by Imani Perry
And she was a Chicagoan. Early on in her New York days she reflected on her home. Lorraine had come from the big city at the center of the country, but in contrast, Chicago must have seemed awfully small and simple. One of her diary entries from her first year in New York has a tinge of nostalgia for her home, and more than a little desire to keep capturing it artistically:
I remember the winters that have come before in my life . . . these same colored days when I could smell the paint of hot radiators with sleep in my eyes . . . when sometimes there was the dirty feeling of being in the thick wool smelling clothes of the school morning . . . and the times they say were happy times . . . (times that were not but were) bitter bitter times for the young soul . . . always these same cold days, I thought were kind because they made others my brothers.5
In the same note, she goes from the bittersweet sense of connection to others in Chicago to a deep loneliness in Wisconsin:
A grey world I did terribly love through the awful hurt . . . narrow black trees somewhere, fighting with the sky and always the greyness . . . moving lonely . . . wonderful rhythms just for me . . . others would be there; [football crowds of laughers] it is worse because I cannot hate them now . . . only they say I must not love my greyness now . . . how can they know.6
And then she is back to yearning:
I want to be inside . . . on a floor . . . near a piano, near a leg that must press against my side or my shoulder or my breast so that I can feel the music in the roots of my eyes . . . and then let my greyness come.7
She was depressed but also hopeful. That was quintessentially Lorraine. Even in the saddest moments she reached for something, usually intimacy. She had excitement, but she yearned for closeness and connection, something still elusive in the throngs of other seekers. Years later a friend reflected, “Many times when I watched her unguarded moments, her thoughts were beyond the second of which she was a part. I could see that here was an extra special kind of human being, one who seemed ordained for something beyond the everyday scheme of things. [. . .] Sometimes I even thought to be unfriendly, anti-social, a girl who should have been born tomorrow instead of some yesterday.”8 Notwithstanding her passion and playfulness, Lorraine had a melancholic disposition.
But she also had a sense of mission and perhaps was grateful that it could distract her. But this mission also seems to have been at least as powerful as her intimate yearnings. In 1951 Lorraine moved uptown, to Harlem, to fulfill it, and to be with her people. She attended tenant strikes and civil rights protests. She lectured about racial and economic justice at the famous Speakers’ Corner at 135th Street and Lenox. And she took a job. In a letter to Edythe, she wrote: “I am living in New York now, since last November and I can’t remember what I wrote you last or how much I told you when I did write. Probably a lot of nonsense about Greenwich Village and that business. Fact is, I have finally stopped going to school and started working. Which means a lot of things. I work for the new Negro paper: FREEDOM, which in its time in history, ought to be the journal of Negro liberation . . . in fact it will be.”9
Freedom was the brainchild of the leftist actor and singer Paul Robeson. Robeson was its publisher, and the editor of the weekly paper was Louis Burnham, a Harlem native who had been active in the American Student Movement and the Young Communist League. In his youth, Burnham had also organized the first chapters of the American Student Union on Black college campuses and served as youth secretary of the Communist-affiliated National Negro Congress and also as the executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Fifteen years her senior, though still quite young, he was a key figure in the Black leftist community. He welcomed Lorraine into the Freedom digs. The humble office overlooked Lenox Avenue. There were two desks, one typewriter, Louis, and Lorraine, and not much else. The resources were limited. Their operations were meagerly funded by the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, which was another outgrowth of the American Communist Party. Lorraine earned a take-home pay of $31.70 a week, which, she noted wryly, kept her lean. But the lessons were abundant. Louis Burnham became a close mentor of hers and would refer to her as “the girl who could do everything.” He quickly moved Lorraine from clerical to editorial and writing work. She learned as she labored.
Freedom provided its readers with incisive articles about global anticolonialist struggles and domestic activism against Jim Crow. It shared a clear feminist message with stories about women’s activism and images of women to represent activist movements. The paper also included television, film, and book reviews; children’s stories about Black history; for adults, fiction with political messages; and Robeson editorials. The general manager, George B. Murphy, scion of the family that founded the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper, who like Lorraine had gone from bourgeois to communist, worked diligently to ensure the paper’s distribution. It became a home of sorts, and ground for immense growth.
At least three of her writings for Freedom show how Lorraine was thinking about art during that period. She chillingly dismissed Richard Wright’s The Outsider: “He exalts brutality and nothingness; he negates the reality of our struggle for freedom and yet works energetically in behalf of our oppressors; he has lost his own dignity and destroyed his talents.”10 In her review of Howard Fast’s novel Spartacus she questioned whether his depiction of the freedom-fighting figure of Spartacus could have been better made if he had written through the eyes of the enslaved rather than the slaveholders, whom she referred to as a degenerate class. In her review of the Japanese film Hiroshima, she argued against the dismissive critiques of the film, calling them vulgar for their shortsightedness. Hiroshima was, she opined, both great propaganda and great art. In calling it both art and propaganda she echoed the sentiments of her uncle Leo’s mentor, and her newly adopted mentor, W. E. B. Du Bois, in the 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art.” He argued that all art is propaganda and should be intentionally so for those advocating racial justice. Likewise, her critique of Black subjects on television indicated that she was concerned with the question of representation of Blacks in media, an issue that had been taken up (controversially) by another family friend, Walter White, when he served on the Hollywood bureau of the NAACP in the 1940s.
Lorraine also wrote about international politics. In a December 1951 issue of Freedom, she covered Kwame Nkrumah (her uncle’s former student) of the People’s Party in Ghana—and his election as the first prime minister of “the Gold Coast” since the Portuguese first established it as a slave trading post in early 1500s. In this article, Lorraine connected the struggle for Ghanaian independence to the one for racial justice in the United States, saying, “The people of Ghana clearly see their struggles and victories in connection with Black folk on the rest of their continent as well as in the United States. A U.S. Negro reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier commented not long ago ‘Whenever I make an interview in Accra it is a two-sided affair. I ask questions about events in the Gold Coast and they ply me with questions about the Willie McGee case, the Cicero Illinois race riot, Dr. Ralph Bunche and topics American Negroes are discussing today.’”11 She similarly noted that Black Americans admired Ghanaian independence, a transformation that was visually marked by the transition from European business suits to traditional draped robes. She also wrote about liberation struggles in Egypt, delinquency and child labor at home, and women’s activism in the case of Willie McGee, a Black man who was falsely charged with the rape of a white woman and who had been given a death sentence. In covering that case, Lorraine traveled with other activists to her father’s home state of Mississippi to organize and advocate on McGee’s behalf. Afterward, his electrocution haunted her pen.
Lorraine was also prepared to tell people about her unequivocal embrace of communism by 1951. She had attended a Communist Party meeting at Wisconsin in January of 1950, but it wasn’t until she moved to New York that she claimed it. In a letter to Edythe, she wrote:
You I imagine are still quite rich with the hopes of a thriving thea
tre in the U.S. and I . . . in my own way dream of such a theatre also, but somehow in a discussion I think I know what would happen Edythe I would recall the picketlines and demonstrations I have seen and been in; I would recall the horsemen I have seen riding down human beings in Times Square because they were protesting . . . lynching. Quite simply and quietly as I know how to say it: I am sick of poverty, lynching, stupid wars and the universal maltreatment of my people and obsessed with a rather desperate desire for a new world for me and my brothers. So dear friend, I must perhaps go to jail. Please at the next painting session you have . . . remember this “Communist!”12
For Lorraine, Black freedom and the prospect of a society free of capitalism were intertwined. This was partially a result of the influence of mentors like Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Louis Burnham, but it was also the result of her studies. She believed that the exploitation of people, labor, and the land by the wealthy while most of the world suffered was fundamentally unjust. The only redeeming organization of society, as far as she was concerned, would be one of common wealth and common good.
Lorraine’s writings for Freedom were political and critical, not creative. Although she didn’t write poetry or fiction for Freedom, Burnham encouraged her creative aspirations. She once confided in him:
I was desperately worried about having become too jaded, at twenty, to retain all the lovely things I had wanted to say in my novel when I was eighteen. It was part of his genius as a human being that he did not laugh or patronize my dilemma, but went on gently and seriously to prod me to consider the possibilities of the remaining time of my life.13
And she did pursue her art. In July of 1951 she had another poem published in Masses and Mainstream, titled “Lynchsong” in honor of Rosalee Ingram, who, along with her two sons, had been given a death sentence for killing a white man who tried to rape her.14 Lorraine wrote:
See the eyes of Willie McGee
My mother told me about
Lynchings
My mother told me about
The dark nights
And dirt roads
And torch lights
And lynch robes . . .
As was often the case, Lorraine referenced her mother’s lessons, earned in the brutal, segregated South. But also characteristically for Lorraine, she reminded readers that the phenomenon—the violence of racism—was a national rather than a regional phenomenon. And both extralegal lynch-law and Jim Crow courts, which were as common up North as down home, were unjust. The poem continues:
White robes and
Black robes
And a burning
Burning cross
Cross in Laurel
Cross in Jackson
Cross in Chicago
And a
Cross in front of the City Hall
In:
New York City . . .
Consistent with the messages in her poetry, Lorraine lived her life in New York as an activist. She was often on picket lines and at protests and worked on local campaigns for the American Labor Party and the People’s Rights Party. Rather than dedicating herself wholly to one organization, she moved about in various leftist groups, including being both a student and an instructor at the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Communist Party–affiliated adult education center. The Jefferson School’s 1952 Winter Term bulletin announcement regarding the significance of Negro History Week gives a sense of the politics and thrust of the organization. It read, in part,
Negro History week 1952, has special significance coming in the wake of the most brutal and intensified attacks upon the Negro people, and at a time when they are moving with ever greater militancy in the struggle for full democratic rights. It comes also at the moment when hundreds of millions of oppressed colored peoples in the colonial countries are fighting as never before for their freedom. . . . The school’s campaign of last term has brought fruits in a significant increase in our enrollment of Negro and Puerto Rican students, and a much higher level in our struggle against white chauvinism. . . . Let us use the month of February to consolidate our gains and to win for ourselves and all we associate with a greater understanding of the contribution and role of the Negro people in today’s struggle of all people for democracy, peace and progress.15
At the conclusion of the message, the bulletin announced a Sunday forum on the evening of February 10, featuring Lorraine and the poet Gwendolyn Bennett, “Working Class Poets of the Negro People,” in which they would read and analyze poems with musical accompaniment.
As a frequent participant in the Jefferson School’s Sunday forums, Lorraine spent time with one of its instructors, W. E. B. Du Bois. Perhaps the greatest scholar of the twentieth century, Du Bois had years prior recognized her uncle Leo’s talent when he was an undergraduate at Atlanta University and arranged for him to study at Harvard. Likewise, he recognized Lorraine’s gifts, and, according to his wife, she became his favorite student, one whom he believed was gifted enough to teach others as well as study under his tutelage. Among the assignments she completed for him in a 1953 course on Africa was “The Belgian Congo: A Preliminary Report on Its Land, Its History and Its Peoples,” a paper that traced the politics, economics, and social arrangements of its precolonial and colonial history. After she completed the course, Lorraine held on to the copious notes on Algeria, Egypt, and French West Africa and referenced them in her future writing. Du Bois was a heroic figure in Black life, and particularly for the Black Left. For a young Black intellectual, studying with him was the very height of apprenticeship. Lorraine captured that extraordinary feeling in verse-like lines she wrote to herself on May 8, 1953, in her class notebook:
—Imagine then what it is for me a young Negro sprung from all the unrest and fervent searching & anxiety
His back against the sunlight of May afternoons.
Blue suit, line/d/ shirt, bow tie, pince nez,
Goatee & moustache—Relaxing black leisurely, full and confident in his vast knowledge and his splendid sense of interpretation of history—
His voice coming always perfectly measured. His
Upper lip curling now and again in appreciation of His wit—
Freedom’s passion, refined and organized, sits there.—16
Tenderly noting his idiosyncrasies alongside the enormity of his influence, she distilled Du Bois. He was freedom’s passion personified. To her mind, this must have been a dramatic contrast to her own youthful restlessness. Unlike her, he was neither stormy nor chaotic but refined and organized. Her own admiration of beauty and elegance, her own aspirations toward the life of the mind, sat there in front of her.
As an intellect, Lorraine read books as Du Bois encouraged her to read them: critically and voraciously. Lorraine the artist and activist took to heart both his belief that all art must be political and a quotation of his that she wrote down: “Somehow you have got to know more than what you experience individually”—a commitment to thinking beyond one’s own experience.17 Surely she applied that lesson when she worked alongside other Communist Party activists like the Trinidad-born Claudia Jones (who was briefly roommates with Lorraine) and Alphaeus Hunton, with whom she taught at the Frederick Douglass Educational Center, “Harlem’s new school for Liberation,” a Marxist adult education institution housed at 124 West 124th Street that opened in March of 1952. At Frederick Douglass, Lorraine taught “public speaking for progressives” and gave presentations such as “Negro History in Poetry and Prose.”18 But she also had to listen, learn from, and attend to the concerns of her pupils, working people who shared her race but not her circumstance. That year, Lorraine also moved into various apartments in Harlem: In March, 499 West 130th Street. By July, she shared an apartment with Claudia Jones at 504 West 143rd Street, unit 6A. At the end of the year, she moved to a place in the Bronx, 820 West 180th Street, apartment 41, for a short time. Lorraine was physically and intellectually immersed in Black New York.
In Harlem, Lorraine also found a community of artists who h
ad devoted themselves to serving their communities in both political organizing and creative production. And she grew as an artist in Harlem just as she grew as a thinker and an activist. Lorraine befriended South Carolinian actress Alice Childress, who was sixteen years her senior. Childress was a frequent contributor to Freedom and both an actress and a playwright. Childress brought Lorraine into the Black theater world of New York. For example, they wrote a pageant together for the Freedom Negro History Festival in 1952, which was narrated by Harry Belafonte, playwright Douglas Turner Ward, Sidney Poitier, and novelist John Oliver Killens.
Hailing from South Carolina, Alice Childress had herself come into the world of Black New York through the American Negro Theater, which was the product of the WPA-sponsored Federal Negro Theater and the Communist Party–affiliated Rose McClendon Players. A cooperative, the American Negro Theater survived for eleven years before buckling under financial pressure. By the time Lorraine came to New York, the theater was almost defunct, but what is important is that she arrived into an established theater community that included Childress and her husband, Alvin, and also Poitier, Ruby Dee, Harry Belafonte, Isabel Sanford, Helen Martin, and many more. They gave her a taste of what a Black theatrical life could be, and some of them would eventually be instrumental to Lorraine’s success as a playwright.