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

Helen Washington. 2014 Columbia University Press. 273 pp. + notes

Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1950s, Mary Helen Washington was considered “lucky”
to attend integrated Catholic schools where she and her fellow black students were “tolerated so
long as we learned the important lessons of assimilation and invisibility.” Integration, she
learned, was about combatting the prejudices of individual whites while blacks made themselves
more acceptable to the mainstream. There was “a deep animosity to black civil rights struggles”
resonating throughout the culture, so powerful that it prepared “even those of us who benefited
the most from civil rights militancy to be stand-up little anticommunists.”

As a child during the Cold War, Washington did not know about the radicals who were fighting
racism – a system of white supremacy – on all fronts. In 1952, for example, she was unaware
when the National Negro Labor Council held its annual convention, complete with a rowdy
street protest, a few miles from the elementary school where she was learning that the fight for
political and economic equality was “a communist plot.” Nor was she aware of the writers and
artists she would later champion in her latest book, The Other Blacklist – people who, despite
growing repression, persisted in bringing radical racial and social content to their work. These
artists were Communists and fellow travelers (and, Washington graciously adds, “Leftists”).

A professor of English at the University of Maryland, Mary Helen Washington is a prodigious

anthologist who has edited three volumes of stories by black women writers, including Black-
Eyed Susans, as well as Memory of Kin: Stories of Family by Black Writers. In this book she
seeks to restore the legacy of the Black Popular (or Cultural) Front and “delegitimize the
demonization of communism and the Left.” An ambitious undertaking, The Other Blacklist
asks: “What happens if you put the black literary and cultural Left at the center of African
American studies in the Cold War?” (Washington’s emphasis)

The answer is constructed not as a comprehensive survey, but instead through portraits of five
writers – Lloyd L. Brown, Alice Childress, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank London Brown and Julian
Mayfield – and the visual artist Charles White. Washington says that she could have just as
easily profiled Rosa Guy, John O. Killens, Elizabeth Catlett, Loraine Hansberry, Paule Marshall,

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and many others. For, indeed, “nearly every major black writer of the 1940s and 1950s was in
some way influenced by the Communist Party or other leftist organizations.”

The great influence of the Party, of course, should have long ago been enough to dismiss an
enduring popular myth of the Cold War: that its victims were almost all white. The Party was
integrated from the beginning, with blacks playing prominent roles at all levels, so it would only
stand to reason that many victims of Cold War repression – aimed first and foremost at the
Communist Party and its allies – were not white. Hence, The Other Blacklist.

No great fan of Joseph McCarthy, HUAC, the FBI, or the CIA, Washington reminds readers of
the humiliation and taming of Langston Hughes; but also of the bravery of the book’s subjects
who responded personally and artistically to “a complex cultural and political moment.”
Washington states that “the government . . . created the tradition of demonizing the Left that is
still with us and has resulted in the dismissal of an entire generation of black intellectuals and
artists.” [Columbia University Press blog]

The zeitgeist of the Cold War1950s – what Washington calls the “official conservative line” and
the “liberal anticommunist line” – decreed that art should be free of any social, political or
historical context. She exposes the political and economic forces behind the “erasure” of realism
in art and the triumphal “hegemony” of modernism during this period. But she also questions
the hard and fast distinctions drawn in the aesthetic arguments over modernism versus realism.

Washington demonstrates that affiliation with the Party and its allied institutions did not hinder
the artist’s ability to work creatively or freely. In fact, she notes the enormous support to black
artists that Communist and left cultural institutions provided, and laments their decimation by the
end of the 1950s. She also includes in her definition of “artistic freedom” the artist having the
option to resist the rising conservative narrative on integration and race – an option provided by
the existence of communist and left magazines and journals, publishers, production companies,
writers clubs, various peoples or popular schools, camps and more. Those who held
“conservative notions of race,” Washington reminds us – and not the left – “energetically sought
to limit expressions of black subjectivity.”

Star Power

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Washington uses the life and work of the incredibly talented painter and muralist, Charles White,
to illustrate the decade’s modernism-versus-realism argument and to show how the tension
between the two can exist in the work of one artist. A CP member in the forties and fifties,
White wrote for and contributed artwork to the Daily and Sunday Worker, Masses and Masses &
Mainstream; studied under Mexican communists Diego Rivera, Jose Orozco and David
Siqueiros; was married to two women communists, including sculptor Elizabeth Catlett; and
taught classes at the Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago and the George Washington Carver
School in New York. White’s artistic choices concerning style were decided by his own
commitment to producing art recognizable to ordinary black and working people – not the
pressure of Party officials or critics, of which he had a few. He remained close to many CP
members long after leaving the Party.

Oddly, White’s “associations with communism and the Left have been downplayed or ignored
by his major biographers and by most literary and art historians.” The same can be said for the
other artist profiled in The Other Blacklist that most readers will know, poet and novelist
Gwendolyn Brooks. Brooks, however, was almost certainly never a communist: she just hung
out a lot with Communists and fellow travelers in cultural and social contexts. While
acknowledging (and almost respecting) Brooks’ often expressed “desires for secrecy and
privacy,” Washington demolishes the old, black cultural studies shibboleth that Brooks’ writing
only achieved racial and political consciousness after the 1950s, when the influence of the Party
on her had waned. This is a view that can only be reached by not reading Brooks’ highly
acclaimed writings from the 1950s.

Cold War of Words

The Cold War against the literary Black Popular Front, whose existence Washington extends
beyond the 1930s and 1940s into the 1950s, began symbolically with a 1950 symposium
published in Atlanta University’s Phylon magazine that essentially elicited the right responses to
the right questions from a stacked panel of respondents. Lloyd Brown, an editor and writer for
New Masses and Masses & Mainstream, responded to the tenor of the symposium in the latter
periodical, and in 1951 published the first significant black novel of the decade, Iron City,
beating Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to press by a year.

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Like Ellison’s acknowledged classic, Brown’s Iron City was also a tour de force, an exciting
journey through black folklore, history and struggle from a genuine working-class writer. Brown
had grown up an orphan, worked as a CIO organizer and served in the segregated army before
becoming a writer. His protagonists – black communists – were not duplicitous, untrustworthy
or neurotic; nor were members of the supporting cast – mostly inmates of the Iron City jail – all
that bad. Ignored or dismissed by the mainstream when it came out, Iron City was reprinted in
1994 by Northeastern University Press and has made some “top 100” lists of 20th century African
American novels.

The Long Good-bye

If the Phylon symposium started the 1950s assault on the Black Popular Front, the decade ended
with the 1959 “First Conference on Negro Writers,” sponsored by AMSAC, the American
Society of African Culture, sponsored by the CIA. Many participants suspected CIA
involvement but chose to attend anyway. There was an impressive left contingent – Lloyd
Brown, Frank London Brown, Alice Childress, keynote speaker Lorraine Hansberry, John
Killens, Julian Mayfield – but the volume of selected papers that appeared the following year,
The American Negro Writer and His Roots, effectively “edited out the left,” including
Hansberry’s opening remarks.

The last three writers profiled by Washington were all present at the AMSAC conference. All
had significant degrees of contact with the Communist Party and affiliated organizations in the
1950s; all three also at various points broke with, or distanced themselves from, the Party. But
their departures differ from those portrayed in the novels of Ellison, Richard Wright, Saunders
Redding and other writers of the period.

Alice Childress was the author of many works, including the plays Trouble in Mind (winner of
an Obie) and Wedding Band, and the novels A Short Walk and Those Other People. She
sustained an open relationship with the Party and its allies during the 1950s, writing in the Daily
Worker, Paul Robeson’s Freedom, and Masses & Mainstream, teaching at the Jefferson School,
and supporting a laundry list of causes that included the defense of the Hollywood Ten, the
repeal of the Smith Act, the restoration of Robeson’s passport, and solidarity with the South

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African freedom movement. She raised money for the United Electrical Workers and was a
founder of Sojourners for Truth and Justice.

Her drift from the Party’s orbit in the 1960s did not result in dramatic pronouncements or
denouncements, and her work – Childress was always a feminist – continued to challenge,
engaging issues like interracial marriage (during the height of Black Nationalism),
homosexuality, justice for racial minorities other than African Americans, and gender bending.

Frank London Brown was active in Chicago trade unions, including two years as program
coordinator of the Chicago district of the United Packing House Workers. He was also active in
civil rights, nationalist and radical organizations. In 1959 he published the remarkable Trumbull
Park, a book in which elements of all those political affiliations “percolate . . . , colliding and
conflicting in some places, overlapping and intersecting in others.” Brown’s FOIA files show
that he declined FBI offers to become a snitch (as did Lloyd Brown). His writing career was cut
short by his death from leukemia in 1962. He was 34 years old.

Writer and activist Julian Mayfield joined the Party in the late 1940s because it was “the most
powerful, radical organization” he could find. Proud of his time as a Communist, he became
disappointed that the Party wasn’t “revolutionary enough.” Indeed, when Party leaders pleaded
innocent to charges of conspiring to overthrow the government, the tragedy to Mayfield was that
they were telling the truth! His 1961 novel The Grand Parade is described by Washington as
semi-autobiographical. The story of an activist who is ousted from the Party, it describes with
“power and nuance” how painful it was for Lonnie to lose the Party.

But The Grand Parade is also about the decimation of the Party and what that meant to the civil
rights struggle. Washington quotes the novel: “At last there was a real mass struggle among the
Negroes but the Communists had been scattered to the four winds.” A far cry from the
hysterically poison tirades of Harold Cruse or the “exaggerated self” of the self-pitying Richard
Wright, Mayfield’s work was a too rare antidote to the “caricatures” of Party life that “narrowed
the range of black political critique.”

For Mary Helen Washington, 1959 was the low point for the black cultural left. By then, most of
the institutional support for black left-wing cultural production had been done in by “Red Scare

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tactics” and the “Cold War orthodoxy” on race and civil rights that had settled in. However, the
Cold Warriors did not win.

The artists Washington champions “carried the resistant traditions of the Black Cultural Front of
the 1930s and 1940s into the 1950s and became a link to the militant politics and aesthetics of
the 1960s and 1970s.” Lloyd Brown and the critics of the 1950 Phylon symposium and the
leftists at the AMSAC conference won the long-range battle of ideas. If one looks at the plethora
of African American writers published in the second half of the twentieth century – those I call
the post-Baldwin generation of writers – one sees that they have successfully adopted modernist
techniques without sacrificing their historic mission of portraying the richness and uniqueness –
the real social content – of the black condition in the United States. And an honest, unblinking
look at blackness offers an amazingly revealing view of our nation. What follows is a very
incomplete list of these writers:

Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, David Bradley, Ernest J.
Gaines, John A. Williams, John Edgar Wideman, August Wilson, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake
Shange, Edward P. Jones, Ishmael Reed, Walter Mosely, California Cooper, LeRoi Jones/Amiri
Baraka, Don L. Lee/ Haki R. Madhubuti, Sister Souljah, Paul Beatty, Nikki Giovanni, Octavia
Butler, Jayne Cortez . . . the list goes on and on.