by Imani Perry
Unlike other special assemblies, no one, not even the teachers, knew the subject of this special assembly. Our school, New Jersey Avenue School, was an enviable physical plant “for a black school” I had heard adults say. New Jersey’s auditorium could seat about 400 people on its main floor about half that number in its balcony. . . . Mr. Gregory said that something had happened yesterday that was a first, and a great day in Negro History (both were always capitalized by his generation even in their speeches). He wondered if any of us knew what this momentous event was. . . . Almost without thinking I raised my hand. As I remember it, I also raised my entire body out of my chair and waved wildly. No other hand in the auditorium was raised. “That little boy in the back. If you think you know, come on up here.” . . . He said, “Tell the school what you know.” I fairly blurted out, “Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a contract to play baseball for Montreal, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm team!” Through that whole shouted sentence I maintained my grin and my leaning pose. . . . With that, Mr. Gregory started clapping and of course everybody joined in and almost immediately we were singing ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ the Negro National Anthem.”20
The anthem baptizes the moment; it signifies the enormous symbolic importance of Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color barrier. There was a reason to hope, his achievement suggested, that the walls were ever so slowly coming down.
Two years after Jackie Robinson joined the major leagues, he was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The subject was “Communist infiltration of minority groups,” and Paul Robeson was of particular interest. Specifically, they wanted Robinson to tell them whether Robeson’s statement that African Americans would be reluctant to fight for the United States against the U.S.S.R. was true. The event was staged for Robinson to rebut Robeson. But in the midst of that task, Robinson made a powerful statement about both African Americans’ desire for civil rights and implicitly criticized the HUAC pattern of seeing all social protest as conspiratorial subversion.
The white public should start toward real understanding by appreciating that every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent any kind of slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he is going to use every bit of intelligence such as he has to stop it. This has got absolutely nothing to do with what Communists may or may not be trying to do. And white people must realize that the more a Negro hates communism because it opposes democracy, the more he is going to hate any other influence that kills off democracy in this country—and that goes for racial discrimination in the Army, and segregation on trains and buses, and job discrimination because of religious beliefs or color or place of birth.
And one other thing the American public ought to understand, if we are to make progress in this matter: The fact that it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of his charges. Just because Communists kick up a big fuss over racial discrimination when it suits their purposes, a lot of people try to pretend that the whole issue is a creation of Communist imagination.
But they are not fooling anyone with this kind of pretense, and talk about “Communists stirring up Negroes to protest” only makes present misunderstanding worse than ever. Negroes were stirred up long before there was a Communist Party, and they’ll stay stirred up long after the party has disappeared—unless Jim Crow has disappeared by then as well.21
In an act of equivocation, however, Robinson also insulted Paul Robeson, saying that Robeson “has a right to his personal views, and if he wants to sound silly when he expresses them in public, that is his business and not mine. . . . He’s still a famous ex-athlete and a great singer and actor.”22 The media jumped on the criticism, which at once diminished Robeson’s work as an activist and intellectual and condescendingly dismissed him. Eleanor Roosevelt interpreted it for the public as she saw fit: “Mr. Robeson does his people great harm in trying to line them up on the Communist side of [the] political picture. Jackie Robinson helped them greatly by his forthright statement.”23
Robinson would later regret his jab at Robeson. Paul Robeson had played an important part in bringing black baseball players, and specifically Jackie Robinson, into the major leagues. Robeson, and a delegation he’d gathered, met with the baseball commissioner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, and major league owners in 1943. Robeson was, back then, highly regarded by Commissioner Landis for being an outstanding athlete, artist, and humanitarian. During his speech to the major league owners, he declared that “the time has come when you must change your attitude toward Negroes. . . . Because baseball is a national game, it is up to baseball to see that discrimination does not become an American pattern. And it should do this this year.”24 After the meeting, the commissioners and owners decided to remove the color bar. But it wasn’t until 1945 they selected Jackie Robinson. He was not the best player in the Negro leagues, but he was the one they considered the best representative of the Negro race. He was clean cut, polished, and “All-American.” Robinson played for two years on a Dodger farm team before integrating Major League Baseball.25
The idealization of Robinson in contrast to the denigration of Robeson, obscuring the fact that there would be no Robinson without Robeson, anticipated a politics of distinction rooted in racial liberalism that would haunt the coming civil rights movement. The idealization of a single “patriotic” black leader in contrast to others who were deemed troublemakers, militants, or communists became a practice embraced by both powerful politicians and the popular media. It often led to not just a misrepresentation of those who were demonized but also misrepresentations of what the idealized black public figures and organizers were actually fighting for, as would be the case with Martin Luther King Jr. The idealization and depiction of “chosen” black leaders within the narrow frames of racial liberalism could also influence and delimit the future trajectory of organizers and activists. Many who emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, like Ralph Bunche and Whitney Young, slowly veered to the political right and turned away from militancy as they become more established. And while they maintained a commitment to racial justice, their activism became domestic and rights-based rather than economically, internationally, and protest-oriented.
And yet a political Left not only was quietly sustained but also remained essential in the development of the freedom movement protests and organizing that we tend to call, too narrowly, the civil rights movement. Recently, scholars have been extending the chronology of the black freedom movement of the 1960s backward to include the industrial unionism, communism and socialism, New Deal activism, and anticolonialism of the 1930s and 1940s, and to argue that the organizations devoted to those politics set the stage for antiracist protests during the 1950s and 1960s. Scholars are also noting how, like educators and other civic leaders, leftists and labor organizers stayed in the thick of the movement through the 1960s. Notwithstanding the Cold War, there were activists in the 1950s and 1960s who maintained Marxist and Popular Front philosophies and who had been members of the Council on African Affairs (CAA), the National Negro Congress (NNC), the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), and the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). As historians Martha Biondi26 and Penny Von Eschen27 have both asserted, the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC) and the CAA operated in New York until the mid-1950s. In various ways, radical leftists continued to play a role in organizing around American racism despite living under a government that scapegoated them.
Historic leftist magazines, such as New Masses and Masses and Mainstream, are a useful resource for exploring this political community. Masses and Mainstream was edited by Herb Aptheker, a Marxist historian and principal political theorist for the American Communist Party who also is credited with developing the concept of the “ideology of white supremacy.” Its February 1950 issues offer an extended political and artistic meditation on black history. Aptheker had been a strong advocate of Negro History Week for years. An example is found in a Februar
y 11, 1947, article in New Masses, another Communist Party–affiliated publication for which he often wrote, titled “Negro History—Arsenal for Liberation.” In it Aptheker describes Negro History Week as not just a celebration but also a meaningful and radical political act.
From 1951 on, the February issues of Masses and Mainstream would regularly and explicitly be dedicated to Negro History Week. The February 1950 issue, of interest here, isn’t described as such, but its content amounts to just that. Its first essay, “Words and White Chauvinism,” was written by Lloyd Brown. Brown was a labor organizer, a member of the Communist Party, a journalist, a novelist, and also a friend and editorial companion of Paul Robeson’s. He later would write Robeson’s biography. Born Lloyd Dight, Brown chose his surname to honor the militant abolitionist John Brown, a reflection of his own radical politics. In this article, Brown explores the symbolism of color and argues that black people shouldn’t worry too much about the positive associations in English attached to “light” or “white” and the negative ones associated with “darkness” or “black.” Although he acknowledges that white people use white skin as a metaphor and sign for greater value, Brown writes that generally speaking the language of light and dark doesn’t necessarily assert white superiority. According to Brown, the question of context is important:
Consider this fact: there is a song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” which is popularly known as the Negro national anthem. It is generally sung at conventions, commencements, and formal occasions concerned with Negro life and struggle. It contains this line: “Sing a song, full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. . . .” And not only is the oppressive past of slavery “dark,” but the future of liberation is “Where the white gleam, of our bright star is cast.” If this conception was inherently or even inferentially white chauvinist, we would have the anomaly of a militant people adopting an anthem which vilifies itself! But obviously, here, the Negro people are merely using the traditional color symbols for their general meaning.
Brown’s essay reveals how deeply intellectuals pursued their confrontation with the problem of white supremacy. They were concerned not only with political formations and economic relations but also with language and its implicit associations. It is also interesting, however, that Brown deems the singing of “Lift Every Voice” to be militant. This is a provocative counterpoint to the conception popularized less than a decade prior that the song was a feature of American patriotism, as well as a shift away from militancy in mainstream black political life. Although the song is unquestionably patriotic, it isn’t obvious to which nation or to whom that patriotism is due. Some listeners and singers interpreted the song as celebrating loyalty to the United States. Others interpreted that loyalty as to a black nation that superseded any government, especially one so consistently oppressive in its treatment of black people at home and abroad.
The second piece in the issue was written by Atlanta-born and Brooklyn-reared Alphaeus Hunton, the executive director of the Council on African Affairs and husband of the late Addie Hunton. Alphaeus Hunton is described by Penny Von Eschen as “one of the most neglected African American intellectuals”28 of the 1940s and 1950s. Hunton worked as an English professor at Howard University and as an editor of the CAA’s New Africa magazine before he moved to West Africa with his second wife, Dorothy, in 1960. Working for the CAA, he criticized postwar liberalism for its silence on and support of colonialism. He advocated a Pan-Africanist political vision and systematically analyzed the structural and historic relationships between Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. He maintained an active engagement with African independence leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe. Hunton was, moreover, an applied intellectual. For example, he spearheaded campaigns in support of Nigerian trade unionists and the Africa National Congress in South Africa.
Hunton’s article in this issue is titled “Upsurge in Africa.” The essay begins with a challenge to the idea behind the term “Darkest Africa.” Hunton turns from a critique of dominant representations of Africa to a challenge to the political actions associated with imperialist ideas. He rejects the then widely held Western belief that colonialism in Africa would save the British Empire from expiration.
The present and would-be exploiters of Africa have left just one thing out of their precise calculations and pat blueprints—the people of Africa. The 180 millions of them are rising, organizing, and fighting with increasing strength to break their chains, and this spells the nemesis of colonial exploitation in the last continent left to the imperialist gang. How long can they hold Africa? With the help of guns from the United States, arsenal of world imperialism, the government agents of European and American monopoly are engaged in a brutal war of repression against the African people in a desperate effort to postpone their V-A Day as long as possible. Since World War II, national revolts and widespread strikes have swept every area of Africa.
Hunton’s radicalism was thoroughgoing and deviated from both the sexist and anti-intellectual tenor of much of American political discourse. He describes anticolonialist organizing in Ghana, Nigeria, and Somalia, emphasizing the importance of both intellectuals and women in the development of African liberation movements: “In Africa as in Negro America, black women have been in the vanguard of the fight for freedom. They have gone on strike against the vicious pass system in South Africa and against the head tax in Nigeria. They have been jailed and beaten and killed along with their husbands and brothers.” He concludes with a global critique of domination, fascism, and capitalism:
Here in America, too, the Negro people’s struggle for full equality and democracy is at the core of the fight against American fascism. The fight of black Americans for their rights is the Achilles heel of American reaction. . . . Thus are the struggles of the 180 million Africans and the 15 million black Americans closely linked. To allow these front lines of the war against imperialism to be breached and broken is unthinkable, to strengthen them is to guarantee the successful building of a new world order of peace, friendship and equality among all people.
In 1951, a year after this issue of Masses and Mainstream was published, Hunton was imprisoned for six months as a result of the Department of Justice charge that the CAA was in violation of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950. The CAA was subsequently disbanded. Racial liberalism was not simply an argument, it was a piece of a coercive juridical regime that punished those who ventured far outside of its confines.
The February 1950 issue of Masses and Mainstream follows Hunton’s essay with a series of drawings by Charles White, a distinguished African American visual artist who for two decades had been associated with the political Left. The series of images is titled “LIFT EVERY VOICE . . .” The ellipsis after the words suggests that the images will guide our interpretation of what assessment or action ought to follow our viewing.
The first drawing, “Toward Liberation,” depicts a man moving past an unlocked gate, his finger pointed upward. A tree stands behind him, perhaps a lynching tree, perhaps a figure of an agricultural past. The viewer is led to imagine that the subject (and, implicitly, the viewer) will take steps toward freedom.
The second drawing, “Ingram Case,” shows Rosa Ingram and her two sons in jail, clutching the cell bars. Ingram and her sons were convicted, and sentenced to death, in 1948 for murdering a white landowner in rural Georgia. The landowner had attempted to rape Ingram, and her sons had come to her defense. The case was widely covered in the black and leftist press, and it elicited a strong response from leftists and civil rights organizers across the nation. Mary Church Terrell, leader of the Women’s Committee for Equal Justice committee of the Civil Rights Congress, a leftist organization in the tradition of the National Negro Congress, mobilized the public campaign in support of the Ingrams, while the NAACP provided legal support. A central figure in black politics for decades, Terrell had been a founding member of the NAACP and the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, as well as an active member of black women�
��s clubs, a suffragette, and an advocate of integration, work that included helping to lead a successful campaign for the integration of the American Association of University Women. Terrell’s stature allowed her to serve as a bridge between organizations with deep political differences. But the bridge itself showed that the ties between the mainstream and radical black activists weren’t entirely destroyed.
With this image of the Ingrams, Charles White rendered black liberation struggles as ones requiring that black people address the problems of both sexual violence and incarceration, as well as the economic domination that gave planters the power to rape and jail with impunity in the rural South. He rendered the “stony road” and “chastening rod” of “Lift Every Voice” in a contemporary outrage, implicitly encouraging action.
The third drawing, which is untitled, shows a woman with her head covered standing before a group of men, ministering to them. She could be Sojourner Truth, or Harriet Tubman, or any of the countless other women who had served on the front lines of freedom movements. Like Hunton’s earlier essay, the centrality of black women and their issues in racial justice organizing was asserted in White’s work.
The fourth and final drawing is called “The Living Douglass.” Frederick Douglass stands in the upper right corner, leading the way. Around him men are pulling back barbed wire. One in the front holds a scroll, another in the back left corner, a book. Literacy, reading and writing, is yet again imagined as part of the path to freedom. And just as “Lift Every Voice” had been written in the tradition of Douglass, here the song’s words are used to reinvigorate the spirit of Douglass, in word and deed.
In an article published in Masses and Mainstream several years after this issue, Charles White wrote that “my major concern is to get my work before the common, ordinary people, for me to be accepted as a spokesman for my people, for my work to portray them better, and to be rich and meaningful to them. A work of art was meant to belong to people, not to be a single person’s private possession. Art should take its place as one of the necessities of life, like food, clothing and shelter.”29 In the tradition of Vivian Schuyler Key and Augusta Savage, White made visual art that sought to articulate the collective spirit of black America as it struggled for liberation. And like them, White participated in the porous, varied, richly textured, and interconnected web of black associational life, and his art reflected that. DuBois had famously stated in his 1926 essay, “Criteria of Negro Art,” that “all art is propaganda.” This was as much argument as assertion. As assertion it was something of an overstatement. But the argument reflected the sense of common purpose embedded in black associational life. And black art in the early twentieth century was created in the midst of a set of cultural and political concerns, and an active community, such that communal concerns and practices often fueled the work, and in turn inspired the communities that witnessed it. For White, like his predecessors in their respective moments, this was a powerful instance in which the “people” were represented in his work under the banner of their cherished anthem.