reviewed The Mark of Oppression by two Columbia professors, Dr. Abram Kardiner and Dr. Lionel Ovesey (1951), who claimed in their psychoanalytic study of twenty-five northern urban Negroes that guilt and self-hatred were part of the “basic Negro personality.” Brown could hardly find enough pejoratives for the book, calling it “a pseudo-scientific rationale for every phase of capitalistic activity from selling TV sets to promoting imperialist war,” a combination of “stupidity, class snobbery and white chauvinist arrogance,” and “a rationale for the oppressive system of white supremacy.” Alarmed at the effort to use psychology and psychoanalysis to explain racial disparities, Brown insisted that the “marks of oppression” were on scarred backs, not in scarred psyches, and that the attempt to enlist psychology to explain away the political and economic causes of the victimization and brutality in black life was a “reactionary ideology and tool of capitalism” being used against the Negro people. This is the review that Murray was stunned to find himself in agreement with. See also Schaub (1991).

24. Brown, letter to the author, July 18, 1996. In stark contrast, the women in Native Son are uniformly portrayed as blind and helpless victims in a narrative world that most contemporary critics would agree, as Arnold Rampersad writes, is “fundamentally hostile to women, especially black women” (Rampersad 2005, xxii). While the women remain minor characters in Iron City, with little attention to their development as characters, they were consciously created as the antithesis of the female victims in Native Son. Among his communist characters, Brown includes the shrewd political operative Lucy Jackson. Wooed by Faulcon, Lucy insists that he become more active in the Scottsboro defense that she has organized at her church before she consents to his courtship. When the Lonnie James defense committee gets underway, the wives and female partners join in the community of support. Charlene, Paul Harper’s wife, does the detective work to find evidence of his innocence and skillfully subverts the police wiretaps when she confers with her husband at the prison. Brown’s class consciousness is more clearly evident than his attention to gender issues, but he was familiar with the debates among leftists over “The Woman Question,” and he lines up squarely with the Party’s progressive positions on gender in Iron City’s carefully designed portrayals of women as effective political leaders. As Barbara Foley (2003; 2006; 2010), and other feminist critics have shown, the legacy of the Left with regard to gender is contradictory. See Deborah Rosenfelt (1981), Dorothy Sterling (2003), Kate Weigand (2002), and Paula Rabinowitz (1991). Rosenfelt says, however, that leftist women writers often found the Party a genuine source of encouragement and a way of being connected to a larger intellectual, international, and political community.

25. The visual artist Alice Neel, for example, did as she pleased with her art, and, as the art critic and Neel biographer Pamela Allara (2000) says, Neel manipulated the Party hard line by confessing that she was just a bad communist.

26. Redding’s review and Brown’s vernacular experimentations precede by twenty-five years John Wideman’s (1976) astute article on the use of black speech in American fiction. Wideman critiques the tradition in American fiction that devalues black speech by confining the black vernacular to the oral, nonliterate speech of black characters and framing it with the standard-English narration that signifies literacy. While I doubt that Redding would have gone so far as to call Brown a modernist, he did implicitly credit Brown with bringing in the new by breaking the old fictional patterns that limited and demeaned black speech.

27. Humboldt’s real name was Charles Weinstock. Brown’s comments about him were in a letter to the author (August 3, 1996), in which Brown described Humboldt as the one who guided his writing.

28. Guilbaut recounts the intense debate between Roger Garaudy and Louis Aragon carried on in the pages of the communist art reviews Lettres francaises and Art de France over the issue of art. In “Artistes sans uniformes,” Garaudy satirized Aragon’s support for “party-controlled art,” insisting that it was a method of forcing artists “to wear a uniform.”

29. Brown, letter to Eric Foner, August 31, 1998. In possession of the author.

30. Bonosky, telephone conversation with the author, February 9, 2009.

31. The literary and cultural historian Aaron Lecklider (2012) presents another remarkable but unnoted aspect of the modernist politics of Iron City. Lecklider shows how Brown disrupts the pattern of leftist acceptance of an antihomosexual narrative of sexual perversion, deployed mainly as a means of arming the Left against the threat of anticommunism. Lecklider argues that, rather than marginalizing sexual difference, Brown’s novel performs an amazingly progressive and lyrical defense of sexual difference, claiming it as one of the sites of defiance against state-sanctioned repression and violence.

32. In a long interview (2009) with the author, Phillip Bonosky, who knew Lloyd Brown, suggests some of the internal struggles Brown had with the Communist Party. Bonosky said that Brown was more alienated from the Party than he would admit publicly. At one point he was nominated for the Central Committee but, according to Bonosky, didn’t take the position because he felt he was being used by the Party, particularly by two members he did not trust, who later defected. Brown felt like the nomination was a hostile move particularly at a point in the Cold War when a public position as a communist was a “ticket to jail.” Bonosky said Brown felt “that jailbird tingle” and decided to refuse the nomination. Brown was not disillusioned by the 1956 Khrushchev revelations about Stalin because, Bonosky says, his faith was in the Party, not always in the leaders. But he did quietly leave the Party and thereafter called himself a “communist with a small c.” This complex and problematic relationship between Brown and the Party is not evident in the fictional representations of communists in his novel.

1. One black-and-white photograph is the only visual documentation of the mural. The photo is at the Chicago Public Library, Harold Washington Center.

2. I am indebted to Peter Clothier for this reading of A History of the Negro Press. In his unpublished manuscript, Charles White: A Critical Biography, he is the first to note the modernism of this work and the way White has structured it to reveal the modernist tone through stylized movement, heavily stylized figures, the power of the machines, and the juxtaposition of men and machines. Clothier also noted “the stylistic contradictions” in White’s early work that he identifies as a conflict in White between representational realism and abstraction (65). More than any other commentator on White’s work, Clothier historicizes the “stylistic contradiction” in White’s work, tracing that contradiction back to what the art historian James Porter called “the diversified legacy of African realism” in White’s work. White’s fascination with this dual heritage may have been formed when he discovered the “tradition of stylization and abstraction” in African art in Alain Locke’s 1925 The New Negro, though clearly he was also influenced by the Mexican School, as I write about later in this chapter. Citing “White’s continuing battle between realism and abstraction,” Clothier also attributes White’s conflict to the struggle between “the fashionable forces of abstraction” of twentieth-century mainstream art culture and “the sense of social obligation to ‘represent’ his people” (88).

3. Peter Clothier’s unpublished, partially completed, twelve-chapter manuscript, Charles White: A Critical Biography, based on a series of private interviews he did with White in the 1980s, is one of the earliest and best critical assessments of White’s work. Clothier, the new dean at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California, met White at the institute in 1977 and was introduced to his work at the retrospective in Los Angeles that same year. Clothier says he was overwhelmed by the rhetorical and visual eloquence of the work, which he had never before fully appreciated. White agreed to be interviewed by Clothier, but, because of White’s poor health, those interviews consisted of only five sessions and seven hours of tape before White died on October 3, 1979.

4. When White’s wife, Frances Barrett White, said in an interview, “You touch blackness … you touch the Left,” she was describing poetically what she saw as the integration between White’s political ideals and his artistic goals.

5. Several of the Mexican muralists may have been a direct influence on White. Orozco’s 1930s public mural The Table of Brotherhood (or Fraternity of All Men), showing a black man in suit and tie seated at the head of a table around which are representatives of all races, was on view at the New School for Social Research in New York (LeFalle-Collins and Goldman 1996, 74) and probably seen by White. Rivera’s massive mural of automobile production, Detroit Industry (1932–1933), commissioned by Edsel Ford and painted on the entrance walls of the Detroit Museum of Art, features blacks prominently as workers on the assembly line and was also on display in the early 1930s. One of Rivera’s murals, the Disembarkation of the Spanish at Veracruz (1929–1951), showing Spaniards branding Africans and Indians working in chains as slave laborers and hanging from trees as Catholic monks pray over them, has all of the qualities we see in White’s Techniques Used in the Service of Struggle. The surreal lynching tree, the black man chained and beaten down by a white overseer, the rounded figures piled on one another, the enlarged hands, and the Dali-esque landscape, with parts of a log cabin jutting into the sky, all suggest the influence of the Mexican School. Like Rivera’s indigenous Mexicans, the people at the center of White’s art were, as Feelings described them, “the most African-looking, the poorest, the blackest people in our ranks.”

The Mexican school: Considering that White made many conscious decisions in his 1940s work to “emulate the tenets, techniques, art processes, and themes of the Mexican School,” his questioning of formal experimentation is all the more incomprehensible since the Mexican artists were, as LeFalle-Collins and Goldman (1996, 70) maintain, first and foremost formal experimenters: “The Mexican movement of the 1920s—in contrast to the visual clichés of Soviet socialist realism—was a true avant-garde, preceding or paralleling similar movements throughout Latin America that fused the stylistic innovations of European cubism, futurism, and constructivism with formal innovations derived from their local aboriginal and African populations, expressing in this manner their own national realities and philosophies.”

6. See Clothier (n.d.), Barnwell (2002), Killens (1986), and Brown’s FOIA file. In my interviews with Elizabeth Catlett, she said that both she and White were closely identified with the Left and the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s. Elizabeth Catlett, interview with the author, NYC, October 24, 2004.

7. Though the writer and critic Harold Cruse was a member of CNA, Cruse sneered (without documentation) that because of its exclusivity, “people in the Harlem cultural circles” referred to the CNA as “The Committee for Some Negroes in the Arts.” And, in his typical knee-jerk reaction to the white left, Cruse pilloried the group for its “white leftwing patronage and control” (1967, 211, 216). In “Harry Belafonte and the Sustaining Cold War Radicalism of the Black Popular Front, 1949–1960,” delivered in November 2012, at the American Studies Association annual meeting in Puerto Rico, the cultural critic Judith E. Smith also notes that CNA attracted a socially very distinguished group of New Yorkers, but she recognizes the importance of CNA’s support for black political protest in an era of a “massive cultural erasure of black experience” (6–7).

8. Jack O’Dell, Julian Mayfield, Ossie Davis, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Charles White, to name a few, all describe that move as essentially “organic,” according to O’Dell, simply the next step for a black radical. The excommunist and white writer Dorothy Sterling described the civil rights movement as the “one bright spot on the political horizon” during the dark days of the McCarthy period. Like other radicals, black and white, who were involved during the 1940s in African American equality struggles as leftists, Dorothy Sterling became a civil rights protester and organizer. She also began writing progressive books about black history, many of them written for children. They were among the first children books to challenge the color line in the publishing industry (Sterling 2003, 201–225). See my discussion of the turn toward black nationalism and civil rights in the epilogue and later in this chapter on White.

9. This brings up, of course, a wide-ranging debate with differing critical opinions. I tend to agree with Hemingway, whose consideration of these issues is well documented, extensive, critically sharp, and measured. He notes that when the cultural critic Charles Humboldt dropped off the editorial board of Masses & Mainstream in 1949, there was a clear shift toward including fewer pieces of modernist art (2002, 214). Humboldt had argued, as early as 1946, that a hard line on modernist art “could alienate abstract artists” (216). In the Daily Worker, the critic and visual artist Joseph Solman described abstract expressionism as “a flight from reality,” but in other Daily Worker articles his approach was more nuanced, with an appreciation of the need for formal sophistication for art to be aesthetically “meaningful” (217). There is clearly a vibrant, energetic, sometimes contentious discourse in the Marxist and communist art criticism throughout the 1940s. But, when Andrei Zhdanov became the chief theorist in Stalin’s administration, he induced a rightward shift that resulted in “an extreme antipathy to modernism [becoming] de rigeur among the Party’s most authoritative cultural spokesmen” (222). According to the major Marxist art critic and White biographer Sidney Finkelstein, an artist like Jacob Lawrence, by flirting too dangerously with modernism, had become limited. The one artist that Finkelstein continued to approve of was Charles White, who, in his estimation, “came nearest to an art that could ‘speak to the common people’” (222).

10. I have no evidence of, nor am I interested in, whether White was an official member of the Communist Party. Throughout this chapter, I am very careful to make the distinction that White was associated with communist organizations and worked with communist critics, artists, and activists. I am not trying to determine his organizational status, but I do intend to challenge and break with the practice of eliding, omitting, and/or minimizing his affiliations with the Communist Party.

11. In the Clothier manuscript, Clothier says that White wanted to clear up the circumstances of his birth before his death and thus revealed in a tape-recorded interview that his mother was never married to his father, a fact that White said was never discussed between mother and son (6).

12. Interview with the author, April 6, 2005.

13. There are numerous books about the influence of the Communist Party in Chicago during the 1930s to the 1950s; see especially Storch (2009) and Mullen (1999).

14. White autobiographical notes, Archives of American Art (AAA), 3189–3195, and oral interviews, Charles White estate, transcribed, September 14, 1970.

15. Clothier, Charles White oral interview, Charles White estate, transcribed, September 14, 1970, p. 29.

16. Daniel Schulman (2004) maintains that the Art Institute’s policies were considered liberal at a time when others barred blacks from attending their institutions or tolerated racism. Schulman attributes these progressive attitudes to the institute’s founding as “an instrument of social uplift and civic improvement” and to the influence of Charles Hutchinson, the president of the institute from 1882 until his death in 1924, who fully supported those policies (43).

17. White, Margaret Burroughs, Peter Clothier, Robert Bone, and Richard Courage very specifically use the designation Art Crafts Guild, though other critics call it the Arts and Crafts Guild.

18. Interview A, p. 8, Charles White estate. Undated, typed, 24 pages.

19. This is a line from the poet Margaret Walker’s poem “Memory.” She described the effects of poverty and unemployment in these terms:

20. Clothier, Charles White oral interview, Charles White estate, transcribed, September 14, 1970, p. 52.

22. Interview with author, April 1, 2008.

23. See Schulman (2009); Rosenwald Catalog. In 1940, William Carter called the mural Chaotic Stage of the Negro, Past and Present. In contrast to White’s murals, WPA-era murals, which were displayed in public places like post offices, libraries, and schools, were apt to show an unproblematic view of American democracy at work.

24. Since the figure is somewhat racially indeterminate, Stacy I. Morgan’s reading of the overseer figure as black is understandable. But, given White’s militant black politics and the historical record of slavery and sharecropping in the U.S. South, it is more likely that the overseer is a white man.

25. See Hemingway (2002) for a discussion of WPA artists’ attempts to portray progressive ideals in their public art works. Edward Millman’s and Mitchell Siporin’s murals for the St. Louis Post Office, portraying the history of Missouri from early settlement to Reconstruction, represent “the image of dignified labor” and “workers’ power and other tropes that register their progressive politics.” Generally, however, muralists did not violate the desire of local communities for “an essentially benign vision of America” (169).

26. Both Millman and Siporin had been to Mexico and had met Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros and worked on murals with Orozco and Rivera. See Clothier, Charles White oral interview, Charles White estate, transcribed, September 14, 1970.

27. Rockefeller had the mural destroyed in 1934 when he discovered the picture of Lenin in it.

28. He also said: “Another event was to take place which was to have a very significant effect on this thing. An effect in a positive way. I went to Mexico to work for a year and a half.”

29. The 1949 portrait, Frederick Douglass Lives Again or The Living Douglass, which appeared on the cover of the Sunday Worker in 1950, is in the style of The Trenton Six and The Ingram Case and follows the same format, with cubist influences obvious in the flat, elongated lines of the figures and the almost architectural quality of the drawing. The massive head of Douglass looms like an Old Testament Moses as he extends his right arm in a protective gesture over a group of eleven black men, all of whom fit snugly under it as they move through a barbed wire fence that appears to have been snapped by Douglass’s powerful left fist. Douglass’s hands and arms are constructed like a block of wood or iron, suggesting a godlike power. One of the men carries a book high over his head, and one dressed in a business suit carries a scroll that might be a proclamation or a document demanding justice, both suggesting the weapons used in breaking down oppressive forces. Hemingway says the painting intentionally evokes parallels with “documentary photographs and newsreel footage of Nazi concentration camps—even as [White] links the cause of these defendants with the historic struggle of Douglass’s generation for freedom from chattel slavery”(2002, 150).

30. Both of these phrases are from Fran’s oral interview with Clothier (11) and reflect the excitement of their time organizing and working with the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA).

31. Clothier, oral interview with Fran Barrett White, transcribed, Altadena, Calif., October 1980, 12.

32. AAA 3191, 215, 1950.

33. I deal with the blacklisting of black artists, intellectuals, writers, actors, etc. on the Left throughout The Other Blacklist. Some of this information on the blacklisting of black artists appears in each chapter. The leftist political activism and subsequent blacklisting of these figures are documented in their memoirs: Ossie Davis, Life Lit by Some Large Vision: Selected Speeches and Writings (2006); Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together (2000); Sidney Poitier, This Life (1981), and The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (2007).

34. At the First Constitutional Convention of the CNA on January 26, 1952, the photographer Roy DeCarava’s opening speech, poetically entitled “There’s a poem in our bread, a story in our meat,” invited progressive artists to fight American cultural Jim Crow by considering every aspect of black culture both worthy subject matter for their art and the grounds for counteracting white racism. He urged those artists who come home tired from their day jobs to try to imagine how a culture despised by the outside world could be transformed through the symbolic representations of politically committed artists:

35. Much of this is extensively reported in Fran Barrett White’s taped interview with Clothier (19–25).

36. Interview with the author, April 1, 2008.

37. For discussions of this question, see Singh (2005, 124) and the correspondence between Horace Cayton, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright.

38. See Cayton (1965) for this same sentiment.

39. These admonitions and advice were featured in the following articles: Charles White (1952; 1955) and David Platt (1951a; 1951b).

40. Hemingway (2002, 221) describes Andrei Zhdanov’s role as head of the Leningrad Central Committee and his alignment with Stalin in Soviet purges as a parallel to his role as hard-line art critic and theorist.

41. Clothier, oral interview with Douglas Glasgow, transcribed, Altadena, Calif., 106.

43. Socialist realism and social realism are often difficult to distinguish. In Social Realism: Art as a Weapon, David Shapiro makes some distinctions that are helpful: social realism, the dominant American art in the 1930s, arose out of the desire of artists to use their art to “communicate social values” (28). To that end, art would serve as a means to focus on those values that could transform society. Promoted by the Marxists, and facilitated by the support of art programs of the WPA, social realism was mean to focus on and appeal to the working class. Socialist realism, promoted, paradoxically, as the Party was in decline in the United States, demanded a more politically correct art, selecting aspects of working-class life that reflected the positive aspects of life under Soviet control (28). In The Proletarian Moment, Murphy traces the shift in the discussions of the term “socialist realism,” noting that in its earliest formulations, socialist realism stressed “the freedom of the writer in regard to form, style and genre”(1991, 102). As Murphy shows, debates on art and literature among Marxists and communists reflected a wide range of perspectives, and in their international discussions, socialist realism was described in broad, flexible, sometimes contradictory statements that insisted on upholding socialist principles but also allowed for artistic freedom.

44. In the section “The End of Democratic Front Aesthetics and the Emergence of Zhdanovism,” in chapter 9, “Cultural Criticism Between Hollywood and Zhdanovism,” Hemingway (2002) outlines a history of the changes in leftist aesthetics that help account for the shifts in White’s work between the late 1940s and 1950s. Clearly there was a range of opinion in Marxist art criticism, and shifting opinions over the years, with critics and artists on every side. An example of these shifts is the art criticism of Joseph Solman, whose art reviews appear in New Masses and Masses & Mainstream between 1946 and 1948. A sophisticated artist and critic, Solman was, according to Hemingway, “a defender of modernism within Marxist criticism” (217). In contrast with the Daily Worker critic Marion Summers (aka Milton Brown), Solman believed that “To be meaningful aesthetically art had to be formally sophisticated and inventive” (217). But, as leftist art critics and artists committed to the values of democracy, pluralism, and the collective confronted the hegemony of abstract art and the domination of the art world by art dealers, critics, and gallery owners, they had little choice but to critique and reject what they viewed as the corporate control of art (101).

45. Fran White’s interview with Clothier provides some insight into how White responded to these critics. She notes that the African American John Pittman was a critic Charlie admired and learned from: “[Pittman] was the art critic that I think of anybody over the years Charlie felt really gave him clues as to how he could grow. Everybody else either praised him or negatived [sic] him, John was the one critic that would seem to hit some chord in Charlie that would help him move from one period, to make change that he agreed with, and he would [be] almost feeling them and John would pinpoint them … He [Pittman] spent a long time in the socialist part of Europe as a correspondent” (10).

46. Clothier, oral interview with John Biggers, transcribed, Altadena, Calif., 15.

47. My efforts to assess the assets and liabilities in Charles White’s vexed relationship with communism and the CP repeat the balancing act of most scholars of the Left. In “No ‘Graver Danger’: Black Anti-Communism, the Communist Party, and the Race Question,” a thorough and balanced analysis of the problems and pitfalls of anticommunism for African American social, political, and intellectual agency, Eric Arnensen concludes that “revisionist historians on both sides of the issue often fail to consider the complex and individual histories of communism and the Communist Party.” He cites A. Philip Randolph’s anticommunism as an example: “Revisionist historians may not accept Randolph’s indictment of the communist activists whose dedication and accomplishments they choose to celebrate. But they might fruitfully listen to the critique of—his jeremiad against, really—the party whose support for the goals of ending racial discrimination and inequality was not enough to offset its frequently destructive tendencies and the genuine harm it did to those with whom it disagreed. Communists’ flaws—born of a voluntary acceptance of an organizational style and vision that required them to submit to what Randolph termed an ‘alien master’—were not incidental but constitutive of their politics, at all levels of the party, at least for those who chose to remain in its ranks. Coming to terms with the CP’s uneven role in civil rights history requires us to take seriously the pragmatic, political, and ethical critiques lodged by anticommunist progressives. Such an engagement will leave us with a ‘far grayer picture,’ but one that can more accurately account for the larger tragedy of the American Left” (2001, 40).

48. See Masses & Mainstream. Obviously this was customary. Lloyd Brown’s 1951 novel Iron City also was sold through Masses & Mainstream by subscriptions.

49. See Corwin (1950), his Daily Worker review of White’s February 1950 show at the ACA Gallery. In the show are pictures of John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Gabriel Prosser, the Ingrams, the Trenton Six, two children holding broken toys, a mother awaiting the return of her soldier son, a flute player, and a blues singer. There is also The Awakening and Frederick Douglass Lives Again. “These forms are as large as the themes, and they are unequivocal, strong and clear.” Clearly Corwin approves of White’s art, and presumably so does the Communist Party. More praise: “But White shows us one valid way that an artist can work … [that] springs from a militant content and is directed in clear, simple, bold terms to the eyes of the people.” It is clear to Corwin that White has chosen an artistic method and theme that the CPUSA approves of—its militancy, its clarity, its boldness. “He represents Negroes of the past and of today, who are not weak or crushed or caricatured or comic. They are heroic…. there is no doubting their dignity and their strength.” But then here is the clincher, the suggestion of what he is doing wrong that Corwin believes must be corrected: “We have certain suggestions we would like to offer to White, even while we applaud the correctness of his basic orientation. His style, with its precisely modeled, architectonic forms, is a cold one, which may be alright. It’s one way to get at things. But it occasionally runs into the danger of going dry or empty, where the modeling thins out or, especially in peripheral areas, where the meanings are lost. Another danger in such a style is that it may become static, and these pictures occasionally do in content as well as form. In many the characteristic mood is a tortured repose with upturned eyes and furrowed brows. The correlative danger is that the picture will be animated by superficial devices, and of this too, White should be careful. He succumbs at times to a kind of mannerism in which figures pose and gesture, but one doesn’t know why.”

50. In both “Charles White: Humanist Art” and the critical biography Charles White: An American Artist, Finkelstein (1953; 1955) makes clear his disapproval of White’s move toward experimentalism: “In the latter two murals [History of the Negro Press and Techniques Used in the Service of Struggle] a move may be observed towards a stylization of painting and drawing technique. In ‘The Negro Press’ it is seen in the lines of the garments, carrying on the hard lines of the newspaper sheets, and to some extent also found in the sharply accented lines of the faces. In ‘Techniques Used to Fight’ it is found in the stylized linear patterns of the garments, faces and hair. This reflects the impact upon White of the experimental techniques which at the time clamored for the attention of every artist who thought himself to be ‘advanced,’ ‘free,’ ‘modern.’ … Yet a contradiction is created. While, in these murals, the stylization of line and of rhythm make for a strong immediate impact on the eye, affecting even the sense of touch, creating a high tension and excitement, these same styles make it more difficult to disclose the inner sensitivity and psychological depth of the human beings who are the subject”(1955, 23–24; translated from original texts).

51. As Hemingway cautions, leftist critics and artists had every reason to be concerned about the “hegemony of modernist abstraction” because of “its authority in museums and the art press, and the corresponding devaluation of traditional skills and almost all variants of naturalism” (2002, 239). Thus, it is important to keep in mind that the artistic prescriptions of the Left, however reductive, were a response to something that had real political consequences. Indeed, by 1949, the major voices in art criticism, most notably Clement Greenberg, had canonized abstract artists like Jackson Pollock, whose art of pure expressionism, devoid of any figuration or easily apprehended social content, was considered the only route to a distinctive and excellent U.S. art tradition (Hemingway 2002, 239; Guilbaut 1984, 161). The rise of abstraction during the Cold War went hand in hand with the consignment of WPA art to the junk heap, the dismissal of socially relevant art as mere “propaganda,” and the blacklisting of the creators of that art. White would have been particularly concerned with this new turn of events in the art world, for, if white leftist artists were worried about finding recognition and acceptance in mainstream art galleries and art journals—not to mention being blacklisted and jailed—a black social realist could hardly have felt sanguine about his or her prospects. Hemingway offers a balanced view of the merits of social realism to show that the “culture of the left” did indeed leave an important legacy in its insistence on a “realistic” representation of working people, black dignity, and class and race struggle. In his final summation of the works of painters like Raphael Soyer and Alice Neel—and, I would certainly add Charles White—who remained committed to the values of the Left even after they left the Party, Hemingway concludes: “Whatever its [the Communist Party’s] limitations—it offered the most sustained critique available of class, racial, and sexual inequality” (247).

52. White’s son Ian White says he does not think his father intended to represent any real figures in this drawing. Phone interview with the author, December 2012.

53. This last point about the “sounds” this painting represents was a suggestion made to me by the professor and literary critic Kenneth W. Warren.

54. Art historians dispute this characterization of the ascendancy of abstract art. Patricia Hill says that “all the art magazines including Life” show that abstract art did not become “hegemonic” in the late 1940s. See Hill’s essays in The Figurative Tradition and the Whitney Museum of American Art co-written with Roberta Tarbell.

55. AAA interview, Box 10.

56. This interview is in the Charles White estate.

57. AAA interview, Box 3, 17.

58. White painted the top half of the card with the image of a black woman with an Angela Davis–style Afro. He placed a pink rose in the center of the bottom half. Using black and white cross-stitching as the background for the entire card, he made the pink rose stand out as the only color on the card. The National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners published the card and one was sent to Governor Ronald Reagan.

59. Clothier oral interview of Fran Barrett White (26/41). Note that I am adding dual page numbers, because I numbered the entire interview consecutively to make it easier to find these references. In the manuscript, each interview is separately numbered.

60. The political nature of some of these cards is represented by the one Dalton and Cleo Trumbo sent bearing the photograph of a heavy-set, menacing, helmeted, and armed white police officer standing behind barbed wire, with the greeting “Merry Christmas to You! inscribed on the barbed wire. The cards are in the Charles White estate.

61. I am deeply grateful to Charles White’s son Ian White for allowing me access to the Charles White Estate, for permission to use the images in this chapter, and for providing the cover image Walk Together. I also want to express my gratitude to Columbia University professor emeritus Edmund Gordon for sharing his extensive collection of Charles White art with me; giving me a private tour of the Heritage Gallery, the major repository of the Charles White collection; and for reading and critiquing this chapter. My deepest thanks to the art historian Daniel Schulman for help in my analysis of White’s work and for generously reading and commenting on this chapter. The art curator Mark Pascale of the Art Institute of Chicago allowed me a private showing of Harvest Talk, and both Mark and Danny alerted me to the relationship between Harvest Talk and the FSA photograph by Marion Wolcott. Thanks also to the art historian Patricia Hills, professor of African American Studies, Boston University, who graciously read and commented on this chapter.

1. Recent scholarship by Gore (2011) and McDuffie (2011) expands the discussion of Childress’s relation to the Left. These two studies constitute the first comprehensive, book-length histories of black radical women of the United States (Washington 2013).

2. See Davies (2008, xv). In her biography of Claudia Jones, Davies comments on these absences as examples of the tendency to “[deport] the radical black female subject to an elsewhere, outside the terms of ‘normal’ African American intellectual discourse in the United States” (xv).

3. LaVinia Delois Jennings (1995, xv) says Gold Through the Trees was the first professionally produced play by a black woman.

4. As William Maxwell (2006) notes in his essay on Claude McKay’s FBI files, unlike mainstream literary criticism institutions of the 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover’s bureau always presumed the importance of black literary texts and traditions. Maxwell’s research on the surveillance and suppression of black literary work and black writers provides evidence that black literary production was highly policed during the Cold War and therefore, to some extent, shaped by state-sponsored censorship.

5. Many scholars of the U.S. Left question the accepted periodization of the Popular Front as limited to the years 1935 through 1939. See Smethurst (1999), Wald (2001), Mullen (1999), and Dolinar (2012).

6. In fact, there is little mention of the politics of the 1950s at all in Jennings’s biography, which focuses more closely on literary history and aesthetics.

7. The relationship of this essay to Maxwell Anderson’s 1941 anti-Nazi play Candle in the Wind is worth considering. Childress might very well have seen Anderson’s play about the German occupation of France since it opened in New York and starred the famous Helen Hayes, and she would have been drawn to its radical political views.

8. In his study of the relationship between Betty Friedan’s feminist politics and her work in the left-wing labor movement of the 1940s and 1950s, Daniel Horowitz (2000) argues that Friedan reconstructed herself in the 1970s as a middle-class feminist, omitting much of her radical leftist past. Horowitz shows that Friedan distanced herself and her politics from her leftwing labor past in her famous text The Feminist Mystique, claiming that her feminism developed in response to the problems of middle class white suburban women. Childress did not turn away from her leftist politics, but she did not foreground her left radicalism, which is understandable given the repressions of the Cold War.

9. See, for comparison, the communist critic Moissaye Olgin’s (1927) essay, “For a Workers Theater.”

10. See Childress’s letter to Hughes from June 3, 1957. She continues in the letter to scold Hughes for his reductionist representations of black culture: “Gin and watermelon is as much a part of white America’s diet as any other food and drink, and yet I got the feeling that it was a part of Negro Culture and we had been shamed into denying it. Where did this watermelon phobia stem from? Out of thin air did we decide to become ashamed of watermelon eating and gin drinking because we liked these things … and thus stamped them as a mark of inferiority? I think not. This shame came out of white-mouthed minstrels grimacing from billboards over a slice of melon, Calendars bearing distorted drawings of Negro children sitting in the midst of melons, from white writers and artists who portrayed Negro men and women as gin-soaked, lazy people. Of course we have a right to drink gin, I agree with you. But there is nothing ‘uppity’ or foolish about drinking scotch. Must it be one or the other? Most restaurants and bars in the South do not allow Negroes to sit down and eat anything, and whatever melons or gins may be sold are there for white customers only. As for a Negro man making love to a woman by repeating the words water melon over and over … I think the protest then becomes so self-conscious that it defeats the protest.” In this same letter, Childress expressed her disappointment with Hughes for disavowing his writing in his appearance before HUAC, which she called, dismissively, “one of those crazy committees.” In 1949, in response to an argument with Sidney Poitier and other men of the Harlem Left, who claimed that only issues involving black men could represent racial struggle, she wrote the 1949 female-centered play Florence, reputedly overnight, to prove that black women’s lives were just as central to issues of underemployment, segregation, and racial violence as men’s (McDonald 2012, 187). From 1949 on, all of Childress’s work would reflect a black feminist viewpoint and a black cultural nationalism that allowed her to incorporate, improve on, and, perhaps inadvertently, conceal her leftist cultural politics. See also Beth Turner (1997, 45).

11. In a phone conversation with me, Jennings told me about the age change and also said that Jean’s birth records are “sealed.” Furthermore, Jennings said she was unable to locate a marriage certificate for Alice and Alvin Childress in any New York borough, despite Childress’s nearly lifelong tenure in New York City.

12. The historian Martha Biondi identifies O’Neal as a “committed activist” blacklisted along with the actors Ossie Davis and Dick Campbell (2003, 177–178).

13. Some of the writing she did in the 1960s, particularly the 1966 play Wedding Band, was aided by a two-year visiting appointment to the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she got with the help of the leftist writer Tillie Olsen.

14. A religious woman who was distributing Jehovah’s Witness material in the black community at the time she was attacked, Ruby Floyd fled to the home of a black family who took her to the police and later testified on her behalf. And, of course, there was never the possibility of an unbiased trial because of the conviction of the entire community that in a Southern state black men accused of raping a white woman could never be exonerated. The NAACP argued that the death penalty for rape in Virginia was reserved for black men, and the CRC pleaded for executive clemency, both to no avail.

15. As with the other scenes in Gold, music is an important counterpoint to the action. The scene ends with John drumming as he names aloud the people and things he is fighting and dying for: “For … my mother … my father … my sister … my people … Burney … for me … for the little children … freedom …”Then, as Ola smiles at him, perhaps for the last time, he slows the drum to an “intense but soft rhythm” and adds, “for Ola” (act 2, 9). In one instance, the play was described by a critic as a “showcase” for both African and African American cultural traditions and, in another, as the descendant of the minstrel tradition (Higashida 2011). Hansberry’s review is particularly helpful because it alludes to two scenes that were lost in the archived version—the scene of the Haitian rebellion led by “Father Toussaint” to overthrow the French planters and Napoleon’s army in 1849 and a scene depicting labor struggles in the British West Indies, both of which make the play’s internationalism even more evident. Hansberry also notes that some of the best acting in the play was by Childress herself playing the Haitian woman, who, between shouting out her wares for sale, is clandestinely bringing news and materials for the rebellion.

16. In Many Are the Crimes (1999), Schrecker says that because of the reports on Africa by the African American press and the work of influential leaders like Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, “the civil rights movement [in the 1940s] had a global perspective,” covering freedom struggles and strikes in Africa, denouncing imperialism, and linking American racism to South African apartheid. With the destruction of the Left, however, “the black community simply let Africa drop off the map,” with the result that “Americans, both black and white, know less about Africa today than they did in the 1940s” (375–376). One of the results of not understanding these links between Africa and the Left is that black intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s perpetuate views on Africa that almost amount to myth. In her 1996 dissertation, Elizabeth Barnsley Brown explains the theme of Africa in Childress’s 1970 play Mojo as “an obvious outgrowth of the revival of the Black Aesthetic during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s”(47) with no reference to the global articulations of the relationship between Africa and U.S. blacks in the 1940s and 1950s made by the black Left, specifically by Childress.

17. Childress may have begun to imagine her Mildred stories when she adapted and directed Langston Hughes’ Simple stories for the production of Just a Little Simple, presented at the Club Baron in 1950.

18. For example, according to a phone interview I conducted with Esther Jackson in 2009, Lorraine Hansberry lived with Jones when she first came to New York. Childress became active with the Harlem Committee to Repeal the Smith Act at the time that Jones was being threatened with deportation.

19. See Davies (2008, xiv). Davies points out, however, that while Marx’s grave bears a “towering” bust of Marx, Jones’s is marked by only a simple flat stone.

20. According to the Freedom files, the paper was distributed throughout the United States, including North Carolina, California, Detroit, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Birmingham, and in all the New York boroughs.

21. Lamphere (2003) states that Lloyd L. Brown was the ghostwriter for many, if not all, of the Robeson columns, which Robeson checked and apparently approved. This assertion was corroborated by Martin Duberman (1988, 393).

22. I want to refute the attack on Freedom made by Harold Cruse in his 1967 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. His chapter on Freedom seems to have but one purpose, and that is to discredit the newspaper as an integrationist tool of the Communist Party, divorced from and disinterested in the realities and needs of the black community. Cruse’s critique of Freedom is a sign of the empty rhetoric and personal vindictiveness of Crisis. There is no consistent review or evaluation of articles and editorials in Freedom, just an unsubstantiated claim that Freedom was uninterested in black culture or “the social problems of people in ghettoes,” when even a cursory glance at the paper shows that it focused on these very issues for its entire five years. Confronted with the overwhelming evidence of the paper’s devotion to black issues, Cruse simply shifts tactics and manipulates the evidence. Unable to ignore Freedom’s extensive coverage of the Willie McGee case, Cruse simply insists that since very few Negroes in Harlem showed up for the Willie McGee defense rally in Harlem, that is evidence enough to show “what little influence Freedom newspaper had in Harlem.” With no mention of the anticommunist assaults on Freedom and the black Left by McCarthy and HUAC, Cruse says that Freedom failed because of “the political and creative default of the Negro leftwing intellectuals.” Lloyd Brown says, and many critics of Cruse agree, that Cruse used Crisis as a private battleground to settle old scores, and he certainly felt that he had many to settle with the writers of Freedom, particularly Robeson and Hansberry. See Singh (2005) for an extended analysis of Cruse.

23. As the historian Martha Biondi puts it, the Cold War targeting of black leaders under the Smith Act meant that “any political link to Communists would have the taint of criminal subversion” (2003, 144).

24. In 1966, Wedding Band was so controversial that Childress could get it produced only at the University of Michigan. No New York producer would touch the play until Joseph Papp agreed to produce it at the Public Theater in 1972, more than six years after its opening. Then, on October 26, 1972, at the last of the three press openings—the one most of the critics attended—there was a horrifying moment for the cast when someone, reportedly wearing a dashiki and a turtleneck sweater, began making loud, hostile remarks during the love scenes between the two main characters, Herman, who is white, and Julia, a black woman. Ruby Dee, who played Julia in the Papp production, said that the mood of the play was shattered and the cast so dispirited that they did not even attend the cast party that night. The reviews, expectedly, were lukewarm, but despite this uncertain beginning, the play went on to become the strongest of any at the Public that season, and Papp began talking about taking it to Broadway.

As this mysterious dashiki’d figure suggests, Wedding Band seemed to have appeared at the wrong historical moment. A year after the Watts uprising, with black nationalism and black power in the political ascendancy, there was little sympathy, even on the Left, for the difficulties of an interracial affair, particularly one between a black woman and a white man. The novelist John Killens, Childress’s friend and fellow leftist, felt that Wedding Band was not only the wrong play for an era of intense black militant struggle but that it was a betrayal of Childress’s own political commitment.

25. Though whites were invited to write for the journal, the rule was that “no whites could be on the editorial board.” See Biondi (2003, 265) and Smethurst (1999). Esther Jackson, in a 2009 phone interview with the author, said that Aptheker was so furious that he refused to subscribe to or read the journal, though before he died he sent a letter apologizing to Jackson.

26. See also Biondi (2003).

27. To forestall any claim that she identified with Julia because of her own interracial relationship, Childress (1973, 8) says that she was not married to a white person and never had “any kind of white relationship in my life.”

28. Childress said explicitly in a 1967 article in Black World, “The Black Experience: Why Talk About That?” that she had political motivations for writing this play.

29. In To Stand and Fight, Biondi reports that Davis argued that “a new race discourse of individual success stories was displacing attention from the more urgent problem of group retrogression.” Some blacks were getting high-paying, high-powered jobs in industry and government, while most blacks could not get a job to drive a milk wagon or work in an airplane factory. These high-paying jobs were, Davis argued, “an attempt of the ruling class to head off and undermine the militant struggles of the Negro workers for jobs and freedom” (quoted in Biondi 2003, 183).

30. See Frazier in Singh (2005, 180), Von Eschen (1997, 158), and Biondi’s (2003, 165, 183)term. See also Carter et al. (1956). Von Eschen (1997, 153–159) excellently analyzes the way race and racism were systematically reframed in domestic terms, thus displacing more militant civil rights arguments that racism was grounded in systems of domination.

31. In the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia, the court specifically used the term “White Supremacy”: “There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause” (Loving v. Virginia, 1967, 388, U.S. 12).

32. Childress set Wedding Band in 1918, the year after the 1917 silent protest parade in New York City organized by the NAACP to protest lynching and the year preceding the Red Summer of 1919, during which racial attacks on blacks occurred across the country in many cities. Some of these racially motivated attacks were directed toward black men in uniform, but a new spirit of self-confidence and self-assertion was evident as black men and women (Red Cross nurses) returned from fighting abroad determined to demand first-class citizenship, and Nelson represents that spirit. In his May 1919 editorial for Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois firmly expressed this new spirit: “We return / We return from fighting / We return fighting.”

33. This parallels the idea on political anger: “Anger becomes a political resource only when it is collective” (Hedin 1982).

34. See also Singh (2005, 13).

35. For my full discussion of this phrase, see Washington (1996).

36. See Singh (1999).

37. I am much indebted to James Smethurst’s meditation on and analysis of the relationship between the “narratorial consciousness” and the representations of the “folk” and the literary Left’s revisions of that relationship. In his chapters that consider the poets Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Melvin Tolson, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden, Smethurst emphasizes how the Left often problematized constructions of the “folk”: “Similarly, in the work of many artists of the literary Left, and the critical writings of many intellectuals associated with the Communist Left, the problematic relation of the Left intellectual-writer to the working class (and, during the Popular Front, to the people) is raised again and again. This is particularly true in the work of African-American writers, such as Brown and [Richard] Wright, where an identification with the folk is asserted along with a vanguard role for the African-American intellectual; then the two assertions are questioned both sharply and uneasily. In the case of Walker, the formal distinction between the ‘prophetic’ poems and the ‘folk’ poems calls into question the identification between the narratorial consciousness of the poems the represented and/or recreated folks, though this commonalty is never questioned by the denotative sense of Walker’s poems” (1999, 185).

38. In my review of A Short Walk (Feminist Press, 2007), I focused on issues of cross-dressing and queer sexuality in the novel. See Higashida (2009) for an excellent reading of queer sexuality in the novel.

39. Alan Wald takes on this issue of the tensions between blacks and whites on the Left in “Through the Eyes of Harold Cruse.”

40. Left-wing journals and illustrations typically portrayed the radical as a white working-class male. The masthead of Masses & Mainstream, for example, shows a muscular, bare-chested white man holding a mallet in one hand and a book aloft in the other.

41. In the summer issue of Feminist Studies (2002), a reproduction of Neel’s portrait of Irene Peslikis is on page 374 of Denise Bauer’s article and on the cover.

1. Lawrence Jackson (2010, 196) puts Brooks in the chapter on “Afroliberals and World War II” and provides some evidence of Brooks’s rejection of radicalism in the letters she wrote to her editor Elizabeth Lawrence “to defend her aesthetic” (210). I agree with Jackson that Brooks aimed “to dramatize her ability to belong to a world quite different from the black Chicago Marxist bohemia,” but that makes my point that early on she was minimizing her leftist ties.

2. She published a second autobiographical sketch in 1996, Report from Part Two.

3. Alan Wald, e-mail to the author, November 2012.

4. See Mullen (1999, 228). In several footnotes, Mullen notes that Shaw and Kent “ascribe nonpolitical motives to her work,” Shaw insisting that she was naïve, believing “innocently in the basic goodness of man and of Christianity, that integration was the solution to the black man’s [sic] problems.” Mullen says that both Smethurst and Ann Folwell Stanford (1992) try to “relocate Brooks as a figure much influenced by the Left cultural and political milieu of the Popular Front and Negro People’s Front” (228n6). Mullen also notes that Brooks excludes her participation in the League of American Writers and in letters to Mullen “discounts the influence of Leftists and fellow travelers” (228n11).

5. Smethurst mentions both poems in his The New Red Negro and wrote to me in an e-mail that they show an indebtedness to Popular Front cultural politics.

6. These were the kinds of charges that were leveled at Charles White’s experimental art in the 1950s as leftist criticism took a turn toward Soviet orthodoxy. Perhaps because Kreymborg was himself an experimental imagist poet, he was particularly sensitive to Brooks’s formal experimentations. He gave brief readings of several poems and was especially impressed with the ten war sonnets that close the volume, calling them “among the finest contributions any poet has made to war poetry” (1945, 28).

7. Here I am following Andrew Hemingway’s (2002) argument in the chapter “The End of Democratic Front Aesthetics and the Emergence of Zhdanovism” (219–223).

8. Alfred Kreymborg, a friend of Carl Sandburg and the editor of the “little magazine” Others between 1916 and 1919, was part of the Americanist avant-garde poetry circles that aimed for transformations in poetry that would move toward a more inclusive modernism. Kreymborg’s praise of Brooks may well have been expiation for his earlier crude racial views shown in his review of Jean Toomer, in which he praised Toomer for exhibiting that “frankly lyrical strain native to the darky everywhere” (quoted in North 1994, 149). Later, he moved to the left, and thus his modernist credentials and leftist politics made him, in many ways, the ideal reader for Brooks’s early poetry.

9. Brooks left clues about her desires for secrecy and privacy in her Bancroft papers. In the Poetry review (January 1967) of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, Eleanor Ross Taylor ends her review, “After Twenty Years,” with this statement about confessional poetry: “The confessional poem seems so amiable, it is easily available to the reader; it makes the poet feel better; yet it uses the poet shabbily; the poem that seemed to him his very individuality tends to fall into a clinical type, and its grasp of the reader deprives that reader of one chief pleasure of poetry, the feeling of having come upon a silence, a privacy, upon intellect existing unselfconsciously somewhere out of reach of camera.” Brooks wrote on the cover of the issue, “See page 262,” and then circled those lines I have italicized. I read this marginalia as a caution to anyone attempting to pin down Brooks’s political or personal views and to suggest that, at least before 1967, Brooks meant to create a poetic persona that could not be easily apprehended.

10. At the risk of reifying the myth of her conversion, I wish to point to some examples of its reproductive vitality. The introductory essays on Brooks in both the Norton Anthology of American Literature and the Norton Anthology of African American Literature open with a story of Brooks’s 1967 “shift” and thus reproduce the teleology of a “new” Brooks that emerges in the wake of the Fisk Black Writers Conference. Critics have been unable—or unwilling—to dislodge this conversion story. Dismissing the importance of race and class in Brooks’s early poetry, one critic claimed that “Brooks’s later work took a far more political stance. Just as her first poems reflected the mood of their era, her later works mirrored their age by displaying what National Observer contributor Bruce Cook termed ‘an intense awareness of the problems of color and justice’” (Poetry Foundation n.d.). Toni Cade Bambara (1973) reported in the New York Times Book Review that at the age of fifty “something happened to Brooks, a something most certainly in evidence in In the Mecca and subsequent works—a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped lean, compressed style. A change of style prompted by a change of mind.” “Though some of her work in the early 1960s had a terse, abbreviated style, her conversion to direct political expression happened rapidly after a gathering of black writers at Fisk University in 1967,” Jacqueline Trescott (quoted in Poetry Foundation n.d.) reported in the Washington Post. Brooks herself noted that the poets there were committed to writing as blacks, about blacks, and for a black audience. If many of her earlier poems had fulfilled this aim, it was not due to conscious intent, she said. But from this time forward, Brooks thought of herself as an African determined not to compromise social comment for the sake of technical proficiency (Bryant 2007).

11. Such arguments encourage literary historians of the Left to reject the standard conversion narrative about Brooks. For example, as early as 1987 Houston Baker disputed the idea of Brooks’s ascension to the enlightenment of the new black nationalist aesthetic and concluded: “she is more justly described as a herald than as an uninformed convert” (28).

12. For discussion of the relationship of black Popular Front and leftist writers and modernism, see especially Smethurst’s (1999) chapter “Gwendolyn Brooks and the Rise of ‘High” Neomodernism.”

13. In 1987, Brooks agreed to publish this essay in my anthology, Invented Lives: Classic Stories by and About Black Women, but she withdrew the essay before publication, saying that she did not want to publish an essay that focused on disagreements between black women and men.

14. Reif-Hughes calls them “snapshots,” but I reject that term because they focus not on the visual but on the interior life.

15. See Brooks’s 1951 essay “Why Negro Women Leave Home.”

16. Though Lawrence Jackson says that Brooks’s first book of poetry A Street in Bronzeville “proved that the social realists had hit their stride” (2010, 205), neither her poetry nor Maud Martha could be considered poster books for social realism. In fact, as I will show, Maud Martha can be read as countering the social realism of Richard Wright.

17. See Mullen (1999).

18. Mullen, personal e-mail, October 13, 2012.

19. The scene with Bigger, Mary, and Jan in a diner in Native Son is a vivid contrast to the diner scene in Maud Martha.

20. Melhem (1987, 90) offers a particularly insightful reading of this ending.

21. Rex Gorleigh correspondence, 1945, Chicago South Side Community Art Center Archives, part 1, box 1, folder 20.

22. Significantly, William Dean Howells used “bitter” (1901) to reject Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition in 1901 and, in an age of censorship of black anger, practically destroyed Chesnutt’s publishing opportunities.

23. The letters from Brooks to Conroy are in the collection of Conroy’s papers in the Newberry Library; those from Conroy to Brooks are in her papers at the Bancroft. This letter is at the Newberry, Box 4:189.

24. Conroy letter from July 17, 1962, to Brooks (Bancroft).

25. This letter, dated October 28, 1955, is at the Bancroft Library, in Box 1:28. There also is a photograph in Conroy’s papers that shows Brooks sitting next to Margaret Taylor and Conroy’s son.

26. In 1952, when Robeson was denied the chance to sing at any churches or high schools in Chicago, he gave a free concert before a crowd of five thousand in Washington Park, which served as the South Side’s forum for free speech. The show was sponsored by the Committee for the Negro in the Arts and the Greater Chicago Labor Council. In addition to singing favorites like “Ol’ Man River,” Robeson promoted his Freedom newspaper. He also addressed the crowd with an appeal for unity: “If Negro fraternal, civic, religious, and social organizations join together this year they could force the powers in Washington to grant full civil rights status to the Negro people.” Quoted in Amsterdam News (June 7, 1952). Brian Dolinar, e-mail to author, April 28, 2011.

27. Dolinar, e-mail to author, April 28, 2011.

28. In his introduction to the newly reissued Federal Writers Project The Negro in Illinois, the literary historian Brian Dolinar (2013) notes that although Wright knew about the park’s political significance, he did not allude to it in his project report dated March 27, 1937: “Wright gives considerable space in the essay to the educational and recreational activities in the park, but only makes brief mention of its significance as an open forum. Washington Park was the center of black political and social life during the 1930s. It was where debates were held between Socialists and Communists, Christians and non-Christians, nationalists and pan-Africanists. It was where rallies, marches, and parades took place. Although Wright had spent much time there, he appears to have edited out any radical or racial commentary that would have sent up red flags indicating his own political views. To do otherwise might have cost him his job with the Writers’ Project.”

29. Named for the first president, the park is the largest of the four Chicago district parks surnamed Washington and was once, according to Brooks, rechristened Malcolm X Park by 1960s radicals.

30. Many thanks to my colleague Christina Walter for this insight about the poem and for the hours she spent reading these poems through the lens of her well-trained modernist eye.

31. Brian Dolinar, personal correspondence.

32. In the poem “IX truth” from the “Womanhood” section of Annie Allen, Brooks writes in metaphorical terms about the people’s hard unwillingness to respond to the “fierce hammering” of change and challenge: “if the sun comes,” the poet-narrator prophesies, those who have spent “so lengthy a / Session with shade” will be unable to respond to the urgencies of the sun, preferring instead “To sleep in the coolness / Of snug unawareness” (reprinted in Brooks 1994, 130).

33. Conversation with Professor Aaron Lecklider (American Studies Association annual meeting, Puerto Rico, November 2012) to whom I am indebted for the possible queer reading of the poem. Convincingly, he argues that the complete absence of gender signifiers requires us to consider that Brooks’s radicalism might extend to her views on sexuality.

34. In a letter to Negro Digest (July 1966), Brooks confronted and corrected a statement by a Stanford student, Ron Miller, that Brooks was not available for the civil rights struggle but was rather a sort of ivory-tower poet. The confrontation is discussed in Kent (1990, 193).

1. In his introduction to Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s in the United States, Josh Lukin proposes integrating two models for theorizing 1950s culture in order to avoid imposing a unitary view on the decade that would fail to account for or to include its historical realities. Lukin argues that views of the 1950s as “the complacent decade” or the “decade of conformity” ignore that decade’s complexities and diversities. Lukin advises combining two opposite models to capture that diverse world, which he calls the “Containment Model” and the “Emergence Model.”The containment model focuses on the decade as dominated by the institutional forces that brought us the political repressions of the Red Scare, ideological censorship, and sexual and racial conservatism. Lukin considers the containment model best represented by Lary May’s 1989 anthology Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Elaine Tyler May’s 1988 study Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. The emergence model, “a complementary school of thought emphasizing resistance,” is represented by such scholarship as Alan Wald on the work of leftists, Michael Denning’s recovery of the Popular Front, Barbara Ehrenreich on male rebellion, John D’Emilio on gay movements, and Leila Rubb and Verta Taylor on feminism (xiv). What is useful about this integrative approach, especially in analyzing fiction, is that it avoids totalizing the decade as entirely dominated by the repressions of the Cold War or by resistance movements. Instead, it acknowledges the variety, diversity, contradictions, and overlap in this cultural moment and recognizes and recovers the agency of those in resistance work, particularly in civil rights struggles among marginalized groups. Though I discovered this book as I was finishing work on this chapter, I wish to call attention to this model since it describes what I attempt in this chapter on Trumbull Park, which is so clearly marked by themes and images of both containment and what I call resistance.

2. Bennett Johnson, phone interview with the author, January 24, 2004.

3. Bennett Johnson, e-mail to the author, July 9, 2012.

4. The group’s politics in regard to communism were quite complicated. The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) was formed in 1943 out of the old CIO packinghouse unions. Leftists, communists, black militants, and white trade unionists formed coalitions in the union that allowed the UPWA to maintain local control and, unlike other unions, to fight against the purge of communists, who were an essential part of the union’s activism. See Halpern (1997, chaps. 6–7).

5. The term “packinghouse exceptionalism” was coined by Halpern (1997) to indicate the union’s extraordinary commitments to leftist politics, civil rights, and women’s equality.

6. See Smethurst (1999) for more on this point. I am indebted throughout The Other Blacklist to the brilliant scholarship of Smethurst on the black literary Left. He is especially illuminating in the way he historicizes the aesthetic practices of the Left and with his close readings and theoretical insights on the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and the entire panoply of Black Popular Front poetry.

7. Stuckey wrote a commentary on the first edition of Trumbull Park, published by Regnery.

8. Phone interview with the author, April 9, 1997.

9. Shelley v. Kraemer (1948).

10. Phone interview with the author, May 14, 2004.

11. According to Evelyn Brown Colbert, the Brown’s fourth child and only son, Frank London Brown III, was born three months after they left Trumbull Park and died forty-five minutes after he was born; his death, she believes, was probably caused by the tremendous stress of their lives during their years in Trumbull Park. Personal interview with the author, January 23, 2004.

12. New Criticism, named after John Crowe Ransom’s book The New Criticism (1941), is a literary movement in North American and British English literature. The movement originated in the 1920s and developed throughout the first half of the twentieth century as a pedagogical practice supposedly focused on objective literary study. New Critical theory insists upon the following tenets: “autonomy” of the text, in that meaning is derived only from form and linguistics without consideration of aspects outside of the text (e.g., authorial intent or historical context); paraphrase as damaging to the text’s autonomy because, as a restatement of meaning, paraphrase remains external to the text; “organic unity” of the text in that each part informs the meaning of a complex whole, yet the whole determines the meaning of each part; irony as the fundamental nature of the text; and close reading as the method to derive the essence of the text (i.e., “irony, paradox, ambiguity, and complexity”). New Criticism remains influential, particularly through its legacy of close reading. Critics, however, accuse New Criticism of promoting positivism and failing to recognize or acknowledge political connotations (Childs 1993).

13. See also Langston Hughes in the New York Herald Tribune (July 5, 1959).

14. See my foreword in Northeastern University Press’s 2005 reprint of Trumbull Park.

15. Smethurst, Maxwell, Wald, Von Eschen, and Duffie, among others, have pioneered this kind of reading.

16. When Hansberry’s play opened on Broadway, even her FBI informant could find no evidence of communist thought and concluded in the report, “The play contains no comments of any nature about Communism as such but deals essentially with negro [sic] aspirations” (U.S. FBI, February 5, 1959). In “The Displacement of Anger and Blame in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun,” the literary scholar Odessa Rose cites four scenes omitted from the Broadway version Raisin in the Sun, omissions that she says reflect the antiradicalism of the play: (1) Travis kills a rat in their apartment, a scene reminiscent of the opening of Richard Wright’s Native Son; (2) Beneatha cuts her hair into an Afro in act 2, scene 1, causing great disturbance among the family (even though the actor Diana Sands actually wore her hair in an Afro, she had to wear a wig for the play); (3) in act 2, scene 2, Lena and her neighbor Mrs. Johnson have a conversation over Booker T. Washington’s ideology, in which Johnson clearly critiques white racism and predicts the violence the Youngers will face in their new neighborhood; and (4) the Younger family is attacked in their new home by an angry white mob, an autobiographical scene that Hansberry’s own family experienced. Rose concludes: “Raisin, as it appeared in1959, told the story of a group of people that just happened to be Negroes. With some minor adjustments, the characters could have just as easily been played by whites. Omitting these four scenes made Raisin a universal play about universal people struggling for universal goals, rather than the story of the life of the working-class Negro” (7).

17. See page 23 of Brown’s FOIA file, particularly the footnote on the Progressive Party.

18. The historian Sterling Stuckey says that Brown was “on the Left politically” and “may have been in the Communist Party, but he didn’t talk the jargon, and I have no evidence that he was a member” (April 9, 1997).

19. Oscar Brown Jr., a union member and open communist, wrote in Freedom in 1953 that the Packinghouse Workers Union was successful in disrupting HUAC’s scheduled hearings in the summer of 1953 (Smith 2004, 302). This disruption of HUAC is an example of a coalition between radical leftists and civil rights organizers.

20. Brown was sent as UPWA program coordinator to cover the 1955 trial of the two white men accused of the murder of Emmett Till. His short story, “In the Shadow of a Dying Soldier,” published in the Southwest Review in 1959, the same year as Trumbull Park, is based on his experiences covering this trial. As in Trumbull Park, Brown’s focus is always on the internal struggle of the black resisters: the black men standing outside the courtroom, the landlady who defies white authorities, and, above all, Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till, and his uncle, Mose Wright, who testify against white Mississippi men. Like the novel, the story emphasizes the small, barely noticeable changes in an oppressed people, who often seem too defeated to struggle, as they summon the courage to make change. Adam Green (2007) argues that Trumbull Park “confined itself to the events prior to 1955” and that Brown did not “venture further [to explore] the parallels with an even more disturbing event of racial violence: the death of Emmett Till in Mississippi in August 1955.” Had Green been inspired to “venture further”—he would have discovered that this short story does indeed interrogate the meaning of Till’s death in powerful ways.

21. The report filed on that day covers the investigative period 10–8, 10–12, 15–19, and 22/56; see pages 20 and 29.

22. In “F.B. Eyes: The Bureau Reads Claude McKay,” Maxwell (2003) reads McKay as a kind of literary double agent, consciously writing back to the agents who were surveilling him, and masking his revolutionary intentions in “politicized formality.” Maxwell takes the term “F.B. Eyes” from Richard Wright’s unpublished poem “FB Eye Blues” (1949). In the poem the voice laments, through classic blues repetition, waking to find the FBI hiding under his bed and informing him of what he revealed about his dreams while sleeping (Maxwell 2003, 40).

23. From Richard Wright’s unpublished poem “FB Eye Blues” (1949).

24. This was published in the Daily Worker (February 12, 1929). The African American communist Harry Haywood, a major figure in the CPUSA until he was expelled in the late 1950s, was involved in developing Comintern’s black belt thesis. For more on African Americans, CPUSA, and the “national question,” see Smethurst (1999, 21–25).

25. The entire debate over the “Negro Question” is recounted in chapter 5, “A Nation within a Nation,” in Mark Solomon’s The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936 (1998, 68–91). Smethurst also has an extended discussion of response to the nation thesis in The New Red Negro (1999, 23–24).

26. As Laura Williams (2012, 7) notes, Wright, in his “Blueprint for Negro Writing”(1937) “indicted black writers as an educated class fixated on ‘begging … white America’ to accept black humanity. Demanding that black writers ‘do no less than create values by which [their] race is to struggle, live and die,’ Wright advocated the production of social realism, immersed in and evolving from black folklore, that ‘will embrace all those social, political, and economic forms under which the life of [the Negro] people is manifest.’”

27. Graham (1990) says that growing up in Chicago, “one of the major centers of bebop music in the 1950s,” deeply influenced Brown’s life and his writing. Graham says that the new music of bebop “based on the same revolutionary impulses as the written literature of the thirties and forties” reflected “a more assertive dynamic in cultural expression.” For the writers and artists who came after Richard Wright, this music functioned as an “abstract expression of a militant political mode that would become a central theme in the black experience in the 1960s.”

28. Wald (2001, 295) writes that representing full-blown interracial class solidarity was difficult because “interracial utopia was not part of the day-to-day experiences of ordinary African Americans,” but, because of his activities in a progressive left-wing union, Brown seems to have been well positioned to offer such a representation of interracial cooperation.

29. Phone interview with the author, May 14, 2004.

30. Thomas Schaub describes Ellison’s protagonist’s move underground as a self-induced paralysis (1991, 104–115).

31. The song continues with these lines, which are omitted in Invisible Man: “I’m white … inside … but, that don’t help my case ’cause I … can’t hide … what is in my face.”

32. Smethurst (2004) notes similar gestures toward both civil rights and black popular front aesthetics in Lloyd Brown’s Iron City.

33. Malcolm X gave literary and political prominence to the Bandung conference when he referred to it in his speech, “Not Just an American Problem, but a World Problem,” given at Corn Hill Methodist Church in Rochester, New York, on February 16, 1965. He hailed Bandung as the first time in history that the dark-skinned nations of the world had united to reject colonialism and racism and to promote unity among the colonized. No European nation was invited, nor was the United States, their very absence, he claimed, signifying them as the world’s colonizers. In The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conferentce (1956), Richard Wright, one of the attendees, gives a first-hand view of the conference. Adam Clayton Powell, then a U.S. congressman, attended the conference and asserted that far from being oppressed, Negroes in the United States were a privileged group. According to Lloyd L. Brown, the press praised Powell for his patriotism, and Congress passed a resolution commending Powell (letter to the author, October 23, 1998).

34. The Bandung organizers had “pointedly” excluded “the two great, rival centers of power in the modern world,” the United States of America and the Soviet Union (Romulo 1956, 1).

35. Denning argues in The Cultural Front that the nationalism of the black cultural front “was inflected with a popular internationalism” that emphasized that ethnic or racial stories were always intended to lead to “the love for, and the unity among, all peoples of all nations” (1996, 132).

36. I want to thank Christopher Brown of the University of Maryland for this insight in how the marginalization of the Left continuously circulates.

37. According to Henry Regnery’s 1996 obituary in the New York Times, “Regnery published some of the first and most important books of the postwar American conservative movement.” The Times called it “one of only two houses known to be sympathetic to conservative authors.” In 1951, Regnery published William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale. Two years later, Regnery published The Conservative Mind, a seminal book for American conservatism during the period. In 1954, Regnery published McCarthy and His Enemies, by Buckley and L. Brent Bozell Jr. The authors criticized McCarthy but were sympathetic to him, and McCarthy was pleased enough with the book that he attended a reception for them. Regnery also published two books by Robert Welch in the early 1950s, both of which can be read as anticommunist: May God Forgive Us, in which Welch accused many influential foreign-policy analysts and policymakers of being part of a conspiracy to further communism, and a biography of John Birch, who served as an intelligence officer during World War II and was killed by Chinese communists.

38. E-mail to the author, September 4, 2011.

39. Phone interview with the author, May 14, 2004.

40. This informant goes on to say that the term “left winger” in this particular case indicated that Brown was a rather outspoken person who was always attempting to gain equal rights for the people of his race and that the term “left winger” in this particular case “had no other connotation whatsoever.”

41. Phone interview with the author, May 14, 2004.

1. I’ll refer to this as the Roots volume throughout this chapter.

2. The question of African history, culture, and independence were clearly the focus of AMSAC. In AMSAC’s twenty-three-page statement of purpose, the centrality of Africa to the organization is constantly reiterated. The statement begins by defining the organization as “a group of American Negro scholars, artists, and writers who have joined together to study African culture,” motivated by an awareness of Africa “swiftly emerging as a major participant in world history.” One of AMSAC’s missions was “to establish contact and cooperation with African governmental representatives in new York, African student organizations in the USA, international organizations, cultural groups and other American organizations primarily concerned with Africa.” AMSAC planned a “Center of African Culture” in New York to facilitate interest in Africa, and a Festival was planned for 1960–1961 to be held in Africa. There is literally only one line in the entire statement of purpose that refers to American Negro culture. See “The American Society of African Culture and Its Purpose.”

3. In The Indignant Generation, Lawrence Jackson (2010) states that the papers tended to question, radically, the psychological, cultural, and developmental value that lay at the bottom of the ideal of fully embracing—“integrating”—into a society that had been content to persecute Americans of African descent.

4. Brenda Gayle Plummer’s (1996) assessment of the AMSAC conference mirrors my own conclusion that many ideological positions were represented at the conference: “Records of AMSAC reveal that internal ideological tensions were rife from the beginning, quite apart from CIA meddling. Cultural nationalism could impose and then disguise a fundamentally conservative outlook. This perspective never dominated because times were simply changing too rapidly” (254).

5. Hansberry’s original speech for the Roots conference is in the Lorraine Hansberry papers, box 66, folder 4, Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture.

6. I want to acknowledge Keith Gilyard’s (2010) critique that my labeling Davis and Redding “conservative” is “reductionist” (350n20). However, I stand by my assessment of their politics even though in some contexts, as Gilyard notes, they would both be called “liberals” for their support of American democratic ideals. Eugenia Collier (who worked with Davis at Howard University) and Julian Mayfield in his unpublished article “The Foolish Consistency of Saunders Redding”—as well as Redding himself in To Make A Poet Black, On Being Negro in America, and An American in India—offer very clear documentation of a kind of politics that I consider “conservative”: it offers very mild rebukes of white racist practice, is highly individualistic, and desires an accommodation with and assimilation into the white American mainstream.

7. Chapter 9 of Wilford (2008), “Into Africa: African Americans,” is the most comprehensive study of CIA involvement with AMSAC.

8. In its concern for African American cultural production and/or racial issues, the CIA seemed, at first glance, to be interested only in cosmetic touch-ups to its diversity program. It paid for an extended European tour of the opera Porgy and Bess, it lobbied Hollywood to tamp down any serious consideration of racial issues, and it urged filmmakers to plant dignified and well-dressed Negroes in crowd scenes. But there was something much more important and sinister afoot with the CIA’s investment in black culture. Given the potential for a radical black politics to develop in the face of an increasingly militant civil rights movement in the United States and growing independence movements in Africa, the question was how to discredit the black Left, undermine any serious discussion of the U.S. race issue, and counter black-Left support for newly emergent independent black African nations.

9. In its early heady days of lavish CIA funding, the organization was so flush with money that it was able to promise members “travelling [sic] a distance of 450 miles or more from any direction to New York” a reimbursement “equal to 1/2 the cost of first class return air transportation,” according to an “Arrangements Information Sheet” in the AMSAC papers. If members chose cheaper transportation, literally all of their travel cost could be paid by AMSAC. Half of the conference fee of $21 could also be reimbursed, and the banquet fee was paid for by AMSAC. All participants were asked to register with AMSAC at the Conference Hotel.

10. See AMSAC papers, Box 9, #3. AMSAC’s ties to the CIA and the money from the agency were exposed by the New York Times in a series of articles in February 1967. Once AMSAC’s ties to the CIA were revealed, Davis was hard pressed to get his funding renewed. As early as April 24, officials were issuing memos about AMSAC’s “present tarnished image.” Davis sent a letter to Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Charles L. Frankel on June 9, pleading not to be dropped on the grounds that the image of the American Negro would be left in the hands of “black nationalists, to SNCC, and to those who excite the rage of the Negro poor by referring to the African and slave past, to injustices done and to empires lost; to those who feel they must ridicule American culture as a means of asserting their own validity” (6). Throughout the letter, Davis walks a fine line on the issue of intelligence, saying, “While it would be expected that such an organization would cooperate with the cultural activities of the United States Government, there must be adequate safeguards against such an organization being used for intelligence purposes.” However, AMSAC was on its way to dissolution. By September 1, the internal memos about “terminal employee benefits” and “lack of funds here” showed that the organization was in its last days.

11. The phrase “The New Negro Liberals” is Lawrence Jackson’s (2010).

12. See, for example, Alain Locke’s essays written between 1936 and 1951, in which he began to refine definitions of social protest, making it clear that social protest was a leftist term. This is particularly clear in several essays published in the collection of his works, The Critical Temper of Alain Locke (1983), including “The Negro: ‘New’ or Newer: A Retrospective of the Literature of the Negro for 1938”; “Of Native Sons: Real and Otherwise,” which originally was published in Opportunity in January and February 1941; “Wisdom De Profundis: The Literature of the Negro, 1949”; “Inventory at Mid-Century: A Review of the Literature of the Negro for 1950”; and “The High Price of Integration: A Review of the Literature of the Negro for 1951.”

13. The lecture—which was, significantly, supported by CIA funds—was later published in Wright’s collection White Man Listen. The lecture series was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which Frances Stonor Saunders declares was “the centerpiece” of the CIA’s covert cultural campaign from 1950 to 1967 (Saunders 1999, 88–91; Wright, “Literature of the Negro” 104–105).

14. See Von Eschen (1997, 175–176). She writes that AMSAC’s “most important legacy lay in the area of scholarship,” which helps make my point about the importance of the Roots volume as Cold War scholarship intended to shape African American literary study. She notes an earlier publication by AMSAC, Africa Seen by American Negro Scholars, published as a special edition of Presence Africaine in 1958 and republished in the United States in 1963. It minimizes racism, accuses communists of manipulating racial issues in international contexts, and omits the anticolonial work of the black leftist internationalists Du Bois, Hunton, and Robeson.

15. For a discussion, see Julian Mayfield’s unpublished essay “The Foolish Consistency of Saunders Redding and Others.” Redding’s talk originally was titled “The Sanctions of the American Negro’s Literary Art.”

16. Many memoirs by blacklisted and politically active writers testify to the level of fear and intimidation of the Cold War and the effects of McCarthyism. Andre Schiffrin’s A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York (2007) is one of the most informative about the effects of Cold War on the publishing industry.

17. In Renewing the Left, Harvey M. Teres (1996) devotes an entire chapter to the failure of Partisan Review to expose its largely white audience to African American cultural expression. Specifically, he notes that the journal included no articles on African American writing and none on race until 1940. The journal produced no coverage of race and segregation during the World War II years, and there was little change in that policy after the war. While the journal did later include an excerpt from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man and published James Baldwin’s earliest essays, Teres concludes: “If we look at the range of African American writing from the 1930s to the 1960s, we see that nearly all of it was ignored by Partisan Review, not to mention nearly every other white publication in the country. Among the writers who produced noteworthy work during this period yet whose work was never reviewed were W. E. B. Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, Margaret Walker, Arna Bontemps, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, John O. Killens, William Attaway, Chester Himes, Frank Yerby, Ann Petry, Willard Motley, Dorothy West, William Gardner Smith, Frank Marshall Davis, William Demby, John A. Williams, Owen Dodson, and J. Saunders Redding” (212–213).

18. At the time of the conference, he had recently returned from Puerto Rico, where he lived from 1954 to 1958, working with his wife, the physician Ana Livia Cordero, and the Puerto Rican Communist Party in the independence movement (Gaines 2007, 145). He also had worked with Robert Williams’s armed self-defense civil rights movement in Monroe, North Carolina, in the late 1950s; had gone to Cuba to celebrate the Cuban independence struggle; and had signed a public statement against the United States for its Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. When he was indicted by the FBI in 1961 for participating in Williams’s program, he and his wife escaped and left for Ghana, where he worked for President Kwame Nkrumah editing The African Review after Ghana gained independence. It is interesting to note that in a 1970s oral history Mayfield reported that, as a Marxist materialist, he was “cynical” about “searching back into our ancestral roots,” and he said he had little faith in such things as looking to the African experience for a “discussion of spiritual values” (Mayfield 1970, 552-30) since he was fully aware of the corruption in African societies that had allowed for a collaboration with the slave trade.