by Carla Kaplan
Nancy had no intention of toeing the line. Her first response was to make the breach as public as she could. On the basis of her mother’s response to Margot Asquith, which Nancy learned of almost immediately, she wrote an ironic essay intended to skewer all white people who believed that “friendships between whites and Negroes are inconceivable.” “Does Anyone Know Any Negroes?” rehearsed the whole episode, named all the principals, and quoted her mother at some length, sputtering foolishly: “Does anyone know any Negroes? I never heard of that. You mean in Paris then? No, but who receives them . . . what sort of Negroes, what do they do? You mean to say they go to people’s houses? . . . It isn’t possible. . . . If it were true I should never speak to her again.” Maud is portrayed as a racist and a fool, an unsophisticated bumpkin. Nancy prepared the essay for publication in The Crisis, where it would attract attention. Strangely, the essay had little impact on its intended audience; apparently it was read by very few whites and none at all in England.
Nancy was spoiling for a fight. She was determined that her break with her family and her new identity both be noticed. In early 1931, she republished her “battle hymn” on “The Poet’s Page” of The Crisis alongside other poems by white women about race, including “A White Girl’s Prayer” by Edna Margaret Johnson and “To a Pickaninny” by Edna Harriet Barrett. She also threw her support to a film that the press had described as “the most repulsive conception of our age” and that the growing European fascist parties were singling out as an example of modern decadence. L’Age d’Or, by the surrealists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, offered a number of vignettes that included a woman fellating a statue’s toe, priests copulating with prostitutes, defecation, and infanticide. The film was banned in France after French fascists attacked screenings. Nancy succeeded in arranging a one-night London screening of a smuggled copy. As she well knew, her mother’s British friends at the time encompassed all the key players of the growing British Union of Fascists, including Oswald Mosley—“The Leader”—and his future wife, the former Diana Mitford, who was just then preparing to leave her husband, Bryan Guinness. It would have been impossible for Nancy’s mother or any of her circle to be unaware that Nancy’s screening was aimed at them. For Nancy it was a relief to be able to dissociate herself publicly from her mother’s right-wing leanings.
Feminists in the 1960s coined the phrase “The personal is political.” Nancy Cunard, from the 1920s on, lived by a reverse formulation that said, “The political is personal.” In spite of a deeply loyal nature that could—and did—forgive many personal slights from her friends, she could not bear reactionary politics in those she knew. “She was democratic [about people] to the point of insipidity,” one friend remembered, unless they revealed reactionary politics. “If ever she disliked or hated anyone, the cause was political.” She never, for example, got over how someone “so hyper-sensitive,” so gifted, and so “very human [a] kind of person” as Ezra Pound could have become a fascist. “Totally baffling,” she said.
As the “smarming twenties” tumbled into the thirties, Nancy, still “at a loose end,” continued trying to get her bearings. Running a press, even one as illustrious as The Hours, having affairs, and scheduling scandalous screenings were not getting her the “contact” she wanted. She was restless and itchy, sure of herself but unsure of where to go. She knew that she wanted “to work on behalf of the colored race.” Now she needed a cause. A good fight.
“Scottsboro and Other Scottsboros”
I intend to devote my life to . . . the Colored Race.
—Nancy Cunard
The Scottsboro case had an electric effect on Nancy Cunard. She was stunned by the “collective lunacy” of the “lynch machinery,” which seemed intent on sending the Scottsboro Boys to their deaths for crimes that had never occurred. She published a poem called “Rape,” which she dedicated “To Haywood Patterson in jail, framed up on the vicious ‘rape’ lie, twice condemned to death, despite conclusive and maximum proof of his innocence—and to the 8 other innocent Scottsboro boys.” Like Josephine Cogdell Schuyler in “Deep Dixie” and Annie Nathan Meyer in her play Black Souls, Nancy was looking at the underside of the myth of the black rapist—the unspeakable and usually unspoken truth that some white women desire black men. In “Rape,” a desolate farmer’s wife, on a restless rainy day, tries to seduce one of her husband’s black workers and is rejected by him. Humiliated and furious—as angry with herself as with him—she charges him with rape. She used exactly the language with which the Klan threatened Nancy in 1932—“Your number’s up”—to spread her deadly lies: “And they cotched him in the swamps / And what the hounds left they hung on a tree.” Sympathetic at first toward the wife’s boredom and sense of entrapment, “Rape” ultimately places her within a southern history where “‘the lady of the house’ was honoured” as “nobody’s nigger” is lynched. That was the history uppermost in Nancy’s mind as the Scottsboro Boys were tried over and over again, and convicted every time. The charges against the defendants were ridiculous, but, as Nancy Cunard put it, “not unparalleled.” She was filled with “the indignation, the fury, the disgust, the contempt, the longing to fight.”
By 1931, Nancy’s politics had increasingly become aligned with the Communist critique of class relations, capitalism, and race, though she never became a Communist. She appreciated the way in which the Party drew attention not only to the Scottsboro Boys and their plight but also to the tens of thousands of unemployed Americans then hopping freight cars in search of work, sometimes crowding into the cars so thickly that, as one former hobo recalled, “it looked like blackbirds.” She especially appreciated the way the Communist Party, unlike the NAACP, stressed militancy over manners, insisting that racism made the usual social niceties irrelevant and even immoral. At the heart of the fight between the NAACP and the Communist Party’s legal wing, the International Labor Defense (ILD), was a fundamental disagreement about what social rules did—and did not—apply when whites were called upon to confront the violence and race hatred within their own ranks. At stake as well was a strategic question about how militant a stand blacks could take in fighting for their rights—the very question that was then splitting the new and old guards of the Harlem Renaissance.
Nancy had experienced a lifetime of social niceties inside the gray stone walls of Nevill Holt. Without a very high degree of civility, certainly, her mismatched parents could never have stayed together. Good manners and emotional reserve, rather than frankness or intimacy, were her parents’ highest values. Nancy came to associate civility with hypocrisy and militant outspokenness with authenticity. She set particular store by militancy. “It is only by fighting,” she wrote, “that anything of major issue is obtained.” Fighters, she declared, “are pure in spirit.” She also set great store by honesty and distrusted anything that smacked to her of window dressing. “The facts please,” she would say to her friends, “without any hooly-gooly.” One friend remembered her as an “extremist in words,” who “never hesitated to express herself with the utmost frankness about anything.” That is not to say that Nancy Cunard was unmannered. In fact, she had impeccable, “delightful manners” and always recoiled sharply from any crudeness of speech or behavior in others; this attitude was an asset in black society.
The NAACP at first was tepid in its response to the Scottsboro arrests and trials. That was not merely caution “to avoid antagonizing Southern prejudice,” as the journalist Hollace Ransdell surmised. Mary White Ovington and other NAACP officials wanted to make certain that there was nothing to the rape charge at all—no sexual contact between parties—before leaping into the case. With its credibility and connections resting on respectability and reputation, the NAACP felt justified in being selective. Nancy Cunard and others were outraged. It was clear to her that the charge of rape was nothing more than “terrorisation of the Negroes.”
The NAACP had stood up to years of criticism that it was an organization founded and run by outsiders, such a
s Mary White Ovington. In turn, its leadership was very sensitive to what it saw as outsiders using the black community for their own agendas and interests. Ovington kept mostly quiet on that score, but Walter White and William Pickens both accused the Communist Party of using the case to recruit members and of being “pig-headed” about the complexities of race. Some black papers also doubted that the Communist Party “would make saving the boys’ lives its top priority,” seemingly clearing the way for the NAACP to take leadership of the case. But the NAACP gave the defendants confusing advice and failed to elicit their mothers’ support—a crucial error that turned the case over to the Party and its ILD.
Ovington and others at the NAACP, moreover, underestimated the attention the Scottsboro case would receive. To them, the case was not unique. As early as 1906, Ovington had written about the “ghastly truth that any unscrupulous white woman has the life of any Negro, no matter how virtuous he may be, in her hand.” The power that Bates and Price were wielding was horrific but not new. Instead, she worried about “the nasty propaganda potential of any event with white women and black men.”
Nancy Cunard and Mary White Ovington squared off on the Scottsboro case chiefly over their views of the need for caution (Cunard couldn’t abide it). Whereas Nancy sometimes traded on her singularity to get her own way (she knew that black male comrades such as Walter White and W. E. B. Du Bois would certainly not try to tell a British heiress how to behave), Ovington courted respectability, which she aligned with being as invisible as possible. From her perspective, the less attention she drew to herself, the more she could build a life that otherwise would have been unthinkable for a woman of her background.
In 1929, the Communist Party made “the struggle for Negro rights” one of its central priorities and sent many whites into black communities, Harlem especially, as organizers. To encourage black recruits and rout out organizational racism “branch and root,” interracial socializing was encouraged. White Communists found guilty of “white chauvinism” were publicly tried in open hearings intended to shame them into “the greatest degree of fraternization.” Party organizers offered dancing classes to white male organizers so that they would not be ashamed to ask their black female comrades to dance. If Nancy had any pity for the humiliated white organizers, she must have felt even more keenly her own superiority to those slow-learning whites. She supported the Party’s insistence that foot-draggers change immediately and absolutely. “The Communists,” she wrote admiringly, “are the most militant defenders and organizers that the Negro race has ever had.” She credited the Party with “putting a new spirit into the Negro masses” and teaching them to “fight.”
During the Great Depression the Communist Party gained ground in Harlem. Its advocacy of militant political protest made it stand out in its approach to local issues. “Throughout the 1920s, Harlem political leaders, even those renowned for their militancy, rarely employed strategies of confrontation and mass protest to achieve their goals.” Langston Hughes, activist and Hampton Institute teacher Louise Thompson, and a few others felt that the Communists were an alternative to the Negrotarians. (Thompson married Party lawyer William L. Patterson after a brief, disastrous marriage to Wallace Thurman.) But its centralized authority, lack of flexibility, and attacks on well-respected blacks, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, alienated many in Harlem. Its highly unusual interracial policies created considerable controversy. Numerous black men who became associated with the Communist Party in the 1930s—such as Theodore Bassett, William Fitzgerald, Abner Berry, and James W. Ford—had white girlfriends or wives. The weekly Amsterdam News accused the Party of using white women as “Union Square blondes and brunettes” to seduce “Harlem swains” into communism. According to Claude McKay, a group of black Communist women, led by Party member Grace Campbell, felt strongly enough about it, in the 1930s, to ask that the Party take a stand against this “insult to Negro womanhood.” McKay noted that it was not a subject blacks were generally willing to “air.” Campbell’s group was a particularly “bitter lot,” he said. Nancy did not see what all the fuss was about.
It is possible that the Party’s interracial program, called “black-white unity,” resonated with Nancy’s thinking. At the heart of much of Harlem’s cultural politics—from Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement to the “Don’t buy where you can’t work” boycott initiative—appeals to “race loyalty” were meant to galvanize support by capitalizing on feelings of loyalty and shared oppression. It was an effective appeal, with many successes to its credit. But it did not include whites, even Nancy Cunard, except as bystanders and observers. She called race loyalty “the wrong kind of pride; a race pride which stopped at that . . . race conscious in the wrong way.” The Party stressed worker solidarity, not race pride. And it formulated an active critique of the ideology underlying race loyalty as divisive and mystifying. The Party attacked the “timidity” of the NAACP and the Urban League, going so far as to call them “agents of the capitalist class,” in the context of the simmering debate over appeals to identity politics. The question of what role whites could and should play in Harlem and in black political struggles more broadly was embedded in those debates. The less one cleaved to an idea of race loyalty—in any of its permutations—the less of a problem it was to have whites in Harlem or in leadership roles in Harlem politics. A principled opposition to the concept of race loyalty helped obviate questions of appropriation, theft, or inappropriate behavior by whites. Though she stopped short of becoming a Communist—Party discipline was out of the question for her—Nancy sympathized wholeheartedly with the Party’s racial ideology, its attack on “Negro bourgeois leaders” as “white man’s niggers,” its challenge to the politics of identity, and its welcome of white activists.
The Scottsboro case brought more white women into black politics: writers such as Annie Nathan Meyer, Muriel Rukeyser, and Hollace Ransdell, as well as activists, Communist and other. That meant that the question of the role white women could play, and the possible damage that their mere presence could pose, was on the table, albeit sometimes in ways that only insiders would have been aware of. Nancy was keenly aware of the myriad ways in which the increased presence of white women provoked debate.
She took the position of honorary treasurer of the British Scottsboro Defense Fund: marching and organizing, circulating petitions and flyers, making banners, sponsoring fund-raisers, and encouraging her friends to write poems about the case that could be used in the cause. She also contributed her own money, when she had any, sometimes sending cash to the defendants and their families and encouraging her friends to do likewise. She was determined to make the Scottsboro case more visible in Europe.
One July Fourth, she threw a fund-raiser that drew enormous publicity as “one of the most spectacular and curious parties that can ever have been held in this country.” Capitalizing on the 1920s suntanning craze, with all the Negrophilia it implied, Nancy threw a sun-ray bathing and dancing party, taking over a swimming pool and a dance floor inside one of London’s best hotels. There she created an imaginary resort, where blacks and whites mingled to bathe, dance, talk, and get to know one another. London’s Daily Mail described the party as “tropically hot” and “exotic,” noting breathlessly that “Negroes of all shades of colour were dancing with white women.” One London paper imagined that Nancy’s behavior must mean that she “hate[s] so many white people.” The suntan party drew attention from as far away as Pittsburgh, Canada, South Africa, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Jamaica. One Jamaican paper noted with approval that “Miss Cunard’s attitude towards the Negro race has estranged her from her mother, and has robbed her of many friends, while it has gained her new ones.”
Nancy did make new friends through the Scottsboro case, realizing some of her ambition both to find “an American white friend with feelings such as mine” and to establish “contact” with blacks. She was in touch with some of the fellow travelers who were also working on the case. In her papers is a warm letter
from Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, certainly someone with feelings “such as” Nancy’s. (Unfortunately, like many on the left who watched his rightward swing with alarm, Nancy came to see George Schuyler as a political “scoundrel,” making further friendship with his loyal wife impossible.) She corresponded with many of the defendants themselves and also with their mothers. Haywood Patterson, who was treated particularly harshly by the Alabama courts, wrote to Nancy about his “unbearable” conditions, his determination “to keep bearing on,” and her “comforting” letters to him. He also urged Nancy, who was notoriously heedless of her own health, to take care of herself and get enough rest, something that even Nancy’s best friends dared not suggest to her. Through the Scottsboro case Nancy befriended a number of other prisoners, including one James Threadgill, a “Negro lifer” to whom she wrote and sent books for two decades. “Dearest,” Threadgill wrote in 1954, “this I hope will find you feeling well and doing just fine.” Again she demonstrated her ability to identify with those who were very different from her. “I’m not really thinking of anything else but them [the Scottsboro Boys] all the time,” she wrote to a friend.
Six days after the Scottsboro Boys were arrested and the day after all nine were indicted, Nancy decided to travel to the United States. She also decided to create a document that would tell the truth about race and drafted plans for a massive book to record and celebrate everything that “is Negro and is descended from Negroes.” It would be, she said, “the first time such a book has been compiled.” She was “possessed,” she later wrote, by “a new idea” of what to do and how to live.