The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation

The Black Cultural Front

The Black Cultural Front

Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation

Brian Dolinar

Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2012 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2012

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dolinar, Brian.

The black cultural front : black writers and artists of the depression generation / Brian Dolinar.

p. cm. — (Margaret Walker Alexander series in African American studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61703-269-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-270-7 (ebook) 1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. African Americans—Intellectual life. I. Title.

PS153.N5D595 2012

810.9’896073—dc23           2011040426

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To James H. Thomas

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

The National Negro Congress and the Radical Roots of the Black Cultural Front

CHAPTER 2

When a Man Sees Red

Langston Hughes and the Simple Stories

CHAPTER 3

A Writer of Revolutionary Potential

Chester Himes and Black Noir

CHAPTER 4

Battling Fascism for Years with the Might of His Pen

Ollie Harrington and the Bootsie Cartoons

Conclusion

Keeping the Memory of Survival Alive

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

A student is only as good as his teacher, and I have been fortunate to have many generous teachers. James H. Thomas, professor in American Studies at Wichita State University, was my first mentor, and he gave me the inspiration to become a writer and educator. Ranu Samantrai, then a Cultural Studies professor at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles, first suggested I write a book on the black cultural front. In the early stages of this project, Val Thomas, professor in African American literature at Pomona College, was a helpful sounding board and provided much-needed direction. I also benefited greatly from the tutelage of Sid Lemelle and Phyllis Jackson, professors in Black Studies.

Since moving to Urbana-Champaign in 2004, I have received what has been a second education both from those at the University of Illinois, as well individuals in the larger community. There have been a number of scholars working on the long history of African American radicalism including Erik McDuffie, Clarence Lang, Fanon Che Wilkins, and William Maxwell, all of whom freely shared their knowledge with me. Additionally, I received guidance from Jim Barrett, David Roediger, and Lou Turner. Belden Fields and Antonia Darder provided me with two shining examples of scholar-activists who were involved in the community and brought with them the rigor of their academic backgrounds. From other community members—Carol and Aaron Ammons, Danielle Chynoweth, Barbara Kessel, Durl Kruse, Martel Miller, Patrick Thompson—I learned directly about grassroots political organizing that has been useful in writing about the history of the American Left. Additionally, I have cherished my friendship with Gregory Koger, who constantly reminds me of the need for revolutionary change.

I have been lucky to have several fellow scholars of the American Left offer their encouragement. In particular, Alan Wald has been tremendously generous in sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of American literary and cultural radicalism. I am thankful to Barbara Foley for our several engaging conversations and her insightful criticism. In the final stages of my project, Mary Helen Washington helped me to more clearly comprehend the vision that the Communist Party provided to African American artists and writers.

One of the most memorable aspects of this project has been meeting the fascinating people who gave me further insight into the lives of Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, and Ollie Harrington, as well as the context of the Depression. Biographer Edward Margolies invited me to his New York apartment for a conversation about Chester Himes. Roger Jelliffe allowed me to interview him about his parents, the founders of the Karamu House. I also spoke with Reuben and Dorothy Silver, who recalled their days at Karamu and memory of Langston Hughes’s time there. I was fortunate to have a phone conversation with Constance Webb Pearlstein before she passed away about her friendship with Chester Himes. Christine McKay, a researcher of the Schomburg Center, openly shared with me her biographical research on Ollie Harrington. I am also grateful to Helma Harrington for reading my chapter on her husband and talking with me on the phone from her home in Berlin.

Lastly, my deepest appreciation is for my partner Sarah, who has been my toughest critic and my most ardent supporter.

The Black Cultural Front

Introduction

In a cultural session at the 1940 conference of the National Negro Congress (NNC), several people talked of the need to build a cultural front. On the panel was Gwendolyn Bennett, African American poet and educator, who proposed that the NNC spend more time, space, and effort on the cultural front. A woman in the audience listed only as Mrs. Lynch spoke up to insist that the work of the cultural group was essential because it is the cultural things that keep us from going stark crazy.¹ The Black Cultural Front will explain how African American writers and artists were swept up in the political struggles of the 1930s and beyond. They often participated directly in these events, but their greatest contribution was through their art. Ultimately, this study will be interested in the aesthetic responses they produced that spoke to the times in powerful and imaginative ways. By dramatizing the issues of their day, they helped themselves and others to keep from going stark crazy as mass joblessness gripped the country, Jim Crow dominated the South, and fascism spread throughout Europe.

The common understanding has been that the Communist Party hindered black cultural expression during this period. As I will show, the Communist-led Left promoted several cultural organizations to draw black cultural workers into its orbit. Most important was the National Negro Congress to which numerous black artists and writers contributed their talents. The NNC was a coalition of civil rights groups and labor organizations officially launched in 1936 at a national conference in Chicago. Its formation was typical of Popular Front organizing, a time when the Communist Party softened its revolutionary rhetoric to work with liberal groups. The NNC reached out to the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which heavily recruited African Americans into the labor movement. With the appointment of A. Philip Randolph as its president, the NNC also courted the AFL-affiliated Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In addition to bringing black workers into the labor movement, NNC organizers also worked on the cultural front by convening panels with artists and writers at its conferences, organizing campaigns against discrimination in Hollywood, and holding mass rallies to fight discrimination. Artists did not have to be card-carrying members of the Communist Party to attend a panel or produce a poster for a rally. Yet the attraction of numerous black cultural workers to Communist-supported events is an indication of the appeal of a radical political approach.²

The story of African American writers and artists who took a sincere interest in the American Left has yet to be fully appreciated. Since the mid-1940s, accounts of betrayal by black ex-Communists have come to represent a mass defection of African Americans from the Communist Party. In Richard Wright’s tell-all exposé I Tried to Be a Communist, appearing in two installments of the Atlantic Monthly in 1944, he detailed how his white comrades had tried to subject him to party discipline. He claims they wanted him to be an activist when he wished to organize other writers. I wanted to be a Communist, he wrote, but my kind of Communist (50). In his 1952 novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s protagonist rebelled against a domineering political organization called the Brotherhood, his fictional version of the Communist Party. During the 1960s, Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) cemented this Cold War narrative that has since pervaded African American literary criticism.³

Several scholars, however, have begun to reconstruct the history of African American literary radicalism. Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983) and Mark Naison’s Communists in Harlem During the Depression (1983) laid the foundation for later studies by Robin Kelley, Gerald Horne, Alan Wald, Barbara Foley, Cary Nelson, James Smethurst, Bill Mullen, William Maxwell, and Mary Helen Washington.⁴ Together, their work has come to fill a void in scholarship on the period between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Combining formal analysis with a revisionist historical approach, they have presented a fresh perspective on the influence the Left has had on African American writers. In Popular Fronts (1999), Bill Mullen argues that Wright’s reputation has overshadowed the many other writers of Chicago’s Black Renaissance, several of whom participated in building a Negro People’s Front on the South Side. Barbara Foley, in Wrestling With the Left (2010), examines Ellison’s earlier reporting in the left-wing press, short stories, and early drafts of Invisible Man (1952) to uncover the proletarian elements that were expunged from his most famous novel in order to appeal to a Cold War audience. Too often, Ellison’s experience has been read through what she calls the rhetoric of anti-communism. Foley advocates for a methodology of reading forward to understand the deep interest Ellison took in Marxist philosophy and praxis.

In The Black Cultural Front, I will show how the Left had a major impact on three important black cultural figures: Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, and Ollie Harrington. Biographers have either minimized their radicalism, depicted it as a minor episode limited to the 1930s, or neglected it altogether. While recovering much of Hughes’s radicalism during the 1930s, Faith Berry in her 1983 biography Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem gives only a brief account in the epilogue of the poet’s life during the decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, with little mention of his continued political sympathies.⁵ The most authoritative biography of Hughes, Arnold Rampersad’s The Life of Langston Hughes (1986, 1988), consists of two volumes separated by the year 1941, when the poet is said to have severed his ties with the Left and suffered a nervous breakdown. In the following years, according to Rampersad, Hughes’s leftist views vanished without a trace (1:378). Michel Fabre and Edward Margolies, in their biography The Several Lives of Chester Himes (1997), take the novelist’s later denunciation of communism at face value without looking more deeply into his political past. Contemporary detective novelist James Sallis in his Chester Himes: A Life (2001) portrays Himes as a political outsider in order to elevate him to the status of other great writers. In the introduction to Dark Laughter: The Satiric Art of Oliver W. Harrington (1993), Thomas Inge discusses the cartoonist’s contribution to American humor and comic art, but does not significantly examine his involvement in the Left. Understanding the political alignment of these artists is crucial to comprehending their art.

The trajectories of these artists, as I will show, are different from what has been previously depicted. Accounts of Hughes and Himes have followed the narrative of political disillusionment also ascribed to Wright and Ellison. Indeed, both Hughes and Himes were radicalized in their younger years and would distance themselves from the Communist Party later in life. Yet Hughes was still a part of the Black Left in the early 1950s and was called in front of McCarthy to explain several of his recent statements. While Himes criticized the Communist Party for failing to take seriously the plight of black workers, his first two novels still express hope in the labor movement. In contrast, Wright and Ellison broke with the Left to gain acceptance in an increasingly hostile Cold War environment. After publishing his essays in the Atlantic Monthly, Wright would contribute to the 1949 anthology The God that Failed, a book that gave further ammunition to the anticommunist crusade. In his biography of Ellison, Arnold Rampersad has commented how the author opportunistically severed his radical ties to advance his own career. It is significant to note that while Hughes was well loved by the black masses, and Himes received some acclaim for his novels, they did not achieve the celebrity status of Ellison, who was embraced by the white literary establishment. Neither Hughes nor Himes succumbed to spewing anticommunist rhetoric in order to gain success in their careers.

Contrary to the narrative of declining radicalism is the example of Harrington, who was politicized in the postwar period. After witnessing the violent backlash against black veterans following World War II, he moved more closely to the Left. Harrington’s story is a reminder of the many other black cultural workers who remained committed to the Communist Left, such as Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Margaret Burroughs, Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, Frank Marshall Davis, Lloyd Brown, John Pittman, and Louis Burnham. Furthermore, Harrington’s writings force us to seriously reconsider Wright’s politics later in life. Harrington and Wright shared a close friendship while they were both living in Paris during the 1950s. According to Harrington, Wright was anything but anti-Communist (23) and regretted his very public disavowal of the party. In the last decades of his life, Harrington lived in East Germany publishing political cartoons in the Communist press.

In separate chapters devoted to Hughes, Himes, and Harrington I will read forward to follow their interactions with the Left and participation in the black cultural front. I will utilize archival materials, newspapers, and biographical information to reexamine their politics. I analyze unknown or neglected texts to offer new interpretations of the works for which they are best known. In the chapter on Hughes, I utilize a recently discovered speech from the early 1930s in which he observed, Capitalist society is pregnant with the new social order. I also discuss the columns Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender showing his long-standing interest in the Left and his deep contempt for red-baiting. On Himes, I examine an early version of the novel that was to become If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) explaining the main character’s political outlook in greater detail. In the chapter on Harrington, I look at his cartoons as evidence of his radicalization in the Cold War years. These findings cause us to reexamine the political biographies of these three cultural figures. While it is possible to highlight tendencies and trends, it is important to understand the individual experiences of each of them. They were radicalized at different moments and for various reasons, yet they were all significantly shaped by their involvement in the American Left.

The 1996 publication of Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front gave scholars a sweeping assessment of the wide range of poets, novelists, muralists, musicians, playwrights, actors, and actresses who were politicized during the Depression and the conditions that bound them together. The language of building fronts was not uncommon in the interwar years when military terms were frequently applied to social and political struggles. As Denning points out, the cultural front was a term often used by authors in left-leaning periodicals. The cultural front was the product of artists who after being reared on radio, movies, and cheap paperbacks went to work in the culture industry. Inspired by the labor movement, they mobilized cultural workers in their own fields. According to Denning, this was the cultural arm of the Popular Front, a period beginning in 1935 when the Communist Party pursued an agenda of cooperation and coalition building with reformist groups. Denning takes issue with the core-periphery model, in which critics have placed those associated with the Communist Party at the center of their discussions. It was the fellow-travelers, Denning surmises, who were most responsible for what he calls the laboring of American culture (5–6). Denning’s study is excellent for its description of the breadth of this social movement, yet there remains much work for future scholars to explore the cultural front in further depth, particularly its African American component.

To refer to a black cultural front is not simply a modern invention; it has historical roots. The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) applied similar terms to the black struggle during the campaign for the Scottsboro boys in the early 1930s when they called on black and white workers to form a United Front from below. In their landmark study of Chicago, Black Metropolis (1945), Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake dedicated a section to Bronzeville’s United Front, noting the passing of the safe leader and the growing appeal of communism. In a pamphlet announcing the formation of the National Negro Congress, A. Philip Randolph wrote in the foreword that the organization would express the struggle of the Negro on all fronts (Davis 3). The NNC eventually formed its own Cultural Division and held a conference in 1947 where Howard philosopher Alain Locke told an audience of some five hundred attendees that although the war was over, this was no time to retreat from the cultural front of democracy’s fight.⁶ More than any civil rights organization during its time, the NNC strived to promote black art and culture. As has been noted, Denning gives short shrift to the role played by the Communist Party in attracting writers and artists to the Left.⁷ The NNC was spearheaded by black Communist John P. Davis and coordinated by several other black radicals who organized conferences, built institutions, and held gallery openings. Among those whose names were frequently listed at events were Paul Robeson, Canada Lee, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Sterling Brown, Josh White, Kenneth Spencer, Aaron and Alta Douglas, Augusta Savage, Powell Lindsay, and Gwendolyn Bennett. Black artists were attracted to Communist Party activities in greater numbers than their white counterparts, probably because they had less to lose. Long shut out of the ivory tower, they found opportunities to promote their work among the network of writers and artists on the Left.

A focus on what I call the black cultural front directs attention away from the political twists and turns of the Communist Party that were often of less interest to artists and writers. Indeed, black cultural workers may have responded to these ruptures, but were not bound to any supposed party line said to have existed. I will avoid referring to black cultural radicalism in the terms of the Popular Front, the period of 1935–1939 that Denning says best characterizes the coalitional politics that attracted artists and writers to the Left. Such a framework, I would argue, is too narrow to understand this phenomenon. In Popular Fronts, Bill Mullen applies these same terms to examine what he calls a Negro People’s Front in Chicago, although extending this period from 1935 to 1946. Yet it is important to recognize how the entrance of the United States into World War II shifted the political terrain, specifically as related to African Americans. Alan Wald in Trinity of Passion (2007) adopts the language of the antifascist crusade to outline the numerous writers on the Left who were drawn to the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War and continued this fight during World War II. African Americans had come together under the banner of Double Victory—fighting against fascism at home and abroad. As Wald shows, when the Communist Party adopted a pro-war stance, it compromised their ability to confront racism on the home front. Yet, as I will document, many African American cultural figures remained aligned with the Left during and after the war.

This is not to say that black writers had nothing to say about the Communist Party’s shifts in policy. Wright recalls he was stunned by the announcement that the John Reed Clubs were being dissolved with the turn to the Popular Front, but this did not stop him from organizing other writers (I tried to Be a Communist 69). He would assemble the cultural panel at the inaugural 1936 NNC conference in Chicago, out of which he and others formed the South Side Writers’ Group. It was not until he had written a bestselling novel and no longer needed the Communist Party that Wright broke with it. In his first novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, Himes—through his main character Bob Jones—was sharply critical of the Communist Party for weakening its stance against racism during World War II. Nevertheless, in an interview with the Chicago Defender to promote his new book, Himes praised the Soviet Union and spoke positively about the labor movement. Indeed, many black writers looked to the Soviet Union as a land free from poverty and racial discrimination. Yet many black writers had little knowledge of Marxist philosophy beyond the Communist Manifesto. What most appealed to them was the aggressive stance the Communists took against racism, sometimes called white chauvinism, and the belief that a society free from all forms of oppression could exist.

Historians of what has come to be called the Long Movement have started to recover links between the Depression-era black struggle and the civil rights movement. They question the accepted periodization of the civil rights era between 1954 and 1965 to explore those individuals and organizations that laid the earlier groundwork for challenges to Jim Crow segregation. For example, the effort to break down racial barriers in unions during the 1930s and 1940s, as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall writes, was not just a precursor of the modern civil rights movement. It was its decisive first phase (1245). Other historians such as Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, Robert O. Self, Matthew Countryman, Angela Dillard, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Penny Von Eschen, Martha Biondi, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore have further bolstered this argument.⁸ The long movement thesis depicts a steady march toward freedom, yet it fails to fully account for what was a major stumbling block—McCarthyism. As illustrated by examples in the collection Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement (2009), edited by Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang, proponents of the long movement have glossed over the reactionary forces responsible for severing the ties between the Black Left and the civil rights movement.⁹ The contributors examine the many ways in which McCarthyism caused a damaging rupture in the African American freedom movement (2). The Cold War had again shifted the political landscape. As Gerald Horne has written, a Faustian bargain of sorts was struck between civil rights organizations and Cold War liberals (Black Liberation 227). In exchange for purging black radicals from their ranks, groups like the NAACP were granted certain gains that inevitably led to the integration of the armed forces and the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, to desegregate schools. Mary Dudziak argues that civil rights leaders benefited from the new international context, exploiting the Negro Problem as the Achilles’ heel of the United States.¹⁰ As Lieberman and Lang argue, this minimizes the impact of the red scare in suppressing the broad outlook and goals that radicals brought to the movement (3).

The experiences of black cultural radicals, many of whom were caught in the anticommunist dragnet, further narrowed the political discourse of the civil rights era. As I will argue, it was not internal squabbles that fractured this alignment of artists and writers on the Left, it was the unrelenting campaign of red-baiting, blacklisting, and un-American committees. Indeed, many black cultural figures were made a target because of their popularity. Hughes was among the most outspoken of them with his weekly columns in the Chicago Defender, his regular speaking tours, and his powerful poetry. Anticommunist crusaders Aimee Semple McPherson in California and Gerald L. K. Smith in the Midwest forced cancellations of Hughes’s speaking engagements. In 1953, he was called before McCarthy to answer questions about his radical poems such Goodbye, Christ. Himes complained of being blacklisted by the publishing industry after having several of his manuscripts rejected. He left for Paris in 1953 in need of a change of setting. By the time Himes arrived, Harrington was already living in Paris. Harrington had moved there in 1952 after being tipped off that he was under surveillance for his Communist associations. As Tyler Stovall has written, the 1950s was the Golden Age of African American writers in Paris. African Americans who congregated on what Michel Fabre has called the Black Bank, were certainly fleeing the oppressive racial apartheid in the United States, but they certainly were not the first to do so—Josephine Baker being the most-famous African American to make her home in Paris.¹¹ Less acknowledged was the role that McCarthyism played in causing black writers and artists to seek a refuge in the 1950s. Others of the black cultural front such as Lena Horne, Canada Lee, Josh White, Hazel Scott, Gwendolyn Bennett, Margaret Burroughs, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson would also suffer from the blacklist. Elizabeth Catlett fled to Mexico. Aubrey Pankey and Harrington would eventually end up in East Germany. While the McCarthy period is regarded by most as a sad moment in U.S. history, scholars have yet to fully acknowledge the extent of the damage done. Now that the Cold War is over, we must account for the many careers destroyed, reputations ruined, and lives cut short by this period of political persecution.¹²

Another distinctive feature among African American artists of this generation was their significant engagement with popular culture. Like other artists of the cultural front, they were raised on radio, movies, jazz records, and pulp fiction. Yet unlike their white counterparts, black cultural workers were kept out of these fields by strict Jim Crow practices. Perhaps more than others, they understood that the culture industries were controlled by the capitalist class. Still, black artists struggled to gain access to and transform these powerful instruments. For those on the Left, art was not for art’s sake, but was for everybody. What C. L. R. James called the popular arts gave access to the working-class audiences that Marxists wanted to reach. Artists of the black cultural front would use mass cultural forms for leftist political aims.

During the Depression, many white literary radicals were able to find well-paying work as screenwriters in Hollywood, but black writers were not afforded the same opportunities, or if given a chance they were disappointed with the results. Langston Hughes went to Los Angeles to make the 1939 film Way Down South, which was his first and last time in the movie business. When it came out, the film reinforced the Uncle Tom stereotypes he was trying to avoid. In a speech titled Democracy and Me given at the 1941 Writers’ Congress, Hughes spoke angrily, Hollywood insofar as Negroes are concerned, might just as well be controlled by Hitler (Good Morning Revolution 140). Himes tried to break through Hollywood’s color curtain in 1941 with the help of Hughes, who gave him a list of contacts. He shopped his early prison novel around at several studios to no avail. He was nearly hired to work on Cabin in the Sky, but MGM practiced complete segregation (Conversations 20). At Warner Brothers, Himes was offered a job but was let go after a racist Jack Warner declared he did not want to employ any black writers.

As the movie industry remained segregated, so did the American press. In his Democracy and Me speech, Hughes again made the comparison with Nazi Germany, Magazine offices, daily newspapers, publishers’ offices are as tightly closed to us in America as if we were pure non-Aryans in Berlin (Good Morning Revolution 139). Shut out of print media, African Americans created their own parallel institutions. Black newspapers grew in circulation as black urban populations exploded during the Great Migration. Numerous poets, novelists, and playwrights sustained themselves by writing for the black press, including Langston Hughes (Baltimore Afro-American), Robert Hayden (Michigan Chronicle), Frank Marshall Davis (Atlanta World and Associated Negro Press), Ann Petry (People’s Voice), Alice Childress (Freedom), and Lorraine Hansberry (Freedom and later Freedomways). Several artists made careers out of sketching cartoons for black newspapers, such as E. Simms Campbell (who published in several black newspapers), Bill Chase (Amsterdam News), Jay Jackson (Chicago Defender), Wilbert Holloway (Pittsburgh Courier), Ollie Harrington (Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, and People’s Voice), and Jackie Ormes (Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier). There were a few anomalies among mainstream newspapers and magazines during the 1930s, one of which was Esquire, a slick white men’s magazine where Campbell was a longtime illustrator, and which also published writings by Hughes and Himes. A few black journalists like Ted Poston were able to cross over to white newspapers in the 1940s, but it was not until the civil rights era that American print media began to be integrated.

In radio, the most popular mass medium of the day, African Americans were vastly underrepresented. Among those who did make advances in the field, several had left-wing connections. According to a study conducted by the Cultural Division of the National Negro Congress in 1948, only one in 150 jobs went to black workers, and often only as a porter, page, or manual laborer. There were no black engineers or technicians. The study cited only two black radio directors, Clifford Burdette and Bill Chase, and one black radio announcer, Gordon Heath, who had a program from 1945 to 1947 on WMCA in New York.¹³ The NNC had sponsored Burdette’s show All Men Are Created Equal, which ran for ten weeks in 1943 on WINS. Both Chase and Heath were sympathetic to the Left, with Chase signing a letter in defense of Angelo Herndon in 1934 and Heath participating in the inaugural Negro Freedom Rally in 1943. Also on WMCA between 1944 and 1947 was the program New World A-Comin’, borrowing the title of Roi Ottley’s successful book, with the theme music written by Duke Ellington. Scripts were written by Roi Ottley, Owen Dodson, and others. The series was narrated by Canada Lee and included appearances by Marian Anderson, Muriel Smith, Hazel Scott, Josh White, and Hilda Simms. The first opportunity in radio for Hughes came in 1940 when a script he wrote about Booker T. Washington was accepted for the CBS series The Pursuit of Happiness directed by Norman Corwin.¹⁴ Joe Bostic, who got his start as a sports reporter for the black press and who worked for Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s progressive newspaper People’s Voice, had a gospel program on New York’s WLIB and became known as the Dean of Gospel Music.¹⁵ Richard Durham’s Destination Freedom radio plays, which ran between 1948 and 1950 on Chicago’s WMAQ, were carried by the same station that also broadcasted Amos and Andy. Sponsored by the Chicago Defender, Durham’s weekly radio program featured shows on important individuals from black history like Crispus Attucks, Harriet Tubman, and Toussaint L’Ouverture, as well as segments dedicated to contemporary cultural figures such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Josh White, Hazel Scott, Lena Horne, and Katherine Dunham. A member of the Communist Party for a brief time in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Durham met his future wife, Clarice, at the NNC office in Chicago.¹⁶ Durham also helped his friend and fellow Chicagoan Robert Lucas find work as a screenwriter in the radio business.

The need for more books suited for African American boys and girls motivated others to venture into the field of children’s literature. Julia Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left (2006) uncovers numerous literary radicals who took an interest in children’s literature to promote what she calls an alternative civic education in an increasingly repressive Cold War atmosphere (259). African American writers such as Shirley Graham followed this trend. Best known for her marriage to W. E. B. Du Bois, Graham was an experienced playwright and author in her own right. In the 1940s, Graham began writing what she called popular biographies about important African Americans such as George Washington Carver, Paul Robeson, Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Banneker, Phillis Wheatley, and others. Corresponding roughly with her joining of the Communist Party in 1947, the decision to write books for young readers was an extension of her radical politics.¹⁷ As his poetry readings were being canceled by his anticommunist detractors, Hughes made up for the lost income by publishing several children’s books in the Negro Firsts series. Harrington collaborated with black Catholic activist Ellen Tarry to produce the 1942 children’s book, Hezekiah Horton, which was reprinted several times and followed by a 1950 sequel called The Runaway Elephant. African American artists increasingly turned to writing children’s books to assure that the younger generation would grow up knowing their history and being proud of themselves.

Black cultural radicals did not feel obligated to uphold the standards of the white literary canon and thus developed their own sense of cultural legitimacy. As James Smethurst explains in The New Red Negro (1999), black poets on the Left often associated authentic black culture with vernacular forms of the rural South that were untainted by the appropriations of mass culture. An outgrowth of the Black Belt Thesis during the Third Period when the Communist Party advocated for black self-determination in the South, Smethurst says this tendency can be seen in the poetry of Sterling Brown, most notably his 1932 collection Southern Road. Other poets focused on the new northern setting of recent black migrants. Hughes created what Smethurst calls a popular neomodernism, a poetic form that utilized the materials of mass culture, employed techniques of high modernism, and addressed African American audiences in northern cities. The 1942 collection Shakespeare in Harlem, he argues, was the best effort by Hughes to create an authentically popular African American poetry. Yet that same year, Hughes accepted an offer to write a column for the Chicago Defender, giving him access to a much wider audience than he would ever reach through his poetry. Out of this newspaper column he created Jesse B. Semple, a war worker living in Harlem who spends his nights in a bar reminiscing about the South. While possessing what Wright called a complex simplicity, this character has no pretense of being high art, but captures the vernacular expressions of black life in Harlem.¹⁸ The message of these stories—just be simple—was easy to understand. Out of these weekly commentaries he invented a unique creation of twentieth-century African American literature.

Margaret Burroughs, who founded the South Side Community Arts Center in Chicago, further articulated this new black popular art form. Burroughs was among a group of left-leaning artists and writers in Chicago. She founded the center with her husband, Bernard Goss, to provide inexpensive art classes and a place for black artists to exhibit their work. Goss was present at the 1940 NNC conference and spoke of their plans to establish an art center. She later married Charles Burroughs, who had been raised in the Soviet Union and was also an artist. Working as a high school art teacher, Burroughs was called before the board of education during the McCarthy era to answer questions about her friendship with Paul Robeson. Despite the pressures of the time, she bravely defended Robeson and still kept her job. The author of a number of children’s books, she published her first, Jasper: The Drummin’ Boy, in 1947. Although competent in various graphic arts, Burroughs was most prolific in producing linoleum cuts, an art form, which, because of its cheapness and accessibility, became popular during the Depression. Burroughs journeyed to Mexico in 1952 to visit blacklisted artist Elizabeth Catlett, also known for her linoleum cuts.¹⁹ In her autobiography, Life With Margaret (2003), Burroughs recalled how black artists reimagined cultural production during this era: In the art of the times, there was a sort of coming together of influences that were multipolitical, international and class conscious (in that they combined working class and rural Southern folkways), which resulted in the emergence of a new hybrid of black popular culture (71).

As Burroughs points out, there were multiple political influences that contributed to this cultural movement. The South Side Community Arts Center was one of more than one hundred centers