Eugene Holmes and Eugene Gordon assembled the first discernible corpus of Black Marxist literary criticism, spanning the crucial divide between the early 1930s and the Popular Front.1 In an unprecedented 1935 essay in International Literature, “The Negro and American Literature: An Estimate of American Negro Writers,” Holmes (writing as Eugene Clay) inspected the achievements of revolutionary Black writers. He avowed that there were a dozen such writers, but only considered Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Richard Wright, and Countee Cullen in that category, with supplementary observations about the non-Left-wing Zora Neale Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and a number of novels by white writers, including the Jewish American Guy Endore’s revolutionary novel Babouk.
Holmes’s essay offers a relatively unrefined correlation of texts to classes and class fractions, treating the Harlem Renaissance and its promotion of a “New Negro” as somewhat of a hoax concocted by white American capitalists seeking novel entertainments. Yet Holmes also shrewdly canvases specific texts and finds virtues in the work of nonrevolutionary southerners as well as weaknesses in pro-Communist Black writers. Especially telling is the estimate of his Howard University colleague Sterling Brown, praised for “forsak[ing] the purer English literary forms, not because of their ineffectiveness, but because his metier and format fit better in his earthy, ‘down-home’ dialect of the workers he knows so well.”2
An abridged version of the essay was presented as a talk at the 1935 American Writers’ Congress, and published in the congress’s proceedings.3 In this form, Holmes’s piece was accompanied by a short speech by Langston Hughes, “To Negro Writers,” which called on Black Communist cultural workers to use their art to reveal the vigor and undistorted character of the African American people, and to bare the shams of white philanthropy and false Black leadership: “Negro writers can seek to unite Blacks and whites in our country, not on the nebulous basis of an interracial meeting, or the shifting sands of religious brotherhood, but on the solid ground of the daily working-class struggle to wipe out, now and forever, all the old inequalities of the past.”4
Eugene Gordon’s contribution to the same 1935 American Writers’ Congress proceedings, “Social and Political Problems of the Negro Writer,” focused on the particularities of racial and national oppression beyond exclusively class exploitation:
Closely linked up with the economic problem of earning a living, there are the social problems of where to live, with whom to associate, and of how to find recreation. These fundamental social problems are common to the Negro people as a whole, but they are the special problems of the Negro writer.
Gordon then traces the concentration of diverse kidnapped African peoples into a “Negro nation” centered in the Black Belt of the southern United States, and he polemicizes against “petty-bourgeois nationalist consciousness” reproduced in several works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chestnut, Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, and Nella Larsen. Other Black Communists addressed the Writers’ Congress as well, including Angelo Herndon, who was out on bail after being sentenced in Georgia for eighteen to twenty years in prison for leading a demonstration demanding food, and Richard Wright, who broached from the floor the problem of “the isolation of the young Negro writer.”5
At the Second American Writers’ Congress in 1937, Holmes spoke on “A Writer’s Social Obligations.” His forceful oration opened with an outline of the burgeoning threat of fascism nationally and internationally, before concentrating on the dilemma of African Americans. In contrast to the situation in the Soviet Union, where Holmes believed that minority groups were being supported and encouraged, only a few voices of resistance were coming from the Black community in the United States at present—he cited Arna Bontemps’s novel Black Thunder, and poetry by Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Richard Wright, Owen Dodson (1914–1983), and Frank Marshall Davis (1905–1987). After rehearsing the many obstacles faced by such writers, and scoring some of the errors made by those who choose to depict middle-class Black life or individualist solutions, Holmes concluded that the writer “must transcend narrow nationalisms, and insidious chauvinism, and realize that our tasks are international.” Holmes postulated that the aftereffect will be writers who are “resolved to respect historic truth, and their knowledge of events and people will be more related to life as it is actually lived.” Moreover, they will promulgate works that “will truly be the product of the social, intellectual and emotional activity of man, and an integral part of an expanding human culture.” This will be the culture “which the artist is obligated to defend with his life.”6
Richard Wright was busy as a chair and participant in the deliberations of the congress. As recorded in minutes taken by the pro-Communist novelist Leane Zugsmith, Wright, speaking in the novelists’ commission, warned of
the tendency of writers going into labor work and trying to escape their writer’s personality. There is no backwardness on the part of trade unionists in accepting the writer as a writer. They realize his function, if the writer realizes it.7
In the debate that followed Holmes’s paper, Robert Gessner8 urged that the growing tensions between Blacks and Jews in Harlem be considered. Holmes rejoined:
I don’t think the average person realizes that anti-Semitism could flourish within an even more exploited and persecuted group. But I have seen it in Howard University where we have Jewish professors. That anti-Semitism exists among Negroes shows that the Negro misunderstands the entire minority set-up. Negroes look upon Jewish landlords and storekeepers as their immediate exploiters and don’t try to get to the real facts accounting for their exploitation.
Holmes further averred that this was an issue that the congress needed to address: “It is tragic that Negroes should possess such thoughts about the Jews.”9
Up until the mid- to late 1930s, including after the advent of the Popular Front, the attainments of the Harlem Renaissance—its literature as well as its jazz—were coded by the foremost pro-Communist Black writers as decadent. They usually claimed that Renaissance works were middle-class entertainments aimed at gratifying the psychological needs of white patrons. Such a “hard-line” approach can be found in Richard Wright’s influential “Blue-Print for Negro Writing,” published in the inaugural issue of New Challenge in 1937, which expressed the shared attitude of the members of the African American South Side Writers Club in Chicago. Harlem Renaissance writings are designated in Wright’s manifesto as the accidental “fruits of that foul soil which was the result of a liaison between the inferiority-complexed Negro ‘geniuses’ and burnt-out white Bohemians with money.”10 Moreover, at the 1935 American Writers’ Congress, all three pro-Communist Black speakers took swipes at the “New Negro” phenomenon, although Langston Hughes, who was one of the three, was cited as an illustration of a Left permutation, as was Sterling Brown.
Such a rejectionist view of the Harlem Renaissance, however, was not ubiquitous. For example, in his 1937 address to the second conference of the Communist-led National Negro Congress, longtime fellow-traveler Alain Locke, the main authority on the “New Negro,” unambiguously stated his belief in “the considerable harmony ...between the cultural racialism of the art philosophy of the 1920s and the class proletarian art creed of today’s younger generation.” His view is cogently argued by William Maxwell’s 1999 study New Negro, Old Left, which provides evidence of a mutual indebtedness between the Harlem Renaissance and the early Communist Left.
The Third American Writers’ Congress in 1939, which ensued prior to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, saw no further onslaughts against the Harlem Renaissance. It featured an address by Langston Hughes about the restricted market for Black writers. Another disquisition was by Jewish anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits of Northwestern University on “The Negro in American Literature—Past and Future,” in which he pleaded that there existed a bounteous patrimony of African-based folk culture and of resistance to oppression. In the audience was Alain Locke, who took the floor and proclaimed a ringing endorsement of Herskovits’s argument. In his remarks, Locke added that the accession of the “New Negro” movement in the mid-twenties had been based on the discernment that
especially for the Negro writer and the Negro artist, one of the soundest possible developments was the development of an historical sense, a knowledge adequate and accurate, of the Negro’s past, and we said definitely that the great cultural disability of the Negro as a minority group was the loss of this proud past which he would have to recapture.11
The Fourth American Writers’ Congress opened on 6 June 1941, a few weeks prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when the position of the Communist Party and those who shared its outlook converted from the isolationist “The Yanks Aren’t Coming” to one of militant prointerventionism in the war. The opening address of the congress was delivered by Richard Wright, who before an audience of 3,000 at the Manhattan Center agitated that the present war was an imperialist war in which African Americans had no stake. Moreover, he assailed the segregationist policy of the U.S. military, which he negatively counterpoised to the integrated International Brigades that had fought in the Spanish Civil War.12 Although Langston Hughes was on the West Coast and could not be present at the congress, he sent a message of solidarity. Eugene Holmes and the Blues singer Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) were among the participants, and Ralph Ellison was a pivotal organizer of the congress, chiefly engaged in the project of developing a national magazine to be sponsored by the League of American Writers.
Other than Richard Wright, no prominent African American writers were willing to risk the exposure of appearing in public as acknowledged members of the Communist Party. Yet sympathy for the Party was so prevalent that it is plausible to acknowledge African American Literary Communism as a major component of mid-twentieth-century culture, one that would grow even stronger during the late 1940s and early 1950s.13 What is more memorable than formal membership in the Party is that, for Black writers, the publications, clubs, and committees that were at least in part created by Party members, and with Party support, constituted principal venues in which many Black writers came together to formulate ideas, share writings, make contacts, and develop perspectives that sustained their future creative work. A robust example of the positive contribution of Black Marxism prior to World War II can be found in the activities of the South Side Writers Club in Chicago, which performed a vital role in launching New Challenge.
The South Side Writers Club was assembled in the wake of the Communist-led National Negro Congress that was held in Chicago in 1936. Richard Wright and Margaret Walker subsequently identified the following Black writers as among the originating members, in addition to themselves: Arna Bontemps, Frank Marshall Davis, Marian Minus, Edward Bland, Russell Marshall, and Robert Davis.14 Of the last three, little biographical information has been preserved. Bland, close to poet Gwendolyn Brooks in Chicago, published literary criticism in journals such as Poetry and Negro Quarterly. One of his essays, “Racial Bias and Negro Verse,” argued that the imposition by white racism of “pre-individualistic thinking” on Black writers resulted in “self-conscious ‘race’ values which impair and delimit the vision of the artist.”15 At the time of publication, Bland was a sergeant in the army stationed in New York City. Shortly afterward he was sent to Germany, where he volunteered for a dangerous mission and was killed.16 Davis was a Communist Party member who was a poet working on the Federal Writers Project in Chicago; later he changed his name and moved to Hollywood, where he pursued a career in acting.17
Arna Bontemps (1902–1973), like Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, incarnated the links between the Harlem Renaissance and the revolutionary spirit of the Black Left in the 1930s.18 Born in Louisiana, the son of a brickmason, Bontemps moved with his family to California to escape southern racism. There he fell under the sway of an uncle who was enthusiastic about minstrel shows, dialect stories, and signs and charms, much in contrast to Bontemps’s father’s assimilationist attitude. While earning a B.A. from Pacific Union College in 1923, Bontemps pledged himself to recount the bountiful legacy of African American folk culture and history in books and through the educational system. He migrated to New York to teach in private schools and launch his writing career, making his first mark as a poet. He had read Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows (1922), and was expressly taken with “If We Must Die” and “Harlem Dancer.” In New York he became fast friends with Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. His 1927 poem “The Return” resonates with many of the motifs of Cullen’s and Hughes’s early work. By the time of the Depression, Bontemps had become a family man, and he acquired a job at Oakwood Junior College in Huntsville, Alabama. There he was exceedingly appalled by the Scottsboro trial, and further incensed when he was subsequently told by the college authorities that his library of books was subversive and must be burned.
Bontemps in his maturity was a short, well-built man, extremely good looking with long wavy hair.19 His first novel, God Sends Sunday (1931), was a picaresque tale about a black jockey in New Orleans who bears some likeness to Bontemps’s favorite uncle. As an effect of his residence in Alabama, he wrote Black Thunder (1936), a revolutionary novel about the nineteenth-century slave rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser. This was succeeded by a novel about the Haitian Revolution, Drums at Dusk (1939), based on research Bontemps undertook in the Caribbean with the sustenance of a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in creative writing. From 1935 to 1938 he taught at the Shiloh Academy in Chicago, where he made his contact with members of the largely pro-Communist South Side Writers Club. After that, he worked for the Federal Writers Project. He also acquired a second Rosenwald Fellowship to work on the “Negro in Illinois” project. Subsequently he earned an M.A. in library science at the University of Chicago in 1943. From that time until his retirement in 1965, he was the head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville.
In addition to composing numerous children’s stories, Bontemps also wrote two plays, St. Louis Woman (with Countee Cullen), which was produced in 1946, and Free and Easy (1949). He also edited a number of major anthologies: Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949, with Langston Hughes (1949); Book of Negro Folklore, with Langston Hughes (1958); American Negro Poetry (1963); Great Slave Narratives (1969); and The Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays (1972). His early poetry was collected in Personals (1963), and a volume of his short fiction and prose was posthumously published as The Old South (1973).
Bontemps’s own statements attest that he was in the 1930s, and perhaps later, an independent Black revolutionary in private convictions, although reticent about public activities. While his trusted friends and collaborators included Communists and pro-Communists—such as Langston Hughes, Jack Conroy, and many members of the South Side Writers Club—there is less evidence of specific pro–Communist Party or pro–Soviet Union sympathy in his writings and letters. Still, he remained in regular contact with the Communist literary agent Maxim Lieber after Lieber fled the United States for Mexico and ultimately Poland, in the face of accusations by Whittaker Chambers that his literary agency was a front for espionage.20 It is possible that Bontemps saw Communists much as he pictured the French characters in his novel Black Thunder; as sympathizers with a struggle that must be led by the targets of oppression themselves.
Bontemps’s shy and retiring personality, and his reluctance to identify himself as a “Red,” did not interfere with his appearing to share many dispositions of the Communist outlook of fellow-travelers such as Hughes and Conroy. Richard Wright’s review of Black Thunder in Partisan Review and Anvil treated the text as an incomparable addition to the revolutionary tradition of proletarian literature, especially its folk component.21 Moreover, in November 1942, Bontemps signed a call for a “Win-the-War Congress” sponsored by the League of American Writers to be held on the first anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By this time the politics of the league were more or less in line with official U.S. policy, but the organization was so closely associated with the turn-abouts of Soviet foreign policy that the list of other endorsers was politically narrower than in the past; for example, even Richard Wright, technically a Party member although increasingly disaffected, did not sign the call. Moreover, direct pressure from the U.S. government’s Writers War Board, headed by Rex Stout (1886–1975), a prominent defector from the league, caused the cancellation of the congress and the loss of money contributed by Dashiell Hammett to support it.22
Frank Marshall Davis (1905–1987) was acclaimed as both a journalist and radical poet prior to the Cold War, and was near to the Communist Party and probably even a member in the 1940s. He had the physique of a football player and was an authority on jazz. Born in Kansas, he graduated from Kansas State before removing to Chicago. His collections of poetry seem to increasingly develop the Harlem Renaissance “New Negro” themes in a revolutionary fashion. Lynching, global war, and the class and race oppression that pervaded urban life are among his central poetic themes; the primary Euro-American influences on Davis appear to be the poetry of Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters.23 The poems in his collections Black Man’s Verse (1935), I Am the American Negro (1937), Through Sepia Eyes (1938), and, finally, 47th Street: Poems (1948) are in progression from a quasi–Black nationalist stance to a Marxist, proletarian outlook. The last book includes a commanding foreword by Davis castigating biological theories of race while espousing a subtle notion of cultural difference among ethnic groups. Davis concluded, however, that he writes not only as someone singled out for discrimination because an ancestor was a Black African, but as one of the common people divided from other common people “for continued domination by the economic rulers of the world.” His poetry is there fore written on behalf “of all the common people, even though I know that many of another color and culture in their confusion consider me foe instead of friend.”24
Davis was executive editor of the Associated Negro Press in Chicago from 1935 to 1947. He first met Richard Wright at the Conference of the National Negro Congress held in Chicago in 1936. In 1938 Davis became active in the League of American Writers, which had a concentrated impact on him: “Never before had I worked closely and voluntarily in equality with a number of whites.”25 In 1938 he was treasurer of the Chicago chapter and he signed the call for the 1941 Fourth American Writers’ Congress. In the 1940s he lectured on jazz at the Communist Party–organized Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago, where he also assisted as a member of the board of directors. Davis additionally worked as a jazz radio disk jockey. He later recalled that his 1944 classes, “possibly the first regular courses ever given in the History of Jazz at a school,” were “instigated primarily by Art Stern, a young Jewish intellectual, who realized the significance of this music in our continuing struggle for equality.”26
During these years Davis participated in a writing circle with the pro-Communist Margaret Taylor-Goss (later Margaret Burroughs) as well as Gwendolyn Brooks, Henry Blakely, Gwendolyn Cunningham, Fern Gayden, and Mavis Mixon. He contributed to the New Masses and came to know and respect the Black Communists Benjamin Davis Jr., Angelo Herndon, and William L. Patterson. When Herbert Aptheker came to lecture in Chicago, Davis chaired many of the meetings at which he spoke.27 Davis adhered to the view that the Soviet Union was being treated by world opinion in a manner similar to the handling of Blacks in the United States. As soon as the Young Communist League reorganized as the American Youth for Democracy during the war, Davis became a national sponsor of the organization and cooperated with it. When World War II began, Davis, who initially was confounded by Communist Party policy at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, felt that Earl Browder’s policy advocating cooperation with the war effort was far too conciliatory. In the postwar period Davis believed that the Communist Party was regaining its credibility in the Black community through its renewed struggle for civil rights, and he collaborated with Party leader Ben Davis in drawing up proposals for the Party leadership to fortify such work. During the McCarthy era, Davis’s books were removed from libraries and schools, and in 1948 he moved once and for all to Hawaii, where he operated a wholesale paper business and wrote a regular weekly column for the Honolulu Record. After nearly a quarter of a century of silence, the poetry of Davis was revived by Detroit poet Dudley Randall and literary critic Stephen Henderson around 1973, and Davis undertook a triumphant tour of Black colleges in the United States. Still committed to the Left, he died in 1977.28
Marian Minus (1913–1973) was born as Mattie Marian Minus in South Carolina. She graduated from Fisk University with a major in sociology in 1935, and studied anthropology on a two-year Rosenwald Scholarship at the University of Chicago. She began publishing short stories in the 1930s and in 1937 became coeditor with her friend Dorothy West of New Challenge, the only time the two of them plainly demonstrated sympathy for Communism. From 1945 to 1952, Minus contributed numerous stories to Women’s Day about middle-class white Americans, while her stories and essays about African American life appeared in Opportunity, Black Life and The Crisis. Later she worked as a clerk at Consumer’s Union in Mount Vernon, New York.
Margaret Walker (1915–1998) pursued her search for poetic voice at the same time as she underwent an education in Marxism through her experiences in the Communist movement in Chicago. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and her family moved to New Orleans while she was still quite young. Her father was a scholarly minister educated at Northwestern University who cherished the classics, the Bible, and European philosophers. Her mother was a musician who habitually read Margaret poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Shakespeare. By the time she was eleven, Walker was reading Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and she was being immersed in family history by way of stories passed on to her by her maternal grandmother, the daughter of a former slave in Georgia. Walker graduated from Northwestern University in 1935. Having met Langston Hughes in 1932 and secured his encouragement, she published her first poem in the Crisis in 1934, at the beginning of her senior year at Northwestern. In the ensuing period she began an association with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), first as a volunteer at a recreation project. In March 1936 she became a full-time employee of the Federal Writers Project, working on the Illinois Guide Book. In 1937 her duties were reduced so that she could work on her novel, “Goose Island,” about a social worker, which she completed in 1939 but never published.
In the later 1930s Walker developed relations with many cultural workers associated with the Communist movement, especially Black and Jewish writers. Some pro-Communist novelists were likewise connected with the Federal Writers Project, such as Nelson Algren (1909–1981) and Jack Conroy. She also sat in on the 1936 convention of the National Negro Congress in Chicago, where Richard Wright presided over the congress’s writers’ section. Her plan was to rendezvous with Langston Hughes, who was present at the congress, and give him copies of her poetry; but Hughes introduced her to Wright, and Wright acquainted her with Arna Bontemps and Sterling Brown. As a result Walker shared in the organization of the South Side Writers Club and played a principal role in soliciting writers to contribute to New Challenge, which was briefly to be the voice of the Black pro-Communist cultural Left.
Wright was already having conflicts with some of the local Black Communist Party leaders in Chicago, but at the time Walker was only cognizant that he was contemptuous of instructions from the Party that he not talk to certain writers and Party members who had been dubbed “Trotskyists.” She felt Wright was justified. Otherwise she was persuaded by Wright’s arguments that the political program of the Party was appropriate for a Black writer, that the Party would provide a political education, and that membership would also teach self-discipline. Thus she joined the Young Communist League in the spring of 1937, and, after Wright departed for New York, she also joined the Communist Party in the summer of 1937.29 Although captivated by Party leaders such as Earl Browder and an enthusiastic student of Marxist doctrine in Party-led classes, Walker could also be sarcastic about the egoism and quirkiness of some of the aspiring writers around the movement. For most of 1938 Walker was a member of a loosely organized Writers Unit of the Party, so chaotic that it was frequently threatened with being disbanded and its members transferred to regular Party units. The main activity of the Writers Unit was building the Chicago League of American Writers chapter, although Walker requested that she be assigned by the Party to gather material for New Challenge.
In spite of the rejection of Walker’s submissions to the New Masses, she published verse in Poetry, which had its office in Chicago and editors who were friendly to the Left. She also declared herself an impassioned admirer of the poetry of Sol Funaroff, and took on tasks for the journal New Anvil and the Negro People’s Theater.30 Among her poems that appeared in Poetry were “For My People” (1937), “We Have Been Believers” (1938), and “The Struggle Staggers Us” (1939). Both before and after Wright left Chicago, Walker collaborated with him; he gave her his opinions about the structure of her poems and advised her about books to read that would help provide her with a Marxist education, one that enabled her to write the historical novel Jubilee (1966). In return, Walker abetted Wright with the short story “Almos’ a Man,” Lawd Today (published posthumously in 1963), and Native Son (1940).
Unfortunately, Walker tended to be overzealous in her personal dealings with writers in Wright’s circle, and Wright became suspicious that she was responsible for spreading gossip that poisoned some of his friendships. When Walker attended the Third Congress of the League of American Writers, she was stupefied at Wright’s coldness and his announcement that he was breaking off all relations with her. There is no evidence that they were lovers, but Walker had developed an overly eager devotion to Wright as a genius, and had filled her numerous letters to him with anecdotes about mutual friends that tended to give the impression that they were disloyal while she was his main defender. When Wright thwarted Walker at the Third Congress in New York, she fell into despondency and trailed after him, trying to get a fuller explanation of his shift in attitude toward her. Finally, from Chicago she sent him a seven-page single-spaced self-criticism, in which she also reaffirmed her fidelity to the Party.31 It was to no avail, and the only further communication between the two of them is a one-sentence formal note of congratulations from Walker on the publication of Native Son.32
Since her job at the Federal Writers Project was coming to an end, Walker enrolled in the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop in 1939, then directed by liberal poet Paul Engle (1908–1991). She received an M.A. from Iowa in 1942 for her collection of poetry For My People, winner of the Yale University Younger Poets Award. For most of the 1940s Walker taught college in the South and worked on Jubilee. In 1949 she moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to begin a long career teaching at Jackson State College. In 1962 she returned to the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, once again working with Paul Engle, and finally completed Jubilee, which she submitted as her doctoral dissertation after three years. In 1970 she published a volume of poetry on the civil rights movement, Prophets for a New Day, followed by October Journey (1973) and For Farish Street (1986).
Once Wright had settled in New York, the Harlem Communist Party leader Benjamin Davis implored him to combine forces with Dorothy West to convert her magazine Challenge into a publication closer to the Communist Party, New Challenge, and to print a political-literary manifesto in the new magazine that the Party could use to sway sympathizers and recruit writers.33 Wright was delighted to comply, and he drafted “Blue-Print for Negro Writing,” which reflected perspectives on nationalism, the Harlem Renaissance, and other matters discussed in the South Side Writers Club, for the inaugural issue.
Challenge was initiated in 1934, when West had returned to her hometown of Boston. Born in 1907, West was a single child, the daughter of an ice cream parlor owner. She secured private tutorials at a young age and went on to study philosophy and journalism at Columbia University in 1923. She commenced writing when she was seven, and her literary career began when Opportunity published her first story in 1926. West, who studied at Boston University as well as the Columbia University School of Journalism, associated with many participants in the Harlem Renaissance. Her stories were also published in Boston by Eugene Gordon, when he was editor of the Saturday Evening Quill. Due to a modicum of acting experience, she accompanied Langston Hughes to the Soviet Union in 1932 to bring about a film tackling anti-Black racism. When the film project collapsed, she tarried in the Soviet Union for another year with Hughes.
By launching Challenge, West aimed to unite the older generation of Black writers with the young radicals. A paradigmatic political evolution can be traced in its pages. James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Countee Cullen were among those featured in the first issue. In her editorial, West hinted at the view that would become stronger during the Popular Front years, that the Left literary movement among African Americans of the 1930s proposed to extend and transform the work of the Harlem Renaissance era: “It is our plan to bring out the prose and poetry of the newer Negroes. We who were the New Negroes challenge them to better our achievements. For we did not altogether live up to our fine promise.”34 A pro-Soviet tint was already visible through “Room in Red Square,” an ardent memoir published under the name “Mary Christopher,” which was “a pseudonym for a young woman who went to Russia a year ago with an acting company.”35
In the second issue, Bontemps replied to the inaugural editorial in language suggesting that perhaps the original “New Negroes” were themselves going to make the journey to the fulfillment of the literary and political aspirations of the 1930s: “We’re not washed up. Not by a jugful.... We left Egypt in the late twenties and presently crossed the Red Sea.... The promised land is ahead. Why Langston (Hughes) has just recently been spying it out for us, and the grapes are promising.”36 Indeed, in the fourth installment, West clarified that the reason why the magazine had not yet taken an explicit revolutionary coloration was due solely to the quality of the writing received: “Somebody asked us why Challenge was for the most part pale pink. We said because the few red articles we did receive were not literature. We care a lot about style.” West spelled out her desire “to print more articles and stories of protest,” and noted her sense of identification with the struggles of the “underprivileged.” Yet in reproaching the relatively privileged younger Black students who lacked political consciousness, West implored them to become part of “the leadership of the literate,” and made no mention of Marxist political parties or even unions.37 Nevertheless, the formula for soliciting contributions mirrored the Communist policy toward Black leadership of interracial organizations such as the National Negro Congress: “Challenge is primarily interested in material by Negro writers. But all writers are invited to contribute to its pages.”38
As Challenge evolved through six issues until the spring of 1937, Black radicals increased consistently among its contributors, including Claude McKay, Frank Yerby, William Attaway, and Owen Dodson. A position paper on Black writing crafted by Marian Minus in April 1937 seems to partake of many similarities with Richard Wright’s approach. In it, Minus acclaims Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder as a major breakthrough for its use of folk material, and she declares that “The time is past when the patterns of veneer of a class which is foreign to the great bulk of Negro life shall guide creative work.”39 An editorial note in this issue of Challenge mentions that the magazine is on the threshold of cessation due to financial uncertainties, but that its one prospect for continuance is the aid of a group of Chicago writers, of which Minus was a member; this coterie had criticized the past practice of Challenge, and the editors responded by offering them space in a forthcoming issue.
Instead, the magazine appeared as New Challenge in the fall of 1937, under the editorship of West and Minus, whom Margaret Walker believed to be lesbian lovers.40 Wright was associate editor, and there was a contributing editors list of mostly pro-Communist Black writers, including Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Eugene Holmes, Langston Hughes, Loren Miller, Arthur Randall (the brother of Detroit poet Dudley Randall), and Margaret Walker. The exact steps leading to the final transformation seem to have entailed a decision by West and Minus to take the publication on an explicit “leftward” trajectory, while Richard Wright interceded (when he came to New York in June of 1937 for the Second American Writers’ Congress) to gain Communist Party assistance in the effort. In a letter to Langston Hughes, Wright recounted that he had the aid of Bontemps, and that the idea was to refrain from being “out and out red” but to place the emphasis “upon a social angle, at least for the time being.” The strategy for gaining funds and a following would be borrowed from the New Masses (fund-raising balls) and New Theater (literary contests).41
The editorial in the revamped journal affirmed that the literary material of the new publication was to be based “in the proper perspective with regard to the life of the Negro masses,” which specifically means “the great fertility of folk material as a source of creative material.”42 The magazine’s object was to become the “organ of regional groups composed of writers opposed to fascism, war and general reactionary politics,” of which the South Side Club was an exemplar, hence the inclusion of advisory editors from cities such as Detroit, Washington, and Baltimore. The editorial closed with the disclaimer that “The magazine, being non-political, is not subsidized by any political party.”
The initial issue boasted an impressive poetry section with verse by Frank Marshall Davis, Sterling Brown, Robert Davis, Owen Dodson, and Margaret Walker; two critical pieces commenting on Wright’s “Blueprint,” Allyn Keith’s “A Note on Negro Nationalism,” and Eugene Holmes’s “Problems Facing the Negro Writer Today”; and a review section that included critical comments about Claude McKay’s A Long Way from Home by Alain Locke, a commentary on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God by Marian Minus, a review of the WPA collection American Stuff that emphasized Black contributors, and Ralph Ellison’s first published writing, a review of Waters Turpin’s These Low Grounds (1937). Euro-American contributors included Norman MacLeod, Charles Henri Ford, and Benjamin Appel.
This was the only issue to occur, despite the considerable enthusiasm that was generated by its appearance. Margaret Walker was told that the money from newsstand sales never got back to the office, although there may have been friction between West and her coeditor Marian Minus. West was afterward employed as a welfare investigator in Harlem. She then worked for the Federal Writers Project until it ended in the 1940s, after which she became a regular contributor of short stories to the New York Daily News. In 1948 she published an autobiographical novel, The Living Is Easy, in 1994 The Wedding, and in 1995 The Richer, the Poorer: Stories, Sketches and Reminiscences. By 1997, the year before her death, she had achieved wide fame and was acclaimed by the First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as a “national treasure.”43
Among the Black cultural leaders closely associated with New York–based activities and publications, Alain Locke (1886–1954) is one of the most intricate and consequential. Locke came from Philadelphia and held degrees from Harvard and Oxford. After a ten-month tour of the American South in 1911, he became persuaded of the need for African American self-expression. Fifteen years later he produced a major contribution to this goal by becoming the champion of the Harlem Renaissance through the publication of his anthology, The New Negro (1925). Ensconced at Howard University as chair of the Philosophy Department when the Depression began, he was obviously affected by the radicalization of his colleagues, as well as friends from the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes.
Although his background was anchored in the elitism of the Niagara Movement and the Du Boisian philosophy of the “Talented Tenth,” he was respectful of the new-sprung developments in proletarian and revolutionary literature throughout the 1930s.44 He was active in the League of American Writers and the National Negro Congress, and, while there is no evidence that he considered himself a Communist, his cultural criticism of the 1940s and 1950s incorporated many Marxist themes. Often his judgments appeared to be richer, better informed and more complex classical Marxist correctives to the dogmatic perspectives emanating from the Communist Party. His writing appeared in the New Masses until the late 1940s.
His essay, “Sterling Brown: The New Negro Folk-Poet,” written in 1934, traces the steps by which Black poetry had evolved and comments astutely on McKay, Hughes, and others; he proclaims that a new era had been launched by Brown’s use of folk expression.45 Two years later, in “Propaganda—or Poetry?,” Locke appraised the verse of young poets such as Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, and Sterling Brown who “show a gradually nearer approach to the poetry that can fuse class consciousness with racial protest, and express proletarian sentiment in the genuine Negro folk idiom.” Locke offered intelligent discriminations in demarcating the poet’s strengths and weaknesses. Locke was not opposed to politics or protest in poetry, but he sought poetic utterances “from the vital heart of the Negro experience”; he scorned derivative strophes that smacked of Moscow or Union Square origins. For him, Sterling Brown represented the pinnacle of the younger poets, for “Today it is the rise of this quieter, more indigenous radicalism that is significant and promising. Doubly so, because along with a Leftist turn of thought goes a real enlargement of native social consciousness and a more authentic folk spokesmanship.” Locke concluded by respectfully counterpoising his views to those of “a recent writer, of doctrinaire Marxist leanings, [who] insists that ... the proletarian poet should not be a racialist.... The art of our time is to be the ‘class angle.’ ” Locke doesn’t name this stand-in critic for the Party, but his assertion, in favor “of a high compatibility between race-conscious and class conscious thought,” more scrupulously expresses the standpoint and mid-century cultural practice of Black Marxism.46
Another venue of Locke’s Black Marxism in the 1930s may be located in his annual review of writings, “Literature of the Negro,” which appeared in Opportunity. Locke cast his net widely, including not only all African American writers of fiction, sociology, drama, poetry, children’s books, anthropology, and biography, but also Euro-American writers who treated Black Americans in these categories. Many such writers were pro-Communist, and Locke characteristically balanced criticisms of dogma and oversimplification with accolades for their apperception of crucial themes. In 1932 he praised the Jewish pro-Communist writer John Spivak’s Georgia Nigger as “a pure propaganda novel, but with that strange power that propaganda takes on when it flames with righteous indignation.”47 In a survey of Black literature published in 1935, he greatly praised novels by the pro-Communist writers Erskine Caldwell and Grace Lumpkin.48 In his 1936 review, he termed James Allen’s The Negro Question “rigid” but “rigorous,” lauding the book for portraying a “South . . . X-rayed to its economic bones.” Locke then challenged anti-Communists to try to come up with a more appropriate alternative than Allen’s to the “economic cancer” of the plantation system.49
His review of literature that appeared in 1937 likens Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” to Jean Toomer’s Cane, declaring Wright’s story a portent of a whole exhilarating new era of “proletarian fiction.” New Challenge was emphatically endorsed by Locke, especially the poetry of the Black Communist Robert Davis and the fellow-traveler Frank Marshall Davis. The Communist Angelo Herndon’s Let Me Live is auspiciously compared to Claude McKay’s A Long Way from Home. He acclaims Euro-American Communist Paul Peter’s Stevedore as among the foremost plays to date on Black life. The collaborative work, The Negro in Soviet America, by James Ford and James Allen, was, as was Allen’s earlier book, branded as too formulaic, but “that does not remove its realistic thrust as a contending alternative to the yet unsuccessful reformism of moral appeal and legislative guarantees.”50
“The Negro: ‘New’ or Newer” was the title of Locke’s review for 1938, and its primary focus was on Richard Wright, who had just published Uncle Tom’s Children. Locke praised him for making use of “the novella with the sweep and power of epic tragedy” to launch “a major literary career.”51 When Wright’s Native Son appeared, Locke unfalteringly placed himself in the Black Communist literary camp of Wright, Ellison, Walker, and Ward, and several Jewish Communist critics, against the more dogmatic Harlem political activists:
There was artistic courage and integrity of the first order in his decision to ignore both the squeamishness of the Negro minority and the deprecating bias of the prejudiced majority, full knowing that one would like to ignore the fact that there are any Negroes like Bigger and the other like to think that Bigger is the prototype of all....Wright’s portrait of Bigger Thomas says more about America than it does about the Negro, for he is the native son of the black city ghetto, with its tensions, frustrations and resentments. The brunt of the action and the tragedy involves social forces rather than persons; it is the first instance of a Zolaesque “J’accuse” pointing to the danger symptoms of a self-frustrating democracy.52
For the next several years, Locke’s literary criticism persevered in a comparable vein, always promoting pro-Communist writers and showing special sympathy for their objects of concern while never explicitly endorsing a revolutionary goal. Robert Hayden’s first volume of poetry, published by an obscure press with Left-wing financial assistance, was admired mainly for its political poems which served as a showcase for his finer talents. Locke especially commended his poem “Coleman, Negro Veteran Murdered by the Black Legion.”53 At the time that The Negro Caravan appeared, edited by his friend and colleague Sterling Brown, Locke took exception to Brown’s claim that “Negro writing” was an inappropriate term. While he was no doubt expressing his own opinion, Locke’s admonition was only a softer version of the intemperate criticism of Brown’s contention offered by Black Communist cultural leaders in the Communist press.54 When International Publishers published the Communist Sidney Finkelstein’s Jazz: A People’s Music in 1949, Locke applauded it in Phylon for its unique ability to connect Black music and social history.55 A year later he gave high acclamation to books by the pro-Communists Earl Conrad and Philip Foner.56
By 1952, however, Locke’s writings registered a new and hostile tone regarding the Communist Left. The Euro-American scholar Wilson Record’s mean-spirited The Negro and the Communist Party is complimented by Locke as “a fine example of an objectively factual study... a fair account of communist plans, tactics and results in the period 1919 to 1950.”57 Even more inexplicable, in his essay “From Native Son to Invisible Man,” Locke introduced for the first time the reproach that Native Son “was marred only by Wright’s over reliance on the Communist ideology with which he encumbered his powerful indictment of society.”58 This was his terminal column; two years later he died.
Many other African American poets during the 1930s and 1940s also had associations with the Communist Left. The verse of Gwendolyn Bennett (1902–1981) occurred mostly before 1935, which is when she first exhibited signs of pro-Communism. In the 1940s she became an administrator of two Communist-led educational centers, first the Jefferson School for Democracy in Manhattan and then the George Washington Carver School in Harlem. When the two institutions were investigated during the McCarthyite witch-hunt, Bennett retreated from public life and worked quietly as a secretary for the Consumer’s Union, then retired to Pennsylvania where she became an antique collector.
Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) is another, less classifiable, radical writer whose achievements are principally related to the Harlem Renaissance period. As literary editor for the Crisis from 1919 to 1926, she promoted several authors who were then shifting to the Left, including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. She commenced publishing fiction and poetry in 1912, and two of her novels appeared in the early 1930s. The China-berry Tree (1931), set in a Black community in New Jersey, delineates a range of characters attracted to middle-class respectability in opposition to those exhibiting nonconformist behavior. Comedy, American Style (1933) portrays a self-hating Black woman. After the mid-1930s, when she was a member of the League of American Writers, her literary and political activity declined.
Sterling Brown (1901–1989) was championed by the Communist Party in the mid-1930s, and he demonstrated considerable sympathy for the Party’s activities. Eugene Clay Holmes’s “Sterling Brown: American People’s Poet” appeared in the June 1934 issue of International Literature, two years after Brown’s Southern Road was published. Holmes argued that Brown was a vanguard writer in a Black Marxist renaissance: “His poetry shows that he is conversant with the social, psychological, biological and economic arguments. And most important, he roots his work in the social soil of life he knows. This knowledge, derived from his varied experience has sharpened his poetic acumen, brought him nearer to his objective . . . and closer to our ranks.”59 The ensuing year Brown became a member of the National Council of the League of American Writers in the pre–Popular Front period, when the league was an organization of revolutionary writers. He remained on the council from 1936 through 1940. In 1936 Brown contributed to the Communist Party pamphlet Get Organized! It is likely that his sympathies led him at times close to joining the Party.
Brown was the son of a Howard University professor. He initiated writing poetry in high school in Washington, D.C. After receiving a B.A. from Williams College and an M.A. from Harvard, he taught in the South for six years, where he was profoundly affected by African American folklore. In developing his technique of dialect verse, however, he sought aid from the Left-wing Jewish folklorist Benjamin Botkin (1901–1975), who recommended that he drop the final “g” in verbs.60 Brown inaugurated his own career at Howard University in 1929 and published Southern Road two years later. His closest ties were with members of the Left at Howard, including Eugene Holmes, E. Franklin Frazier, Abram Harris, and Ralph Bunche. From 1936 to 1939 Brown served as the editor on Negro Affairs of the Federal Writers Project, with Holmes as an assistant, and he contributed the section “The Negro in Washington” of the massive WPA guidebook, Washington, City and Capital (1937). In a 1978 interview, Brown described how the FBI had conducted an investigation of alleged Communist influence at Howard, interrogating himself and twenty other professors. He avowed that, in answer to the notorious question, he had responded: “Listen, son, any Negro who has been to the seventh grade and is against lynching is a Communist. I have been to the eighth grade and against a hell of a lot more than lynching.” Brown believed that the Howard administration took no action against the accused faculty because “among our people it was a credit...a badge that you were a radical.”61
William Attaway (1911–1986) was a committed Communist from the late 1930s well into the Cold War era. Attaway was born in Mississippi, the son of a schoolteacher and a physician, and moved at the age of five with his family to Chicago in the Great Migration. He rebelled early against his family’s middle-class aspirations, and devoted himself to literature after reading Langston Hughes while in high school. He often skipped class and meandered out to Checkerboard Air Field to observe the planes, and eventually got a job washing the planes with the added benefit of going on free plane rides with the pilots. Attaway’s parents coerced him to attend the University of Illinois Medical School, but he was determined to study law, then creative writing, and, finally, dropped out of school to hobo and work variously as a seaman, salesman, agricultural worker, and labor organizer during the early 1930s.62 In late 1933 he re-enrolled at the University of Illinois and produced a play called Carnival.
When Richard Wright appeared on campus to speak about the union movement, they met and became friends; soon Attaway arranged for Wright to appear before the literary society, where he appalled the audience by reading his lynching story, “Big Boy Leaves Home.” Attaway then joined the Federal Writers Project, where he again encountered Wright. Attaway’s short story in the vein of a medieval romance, “Tale of the Blackamoor,” appeared in Dorothy West’s Challenge in June 1936, the same year he graduated from the University of Illinois. Attaway was briefly associated with the South Side Writers Club before moving to New York, where he worked at odd jobs and as a union organizer until he found employment acting in a traveling theater company.
He finished his first novel in Philadelphia. With mainly white characters and a plot that had some likeness to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939) was an “on-the-road” novel featuring two white migrants who befriend a nine-year-old Mexican American boy. When it appeared, the Daily Worker published an interview with Attaway, who announced that his next book would be “about the sharecroppers who were brought up to work in the Allegheny steel mills during the world war.”63
With a two-year grant from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, Attaway devoted himself during 1939 and 1940 to writing Blood on the Forge (1941), a magisterial novel about Southern Black workers in the 1919 steel strike in western Pennsylvania. The Daily Worker review, although amicable and laudatory of the novel’s power, was firm in contending that the book “will not contribute...to ward a sympathetic knowledge of the fate of the millions of Negro workers on Southern farmlands and in Northern industrial peonage.” While the violent explosion of one of the main characters, Matt Moss, resembled the violence of Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son, there was present no Mr. Max to sum up the situation, nor did Attaway “express hope for the final unity of black and white workers.”64 The mixed disposition of the Communist Party’s institutional relation to Black literature is evident in these two pieces; on the one hand, the Daily Worker interview with Attaway gave recognition to a young and unknown writer; on the other, the review of Blood on the Forge revealed how shallow political criteria could be employed to negate the magnitude of a work judged as to whether it might be a potential “weapon in the class struggle.”
Coming on the eve of the United States’ entrance into World War II, Blood on the Forge had themes and perspectives that grated against the Communist Party’s call to maintain national unity in the face of fascism. There is no doubt that Attaway wrote as a Black Marxist, one whose exertions were aimed in part at educating the white labor movement about the corrosive costs of continued racial chauvinism. Attaway remained a participant in the Party-led Harlem Writers Club and carried on other radical activities. His last published piece of fiction was the story “Death of a Rag Doll” in the literary journal The Tiger’s Eye in 1947. It is a disclosure about the birth and death of art, but with a disturbing psychological focus. The story’s central relation is between an older sister, dark and beautiful, and her younger brother, gray skinned with blue eyes. The brother remains mute except for playing an instrument, a Jew’s harp, on which his sister teaches him to perform for her. On her wedding day, when the sister is about to marry without love into a wealthier family, the brother flees to the waterside and begins to play the Jew’s harp to a rag doll surrogate for his sister. The sister, still ambivalent about the wedding and worried about her brother, hears the music. She rushes to her brother, rips up the rag doll, and returns to her wedding without looking back. The story is a likely metaphor of the death of Attaway’s writing career; a biographical gloss might refer to his own sister, the actress Ruth Attaway, who had introduced him to art and then she moved on to a more successful commercial career. Whatever the totality of the forces at work in detaching Attaway from his original literary career—adverse economic circumstances would seem most obvious—“Death of a Ragdoll” may suggest some of the troubling issues at war within his psyche.
Attaway subsequently worked at odd jobs in Harlem. At the height of the Cold War he hid and transported Black Communist Party leaders who went underground.65 His first novel was reissued as a mass market pulp thriller, Tough Kid (1952). Through his connections with Black Left-wing cultural leaders, he composed and arranged songs for Harry Belafonte and other singers. Attaway’s only other published books were Calypso Song Book (1957) and Hear America Singing (1967). All his subsequent literary work was confined to writing scripts for radio, television, and films. From 1966 to 1976 he lived in Barbados, partly out of a desire to reside in a country with a Black government, Black police, and a Black professional class. He died of cancer in 1986 in Los Angeles.
In 1942 The Negro Quarterly was launched with strong Communist support. Angelo Herndon was the editor, and Black and white pro-Communists dominated the list of contributors in the first issue: Sterling Brown, Dorothy Brewster, Langston Hughes, Doxey Wilkerson, Millen Brand, Ralph Ellison, L. D. Reddick, Herbert Aptheker, and Augusta Jackson. The policy statement for this “review of thought and opinion” included a special emphasis on the relationship between political equality and the need for Blacks and whites to “share equally in the hardships of war, as well as in the victory to come.”66 With the second issue, Ralph Ellison became the managing editor, persevering to the end when he left to join the merchant marine.
Only four issues of The Negro Quarterly were published, but the sweep of topics addressed was extraordinary—history, international politics, current controversies in African American education, Black-Jewish relations, the situation in publishing, folk culture, and recent books of all types. The final editorial embodied a sustained commentary on World War II, which stylistically and the matically appears to be primarily the work of Ellison. Repudiated are the attitudes of passive subordination to the racist aspects of the military machine and wartime climate, as well as the opinion of those who express “unqualified rejection” of the war. While the latter arises out of a kind of “Negro nationalism” that admirably holds out for equal treatment, it also reflects “the attitude of one who, driven into a corner, sees no way of asserting his manhood except to choose his own manner of dying.”
What is required is to recognize that African Americans “have their own stake in the defeat of fascism” and to see “the peoples aspect of the war.” The alternative is “critical participation” in the war, which was seen as partly a nationalist expression in its recognition of “the Negro people’s stake” in the antifascist struggle. The foundation for an potent intervention, then, is the outlook that “to fail to protest the wrongs done Negroes as we fight the war is to participate in a crime, not only against Negroes, but against all true anti-Fascists.” Moreover, an effective fight means centralizing the “group unity” of African Americans of all classes. This is essential to guarantee the democratic role of the labor movement (which might be exploited for reactionary ends), as well as to prevent African Americans from playing the role of “sacrificial goat.” To that end, African American leadership must “integrate” into the Black masses, urge the population to gain new mastery of technological skills available due to the war-time situation, and “learn the meaning of the myths and symbols which abound among the Negro masses.” The zoot suit and Lindy-hop, for example, embody potential clues to effective slogans and tactics that might help “the Negro masses...to see the bright star of their own hopes through the fog of their daily experiences.” This is a psychological issue “solved only by a Negro leadership that is aware of the psychological attitudes and incipient forms of action which the black masses reveal in their emotion-charged myths, symbols and wartime folklore.” In effect, the use of words, although insufficient for social revolution, is absolutely necessary for a “skillful and wise manipulation of those centers of repressed social energy” to facilitate positive action.
Already pressing beyond the borders of acceptable Communist policy, the editorial went a step further in insisting upon Black autonomy and self-leadership as the only guarantor that African Americans would not simply become the instrument of “Labor” rather than “Capital.” A final warning asserted that “leaders and organizations must be measured not by their words, but by their actions.”67 Retrospectively this was Ellison’s declaration of Marxist independence from the Communist movement, a stance similar to that of Richard Wright. The proposition of an independent African American political movement intervening to keep the rest of Labor in line was certainly compatible with the original Leninist argument for self-determination adumbrated in the early 1930s. Yet its militant articulation at the height of Browderism and antifascist unity and in conjunction with criticisms of the Party coming from other Black Leftists as well as Trotskyists for subordination of the Black struggle portended a potential political break. Yet neither Ellison, nor Wright, who surely shared this perspective, took that step in 1942.
By this time New York City had become the center of Black literary Marxism, much as it had become the headquarters of both the radical movement in the United States as well as the publishing industry. The formation of the League of American Writers in 1935, also headquartered in New York, provided a new visibility for Black pro-Communist authors, and it brought them into closer contact with each other as well as with like-minded Euro-American writers. Langston Hughes and Richard Wright served as vice presidents of the league, and among its African American members were Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Frank Marshall Davis, Ralph Ellison, Arthur Huff Fauset, Jessie Fauset, Eugene Gordon, Eugene Holmes, Alain Locke, Loren Miller, Marian Minus, Margaret Walker, Theodore Ward, Dorothy West, Frank Yerby, and Claude McKay.
Assuredly, Black Communists during the Depression lived and wrote in other areas of the United States. Eluard Luchell McDaniel was born in 1912 in Lumberton, Mississippi. He resided on a small farm with his father, a minister who was widowed three years after McDaniel was born. At the age of ten he set out to see the world, working as a boot black, water boy, news boy, bell hop, hotel porter, and automobile mechanic. While still in his teens, he had visited most of the United States, hitchhiking and riding the rails. By the time he was eighteen, he had settled in San Francisco and in 1931 he began attending night school to learn short-story writing. Under the title “2 or 3 Stories by Luchell,” he published a group of anecdotes in Story magazine in 1935, before volunteering to fight in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.68 The Crisis reported on his exploits in 1938, describing how he “drove back a whole company of Franco’s troops by the use of hand grenades, when the Loyalists were re-crossing the Ebro. He is now a black god in Spain, with one explosive bullet in his left thigh.” In remarking on the absence of color prejudice among the Spanish Loyalist population, the Crisis noted that “McDaniel is as black all over his body as a well-shined pair of black shoes.”69 Following his return to San Francisco, McDaniel worked for the Federal Writers Project and contributed to the collection American Stuff.
Ray Durem (1915–1963) was another African American Spanish Civil War veteran who became a writer and a Communist. Born in Seattle, Durem ran away from home at fourteen and served in the U.S. Navy before volunteering for the International Brigades in Spain and joining the Communist Party. He mainly supported himself by working in factories, shops, and warehouses on the West Coast. Durem was sufficiently light-skinned that he could pass for white, and he was horrified by the discussions of Blacks by whites on which he eavesdropped. In the 1940s Durem commenced to write poems to express his anger and frustration; many of them were bitterly sarcastic and humorous. His work began appearing in Phylon and other magazines and drew the attention of Langston Hughes, who included his poetry in The Book of Negro Humor (1966) and Poetry of the American Negro (1970). During the Cold War, Durem took his family to Mexico. He died of cancer shortly after his return to Los Angeles in 1962. A posthumous collection of his poetry, Take No Prisoners, appeared in 1971.
Frank Yerby (1916–1992) was in the environs of the Communist movement in the late 1930s but quickly departed. He was born in Georgia, attended a private Black school, and graduated from Paine College in 1937. He received an M.A. in English from Fisk University in 1938.70 In 1939 he enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at University of Chicago and worked with the Federal Writers Project, where he made the acquaintance of Margaret Walker and other radicals. He had already published in Challenge and contributed a story to the New Anvil, Jack Conroy’s sequel to The Anvil of the early 1930s. Yerby also joined the Chicago chapter of the League of American Writers. By 1940, financial problems caused Yerby to drop out of the university, and he spent some time teaching in the South before working from 1941 to 1944 in a defense plant in Dearborn, Michigan. In the 1940s he published a series of short stories treating racism, one of which, “Health Card,” brought him offers from several publishers.71 However, he resolved that writing about race was a dead-end and switched to producing what he called “The Costume Novel.” His first such novel, The Foxes of Harrow, appeared in 1946, selling over a million copies in its first year; by the 1980s, it had sold nearly twelve million copies. This was followed by numerous other best-sellers, most of which were historical novels. After 1952, Yerby became an expatriate. He died in Madrid six years after publishing his last novel, which appeared in 1986.
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) was among the most productive Black Communist critics during the late 1930s and very early 1940s. Born in Oklahoma in 1914, Ellison was only two when his father died. He became conscious of politics early on through his mother, a woman who supported the Socialist Party before World War I and remained an activist until her death in 1937. Ellison was precociously drawn to a range of cultural interests, including music, literature, sculpture, and theater. He won a scholarship to the Tuskegee Institute to study music, but left in his junior year to move to New York, where he lived from hand to mouth. Through Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, he met Richard Wright just as New Challenge was appearing; at Wright’s urging, Ellison published his first book review in the magazine, but it folded before his story, “Hymie’s Bull,” about a Jewish hobo who kills a policeman, appeared.
In 1938 Ellison joined the Federal Writers Project and was designated to gather folk material in Harlem. His writing began to appear in 1939 in the New Masses and then Direction, a pro-Communist publication associated with the League of American Writers. His literary criticism reflected a breadth of reading and concern with technical innovation that placed him squarely in the camp of Charles Humboldt and a world away from the “ask the worker” school of criticism. But his perspective indicated an impressive grasp of historical materialism as he the orized the evolution of Black literature from a folk consciousness to that of an urban proletariat. Many of his opinions were identical to those of Wright, especially his view of the centrality of combining national consciousness with an internationalist perspective of class unity. He even held up Wright’s Communist affiliation as crucial to his artistic achievement. Speaking of Wright’s period of leadership in the politically engaged John Reed Club, Ellison observed:
Wright, through exercising his function as secretary of that organization, and, through his personal responsibility, forcing him to come to grips with those [social] issues and making decisions upon them, built up within himself tensions and disciplines which were impossible within the relaxed, semi-peasant environs of American Negro life. This mounted almost to the attainment of a new sensibility, of a rebirth.72
In addition to holding positions in the league, Ellison was active in Communist Party affairs. Information about his activities appeared in many issues of the New Masses, along with notices (sometimes with photographs) for speaking engagements such as one sponsored by the Council on African Affairs and at a New Masses series on Black writers with William Attaway. A. B. Magil and Howard Johnson (a Harlem Party leader in the 1940s) believe that Ellison held Party membership, while Ellen Wright (Wright’s widow) denies this.73 Ellison’s personal correspondence with Richard Wright documents an intimate familiarity with Party life.74 More important, Ellison’s militant Communist convictions are consistently in evidence, rising to a fever pitch during the Hitler-Stalin Pact when former comrades such as Granville Hicks are denounced for their defection from the Soviet cause; Ellison even predicted that he and Wright would live to see a similar retreat by Black Party leaders such as Ben Davis, who lacked their true grasp of Marxist “necessity.”75
For the most part, Ellison held that the Black leaders of the Party were far inferior in political acumen than the whites. Still, he was convinced of the revolutionary potential of the Black working class and underwent what he called a “mystical experience” when he attended the 1940 meeting of the National Negro Congress as a reporter for the New Masses. Along with Wright, he responded to the Communists’ historic emphasis on Black folk culture and the psychological dimensions of oppression, and through wide reading and extraordinary intelligence approached the topics with an intense creativity that gradually began to be reflected in his essays and fiction. He was also convinced that writings by Wright and himself were pushing the Communist leadership toward more sophisticated and less formulaic approaches to the situation of African Americans, and in his new capacity on the New Masses editorial board in the early 1940s he dreamed of enlisting regular articles by Party supporters such as Franklin Frazier, Sterling Brown, Ralph Bunche, and Eugene Clay Holmes. Unfortunately, Ellison’s devotion to mastering the full corpus of Marx and Hegel was also accompanied by oddball theories about female biological determinism.76
At the end of the 1930s Ellison passed through a first marriage to a woman named Rose, about whom he would subsequently remain immovably secretive, and also had an intense affair with the Communist writer Sanora Babb.77 After serving as coeditor of the Negro Quarterly with the well-known Black Communist Angelo Herndon, and initiating a career as a short-story writer, Ellison joined the merchant marine as a second cook and baker from 1943 to 1945, seeing it as a means of contributing to the antifascist effort without serving in the segregated army. During this period, Wright, whom Ellison had declared to be his one and true “brother,”78 evolved from dismay over the excesses of the Party’s wartime policy to the more comprehensive critique that appeared in an essay excerpted from his autobiography, “I Tried to Be a Communist.”79 Ellison defended Wright’s new position in arguments with William Attaway and others.80 When the autobiography, originally called “American Hunger” and now entitled Black Boy, came out the following year, Ellison, back from the sea, similarly tangled with Eugene Clay Holmes, whom he now likened to a “Commissar.”81 At this point he was as disaffected as Wright from the Communist Party, but it was on the revolutionary Marxist grounds that the Party had sold out “our people”—meaning not only African Americans but the U.S. labor movement.82 On the Left political spectrum, his views seem closer to the more orthodox William Z. Foster wing of the Party than to the more “Americanized” Browder wing, and at the time of Browder’s expulsion Ellison even appeared skeptical that Foster was sincere about breaking from the earlier accommodationist policies. When Angelo Herndon, Ellison’s former co-editor of Negro Quarterly, visited from Chicago and revealed himself to be a cynical businessman in the fields of insurance brokerage and women’s clothing, Ellison and his new wife, Fanny, were taken aback.83
Ellison’s insistence that he was to the Left of the Party, and repelled by its procapitalist policies, persisted for another year or two, but it is evident that he was not aggressive in expressing his opinions about the Party as emphatically in public as in private. In the summer of 1946 a representative of the New Masses approached him to ask if he might reestablish his former relationship.84 Despite his tough talk to Wright about how he allegedly told off the Party comrades about their betrayals, his views must have been more ambiguously stated. When a section of Invisible Man appeared in Horizon, his old Party friend, Charles Humboldt, still a Communist, expressed his admiration to Ellison and proposed that they get together to talk about reprinting one of Ellison’s New Masses stories in an anthology. Again, Ellison reported to Wright that he turned a cold shoulder and explained that he had completely changed literary direction in his new writing—although Humboldt claimed that he didn’t see the difference.85 In these years Ellison was working away at his early drafts of Invisible Man, a novel that emerged from the contradictions of his convoluted deradicalization process, as well as his complex relations to the Marxist work of Wright, Attaway, and others.
The achievement of the formative years of Black literary Marxism has yet to receive fitting recognition. Due to the widespread belief among publishers that only a limited audience existed for African American literature, many of the chief Black authors’ texts—the poetry of Frank Marshall Davis; Black Thunder, by Arna Bontemps; and Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway—received only limited publicity and distribution. Richard Wright’s first novel was rejected by publishers and appeared only after his death. Sterling Brown’s second volume of poetry, “No Hiding Place,” was also rejected, and several of his poems from the 1930s only emerged after the onset of the new Black radicalization of the 1960s. Robert Hayden’s second collection, “The Black Spear,” assembled in 1942, never found a publisher and was eventually abandoned.
In a way, Hayden’s fate symbolized the situation of most radical Black writers. Relying heavily on research he had conducted while employed by the Detroit Federal Writers Project, Hayden hoped to pen a new epic interpretation of American culture that foregrounded the complexities of the African American condition. Toward this end, he aspired to draw upon every available literary technique, especially irony, montage, dramatic voices, and juxtaposition. Directly from this effort grew Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” one of the most admired poems in American literature, but one not generally recognized as a fruit of Black Marxism.
Despite the penchant of Claude McKay and Countee Cullen for more traditional verse forms, there is otherwise a remarkable coherence to Black Marxist verse of the formative period of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Early on, McKay inscribed the centrality of courageous resistance to racism even in the face of death in his “If We Must Die.” McKay claimed to have initially written this poem to read to his crew of Black railway workers in response to the widespread lynchings that occurred in 1919. One trait of McKay’s overall accomplishment is his giving a specificity to the tragedy of anti-Black racism while dialectically invoking universal themes, thus balancing class and nationality. For example, “If We Must Die” does not refer to African Americans as such, while another influential poem, “The Negro’s Tragedy,” insists that Black suffering can never be grasped by anyone other than a Black person.
Sterling Brown, on the other hand, relied more directly on the rich store of southern working-class and peasant folk culture to create humanized symbols of the Black nation in formation. Sometimes a trickster character, as in “Slim in Hell,” will attack southern racism by exposing the absurdity of its racial codes. In other instances, a character like “Old Lem” will embody the fatigued resentment that came from witnessing decades of racist savagery. In Brown’s “Strong Men,” one senses his call for African American artists to fuse with the invincible spirit of southern folk resistance to economic and political exploitation by creating a new culture, and the new forms that give voice to it.
A complementary theme in Black poetry consists of satiric jibes at middle-class aspirations and delusions of African Americans who fail to affirm their class and national loyalties. Frank Marshall Davis’s poetic creations “Robert Whitmore,” “Arthur Ridgewood, M.D.,” and “Giles Johnson, Ph.D.,” are all doomed to early graves when their illusions are shattered. Langston Hughes canalizes a similar critique in the direction of northern liberals, especially in the “Dinner Guest: Me” section of The Panther and the Lash, a volume that thematically groups political poems written over four decades.
Among the most robust testaments of Black Marxism in poetry is Margaret Walker’s 1942 collection For My People. This is work by a perfectionist equally immersed in African American culture and Popular Front Communism. The title poem, which opens the collection, blends personal biography and historical narrative to climax in a vision of phrases from “The Internationale”: Walker’s line “Let a new earth rise” is a variation of “the earth shall rise on new foundations” from “The Internationale”; and “Let another world be born” is a variation of “A better world’s in birth.” Her call to “Let a bloody peace be written in the sky” is a defense of violent revolution, and the concluding sentence expresses the Marxist demand for workers to seize the means of production: “Let a race of men now rise and take control.”86 The third poem, “We Have Been Believers,” dramatizes the shift in consciousness from the alienation of religion to the moment of revolutionary action: “Now the needy no longer weep / and pray; the long-suffering arise, and our fists bleed / against the bars with a strange insistency.”87
The musicality of Walker’s poems in form, references, and theme recall that Black music from its earliest literary depictions by African American radicals was understood by the Left, as well as others, to be a prime feature of the African American nationality as well as culture. Hence the political makeup of spirituals, blues, and jazz became contested terrain in cultural practice and criticism. For the Left, rural Black southern folk culture was coded as the authentic voice of the proletarianized peasantry; memories of resistance to slavery and signs of the subversion of Jim Crow racial capitalism were found lurking under every metaphor and simile. In 1934 the New Masses published a startling article by a white southerner writing under the pseudonym Richard Frank on “Negro Revolutionary Music.” Frank argued that it was the music of Blacks that was Americanizing the ideology of Bolshevism and the working-class movement. Moreover, since whites were fascinated by Black music and often sang Black songs, Black music was truly the route to Communist politicization of the entire working class. As evidence, Frank gave a number of examples of spirituals in which revolutionary themes had been interpolated.88
Yet during the 1930s a shift occurred in the conception of the relation of Black music to revolutionary struggle, at least in terms of its literary representation, due to the impact of the events of the decade. This shift was felt in the excruciating intensification of class struggle nationally and internationally—the Depression, Scottsboro, Ethiopia, and Spain. The feeling grew among committed Black writers that every moment counted in life-and-death terms, which made cultural workers all the more susceptible to an increased strategic, almost military, approach to producing and judging writing. In terms of the depiction, dramatization, and assessment of the politics of music in novels, there is a paradigmatic shift from the 1920s to the 1930s that might be called “From Banjo to Melody.”
Banjo is the main character in Claude McKay’s 1929 novel of the same name, who plays the banjo in a rag-tag jazz band. Melody is a central figure in William Attaway’s 1941 Black proletarian novel, Blood on the Forge, who plays a blues guitar. The correspondence between the two texts, published a decade apart, is noteworthy. Both stories are set in “exile” after World War I. McKay’s Banjo is an escapee to Marseilles, France, from the Deep South, where he had seen his brother lynched. Attaway’s Melody is also in flight, to the steel mills of Pennsylvania from rural Kentucky, to evade a potential lynch mob. Both characters are part of larger collectives. Banjo’s is a jazz-band-in-formation of “beach boys” from diverse locales in the African Diaspora. Melody’s is the close-knit family of the three Moss Brothers, each with an extravagantly different outlook on life. Finally, both musicians, characterized by fluidity and adaptability, are paired with an alter-ego of a more rigid temperament—Banjo with the Haitian intellectual, Ray; Melody, with his disciplined and fanatically religious brother, Matthew.
Otherwise, the novels tug in opposite directions, strongly indicative of the different moments they express in the evolution of the Left African American tradition of literary expressions of jazz and blues themes. The customary interpretation of Banjo is that it constitutes a middle stage in McKay’s tripartite movement to a harmonious Black aesthetic. The first level was expressed in his novel Home to Harlem, and the third would come in Banana Bottom. In Banjo, McKay sought a fusion between the radical intellectual, depicted in the semi-autobiographical figure of Ray, and the instinctual spontaneity of Black creativity, represented by Banjo. The novel terminates with Ray’s resolve to cut loose and “go vagabonding” with Banjo. Attaway, in disparity, was offering in his novel a direct challenge to the Left. In Blood on the Forge, he makes use of the role played by Blacks as scabs in the 1919 steel strike to dramatize how difficult it was actually going to be to build a culture of solidarity between Black and white workers.
Banjo, because it is basically an expression of the pre-Depression Black Left, can freely employ a European exile setting as the site for a healthy integration of serious commitment and vital art, symbolized by Black music. This is because Blacks living in France had increased agency and autonomy, due to the distance from the peculiarly virulent and constricting racism of the United States. Blood on the Forge, in contrast, coming at the end of the crisis-ridden 1930s, presents a more troubling and challenging vision because, although the novel’s climax is horrifying, the novel’s solution remains unstated.
Until the Moss brothers are literally broken by the new industrial system, Melody had been the most balanced of the three, using his blues guitar to assuage pain and communicate equanimity to those around him. His brother Chinatown had been a creature of immediate gratification who became blind due to an industrial accident. His older brother Matthew, a master of repression and controlled strength, explodes: first into sexual passion, then into violence as a tool of the police against the striking unionists, resulting in his death. The final scene has Melody, guitarless and with a self-inflicted broken hand, escorting the blind Chinatown off to new class battles in Pittsburgh. The contrast here with McKay’s final scene of Banjo and Ray joyously departing Marseilles to vagabond together could hardly be more pointed.
Left critics responded to each novel similarly. Michael Gold, despite his earlier conflicts with McKay at the Liberator, warmly praised in the New Masses McKay’s depictions of street life and his antibourgeois attitude in Banjo. Nevertheless, according to his political yardstick, Gold deemed the novel insufficiently “proletarian” in outlook and themes.89 In parallel fashion thirteen years later, Blood on the Forge fell victim to the Party-line admonitions of Ralph Ellison in a six-page essay on Attaway in The Negro Quarterly. Attaway’s novel was commended for its artistry, but also sharply assailed for its deviations from the Communist view of World War II, which had changed after the Soviet Union was invaded by Germany in June 1941. Ellison also upbraided Attaway for failing to include among his characters “the most conscious American Negro type, the black trade unionist.” Concerning the treatment of Black music and culture, about which Ellison would later write so brilliantly, he formulaically condemns Attaway for exhibiting, in the fate of Melody, “the destruction of the folk,” but not depicting “its rebirth on a higher level.” By this, Ellison meant a class consciousness that grows out of folk elements but achieves an ability to distinguish between whites who are oppressors and white working-class allies.90 Ironically, it was Ellison, in this instance the most severe administrator of the militarized strategic evaluation of the artistic use of Black music, who defected from the Left as the Cold War began. Attaway, whose artistic use of music evidenced a felicitous dramatization of a friendly but sharp political critique of Communism, continued loyal to his Left commitments. During the militant civil rights movement of the 1960s, Attaway marched in the South while Ellison remained aloof.91
Attaway was not the last pro-Communist writer to employ themes of Black music as a vehicle to understand the mutable and unfinished evolution of African American national culture in the context of race and class oppression. Indeed, the Communist Party would enjoy an equal if not greater success with African American cultural workers during the Cold War when such themes would be subject to further exploration, at times dogmatic and other times highly original. Moreover, the issues raised by Attaway in Blood on the Forge prefigured future developments. From the late 1940s through the late 1950s, the classical Black Marxist project—which delicately balanced the dialectical interplay of the class and national components of a struggle for liberation—became progressively disarticulated by a combination of economic, social, intellectual, cultural, and political challenges. Scarcely a major African American writer of the interwar years, and especially the poets, was unaffected by Marxism; after the war up to the present, few could avoid a rethinking and reformulation of the Black Marxist project, which occurred with widely varying results. Even for Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, who separated from the Party in the mid-1940s, Marxism remained the touchstone for their political and creative thought for years thereafter.
From the outset, Black Marxists were compromised by faith placed in two allies. One was an illusion that the Soviet Union was a model for anti-racism and the fair treatment of national minorities. This fantasy was articulated very early by Black Communist leaders such as James Ford, who wrote in Nancy Cunard’s famous 1933 anthology, Negro: “Soviet Russia’s insistence upon absolute equality for all people... has led to the freedom of the nationalities formerly oppressed by the Tsarist regime in the same way that Negroes are oppressed in the United States.”92
The other false friend was the utopian hope for white working-class allies. In Sterling Brown’s “Sharecropper,” published first in the New Masses and then in the Communist Party’s 1939 pamphlet Get Organized!, Euro-American partners never appear in person as such. Yet the Black member of the sharecroppers union in Brown’s poem refuses to identify Black or white union members as he is being tortured to death by white vigilantes, and he dies with a vision of a Black Oak and a White Oak growing side by side.93 In Robert Hayden’s “Speech,” included in his 1940 collection Heart-Shape in the Dust, an African American worker pleads that the same hand, and the same voice, beat and divide Black and white workers; yet the poem is oratorical, not dramatic.94 In the 1940 edition of Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, the short story “Fire and Cloud” depicts unity in the form of the Black and white Communist buddies Hadley and Green; yet the two are barely sketched as characters, and their specific activities among Black and white workers are not revealed. In “Bright and Morning Star,” the Black Communist Johnny-boy’s fanatical belief in the primacy of class solidarity over racial division actually leads to his own death, which is avenged by his more nationalist-inclined mother, Aunt Sue.
The imbalance in artistic representations of the complex relationship of national oppression and class unity is partly explained by the relationship of art to experience. The experience of national and racial oppression was vivid, real, and overwhelming for Black writers. Full-blown interracial class solidarity was by comparison almost a leap forward to a quixotic chimera. This dream of a majority of Euro-American workers finding common ground with their darker sisters and brothers was limned primarily by a few admirable experiences in the Communist Left such as the instances of interracial collaboration in the Scottsboro case, the sharecroppers union, the struggles against evictions in Harlem, the camaraderie of the John Reed Clubs, and the integrated ranks of the International Brigades in Spain. It was present in literature in the Black political prisoner Angelo Herndon’s 1934 pamphlet You Cannot Kill the Working Class, and especially in his narrative about a racist white worker in the South who joins a Black protest against unemployment because “an empty belly is a pretty punk exchange for the honor of being called a ‘superior’ race.”95 But an interracial utopia was not part of the day-to-day life experiences of ordinary African Americans in the segregated United States; and daily existence offers the raw materials of any sustained, rich, multifaceted, and fully textured artistic work in the realist vein.
Still and all, one might have expected Richard Wright to have gone further in elaborating the delicate balance between nationality and class at the very heart of pro-Communist Black Marxism. He was a public member of the Communist Party and active in several Party-related institutions. Further, in the circumstances of his time, he led an unusually interracial political, literary and personal life. Yet in 1940 it was Wright who shattered forever the trajectory that one might have expected to emerge from this crucible in light of his having published Uncle Tom’s Children. In the pages of U.S. literature emerged Wright’s unforgettable Bigger Thomas, and Black Marxist culture, African American culture, and American culture were shocked by a new sensibility. Here was a central character who had neither a positive Black national folk-religious culture, nor a hint of the utopian dream of international proletarian class unity. Bigger Thomas is depicted by Wright as the product of a commercially controlled mass culture, primarily manifested by the movies.
Ironically, Wright chose a mass-culture strategy as well—a noir murder mystery with a fake kidnapping plot and a citywide police manhunt—in which to cast his desperate plea for a profound revamping of the very terms of Black Marxism that he had once helped to formulate in his famous 1937 manifesto “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” His choice of form is significant, for Wright was still very much within the Black Marxist tradition in 1940 and would remain so even after he left the Communist Party. Thus he subscribed to a Marxist orientation that regarded popular culture not as exclusively the site of indoctrination by commercial forces but as a vessel to be filled with multiple contents. His decision to write a novel that took the structure of a murder mystery and detective thriller would later be emulated by the radical African American novelists Chester Himes, Ann Petry, and Willard Motley, among others.
From the point of view of classical Black Marxism, Wright presented the rather terrifying vision that traditional Black culture cannot reach the Bigger Thomases, and that potential Euro-American working-class allies, symbolized by Jan, the Communist boyfriend of the murdered Mary Dalton, are simply part of a reified natural world of snowstorms and mountains against which Bigger must struggle to survive. Although Wright was defended in the Left press by the leading Jewish Communist writers, Mike Gold and Samuel Sillen, and the Black fellow-travelers, Chester Himes and Alain Locke, a number of African American political leaders and Communist Party activists in Harlem and elsewhere knew where the logic of his vision might lead; in private and internal discussions they denounced his novel harshly—no doubt because some of them had similar fears about the flaws inherent in the illusions of the traditional Black Marxist project.96
The legacy, then, of poetry and fiction written by pro-Communist African Americans of the pre–World War II era is more compelling in its use of Marxism to divulge the social and cultural bases and multiple levels of racial oppression rather than in articulating programmatic paths leading to liberation. Examples of texts exhibiting the fragile equilibrium between the writer’s sure knowledge of racial oppression, leading to Black cultural resistance, and the same writer’s tentative utopian hope of an interracial alliance against racism on the basis of common position, are scarcer. Such an equipoise can be found in several historically important Black Marxist poems by Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Richard Wright, and Robert Hayden. The dream of interracial unity appears as well in the concluding stories of Uncle Tom’s Children and is represented by the characters Jan and Max in Richard Wright’s Native Son, as well as by the French sympathizers of the Louisiana slave rebellion in Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder, and by the Jewish radical who leads the protest climaxing Theodore Ward’s play Big White Fog (1938).
Conceivably the most poignant statement of that particular yearning for Black and white unity against racial and class oppression can be found in Ralph Ellison’s “The Black Ball,” an unpublished story from the late 1930s only recently discovered. The protagonist is a young Black father employed as a service worker in a hotel in the Southwest, who is approached by a white union organizer. The organizer’s arguments about how unions have changed so that Black members are valued fall on deaf ears, until the Black man sees the burned hands of the organizer—hands scorched with a blow-torch because the organizer provided an alibi for a Black comrade falsely accused of rape. Still, the narrator disdains to take action at the time; but a series of subsequent incidents that humiliate him in front of his son cause him to accidentally cut his own hand, which in turn impels him to reach for the union card that the organizer had given him.97 Ellison teaches us that experience can create the basis for an interracial alliance based on a working-class solidarity, but it is crucial that the extended hand of the white working class must be marked by some irrefutable evidence of its sincerity. Similarly, Richard Wright’s Jan Erlone, in Native Son, earns his credibility with Bigger Thomas through his analogous ordeal of searing sacrifice in the loss of his beloved.
These are nonetheless rare moments in the literature composed by the pre–World War II Black literary Left. The poetry and fiction authored by the early Black Marxists provide an extensive amount of textual illustration of the Black proletarian experience, as well as satires of the Black middle class, which coexists with a few semi-utopian depictions of interracial partnership. The preponderance of the freshest and most compelling poetry and fiction of Sterling Brown, Margaret Walker, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and the other Black writers also dramatizes the dual consciousness of African Americans as a nationality with its own history and culture as well as a constituent of the working class. What transpired in the 1930s and early 1940s actualized a foundation for equally uncommon achievements to come. African American Marxist cultural practice thus responded to the tragic history of the intractability of racism in the United States that would, in the postwar era, yield, first, a recrudescence and then an extraordinary reconfiguration of the Black Marxist literary tradition.