by Imani Perry
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 carrie
d 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 th
e 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.