Baldwin v. Buckley

Whenever I’m feeling down, I watch this.  James Baldwin thoroughly flays William F. Buckley in a debate at the Oxford Union in 1965.  The Union supported Baldwin’s position 544-164.

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Baldwin in London

‘Everybody knows, no matter what the professions of my unhappy country may be, that we are not bombing people out of existence in the name of freedom. If it was freedom we were concerned about, then long, long ago we would have done something about Johannesburg, South Africa. If we were concerned with freedom, boys and girls would not, as I stand here, be perishing in the streets of Harlem. We are concerned with power, nothing more than that. And most unluckily for the Western world, it has consolidated its power on the backs of people who are now willing to die rather than be used any longer. In short, the economic arrangement of the Western world proved to be too extensive for most of the world, and the Western world will change its arrangements, or its arrangements will be changed for them.’

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Radicalism in Black Politics and Culture, 1945-1965

News coverage of Barack Obama’s presidential victory in 2008 was dominated by one word: historic. As if newsrooms around the country had suddenly been seized by a bout of Hegelianism, headlines trumpeted the ‘unfolding’ of history before our eyes. Obama’s victory, it seemed, was the next step of the Absolute Spirit. Yet as overwrought as such rhetoric appears now, after two years of unremarkable managerial liberalism, it hints at a deeper truth about Obama’s campaign. Both Obama’s supporters and his detractors, after all, grounded their vision of the candidate in prominent narratives of American history. One thinks, for example, of the shirts prominently displayed by Harlem street vendors that read “Rosa sat so Martin could walk so Obama could run.” For his supporters, Obama embodied the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. For those opposing him from the right, however, Obama was the product of a different historical saga: the perfidy of the American Left. For these critics, Obama was the protégé of Black Communist Frank Marshall Davis¹, the parishioner of Black Liberation Theologian Jeremiah Wright, the friend of Bill Ayers. If for his supporters Obama’s election was the dénoument of that most American of stories, for his opponents his victory represented the penetration of anti-American radicalism into the highest office in the land.

This double vision, seeing both radicalism and civil rights in the same person, speaks suggestively to recent scholarship on the Black freedom struggle in the middle decades of the twentieth century. One major focus of this historiography has been the relationship between radicalisms of various sorts (both class-based socialisms and race-based nationalisms) and the movement represented in popular memory by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks (which some scholars have taken to calling the ‘classical phase’ of the movement). In re-examining this relationship, many historians have concluded that civil rights and radicalism are not as opposed as the competing representations of Obama’s candidacy would lead us to believe. This essay will examine this scholarship through the lens of Jacqueline Dowd Hall’s formulation of a “Long Civil Rights Movement,” consider objections to the concept, and suggest ways it may be extended.

Hall announced her conceptualization of the long movement in her presidential address to the Organization of American Historians in 2004. Entitled “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” the address was a combative response to conservative appropriations of the image of civil rights. Hall sought to reconceptualize this history in such a way that it would be both a “more robust, more progressive, and truer story” and “[h]arder to celebrate as a natural progression of American values. Harder to cast as a satisfying morality tale.” To accomplish these dual objectives, Hall crafted a narrative of civil rights which began not with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or even Brown v. Board of Education, but the struggles of liberals and radicals against racial oppression in the 1930s. These struggles, such as the Communist Party led campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, or the struggle of Blacks in the CIO for a “civil rights unionism,”² signaled a capacious understanding of the fight for racial justice, which included confronting class and gender oppression as well. In these campaigns, Hall argues, lie the origins of the civil rights movement.³

United Tobacco Workers protest R.J. Reynolds, 1946

Hall suggests that understanding the nature of the civil rights movement’s classical phase requires coming to terms with how this earlier movement was defeated. As a radical challenge to what Hall describes as “racial capitalism,” it should come as no surprise that this first wave of civil rights should have met with fierce opposition from the business class, defenders of white supremacy, and the US state. The anticommunist crusade, aided by liberal figures inside civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, broke the back of organizations which had been at the heart of radical challenges to Black oppression. Leftist figures like Paul Robeson were denounced in the the press, and groups like the anticolonialist Council on African Affairs were prosecuted by the government for being agents of a foreign power. The disorganization this repression visited on the Left led Hall to pronounce civil rights a “casualty” of the Cold War.⁴

Anticommunist repression thus decisively changed the character of civil rights struggle, marginalizing those with a more expansive vision of emancipation and encouraging groups like the NAACP to pursue a more narrowly legalistic strategy than they had in the mid-1940s. Even as it disorganized the left, however, Cold War repression did not succeed in completely isolating radical activists. As a great deal of research on the classical phase of the civil rights movement is now showing, figures like Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker, who were absolutely central to the movement, had substantial Old Left backgrounds and training which carried over into their work with the movement’s most recognizable leaders and institutions. Moreover, activists at the local level, who have increasingly displaced telegenic leaders like Dr. King as the focus of recent research, often brought to civil rights work their experience in the radical campaigns of the 1940s.⁵

Hall’s reconceptualization of civil rights thus extends the movement backwards in time, effectively positing two distinct, though intimately related, waves. The first, based in the radical challenges to racism of the thirties and forties, was closely linked with working class movements and supported by activists who often held a vision of total social transformation for the United States. After this movement was crushed by government repression, the classical phase of the movement emerged. This wave advanced more restricted goals than the earlier wave, but was still supported by a significant group of activists with ties to earlier radical organizing.

This vision of a long civil rights movement obviously has tremendous synthetic power. Yet the concept has also provoked criticism. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang have recently argued that, in its amalgamation of 1930s and 1960s struggles, the long movement concept resembles a vampire, in that “it exists outside of time and history, beyond the processes of life and death, and change and development.” According to this critique, “the continuous 1930s-1970s timeline theorized by Long Movement scholars ignores or minimizes the ruptures and fractures” wrought by government repression. Eric Arnesen advances a similar criticism, in addition to a more broadly political point that historians of the long movement tend to gloss over the Communist Left’s defects and ignoring its critics.⁶

As the above gloss on Hall’s presentation of the long movement concept makes clear, the critique of overly inclusive periodization largely fails to engage with long movement scholarship. Hall’s contention that civil rights were a “casualty” of the Cold War can hardly be described as downplaying or ignoring the effects of government repression. Indeed, documenting the rupture between the character of activism in the earlier era and the classical phase of the movement has been one of the hallmarks of long movement scholarship. Penny Von Eschen, for example, provides a detailed account of the ways that the racial discourse of groups like the NAACP shifted during the Cold War. Where they had once condemned the exploitation and oppression that white supremacy entailed, by the 1950s their descriptions of racism evoked Myrdalian moral dilemmas or organic metaphors of “the virus of prejudice,” both of which took race out of history. Similarly, Martha Biondi has described how anticommunism in New York City led the NAACP to move away from popular forms of protest such as picketing, which officials feared was too open to Leftist infiltration. Finally, Glenda Gilmore’s Defying Dixie, which presents an impressively researched account of the long movement to an audience beyond the academy, argues that “virulent southern anti-Communism…eviscerated postwar social justice movements and truncated the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s.” In the face of this body of work, Cha-Jua and Long’s contention that “Long Movement scholars generally fail to engage these issues of postwar anticommunist repression” is simply unsustainable.⁷

Eric Arnesen’s criticism of long movement periodization is similarly misdirected. In an attempted reductio ad absurdum, Arnesen asks why scholars stop at World War I, and don’t include Reconstruction-era struggles or uprisings on slave ships as part of the long movement. The point of long movement scholarship, however, is not simply that African Americans fought against racism before the classic civil rights movement. Indeed, this point is taken for granted by virtually everyone who currently studies Black history. Rather, long movement scholars emphasize that, in the decades prior to the classic movement, activists challenged white supremacy in such a fashion that their struggle shaped the next wave in two key ways: first, the earlier wave of civil rights activism won a number of important victories that changed the shape of later struggle, and second, the earlier wave produced institutions and trained activists that would go on to play an absolutely central role in the later wave. These relations, not the abstract fact of struggle, are what lends support to long movement scholarship’s linking of the 1940s with the 1960s.

Arnesen’s political critique attempts to rehabilitate the perspective of anticommunist Black activists such as A. Philip Randolph, who he contends have been marginalized by long movement scholars overly enamored with groups and individuals linked to the Communist Party. These figures, he argues, were not merely dupes of J. Edgar Hoover, but important Black progressives who had a deep critique of communist cynicism towards Black rights and complicity with Stalinist repression abroad. For Arnesen, the question must be asked: “So where do Randolph and his non-communist allies fit into the new narrative of the long civil rights movement? The quick answer: awkwardly, when they fit at all.” As with the Cha-Jua and Long’s critique of periodization, this is simply a misrepresentation of long movement scholarship. Thomas Sugrue’s recent Sweet Land of Liberty, for example, which presents the civil rights struggle in the North to a popular audience, explicitly takes its cue from Hall’s long movement framework. Far from Randolph being marginalized in that text, he is discussed at length, receiving easily as much attention as the Communist Party. Nor is Randolph absent from other long movement scholarship. Indeed, it is telling that Arnesen never directly names any works that overlook Randolph’s contributions.⁸

A. Philip Randolph

On the political level, Arnesen’s promotion of Randolph runs into other problems. As Arnesen makes clear, Randolph’s critique of the Communist Party was not primarily based on the party’s backing off from militant civil rights struggle during World War II, but rather its support for the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. Neither of these actions by the party, however, appear to have damaged its ability to recruit and appeal to African Americans. As Bert Cochran has noted, the war years actually saw an increase in the percentage of Blacks among new recruits to the party, so that by 1944 they constituted fully thirty-seven percent of new members. While Randolph’s outrage over the party’s shifting lines with regard to race and war may have been justifiable, it does not appear to have prevailed among broad layers of the Black working class. Arnesen may well be correct that revisionist scholarship on the CP has not fully reckoned with the party’s failings regarding civil rights, but it is clear that Randolph’s perspective provides little help in understanding these failings.⁹

Existing critiques of long movement scholarship thus largely fail to engage with the key claims of the historiography. However, the long movement concept, especially as theorized by Hall, does possess a notable weakness: its relation to space.¹⁰ Aside from extending the movement’s periodization and reconsidering its relationship to the Left, a major theme of long movement scholarship has been the ways African American activists related to spaces outside the United States.¹¹ Yet Hall spends barely a paragraph on the global imaginaries of Black activists. As a consequence, the concept of a long movement expands the location occupied by civil rights in time, but does little to push the spatial boundaries of the movement beyond those theorized by earlier waves of scholarship, even as long movement scholarship has clearly called for just such a reconceptualization.

Paul Gilroy’s theorization of a “Black Atlantic” is suggestive in its ability to propose an alternative, “outer-national” space of Black struggle. Gilroy argues that the diasporic space of the Atlantic as a whole has framed Black experience in a way that simply cannot be captured through national heuristics. The international experiences and engagements of Black activists from Frederick Douglass to Richard Wright show that even when Black struggle is directed against profoundly national institutions such as American chattel slavery or the construction of Black ghettos, the contours of Black struggle cannot be explained without reference to the broader stage of the Black Atlantic. The histories of long movement activists like Paul Robeson, George Padmore, and Lorraine Hansberry confirm the importance of this “outer-national” framework.¹²

As helpful as Gilroy’s Black Atlantic is for moving the long movement outside the borders of the United States, it is ultimately insufficient for the task. Black internationalism, especially during the years long movement scholarship covers, ultimately went far beyond the framing of the Atlantic. Martin Luther King’s embrace of Gandhian satyagraha is only the most obvious way in which civil rights activists looked beyond the Atlantic for resources in their struggle. Gerald Horne has recently shown that King was far from alone among civil rights activists in his engagement with the Indian anticolonial struggle. Bill V. Mullen has gone so far as to propose a discourse of “Afro-Orientalism” as a sort of Eastern version of the Black Atlantic, to capture the ways in which Black activists engaged with India and China. In particular, his portrait of a “Bandung Detroit,” awash in the politics of decolonization, seems especially important for long movement scholars to take note of. If these works gesture towards the need to go beyond the Black Atlantic, none of them, in the end, provide formulations of sufficient rigor and breath to replace it.¹³

W.E.B. Du Bois meets the Chairman

The lack of attention that historians have paid to the formulations of literary critics like Mullen and, to a lesser extent, social theorists like Gilroy is also indicative of the ways in which the concept of the long civil rights movement can be extended. This essay will thus conclude with a comparison of Richard Wright’s Native Son and James Baldwin’s Another Country, works which could stand as representative cultural productions of the two waves of the movement. Additionally, I will consider the problems that arise from current periodizations of Black literature, and suggest how the concept of the long movement could contribute to solving these.

Native Son is easily the most famous work to come out of the Leftist milieu long movement scholars have described. Wright’s role in the Chicago John Reed Club, his relocation to Harlem and his ultimate disillusionment with the CP are all well known. Because of Wright’s prominence in the CP and the success of Native Son, the novel has come to stand in for the literary productions of the what Michael Denning has called “the cultural front” as a whole. Literary critics looking back on this movement have often seen didacticism and antimodernism as hallmarks of this literature, qualities they have often found in no short supply in Native Son. Yet such a reading does violence both to Wright’s novel and the broader movement. As Barbara Foley has argued, Native Son in fact has a much more complex formal structure than its common description as “naturalist” would imply. Though most of the novel is narrated from the limited perspective of Bigger’s consciousness, Wright also included the Communist lawyer Max’s lengthy closing argument, which presents an account of Bigger’s life that is not identical to the one to which readers have access through Bigger. Additionally, in every edition after the first, Wright included his essay “How Bigger Was Born,” which, unlike either Bigger’s story or Max’s summation, compares the book’s protagonist with the alienated and dispossessed youth of all races. As Foley notes, “[a]ll three perspectives upon Bigger’s experience coexist in the novel, vying for the reader’s consideration and judgment.”¹⁴

This multi-layered rhetorical structure places Native Son alongside works like John Dos Passos’ USA, the standard bearer for Leftist modernism. Like Dos Passos’ trilogy, Wright’s use of multiple perspectives allows his work to represent what Marxist critics have called the “totality,” or the whole complex of social processes and contradictions that compose a social formation. This aspiration to totality is replicated on the level of plot, as Bigger’s fear, flight, and fate take him from the segregated South Side of Chicago to the mansion of his white employers, and into a confrontation with the state in the courtroom climax. This plot structure allows Wright to draw a picture for the reader of the interactions of different classes and institutions in Bigger’s life, making clear the connection between the ‘philanthropic’ real estate baron and the crushing poverty in which Bigger’s family lives. Form and content thus interact in Native Son to present a total critique of American society, merging opposition to racial oppression and class exploitation in just the way that long movement activists sought to.¹⁵

James Baldwin’s Another Country is a very different sort of book. Well before it was published (1962), Baldwin had signaled his intention to create a different aesthetic from Wright. His essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” pilloried the older writer mercilessly, comparing Native Son to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The essay was published in Partisan Review (the first piece by an openly Black author in that venue), former journal of the New York John Reed Club which had, by the time of Baldwin’s piece, become solidly anticommunist. In fact, Partisan Review would go on to play an important role in articulating an American aesthetic meant to replace the literature of the Thirties. Valuing irony and ambiguity over social commitment or mimesis, the Partisan Review aesthetic dovetailed nicely with the reactionary agrarian philosophy of the New Criticism. Together, these critical currents marginalized the literary values which had inspired much of the cultural front. In effect, Partisan Review was a major part of the aesthetic wing of the ‘long backlash’ identified by Hall.¹⁶

Another Country fulfills a great deal of these critical expectations. On the most surface level, the book is dedicated to Mary S. Painter, a close friend of Baldwin’s who worked for the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. On a more substantial level, the novel’s plot concerns a group of friends, acquaintances, and lovers coming to terms with race, sex, and love in the aftermath of a friend’s suicide. The novel’s tight focus on this group of characters, who all seem to be Greenwich Village bohemians of one sort or another, is the opposite of Native Son’s expansive vision, running as it does from the ghetto to the mansion. While the novel focuses closely on the ways that race distorts human relationships, it is, in contrast to Native Son, almost silent on the class question. As Paul Goodman noted in a review at the time, “It is puzzling how most of Baldwin’s people make a living.” Other critics with radical affiliations were similarly disappointed. Langston Hughes, while conceding the novel’s emotional power, thought it a “curiously juvenile” book that focused too much on sex. Most famously, Eldridge Cleaver pronounced the novel “void of a political, economic, or even a social reference.”¹⁷

Yet just as long movement scholarship emphasizes the rupture that anticommunist repression created in the struggle against white supremacy, it also emphasizes the continuities that remained between the earlier wave and the classic phase. Such continuities exist in Baldwin’s work as well. Baldwin himself had something of a background in the Left, having joined the Trotskyist Young People’s Socialist League as a youth. While his tenure in the organized Left was brief, Baldwin would go on to be an important voice in the journal Freedomways, the theoretical journal of the classic phase of the movement. Edited by Esther Cooper Jackson, a veteran of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and wife of CP member James Jackson, Freedomways was the site of some of the strongest links between the civil rights unionism of the 1940s and the movement of the 1960s..¹⁸

James Baldwin, Joan Baez, and James Farmer, 1965

In light of such links to political radicalism, it is unsurprising that Another Country’s politics, like Native Son’s aesthetics, are more complicated than they at first appear. For one thing, class is not so absent from the novel as Goodman and Cleaver argue. While it’s true that Baldwin’s characters seem to have access to more money than their life styles would indicate, the legacy of Black poverty and exploitation appears in the novel through its suffusion with the voices of women blues singers. Throughout the novel, lyrical fragments from blues singers like Bessie Smith appear interspersed with the dialogue of the characters. As the characters sit in a club, Bessie sings “I wouldn’t mind being in jail but I’ve got to stay there so long,” testifying to the incarceration of Blacks outside the clubs. Later, a white character awakes to his Black girlfriend (a waitress, who is, significantly, the only main character in the novel who works for wages) singing “ If you can’t give me a dollar/Give me a lousy dime-/Just want to feed/This hungry man of mine,” a song that comments both on the poverty of Black households and Black women’s consequent entry into the labor market well before their white counterparts.¹⁹

Another Country also has moments of anger that seethe as much as Bigger Thomas ever did. When the father of the Rufus, the Black jazz musician who committed suicide, is presented with his son’s body, his wife asks him to pray. He shouts in response “Pray? Who, pray? I bet you, if I ever get anywhere near that white devil you call God, I’ll tear my son and my father [who was beaten to death with a hammer by a white railroad guard] out of his white hide!” Baldwin here foregrounds the violence of white supremacy, as well as the poverty of Black men (the father’s death strongly suggests he was a hobo). Baldwin’s characters can also be every bit as didactic as Wright’s, describing their lives in such a way that no white reader could miss the message. In a moment of interracial honesty, for example, Ida, the waitress, tells her white friend Cass her true feelings about white folks:

Shit. They keep you here because you’re black, the filthy white cock suckers, while they go around jerking themselves off with all that jazz about the land of the free and the home of the brave. And they want you to jerk yourself off with that same music, too, only keep your distance. Some days, honey, I wish I could turn myself into one big fist and grind this miserable country to powder. Some days, I don’t believe it has a right to exist.

As this passage indicates, Baldwin’s emphasis on the importance of sex, which so disturbed Cleaver and Hughes, could be harnessed to an anger at American racism as intense as their own.

The ruptures and continuities between Baldwin and Wrights’ works line up suggestively with those foregrounded by the concept of a long civil rights movement. They also point to a way of periodizing African American literature that is more coherent than current efforts. The current edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, a text that largely sets the terms for such periodization, lists both Wright and Baldwin under the same period, which the editors (Nellie Y. McKay and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) label “Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, 1940-1960.” As they themselves readily acknowledge, such a melange of genres is essentially arbitrary. Encompassing a range of aesthetics which are largely opposed to one another, the label mixes together writers such as Baldwin, Ellison, and Wright, whose primary relations to one another were often gestures of disaffiliation. Furthermore, by using form as the primary means of dividing writers, it encourages the mis-reading of books like Native Son, whose obvious naturalist tendencies should not cause us to overlook its modernist features.²⁰

A periodization which bases itself on long movement scholarship might look at the years surrounding mid-century differently. Recognizing the importance of the labor left to the first wave of civil rights struggle, as well as the connection of virtually every major Black cultural figure to the movement during this period, such a periodization would see a decisive break in the late 1940s. The thorough disorganization of the movement during these years, combined with the CP’s success in alienating its most talented Black authors (Wright and Ellison), could mark a transition point, when the radical Black aesthetics of the thirties and forties were displaced by the rise of a liberal Black modernism. Heartily encouraged by the institutions of the cultural Cold War, this new aesthetic would repudiate the social commitment of earlier writers in favor of protagonists who are largely equivocal about the society in which they live.²¹

Just as Baldwin (who had done as much as anyone to marginalize Wright and the socially committed work of the Black Popular Front) would retain important radical moments in his work, however, Black literature as a whole was not utterly purged of its radicalism by the McCarthy years. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, for example, was partially a product of Hansberry’s involvement with the Freedom group, comprised of mostly Black writers centered around Paul Robeson. By using the long movement framework as a guide to periodizing Black literature, scholars could avoid the admitted artificiality of current efforts, and account for the continuities and discontinuities in cultural production at mid-century.

The concept of a long civil rights movement thus has a great deal to offer scholarship on Black politics and culture during the twentieth century. Its ability to reshape discussions of Black cultural production has yet to be appreciated, though it clearly has a great deal to contribute in this area once literary scholars take note of what historians have been up to. Though an adequate theorization of space within the concept has yet to appear, this lacuna has not prevented long movement scholars from definitively pushing the boundaries of civil rights outside the United States. The need for such a reconceptualization is not merely academic. As the controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s birth certificate has shown, those who support America’s racial status quo have a healthy interest in questions of space as well. If long movement scholarship is to succeed in its aim of destabilizing the racial narrative that supports such controversies, it will ultimately have to grapple with the same questions of culture and space that the heirs of the backlash do.

1Ironically, Obama’s friendship with Davis was brought to the attention of the right wing partially by radical historian Gerald Horne, who described it in his talk at the 2007 reception of the Communist Party-USA archives at New York University’s Tamiment Library. See Horne, “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party,” http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5047/1/32/

2The struggle of the Communist Party and its allies against racism was introduced into the historical discussion primarily by Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Great Depression and Robing D.G. Kelley Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Randi Storch brings the Midwest into the story in Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 1928-1935.

3Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” Journal of American History. 91.4 (2005) pg 1235. Though most of the scholarship Hall discusses under the long movement rubric was published in the mid-nineties or after, there were important anticipations of the concept as early as the mid-1980s. See Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990; and Robert Korstad and Alex Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of American History 75.3 (December 1988), pp 786-811 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984)

4Hall, 1249. For accounts of civil rights casualties of the Cold War, see Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Colonialism, Ch. 7, and especially Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight, Chs. 7-8.

5On Baker and Rustin, see respectively Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement and John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet. For local struggles, see Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom and Michael K. Honey, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle.

6Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies.” Journal of African-American History 92.2 2007, 271. See also, Eric Arnesen “Reconsidering the ‘Long Civil Rights Movement’” Historically Speaking 10.2 2009. pgs 31-34; and “No ‘Graver Danger’: Black Anticommunism, the Communist Party, and the Race Question” and “The Red and the Black: Reflections on the Responses to ‘No Graver Danger,’” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 3, No. 4 (Winter 2006). Ironically, Kevin Boyle makes the exact opposite criticism of long movement scholarship, arguing that it exaggerates the differences between the character of struggle in the 1940s and the 1960s. See Kevin Boyle, “Labour, the left, and the long civil rights movement.” Social History 30, No. 3 (August 2005), 366-372.

7Von Eschen, 145-159. Biondi, 189. Gilmore, 8. Cha-Jua and Long, 272. Cha-Jua and Long attempt to make their case by examining Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodward’s collections Freedom North and Groundwork. Cha-Jua and Long note that only three articles in these two collections cover the period between 1947 and 1955. Yet as the above summary makes clear, such a lacuna is hardly characteristic of long movement scholarship.

8Arnesen, “Reconsidering,” 33. In his introduction, Sugrue announces that he has been “inspired by the work of a new generation of civil rights historians, most of them focusing on the South, who have challenged the tired chronologies of that region’s battle over Jim Crow.” He also cites Hall specifically for her theorization of the long movement. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle in the North (New York: Random House, 2008). pg xix.

9For CP membership data during the war, see Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977), pg 228.

10Cha-Jua and Long critique long movement scholarship on a spatial basis for its alleged elision of differences between the conditions of civil rights struggle in the North and in the South. Hall, however, is quite clear on the differences in race and class structure in different regions, noting that the “plantation metaphor” of oppression failed to describe conditions in areas where migrants from the South arrived. See Cha-Jua and Long, pg 281-283; and Hall, 1240.

11See, for example, Von Eschen, Race Against Empire and Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960; Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie; Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates During the Civil Rights Era. Interestingly, Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Roots, Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America suggests that whiteness in this period had a similarly international character, as white ethnics claimed their linkages with European homelands as a way of distancing themselves from whiteness. Thus, the ‘long backlash’ Hall describes has an international component that goes well beyond the Cold War pressures she identifies.

12Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993). Additionally, Gilroy’s theorization of the Black Atlantic is meant to destabilize nationalist discourses of race in a way that is strikingly congruent with Hall’s project of making civil rights “harder.”

13See Gerald Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), esp. Ch. 3. Vijay Prashad provides a broader view of Black engagements with Asia in his Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). Kate Baldwin has extended Gilroy’s framework to include the Soviet Union in her Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain. (Durham: Duke UP, 2002), but her inattention to the actual politics of her subjects mars the attempt. Robin Kelley notes that Black history has always had a global perspective in Kelly, “But a Local Phase of a World Problem: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950” Journal of American History 86.3 (December 1993), pgs 1045-1077. Gerald Horne outlines possible avenues of study for future global research in Afro-American history in Horne, “Towards a Transnational Research Agenda for African American History in the 21^st Century’ Journal of African American History 91.3 (2006), pgs 288-304.

14Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941. (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) pgs 209-212. Foley also demonstrates conclusively that there was no generalized antipathy to modernism among writers associated with the CP. For an excellent account of the the relation of modernist poetry and radicalism, see Alan Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960. (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2008), Ch. 1. Michael Denning’s incredible The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. (New York: Verso, 1998) remains the best book yet written on“culture in “the age of the CIO.”

15The classic work on the Marxist theory of totality in literature is Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). Lukács’ description of the way writers of the historical novel like Scott were able to create a picture of social totality through the interaction of their protagonists with multiple social layers is suggestively similar to Wright’s practice in Native Son, though Wright almost certainly never read Lukács. See Lukács, Ch. 1 Sec. 2.

16For more on the critical consensus of the Cold War, see Thomas Hill Schaub, American Fiction in the Cold War. (Madison: University of Madison Press, 1991); Lawrence Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism. (Nashville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); and Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996 [2^nd Ed.]), pg 43.

17On Baldwin’s relationship to Painter, see Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement. (New York: Norton, 2001), pg 93. Paul Goodman review, “Not Enough of a World to Grow in,” appeared in the New York Times on June 24^th, 1962. For Hughes’ assessment, see Herb Boyd, Baldwin’s Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008) pgs. 40-41. Cleaver’s attack on Baldwin, “Notes on a Native Son,” was published as part of his Soul on Ice.

18On Freedomways and the Left, see James Smethurst, “SNYC, Freedomways, and the Influence of the Popular Front in the South on the Black Arts Movement.” Reconstruction 8.1 (2008). <http://reconstruction.eserver.org/081/smethurst.shtml> Smethurst’s authoritative The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2005) maps in detail the linkages between Old Left artistic practices and persons and the militant art of the Black Power era.

19On the class politics of women’s blues, see Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrue “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. (New York: Vintage, 1999).

20Nellie Y. McKay and Henry Lous Gates, Jr. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2^nd Ed. (New York, Norton, 2003) pgs 1355-1368.

21Barbara Foley’s forthcoming Wrestling with Prometheus: Ralph Ellison, the Left, and the Making of “Invisible Man” promises to provide an in-depth picture of the move from the aesthetics of the Black Left to those promoted by the New Criticism by one of the most important writers of this period.

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Baldwin on Palestine

I apologize for the rather meager fare which has been on offer here of late. A post is coming soon, I promise, on Richard Wright, communism, and the blues. Until then, here’s a passage from James Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head (1978), in which he addresses the subject of terrorism.

I was traveling before the days of electronic surveillance, before the hijackers and terrorists arrived.  For the arrival of these people, the people in the seats of power have only themselves to blame.  Who, indeed, has hijacked more than England has, for example, or who is more skilled in the uses of terror than my own unhappy country?  Yes, I know: nevertheless, children, what goes around comes around, what you send out comes back to you.  A terrorist is called that only because he does not have the power of the State behind him – indeed, he has no State, which is why he is a terrorist.  The State, at bottom, and when the chips are down, rules by means of a terror made legal – that is how Franco ruled so long, and is the undeniable truth concerning South Africa.  No one called the late J. Edgar Hoover a terrorist, though that is precisely what he was: and if anyone wishes, now, in this context, to speak of “civilized” values or “democracy” or “morality,” you will pardon this poor nigger if he puts his hand before his mouth, and snickers – if he laughs at you.  I have endured your morality for a very long time, am still crawling up out of that dungheap: all that the slave can learn from his master is how to be a slave, and that is not morality.

Reading this passage today, one is struck by the force of its prescience.  Twenty years before 9/11, Baldwin utterly eviscerated Bush and now Obama’s pious apologias for the War on Terror.  The contemporary relevance of the passage, however, can obscure its own context, which is just as notable.  Baldwin’s emphases here, on stateless peoples and hijackings, make it clear that the occasion for his reflections is the Palestinian struggle, which during the 1970s especially took the form of hijackings meant to draw international attention to the occupation.

Palestine came to be a prominent issue during the Black Power years, as Black radicals who identified with anticolonial movements embraced the Palestinian struggle against Israel.  This embrace led to allegations of anti-semitism (which were not always unjustified) against Black Power figures, ultimately culminating in Johnson Publications’ decision to shut down Black World, an important Black cultural and political journal, over a supposedly anti-semitic article about Zionism.  In this context, Baldwin’s writings on the subject, though brief, display a remarkable clarity of focus, as he unhesitatingly declares that Israel represents imperialism, not Jewish self-determination.

Thus in 1972, in his essay “Take Me to the Water,” Baldwin recounted his reasons for not settling in Israel when he became an expatriate in the late 1940s:

And if I had fled, to Israel, a state created for the purpose of protecting Western interests, I would have been in a yet tighter bind: on which side of Jerusalem would I have decided to live?

Here Baldwin displays an awareness that, in 1948, most of the Left still lacked.  When he made the decision to flee the United States, Baldwin realized he could scarcely accomplish his goal by settling in a country then replicating our own bloody frontier days.  Indeed, Baldwin’s clarity on this question stands out from almost any analysis on the Left during the period of Israel’s birth, with the notable exception of Tony Cliff.

Baldwin’s most substantial writing on Palestine came in 1979, with his “Open Letter to the Born Again.”  This letter was occasioned by Jimmy Carter’s dismissal of Martin Luther King’s former aid Andrew Young from his position as ambassador to the UN because of his decision to meet with a PLO delegation.  Baldwin is again clear on the circumstances of Israel’s birth:

Jews and Palestinians know of broken promises.  From the time of the Balfour Declaration (during World War I) Palestine was under five British mandates, and England promised the land back and forth to the Arabs or the Jews, depending on which horse seemed to be in the lead.  The Zionists – as distinguished from the people known as the Jews – using, as someone put it, the ‘available political machinery,’ i.e., colonialism, e.g., the British Empire – promised the British that, if the territory were given to them, the British Empire would be safe forever.

But absolutely no one cared about the Jews, and it is worth observing that non-Jewish Zionists are very frequently anti-Semitic.

Baldwin goes on to speak of Europe’s history of anti-semitism, the civilizational links between the Inquisition and Franco.  The situation in Palestine, he makes clear, is not the result of terrorism or Jewish malfeasance, but European imperialism:

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of Western interests.  This is what is becoming clear (I must say it was always clear to me).  The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’  and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years…The collapse of the Shah not only revealed the depth of pious Carter’s concern for ‘human rights,’ it  also revealed who supplied oil to Israel, and to whom Israel supplied arms.  It happened to be, to spell it out, white South Africa.

Baldwin’s sharp sense for geopolitics, his grasp of the gulf which separates Jewishness from Zionism, and his willingness to locate the source of the problem in 1948 (‘for more than thirty years’) all would put him on the Left edge of the Palestine solidarity movement today.  Thirty years ago, in the United States, he must have felt as if he resided in the most desolate political wilderness.  Studied today as a writer of sexuality and gender, or of civil rights, Baldwin’s international radicalism remains in the hinterlands.  Those of us struggling too make good on his vision of real justice in the Middle East have a right and a duty today to claim Baldwin’s voice for our side, and in doing so help bring his radicalism the recognition it deserves.

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James Baldwin on History

Baldwin in Paris

If I had to pick a favorite writer, it would probably be James Baldwin.  His 1972 essay, “Take Me to the Water,” is simply one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing that I’ve ever read.  It’s a long, angry meditation on race and history, ranging from the killings of Malcolm and Martin to France and Algeria.  While all of Baldwin’s writings engage the question of oppression and what it does both to its perpetrators and its victims, in this essay he is exceptionally clear on what the existence of oppression means for history.  In the quote below, he compresses his argument into a few sentences.  He begins by talking about Faulkner’s relationship to Southern history:

He is seeking to exorcise a history which is also a curse.  He wants the old order, which came into existence through unchecked greed and wanton murder, to redeem itself without further bloodshed – without, that is, any further menacing itself – and without coercion.  This, old orders never do, less because they would not than because they cannot.  They cannot because they have always existed in relation to a force which they have had to subdue.  This subjugation is the key to their identity and the triumph and justification of their history, and it is also on this continued subjugation that their material well-being depends.  One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same as seeing that, for millions of people, this history – oneself – has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave.  It is not so easy to see that, for millions of people, life itself depends on the speediest possible demolition of this history, even if this means the leveling, or the destruction of its heirs.

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