CHAPTER NINE

American Radical

A really serious intention . . . in so glamorous a frame.

—James Baldwin of Lorraine Hansberry¹

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, radical was a compliment my parents gave to people whom they considered smart and politically righteous. It was a mid-twentieth-century leftist term of art. But even before that, the word had a long history as praise. As far back as the early nineteenth century, it meant something grander than reform. It referred to a belief that a thorough transformation was necessary to correct injustice. Hence, its etymology “at the root.” That, according to radicals, is where the change must occur. These days, radical, at least in the mass-mediated public sphere, has mostly negative connotations. It is associated with violent fundamentalisms or irrational passions, while moderation is associated with decency. For Lorraine, however, American radicalism was both a passion and a commitment. It was, in fact, a requirement for human decency.

In the years between the production of A Raisin in the Sun and 1965, Lorraine’s politics cohered. She sustained an overarching belief in socialism, but her focus became the liberation of Black people from colonialism abroad and Jim Crow at home, both South and North. Her internationalism and her rejection of both imperialism and capitalism still put her at odds with the most prominent mainstream civil rights organizations of the day and their postwar liberal politics: patriotism with respect to US interests abroad and advocacy of integration with a modest welfare-state model.

Lorraine wrote an article for the January 17, 1960, New York Times supplement prepared by the Urban League, a moderate civil rights organization. In that work, as in so many others, she made the point that we ought to look away from elites and to the grassroots to understand Black America. The piece, “Stanley Gleason and the Lights That Need Not Die,” told the story of a young Black man, barely out of his teens. She argued that society had failed Stanley. His elementary school teacher had not believed him when he told her he had an outside toilet in New York City. In middle school, he had been assaulted by a police officer. And as a reminder of the international scope of the problem, Lorraine wrote about how Stanley witnessed the racist depictions of Africans in the Museum of Natural History. In that building, Black people were a hair above primates. She wrote,

It was after the museum that Stanley developed his way of walking. It is a gait made up of the alternation of one tautly bent knee and one dragged foot which culminate to give him a bouncy propulsion through life. There is pungent irony in the fact that it resembles nothing quite so much as a limp. Stanley intends to connote something else by the way he walks which, though he would never articulate it in that way, has an organic relationship to the lie on the walls of a mighty museum.²

Lorraine saw in his stride an unarticulated knowledge that he came from survivors, people who made it through the Middle Passage and slavery. The bop in Stanley’s walk, a performance of the disabling that race does and a defiant aesthetic mastery despite it, was and is quintessentially Black style. Lorraine interpreted its meaning in light of world history, contemporary economics, and the growing movement. The spirit of those who sought freedom, those who were Black, was beautiful.

Lorraine was part of a group of US-based artists and intellectuals who, though often in community with their less radical counterparts, were unflinching in their social critique. Even her anticolonialism was deeply connected to her criticisms of the United States and its role as a global power. And yet this didn’t disrupt her celebrity and influence. In that period, fame and national prominence for African Americans was rare enough that it was not unusual for a playwright to be involved in cultural diplomacy. She was invited by the State Department to meetings of various sorts, which it appears she frequently turned down. Maybe they didn’t care about her radical politics because she didn’t seem so powerful. Maybe they hoped she might be swayed to the political center by proximity to power. I don’t know. However, Lorraine agreed to participate in then Senator John F. Kennedy’s 1960 African “airlift.”

That summer, fifteen former African colonies became independent. Kennedy, as a matter of Cold War diplomacy, considered establishing relationships with these newly independent nations to be in the best interests of the United States. He said as much explicitly:

I believe that if we meet our responsibilities, if we extend the hand of friendship, if we live up to the ideals of our own revolution, then the course of the African revolution in the next decade will be toward democracy and freedom and not toward communism and what could be a far more serious kind of colonialism. For it was the American Revolution, not the Russian revolution, which began man’s struggle in Africa for national independence and individual liberty. When the African National Congress in Rhodesia called for reform and justice, it threatened a Boston Tea Party, not a Bolshevik bomb plot. African Leader Tom Mboya invokes the American Dream, not the Communist Manifesto.³

Airlift Africa was one of Kennedy’s strategies. It brought nearly three hundred young Africans to study at universities and high schools in the United States and Canada. Both Malcolm X and Lorraine Hansberry served as orientation leaders. Malcolm was recognized as an important international voice with respect to African independence, and had been invited to meet with representatives of the newly independent nations at the United Nations that summer. Kennedy, probably with some reluctance, undoubtedly saw it in his best interest for Malcolm to be included, though he was under FBI surveillance and the US government considered him a threat. Lorraine was probably an easier choice, although she had been on the radar of the FBI for as long as Malcolm had and was at least as militant. But given how A Raisin in the Sun had been interpreted by the public as a celebration of the American dream, perhaps the soon-to-be-elected president imagined that she would symbolize the great promise of liberal democracy for the young Africans.

But Lorraine saw herself as a representative of the struggle for Black freedom, not American capitalism. It was the death of Patrice Lumumba a few months after the African airlift that made that fact crystal clear to anyone paying attention.

Patrice Lumumba did not come to the States like the young Africans on the Airlift Africa planes. He was born in the Belgian Congo in July of 1925 and attended missionary schools. He began his professional life as a public servant in the colonial government. While working as a postal worker he began to be politicized and organized a postal workers’ labor union. At first he aligned himself with the Belgian Liberal Party, but later, when he moved to the capital, Leopoldville, he involved himself in the independence movement. When the brilliant and charismatic Lumumba attended the All African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958, he emerged as a Pan-Africanist leader with international influence. He became the most prominent leader in the Congo at the Luluabourg Congress in April 1959. Attendees decided to set aside tribal differences and build a unified liberated Congo, and Lumumba spoke to that vision. Almost concurrent with the declaration of independence, Lumumba was elected president in May of 1960. Less than a year later, in January, he was assassinated. Both the Belgian and the United States governments were implicated in his death. They considered him dangerous. Lumumba had developed a favorable relationship with the Soviet Union, although he didn’t intend to make the Congo a communist country. For the sin of African sovereignty, the two nations’ leadership decided Lumumba deserved a death sentence. This enraged Lorraine.

Lorraine was inspired and fascinated by Patrice Lumumba. She had studied the history of the Congo in depth with Du Bois. And Lumumba was, in a sense, a living version of the character she created in Joseph Asagai: a pragmatic freedom fighter who believed in the religion of doing what was necessary in the world.

Patrice Lumumba was killed on January 17, 1961, but word didn’t get out until February 16. In response, rebellions took place all over the world. In Chicago, Nigerian students protested at the Belgian consulate. In New York, Black people, mostly American and some international, protested at the UN. They carried signs that read “Congo Yes, Yankee No!” Police responded aggressively by dragging protestors out. The protestors fought back.

Ralph Bunche, one of the most well-known African American leaders and at that time the undersecretary of the UN, referred to the protestors as “misguided misfits.”

Both Lorraine and Jimmy responded to Bunche with ire in the New York Times. Lorraine’s letter followed Jimmy’s. She wrote,

Mr. Baldwin’s gift for putting down the truth in his celebrated ringing essay style prompts me to remark that I too was profoundly offended by the effort to link the Lumumba demonstrations at the United Nations with Mecca or Moscow inspiration. [. . .] We may assume that Mr. Lumumba was not murdered by the black and white servants of Belgium because he was “pro-Soviet” but because he was, unlike the Kasavubu-Tshombe-Mobutu collection, truly independent which, as we seem to forget in the United States, was at the first and remains at the last an intolerable aspect in colonials in the eyes of imperialists.⁴

Bunche pissed her off. Frequently. He had no mandate from Black America to issue such an apology. And so, Lorraine said she hastened “to publicly apologize to Mme. Pauline Lumumba and the Congolese people for our Dr. Bunche.”⁵

Even rage-filled, Lorraine maintained her sharp wit. And she made clear that though she’d aided the president a few months prior, her allegiance lay with Africans and not with the US government. She was not a Bunche-type Negro.

In a longer version of the letter, she wrote further, “Lest some be falsely persuaded by the tidings that the city’s ‘Negro leaders’ deplored the nationalist demonstrations at the United Nations, we should all be reminded that ‘Negro Leaders’ in such instances, are held to be any and all commentators who tell the white community exactly what the white community has made it clear it wishes to hear. It is an old and beloved if mutually dangerous custom in our land since plantation days.”⁶

Whether domestic or internationally focused, Lorraine emphasized Black independence from white (European or American) political control. She continuously rejected the Western nations’ panic around the potential influence of Islam or communism as both condescension and an effort at control. In this way, she was something of a Black nationalist, not as a matter of separatism but as an ethic of self-determination.

Lorraine belonged to a political community that agreed with her. Julian Mayfield wrote to her on April 5, 1961,

I wanted to dispatch [a note] to you with one word “Wow” after the Times letter only to find Ossie had beaten me to the punch. What is the world coming to when us “respectable” folk start criticizing Roy Wilkins and Ralph Bunch [sic]! Seriously, that last sentence must have caused Mr. Charlie some consternation—and somebody had to say it. . . .

Ossie and I have been thinking that a few of us ought to get together one afternoon to knock around some of the problems that are bound to face us in the near future: Africa, Sit ins, Passive resistance, etc.⁷

These artists stayed radical even as organizations like the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) tried to cautiously negotiate between the government and the people. Her artist community reached out with bold freedom dreams to organizing students down south and other like-minded people overseas. This is an important historical detail. The traditional narrative of Black radicalism in the US usually jumps from the 1930s to the late 1960s, but in fact there was a steady thread, a small but persistent network across the intervening decades. Lorraine and her people were a part of it.

Several weeks later, on May 20, Julian wrote a letter inviting Lorraine for a visit, because he and his wife, Ana Livia Cordero, were planning to move to Ghana soon, “despite what Isaacs said in the New Yorker about those Africans not being our natural brothers.”⁸ Julian joked, but it was serious. They believed Africans were their brothers, not in a romantic sense but in the shared commitment to a global struggle against white supremacy and for Black freedom.

As was her habit, Lorraine crafted fictional characters who allowed her to explore her political concerns about Lumumba specifically and African independence generally. In Les Blancs, two of the characters’ names, Tshembe and Abioseh Matoseh, were plays on that of Lumumba’s primary political opponent, Moise Tshombe, who was supported by the US government.

In a fictional vignette that she wrote around 1960, titled “Metamorphasis [sic],” she used her imagination and experience to explore the emergence of African independence and its leaders, like Lumumba. The story is written in the third person but from the perspective of a white businessman named Harry. Harry travels to meet “Rochester,” a former employee of his, at the airport in Washington, DC. He reveals that he called the young African student he employed “Rochester” though it was not his name. And it was a cruel joke, a nod to the stereotypical shucking and jiving Black character who appeared on the Jack Benny TV show. The student’s real name was Bandele Matoseh.

Harry says Rochester has moved up in the world, though the reader is left unsure how. As he travels, Harry contemplates the intense concern in Washington about African independence. He “let his mind puzzle again on some of the attention that was being given of late to the African zigs; well, he surmised, that was Washington for you. Got itself into a positive heat every time Khrushchev yawned!”⁹ But then he wonders at his own interest in seeing Rochester. Perhaps it is also undignified for him to travel to see his former custodian. At the airport his misgivings grow. The airport is filled with homegrown Black people.

His mind jumped suddenly . . . to the newsreels of the Negroes at the U.N. the day the red Congo boy, Patrice Lumumbabalaba or what ever his name was was killed. All those screaming, fighting local colored people. They had confused him mightily: surely they didn’t identify: he had always thought they only wanted not to identify. Those newsreels had upset him; suggesting as they did some passions he had not known to exist. Oh it was a shameful day for the country all right. Put any ten of them on a boat bound for Africa and they’d turn it around in mid ocean, he was certain.¹⁰

Harry mistakenly and strangely thinks perhaps some royalty from the Netherlands is arriving when the crowd surges in excitement. At the denouement of the story, a shiny black limousine arrives, drums are playing, and out of the limo emerges his custodian of fifteen years prior, now called Mr. Prime Minister.

Though Bandele Matoseh had become the prime minister of an independent Black nation, Lorraine made him a man who had once served as a custodian in the States. Of course part of the point was how Harry had underestimated his employee. But it was also a sign of what kind of representative she imagined he would be, the kind of representative the people could and should have. He was of the people, or in the terms of her day, of “the Black masses.”

There had been a long history of Black Americans seeing their destinies linked to other colonized and Jim-Crowed people around the world. Lorraine, however, not only identified with Africans on the continent and in the diaspora in an abstract way, she also connected US imperialism abroad with racial injustice at home. She believed in undoing the domination and undue influence of the United States upon Black people, at home and abroad.

Lorraine also continued to follow politics in Latin America, perhaps because she had been so affected by her experiences in Mexico and Uruguay. In February of 1961 the FBI reported that Lorraine’s name appeared in Excelsior, a prominent Mexico City newspaper, in support of David Alfaro Siqueiros on his sixty-sixth birthday, urging his release from prison. The Marxist painter had been arrested in 1960 for openly criticizing the conservative Mexican president and supporting striking factory workers and teachers. Lorraine was joined by other prominent thinkers and artists, including Du Bois, Alexander Calder, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the architect Eliot Noyes. Then in October of 1962, Lorraine asserted her support for the Cuban Revolution during a rally to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. In this speech, Lorraine criticized the Cold War fiction that the United States was a beacon for freedom and democracy by virtue of the country’s intrusion into the self-determination of other nations. With respect to Cuba, she said:

I think my government is wrong. I would like to see them turn back our ships from the Caribbean. The Cuban people, to my mind, and I speak only for myself, have chosen their destiny, and I cannot believe that it is the place of the descendants of those who did not ask the monarchists of the eighteenth century for permission to make the United States a republic, to interfere with the twentieth century choice of another sovereign people.¹¹

Indeed, she went a step further and accused her country of absolute hypocrisy on the matter of freedom. They should not only turn back their ships to Cuba but also focus upon the sins of the United States at home. She argued that the US government must “empty the legislative and judicial chambers of the victims of political persecution so we know why that lamp is burning out there in the Brooklyn waters. And while they are at it, go on and help fulfill the American dream and empty the Southern jails of the genuine heroes,” who were, to Lorraine, the young people of the student movement.¹² The troops, she said, ought not be sent to Cuba but to the South to finish the reconstruction that had been halted in 1877 in an indecent and unjust political compromise.

It was significant that at this rally, which focused on the Red Scare, she centered the lives of Black Americans. The anticommunist hysteria had often targeted white Americans who worked for racial justice. Lorraine understood that a belief in racial equality was a great deal of what the US government found threatening about radical left-wingers.

Though she was a radical in essays and letters, it was challenging for Lorraine to bring her radicalism to the American public in her art. She’d tried and failed to add content and context to the film version of A Raisin in the Sun. Then she was commissioned to write the first television miniseries about slavery, titled The Drinking Gourd. In it, she confronted the evils of slavery directly. But it was far from a simplistic demonization of white Southerners. That approach might have been easier for network executives to digest. Rather, Lorraine was sympathetic to poor whites. She showed how class and social stratification among whites sustained slavery and maintained investment in it, even though poor whites were more victimized by economic exploitation than they were beneficiaries of whiteness. The radicalism of the screenplay lay in her exposure of the evils of capitalism that were at the heart of slavery. She also displayed the complex intellectual lives of the enslaved. It is a beautiful script. Had it been aired, it would have preceded Roots by more than ten years and, arguably, it would have challenged Americans about race even more than the landmark Roots did. But after the network executives read Lorraine’s screenplay, it was left to languish in a drawer.

Lorraine continued to write however, multiple works with many drafts. And she threw herself into political organizing. She communicated with the young members of SNCC and arranged fund-raisers for them. She lent her voice to other causes also. At the Negro History Week program of the Liberation Committee for Africa, February 10, 1963, Lorraine served as a speaker, along with Carlos Gonçalves of the National Front for the Liberation of Angola and Oyil Chakamoi of Uganda. Gonçalves spoke about Portuguese colonial domination; Chakamoi spoke of Pan-African solidarity and the particular needs of African students in the United States. Lorraine expressed her admiration for young Africans taking steps toward liberation. And she yet again decried the “present and insufferable idea of the ‘exceptional Negro.’ Fair and equal treatment for Ralph Bunche, Jackie Robinson and Harry Belafonte is not nearly enough. Tea parties at the White House for the few will not make up for 300 years of wrong to the many. The boat must be rocked for the good of all.”¹³ Lorraine much preferred the overall-wearing fieldworkers who were pursuing a grassroots model of freedom deep in the Mississippi Delta.

And though she disagreed politically with the Nation of Islam, Lorraine refused to distance herself from them like so many respectable bourgeois Black people did. While Jimmy thought their racial absolutism was a problem, he too felt a bond with the Nation. Lorraine was less bothered by their response to whiteness, but considered it strange that they romanticized Islam as a Black religion, given how sub-Saharan Africans had been enslaved and colonized by Arab invaders before Europeans. And yet she saw value in the boldness of the Nation of Islam and in Black Americans maintaining a variety of political visions, including nationalist ones. In a March 22, 1963, letter to Daniel Thompson, a professor at Howard University and an editor of the Journal of Negro Education, Lorraine responded to questions he’d asked for their annual civil rights yearbook. In it she explicated her thoughts on the landscape of Black politics. She did not see the problem of racial inequality through the lens of individual experiences of discrimination but rather a universal condition of oppression. On this and other counts she found traditional civil rights organizations lacking. Regarding the NAACP she wrote:

I am not sure that our people will ever have enough money to fight ALL the court cases it would take to begin to re-state what is already on the books. I think it is probably an outmoded organization. Hostile power in this country does not appear to be in the least responsible to legalisms. The celebrated Supreme Court decision of several years ago seems to have virtually invalidated its implications by the sheer fact of the nature of Negro life as a reality today. I mean I cannot see that it changed anything.¹⁴

Lorraine knew something about this, had known it since she was ten when her family won their lawsuit and the ghetto stayed as segregated as ever. As a result of that, and her diligent study of race as an adult, Lorraine’s hope lay in direct-action protest rather than courts or the appeals of Black elites to white elites. She believed African Americans ought to

attract the attention of the rest of the world to our plight and thereby use international sensitivity on the matter as a weapon in behalf of our otherwise mostly powerful people. This to me, is the real value of things like the Montgomery struggle and the subsequent student movements: they make it possible for the Negro question to be forced upon the conscience of a nation which is otherwise delighted to have any number of priority questions that it must always deal with first.¹⁵

Lorraine was not simply a person who felt fidelity with oppressed people across the globe; she believed that the liberation of African Americans was also a cause for international concern. And though she advocated direct action, she also sustained a belief that art and intellectual work mattered in this struggle. There was no either-or for her or for her friends. In the same letter to Thompson, she used Jimmy as an example of this. Like her, Jimmy was involved with SNCC. In fact, he was even more directly involved. Though Lorraine wrote letters, raised money, and dedicated her time to organizing in the North, Jimmy traveled down south and put his body on the line with the young people. Lorraine said of his art that it held the urgency of the political moment, that “in his essays, . . . [he] has taken the politeness out of discussions of the brutalizing experience of the black man in this country and put it down as it is. I think Mr. Baldwin has left the apologists, black or white, nowhere to go but toward the truth.”¹⁶

The contrast between the artist who serves as a witness for justice and the use of prominent artists or other Black people as respectable representatives was significant for Lorraine. She hated the American habit of exceptionalizing certain Black people and the way such practices were used to neglect or even justify the mistreatment of others. She wrote, “I feel that the old games of giving Ralph Bunche an award (or Lorraine Hansberry for that matter) for doing something that a Negro has not been allowed to do before is today intolerable. Leontyne Price is a very great artist—but the fact of her presence in the Metropolitan alters the condition of the masses of Negroes not in the least; neither will a Negro stuck here and there in the cabinet eventually.”¹⁷

Lorraine ultimately shared her vision for a national Black political vision, one that certainly had to be inspired by what she saw on the international stage. She believed the answer would be a “mass organization” of Black people that could be organized to boycott or vote collectively or, as imagined in her good friend Douglas Turner Ward’s future play, engage in a Day of Absence and put a wrench in the works of American industry. She saw the Southern freedom movement as the root of such possibility. For her it was not a reform movement, at least not the student movement, but rather a revolutionary one. Lorraine wrote:

I don’t think there is much of another direction. Julian Mayfield has said that whether we like the world or not we are going to have to deal with the fact that the condition of our people dictates what can only be called revolutionary attitudes. It is no longer acceptable to allow racists to define Negro manhood; and it will have to come to pass that they can no longer define his weaponry. I look forward to the day, therefore, when a centralized Negro organization will direct me not to pay taxes in protest of this segregated society: it will be a privilege to go to jail.¹⁸

Yet again, Lorraine emphasized self-determination for Black people. She was neither interested in status nor seeing Black folks manipulated by elites, whether said elites be Black or white. She wanted to be led by the people. It is this unflinching posture that makes Lorraine and Jimmy’s famous 1963 meeting with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy so fascinating. Of course she was an elegant and poised role model, an achiever and an exception. But she’d also proven herself to be unwavering and even confrontational in ways that did not leave much room for working with elites and powerful politicians. Perhaps because RFK hadn’t paid attention to her strident positions and firm convictions, or he underestimated her, Lorraine wholly surprised the attorney general.

The day has been written about in numerous books and essays. The story is as follows: In response to the unrest in Birmingham, the attorney general called James Baldwin and other prominent Black people, and a few liberal white people, to meet with him quietly. He hoped to quell the Black people of my hometown, Birmingham, which was best described, for lack of a more appropriate metaphor, as a powder keg. The meeting took place on May 24, 1963, at a Kennedy-owned apartment at 24 Central Park South in Manhattan. In addition to RFK and his aide, Burke Marshall, present at the meeting were Jimmy and his brother David; Harry Belafonte; famous Black psychologist Kenneth Clark; Edwin Berry of the Chicago Urban League; Clarence Jones, an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr.; the singer, actor, and activist Lena Horne; the actor Rip Torn; June Shagaloff of the NAACP; and Southern freedom movement organizer Jerome Smith. Smith had founded the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and had initially come to New York so that doctors could attend to the jaw and head damage he’d sustained from beatings at the hands of Southern cops.

The energy of that time in history is important to understand. That year, Baldwin was touring the South and said, “There is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, simple, naked, unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter . . . to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as that dusk in which he himself has been and is being trampled.”¹⁹ Lorraine also felt this rage. Though the meeting began quietly, things heated up when Jerome asked about the government’s real role in Birmingham. He implied that they were insincere with respect to protecting the civil rights of African Americans. Having faced the violence of the white South with no assistance from the federal government, Jerome had an empirical basis for this feeling. Jimmy recalled that “Bobby—and here I am not telescoping but exercising restraint—had turned away from Jerome, as though to say, ‘I’ll talk to all of you, who are civilized. But who is he?’”²⁰

And then she unleashed. Recalled Baldwin, “Lorraine said (in memory she is standing, but I know she was sitting—she towered, that child, from a sitting position). ‘You have a great many very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General, but the only man you should be listening to is that man [Jerome Smith] over there. That is the voice,’ she added after a moment during which Bobby sat absolutely still staring at her, ‘of twenty-two million people.’”²¹

For Jimmy, Lorraine became a representative of a special sort, of Black womanhood, of freedom fighting, of her people writ large. He watched her face, saw her insistence that Bobby Kennedy hear her. He wrote,

Her face changed and changed, the way Sojourner Truth’s face must have changed and changed, or to the truth, the way I have watched my mother’s face change when speaking to someone who could not hear. Who yet, and you know it, will be compelled to hear one day. . . .

“We would like,” said Lorraine, “from you, a moral commitment.”

He did not turn from her as he had turned away from Jerome. He looked insulted—seemed to feel that he had been wasting his time.²²

Lorraine stood up and Jerome continued. Jerome talked about the “perpetual demolition” faced when Black men tried to protect their families’ homes and lives. Lorraine interjected, and though it might seem like a contradiction, it was her way of getting to the root. “That is all true,” she said, “but I am not worried about black men—who have done splendidly, it seems to me, all things considered.” Jimmy remembered a pregnant pause, and her words “But I am very worried . . . about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham.” She smiled a cutting smile at the attorney general, turned, and walked out. Most of the others followed.

Jimmy wrote more than once about this meeting. In each account, Lorraine was magnificent. But just as she was at once towering and childlike, she was both mighty and vulnerable. This struck him deeply. He returned to it in the way Thelonious Monk would go back to a song he wanted to turn over in his head, to see it for all its beauty and majesty. That was how Jimmy saw Lorraine. And remembered her. After the meeting was over, he wrote,

I had forgotten that I was scheduled to be interviewed by Dr. Kenneth Clark, and we were late. We were hurried into the car. We passed Lorraine, who did not see us. She was walking toward Fifth Avenue—her face twisted, her hands clasped before her belly, eyes darker than any eyes I had ever seen before—walking in an absolutely private place.

I knew I could not call her.

Our car drove on; we passed her.

And then, we heard the thunder.²³

Years later, in recollection, her posture was ominous, but it followed a moment that would become legendary. Small but overtaking a room, hers was a presence much greater than her remarkable attractiveness, stylishness, and poise. It was a presence beyond the expectations of her role, her place, her celebrity. She gave public voice to her belief that the Black working class were at the center of the struggle for liberation, and that she must be an amplifier not a figurehead. That was something for which Robert Kennedy was not prepared.

Though RFK was reported to have considered the meeting a great waste of time, less than one month later, his brother President Kennedy, at RFK’s urging, gave his landmark civil rights address during which he proposed the legislation that would be known as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the address, JFK spoke of civil rights as not just a legal issue but also, as Lorraine said, a moral one. He asserted that the Congress must pursue equal access to education, public accommodations, and employment.

On Lorraine’s end, after the meeting she returned to her home in the Hudson Valley and held a rally and fund-raiser for the Southern freedom movement five days later. The performer Judy Collins began the event by singing folk songs, and Jerome Smith was an invited speaker. Lorraine wasn’t simply making a point in directing RFK’s attention to him. She held Jerome in high regard. As a child of nine or ten, he’d first challenged segregation on a public bus in New Orleans after having seen his father, a seaman, do the same. When the white passengers responded angrily, he was protected by an elderly Black woman who fussed at him in front of the angry whites but privately praised his courage once they disembarked. He recollected, “She hugged me and said: ‘Never stop doing what you’re doing. Never stop taking that sign down.’ Then she cried, and said a prayer. That was the jump-off point for me.”²⁴

Jerome had participated in two freedom rides, one from Montgomery to Jackson and another from New Orleans to McComb, Mississippi. In McComb, he and his fellow freedom riders were beaten with brass knuckles, sticks, and fists by an angry white mob that shouted their plans to kill the niggers. The freedom riders hid out outside McComb in a juke joint. And it was there in McComb that Jerome had first spoken to Burke Marshall, RFK’s assistant attorney general, on the phone two years before their meeting in Manhattan on Central Park West. Jerome remembered, “He called and said he wanted us to stop protesting. We were in pretty bad shape, so he said, ‘You need to go to the hospital.’ I said: ‘You deal with this just like you would if President Kennedy was down here. We’re not stopping. We’re going back.’”²⁵ His words echoed the fictional voice Lorraine gave Nannie Hansberry when she defended their right to take space in their home: “We are not moving.” Jerome, however, wasn’t one of the representative few who could “break barriers.” He was a person who gave voice to the many unknown people who, as he said, “paid a tremendous price. He said freedom fighting had always been “about our collective strength. To face those monsters every day with no cameras rolling, plain ordinary people had to extend their hand and help you get your job done.”²⁶ This was what Lorraine meant when she said to RFK, and to Burke Marshall, that Jerome spoke for “twenty-two million Negroes.” This is also what she wanted the well-intentioned audience in the Hudson Valley to understand.

When Lorraine took the stage at the fund-raising rally, she told the crowd about the meeting she and Jerome had had with the attorney general five days prior. She described the tension in the room, and how Jerome had made clear to Robert Kennedy that “the passion and the absence of patience of a sorely oppressed, native American people is beyond anything that we can sit around and be polite about any more.” She described her own words too; how she told the attorney general that he ought to reconsider his impatience and frustration because, despite the room being full of Black celebrities, “we are not remotely interested in the all-insulting concept of the exceptional Negro, we are not remotely interested in any tea at the White House. . . . What we are interested in is making perfectly clear that between the Negro intelligentsia, the Negro middle class, and the Negro this and that, that we are one people and as far as we are concerned, we are represented by the Negroes of the streets of Birmingham.”²⁷

The salience of her point is perhaps lost today. The Black folks on the streets of Birmingham are now talked about as heroes. But back then they were considered out of control, pushing too fast and hard. They raced beyond the authority of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They had their own local leaders, and they were not uniformly committed to nonviolent resistance. Even the children of Birmingham were ready to fight. Those were Lorraine’s heroes. That day, as a result of Lorraine’s organizing, the people of Croton raised $5,000 for the movement. With part of the proceeds, CORE bought a station wagon for civil rights organizers in the Mississippi Delta.

In 1964, when Jimmy was unable to complete an assignment for SNCC to write for a fund-raising photo-essay book titled The Movement, Lorraine filled in for him. In the pages, filled with images of protest and of daily life, both North and South, she wove a story that was about the Southern freedom movement. In it, she connected the Southern domestic struggle for racial justice with the global one—including references to the Northern US and the colonized world. Lorraine wrote about the condition of the white poor of the South, and how racism had poisoned them against allying themselves with Black people. She wrote, “The New South slams up against the Old, but the coming of industry in the Southland has not changed the problems of many of its people—white or black—for the better. This is why, for a long time, one of the South’s chief exports has been people. Their destination: the ghettos of the North.”²⁸

Lorraine brought the lessons of others of her teachers to bear, quoting Du Bois and Langston Hughes but also the young organizer and architect of Mississippi Freedom Summer, Bob Moses. In one of the most powerful assertions of the text, she states simply and subversively, “The laws which enforce segregation do not presume the inferiority of a people; they assume an inherent equalness. It is the logic of the lawmakers that if a society does not erect artificial barriers between the people at every point of contact, the people might fraternize and give their attention to the genuine, shared problems of the community.”²⁹

This was almost the exact opposite of the logic presented in the legal case that ushered in the modern civil rights movement. In Brown v. Board of Education, the court spoke of the psychological damage and sense of inferiority created by segregation. Lorraine made clear that inferiority was constructed rather than actually believed. Hers was a subtle yet profound point. If people accepted the idea that racism was merely ignorance or misperception, white innocence could be preserved. If instead it was a system bent on the oppression of Black people, and the deliberate destruction of natural ties among members of the human community, then the whole damn nation was guilty.

Though the acronym SNCC stood for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, its members had varying positions on nonviolent resistance. For some, it was a philosophical or theological commitment. For others, it was a tactic. And many SNCC members had, like Lorraine, an interest in and commitment to international struggles. They were not simply an offshoot of King’s SCLC, though they began under the umbrella of that organization. SNCC’s broader and more complex set of politics allowed Lorraine, when writing on their behalf, to ask pointed questions of a sort that wouldn’t be posed by SCLC or King for several more years. After seeing images of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing she wrote, “Twenty million people began to ask with a new urgency: IS nonviolence the way?” This question is followed with an image of MLK with the words “The responsibility for an answer lies heavy on the hearts and shoulders of the men who lead.”³⁰ What follows in her writing is a challenge to King. There are lyrics from a Revolutionary War–era song sitting above images of Black boys bearing weapons. And then two quotations, one from Boston abolitionist Theodore Parker and the other from Robert Williams, a man who became famous in the Southern freedom movement for advocating Black self-defense. The Parker quotation includes the following sentences:

I was born in the little town where the fight and the bloodshed of the Revolution began. My grandfather fired the first shot in the Revolution. The blood that flowed there was kindred to this which courses in my veins today. . . . With these things before me . . . when a fugitive, pursued by kidnappers, came to my house, what could I do but defend her to the last? . . . I should not dare to violate the eternal law of God!³¹

Lorraine’s answer to the question about self-defense was only thinly veiled. While she said that she supported and applauded Dr. King, she was clear that she did not believe his approach was enough. Black people must, according to Lorraine, be granted full citizenship and access to political participation. Absent that, Black revolt was not just possible but completely justifiable. In speeches she repeated this formulation in various ways. In one, she said,

I think the daily press lulls the white community falsely in dismissing the rising temper of the ghetto and what will surely come of it. The nation presumes upon the citizenship of the Negro but is oblivious to the fact that it must confer citizenship before it can expect reciprocity. Until twenty million black people are completely interwoven into the fabric of our society, you see, they are under no obligation to behave as if they were. What I am saying is that whether we like the word or not, the condition of our people dictates what can only be called revolutionary attitudes.³²

This talk was delivered almost exactly a year before Malcolm X gave his famous “by any means necessary” speech at the opening rally for his new institution, the Organization of African American Unity. Lorraine anticipated his precise sentiment by saying,

I think then that Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent. That they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps, and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities. The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.³³

Both Lorraine and Malcolm had likely read Jean-Paul Sartre’s formulation in his play Dirty Hands that the class struggle should be pursued “by any means necessary.” But in the context of the United States, and with respect to Black people, a nation that has a long history of violent hysteria in response to their self-defense, whether in the context of slave rebellions or Black Muslims or Alabama communists, this assertion had an extraordinary intensity and would be made only by the truly courageous.

Lorraine tried to take this message to a broad public. She confronted the way that a press that claimed itself impartial tended to castigate Black protest when it went beyond the narrow bounds that the white public deemed acceptable. When the New York Times published a piece criticizing the Congress of Racial Equality’s New York “Stall In,” during which they disrupted traffic, Lorraine responded strongly. She described her own realization that such tactics were not only useful but necessary. Unfortunately, the Times rejected the letter. But, thankfully, it has been preserved as a testimony to her courage and power. In it she tells the story of her father’s patriotism, his belief in the American way, and his years of devotion to fighting in what was deemed the respectable way. Of his experience, she said, “The cost, in emotional turmoil, time, and money, which led to my father’s early death as a permanently mad exile in a foreign country when he saw that after such sacrificial efforts the Negroes of Chicago were as ghetto-locked and segregated as ever, does not seem to figure in their calculations.”³⁴ The “right way” hadn’t yielded the necessary change. And so, she said, “we must now lie down in the streets, tie up traffic, do whatever we can—take to the hills with guns if necessary—and fight back. False people remark these days on our ‘bitterness.’ Why, of course, we are bitter.”³⁵

In a different piece that was published, in the Sunday Times, Lorraine situated her political commitments in light of her generation and how she had come of age. It was as though she saw that the moment had thrust upon them an unanticipated urgency and responsibility. One response was the creation of an organization that was called Association of Artists for Freedom (AAF), which was formed in 1963 to “speak to the conscience of the American people,” according to one source announcing its creation. Its founding members were James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and John Oliver Killens. In their first campaign, in the winter of 1963, they called for people to make contributions to civil rights organizations and to make the Christmas season a “time of national shame and mourning” rather than an orgy of Christmas shopping.³⁶

The following summer, on June 15, the AAF held a forum called “The Black Revolution and the White Backlash.” On the program were six Black artist-activist-intellectuals: Paule Marshall, John Oliver Killens, LeRoi Jones, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Lorraine. There were three white writers too: New York Post columnist James Wechsler, producer David Susskind, and journalist Charles Silberman.

There were about 1,500 people in attendance, and the crowd was multiracial though mostly white. The press regarding the event described it as, frankly, something of a mess. The radicalism of the Black speakers agitated the white ones. Susskind was quoted as saying, “I have never heard such carefully couched calls for violence in a long time. I find it dangerous, irresponsible, ineffective talk.”³⁷ Wechsler said that “time and again the thought was advanced that everything that has occurred so far in the freedom struggle has been virtually unimportant, largely because of the corrupt influences of white liberals who stealthily dominate existing Negro groups, pervert their aims, and dilute their deeds.” He took particular offense at the calls for Black-led or all-Black organizations, saying, “I disagree that the white liberal has the role of water boy in the Freedom Movement.” He argued that “separatism in connection with racial problems would be disastrous,” and added, “I find it embarrassing and weird that I am here tonight to argue that the message of Martin Luther King still has some meaning.”

The white panelists were both shocked and enraged at the militancy of their Black counterparts. The Barbadian American writer Paule Marshall responded by saying, “What has been going on right here proves poignantly how impossible it is to conduct a dialogue with a white man.” She then called for “a nationwide freedom organization far more militant than any that exists today.” The crowd roared their applause. Times were changing.

When it was Lorraine’s turn, she took the audience on a journey. She began with a joke: “How do you talk about 300 years in four minutes?” The crowd laughed. And then she said, “Was it ever so apparent we need this dialogue?”³⁸

Lorraine told the audience about her letter to the Times regarding the CORE Stall In. And then she placed it in a larger context. This radicalism, she made clear, was not new and it was necessary.

It isn’t as if we got up today and said, you know, “what can we do to irritate America?” . . . It’s because that since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation from petition to the vote, everything. We’ve tried it all. There isn’t anything that hasn’t been exhausted. Isn’t it rather remarkable that we can talk about a people who were publishing newspapers while they were still in slavery in 1827, you see? We’ve been doing everything, writing editorials, Mr. Wechsler, for a long time, you know.³⁹

And then she repeated the charge Nina Simone made in her 1963 song “Mississippi Goddam”: “You keep saying go slow, go slow, but that’s just the trouble.”⁴⁰ Not only did Lorraine find the idea that Black people were impatient both unbearable and absurd, she essentially said that the people who on the one hand said they supported equality yet cawed at Black people’s insistence on the other hand were unbearable and absurd. They were the problem. The solution, Lorraine said, was “to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.”⁴⁵ The radical could understand that the basic organization of American society had to be transformed in order for racial justice to ever become a possibility.

Lorraine’s criticism of liberals was not mere chafing at their condescension or bias. She made very clear that she saw the structure of empire: exploitation and stratification at home and abroad made racism inextricable from the American project as it stood. Fighting a war against the sovereignty of the Vietnamese people and having an FBI that refused to protect Southern organizers were connected pieces of what America actually was. As far as Lorraine was concerned, liberals who claimed to believe in racial justice and yet also embraced American exceptionalism and empire held irreconcilable commitments.

Lorraine rejected the American project but not America. She saw her embrace of radical politics as a commitment to it, to what it could be. She said, “It isn’t a question of patriotism and loyalty. My brother fought for this country, my grandfather before that and so on and that’s all a lot of nonsense when we criticize. The point is that we have a different viewpoint because, you know, we’ve been kicked in the face so often and the vantage point of Negroes is entirely different and these are some of the things we’re trying to say.”⁴⁶

The New York Times and New York Post reported on the tension-filled program, drawing out two representative quotations: Charles Silberman’s “The black radical seems to be long on talks and short on specifics” and Lorraine’s “We have to find some way to persuade the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.”⁴⁷

Six days later, on June 21, 1964, the station wagon that CORE bought with the proceeds from Lorraine’s Croton rally sat by the side of a Mississippi road. The three young men who had been driving it the night before were going from town to town, working on voter registration in the Delta. They had been pulled over in Nashoba County. They were abducted, taken into the darkness, and each one was shot in the head at close range. Their bodies, those of two Jewish New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, and James Chaney, a Black man from Meridian, were thrown into an earthen dam and left to decay. It was a tragedy that would shake the nation.

Three and a half weeks later, on July 16, a white police lieutenant killed another James—James Powell, a Black teenager in Harlem. He died in front of his friends. Three hundred Harlem schoolchildren marched to the police station to demand answers. Harlemites and cops battled for six days. At the end, there was another dead Harlemite, 118 who were injured, and 465 arrests. Lorraine and her peers had seen what was around the corner, because they knew what their people were tired of enduring, what they too were tired of enduring. The powder keg exploded while the government and polite society were busy repeating, “Go slow.”

The story of the civil rights movement is usually told in the shape of a mountain. The apex is 1965, with a steep decline caused by the turn to radicalism and Black Power. That chronology is too neat. So are the politics. The question of Black independence and autonomy coursed through the entirety of the movement. It was a recurring theme. Tensions between liberal reform politics and more radical ones recurred too. By 1964, Lorraine had spent five years being scolded for her criticisms of self-proclaimed allies in the cause of racial justice. But it was as though in 1964 everything she had been saying became blindingly clear. A radical vision was necessary.