Amiri Baraka's Last Play "Most Dangerous Man in America" About the Government's Persecution of W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) Is Now In Production in New York

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/theater/amiri-barakas-play-about-w-e-b-du-bois-via-woodie-king-jr.html?_r=0

Theater

Amiri Baraka’s Play About W. E. B. Du Bois, via Woodie King Jr. 
by ERIC GRODE
MAY 13, 2015
New York Times

The director and producer Woodie King Jr. at a rehearsal of “Most Dangerous Man in America.” Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Even a relentlessly adventurous producer and director like Woodie King Jr. was bound to reach a breaking point when it came to Amiri Baraka.

For a half century, ever since Mr. King had his theater shut down and was nearly arrested in 1964 for presenting Mr. Baraka’s “The Toilet” in Detroit, the two men had brought to the stage a barrage of incendiary characters and themes. A middle-aged Tarzan, a Faustian Sidney Poitier, a slave ship, what Mr. Baraka called a “coon show”: These and many other theatrical Molotov cocktails found their way into works at Mr. King’s New Federal Theater and elsewhere.

But the last script that Mr. Baraka, who died in January 2014, handed Mr. King, “Most Dangerous Man in America (W. E. B. Du Bois),” was another matter altogether. The subject matter was no surprise: the revered African-American scholar and civil rights activist Du Bois, whose evolution from black nationalism to Marxism closely paralleled Mr. Baraka’s own.

Its size, however, was.

Amiri Baraka, who wrote the play. He died in 2014. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

“This thing was 250 pages long,” said Mr. King, whose theater has provided an early theatrical home for notables like Ed Bullins, Ntozake Shange and David Henry Hwang. “Ossie Davis was doing the initial reading, and he and Baraka just got into it: ‘Look, you can’t give an actor no 250-page play!’ “ (Going by the page-a-minute rule, it would have run over four hours.)

That first reading was roughly a decade ago. Mr. Baraka came back a year later with a 90-page draft, having jettisoned reams of courtroom  material and several characters, including Paul Robeson. Finally, at a 2013 arts festival in Atlanta, he gave Mr. King a lean but no less wide-ranging 50-page version.

This final iteration — or one very close to it — begins previews on May 28 at the Castillo Theater, the New Federal’s most recent home. It comes on the heels of a New Federal revival of “Dutchman,” the 1964 play that vaulted Mr. Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) to stardom.

Despite Mr. Baraka’s success as a playwright, Mr. King said the two men had bonded over music rather than theater. “We mostly talked about what clothes the jazz musicians wore,” he said. Having mutual friends like Langston Hughes also paved the way for a long-lasting friendship that would include collaborating on literary anthologies and documentaries.

“Most Dangerous Man” focuses on a period in Du Bois’s life with particular resonance for Mr. Baraka. Just as his September 11-themed poem “Somebody Blew Up America” turned a fairly comfortable late-career job into a political firestorm, Du Bois, at 82, found his status as America’s leading black intellectual threatened in 1950 when he became chairman of a nuclear disarmament group and was accused of being an agent of a foreign state.

The ensuing indictment led to the confiscation of Du Bois’s passport and the rejection of many of his colleagues at the N.A.A.C.P. (a group he helped found). Mr. Baraka’s play, which still has a cast of 18 despite the trims, bounces between Du Bois’s trial and groups of working-class African-Americans reacting to the news of the trial on television and in newspapers.

Du Bois also steps forward on occasion to speak words from his speeches and writings. It was these rather sizable chunks of material that gave Mr. King pause. “In all of my conversations with Baraka, the hardest thing in the world was to find a Du Bois,” he said. “No 80-year-old can do that part.”

Art McFarland stars in “Most Dangerous Man in America,” as W. E. B. Du Bois. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

By the time he had raised the funding (in part through a Kickstarter campaign) to present “Most Dangerous Man,” a new Du Bois had surfaced in Art McFarland, who had retired from his decades-long newscaster position at WABC in 2014 and soon joined the New Federal’s board.

“My plan was to gradually ease my way back into acting,” said Mr. McFarland, who had trained as an actor before entering journalism and who had caught Mr. King’s eye during at least one of those early productions. “When Woodie called me about playing Du Bois for my first show, I spent the rest of the weekend with my jaw hanging open.”

Mr. Baraka converted to Marxism in the early 1970s, decades after he had inaccurately but presciently received a dishonorable discharge from the Air Force on suspicions of being a Communist. This conversion, Mr. King said, had everything to do with exposure to Du Bois’s writing.

And when Mr. Baraka was sold on something, he set out to convert friends as well as audiences. “Every once in a while,” Mr. King said, “Baraka would call you at 3 a.m. and say, ‘Hey, man, pick up “The Souls of Black Folk” and call me back.’ ”

This history reverberates through “Most Dangerous Man,” particularly as an elderly Du Bois looks back on his life. “I have been despised for so long for being black,” he says in the play, “that to tell me you will despise me because now I declare myself officially Red, does not faze me in the least.” (“I like to think Baraka had some fun sticking that line in there,” Mr. McFarland said.)

A continued commitment to Mr. Baraka’s work signals that the New Federal Theater, in its 46th year, hasn’t abandoned the hunger for experimentation and political inquiry that paved the way for works like “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” and “The Taking of Miss Janie.”

In fact, “Dutchman” has been the subject of periodic radical suggestions from Mr. King, including the proposed casting of the drag performer Neil Flanagan as the female lead in the 1970s, something its author never let him forget. “Amiri would stand up places and introduce me, ‘Here’s the man wants to mess up my play,’ “ Mr. King said.

Forty years after looking to take some liberties with Mr. Baraka’s first play, Mr. King is toeing the line with his last one. “These are the words that Du Bois gave, and these are the words that Baraka wrote,” he said. “This is real stuff.”

Amiri Baraka, reading from his play, "Most Dangerous Man In America"
February 23, 2013:

In February 2013, Clark Atlanta University hosted an international conference, "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Wings of Atlanta," which celebrated the birthday of Dr. Du Bois and commemorated the 50th Anniversary of his passing. The gathering was held on the campus where Du Bois spent 23 years as faculty. After four days of dialogue featuring 150 speakers on 30 panels, Amiri Baraka gave the keynote address. Baraka read from his play in production at the time, “Most Dangerous Man in America,” about the trial of Du Bois, prosecuted (persecuted) for his peace activism. Mr. Baraka joined the Ancestors on January 9, 2014. This 15-minute clip is an excerpt from a documentary in production by CAU professors, Drs. Shawn Bulloch and Stephanie Evans.

Cultural Historian and Literary Critic William J. Maxwell On the Notorious Role of the FBI in Spying On And Attempting To Supress African American Writers And Their Work from 1919-1972,: Part Two

https://www.rawstory.com/2015/02/new-documents-show-the-fbi-spied-on-notorious-negro-writers-for-decades/

 

New documents show the FBI spied on ‘notorious negro’ writers for decades
by Alison Flood,
The Guardian
09 Feb 2015

Poet Claude McKay, from Spring in New Hampshire, 1920 (Wikimedia Commons)

Newly declassified documents from the FBI reveal how the US federal agency under J Edgar Hoover monitored the activities of dozens of prominent African American writers for decades, devoting thousands of pages to detailing their activities and critiquing their work.

Academic William Maxwell first stumbled upon the extent of the surveillance when he submitted a freedom of information request for the FBI file of Claude McKay . The Jamaican-born writer was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, author of the sonnet If We Must Die, supposedly recited by Winston Churchill, and Maxwell was preparing an edition of his complete poems. When the file came through from the FBI, it stretched to 193 pages and, said Maxwell, revealed “that the bureau had closely read and aggressively chased McKay” – describing him as a “notorious negro revolutionary” – “all across the Atlantic world, and into Moscow”.

Maxwell, associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St Louis, decided to investigate further, knowing that other scholars had already found files on well-known black writers such as Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. He made 106 freedom of information requests about what he describes as “noteworthy Afro-modernists” to the FBI; 51 of those writers had files, ranging from three to 1,884 pages each

“I suspected there would be more than a few,” said Maxwell. “I knew Hoover was especially impressed and worried by the busy crossroads of black protest, leftwing politics, and literary potential. But I was surprised to learn that the FBI had read, monitored, and ‘filed’ nearly half of the nationally prominent African American authors working from 1919 (Hoover’s first year at the Bureau, and the first year of the Harlem Renaissance) to 1972 (the year of Hoover’s death and the peak of the nationalist Black Arts movement). In this, I realised, the FBI had outdone most every other major institution of US literary study, only fitfully concerned with black writing.”

Maxwell’s book about his discovery, FB Eyes: How J Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, is out on 18 February from Princeton University Press . It argues that the FBI’s attention was fuelled by Hoover’s “personal fascination with black culture”, that “the FBI is perhaps the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African American literature”, and that “African American literature is characterised by a deep awareness of FBI ghostreading”.

Princeton said that while it is well known that Hoover was hostile to Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, Maxwell’s forthcoming book is the first exposé of “the extent to which the FBI monitored and influenced African American writing” between 1919 and 1972.

Taking its title from Richard Wright’s 1949 poem The FB Eye Blues, in which the Native Son novelist writes that “every place I look, Lord / I find FB eyes / I’m getting sick and tired of gover’ment spies”, the work also posits that for some authors, suspicion of the surveillance prompted creative replies.

Digital copies of 49 of the FBI files have been made available to the public online. “The collected files of the entire set of authors comprise 13,892 pages, or the rough equivalent of 46 300-page PhD theses,” Maxwell writes in the book. “FBI ghostreaders genuinely rivalled the productivity of their academic counterparts.”

The academic told the Guardian that he believes the FBI monitoring stems from the fact that “from the beginning of his tenure at the FBI … Hoover was exercised by what he saw as an emerging alliance between black literacy and black radicalism”.

“Then there’s the fact that many later African American writers were allied, at one time or another, with socialist and communist politics in the US,” he added, with Wright and WEB Du Bois both becoming Communist Party members, Hughes a “major party sympathiser”, and McKay “toasted by Trotsky and published in Russian as a significant Marxist theorist”.

The files show how the travel arrangements of black writers were closely scrutinised by the FBI, with the passport records of a long list of authors “combed for scraps of criminal behaviour and ‘derogatory information’”, writes Maxwell. Some writers were threatened by “‘stops’, instructions to advise and defer to the Bureau if a suspect tried to pass through a designated point of entry” to the US.

When McKay went to the Soviet Union, a “stop notice” instructed that the poet should be held for “appropriate attention” if he attempted to re-enter the US. In Baltimore, writes Maxwell, FBI agents “paraded their seriousness in a bulletin sent straight to Hoover, boasting of a clued-in ‘Local Police Department’ on the ‘lookout’ for one ‘Claude McKay (colored)’ (23 Mar. 1923)”.

They also reveal how, with the help of informers, the agency reviewed works such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man before publication.

“What did the FBI learn from these dossiers? Several things,” said Maxwell. “Where African American writers were travelling, especially during their expatriate adventures in Europe, Africa, and Latin America. What they were publishing, even while it was still in press.” In the 1950s, he said, the FBI aspired to “a foreknowledge of American publishing so deep that literary threats to the FBI’s reputation could be seen before their public appearance”.

The bureau also considered “whether certain African Americans should be allowed government jobs and White House visits, in the cases of the most fortunate”, and “what the leading minds of black America were thinking, and would be thinking”.

But, he added, “the files also show that some FBI spy-critics couldn’t help from learning that they liked reading the stuff, for simple aesthetic reasons”.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/new-documents-show-the-fbi-spied-on-notorious-negro-writers-for-decades/

“The collected files of the entire set of authors comprise 13,892 pages, or the rough equivalent of 46 300-page PhD theses,” Maxwell writes in the book. “FBI ghostreaders genuinely rivalled the productivity of their academic counterparts.”

http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/

The F.B. Eyes Digital Archive makes available for the first time a collection of 49 FBI files on prominent African American authors and literary institutions unearthed through William J. Maxwell's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Now part of the public domain as unrestricted U.S. government documents, these once-secret files are arranged on this site as they were at FBI national headquarters, under the names of individual authors and institutions. 


http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/

Description

Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on thousands of pages of recently released FBI files, William J. Maxwell’s book F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature exposes the Bureau's intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem's renaissance and Hoover's career at the Bureau, secretive FBI "ghostreaders" monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover's death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau's close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as F.B. Eyes reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century.

The F.B. Eyes Digital Archive makes available for the first time a collection of 49 FBI files on prominent African American authors and literary institutions unearthed through William J. Maxwell's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Now part of the public domain as unrestricted U.S. government documents, these once-secret files are arranged on this site as they were at FBI national headquarters, under the names of individual authors and institutions.

The collected files of the authors alone comprise 13,892 pages, or the rough equivalent of forty-six 300-page PhD theses. If this seems a strange comparison, it should be noted that the average length of the 45 author files is a healthy 309 pages. FBI ghostreaders genuinely rivaled the productivity, if not always the insight, of their academic peers. The Bureau’s copious files addressing twentieth-century African American writing are documents of troubling state surveillance and sometimes-illegal counterintelligence. But they are also recognizably literary-critical documents, analytical encounters that cannot always resist the pleasures of the enemy text. William J. Maxwell is associate professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches modern American and African American literature. He is the author of New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism between the Wars and the editor of Claude McKay's Complete Poems. He can be reached at wmaxwell@wustl.edu.
  F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature is published and distributed by Princeton University Press: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10321.html.

Credits

The F.B. Eyes Digital Archive was built at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) in conjunction with William J. Maxwell's F.B. Eyes book project. Jaydee Lee scanned thousands of pages of FBI documents and contributed to the design of the exhibit. Paulo Loonin wrote and developed the Omeka digital archive. Technical and design assistance was provided by Shannon Davis at the WUSTL department of Digital Library Services. Summer fellowships from the Humanities Digital Workshop of the WUSTL School of Arts & Sciences supported the work of Jaydee and Paulo.

BALDWIN, JAMES
BARAKA, AMIRI (LEROI JONES)
BENNETT, GWENDOLYN
BROWN, FRANK LONDON
BROWN, LLOYD
BROWN, STERLING
CHILDRESS, ALICE
CLIFTON, LUCILLE
CRUSE, HAROLD
DAVIS, FRANK MARSHALL
DRAKE, ST. CLAIR
DU BOIS, SHIRLEY GRAHAM
DU BOIS, W.E.B.
DUNHAM, KATHERINE
DUREM, RAY [RAMÓN]
ELDER, LONNE, III
ELLISON, RALPH
FRAZIER, E. FRANKLIN
FULLER, HOYT
HANSBERRY, LORRAINE
HARRINGTON, OLLIE
HERNTON, CALVIN
HIMES, CHESTER
HUGHES, LANGSTON
JEFFERS, LANCE
JOHNSON, CHARLES S.
JOHNSON, GEORGIA DOUGLAS
KAUFMAN, BOB
KILLENS, JOHN O.
MAYFIELD, JULIAN
MCKAY, CLAUDE
MOTLEY, WILLARD
MURRAY, PAULI
NEAL, LARRY P.
PATTERSON, LOUISE THOMPSON
PICKENS, WILLIAM
RANDALL, DUDLEY
RAZAF, ANDY
REDDING, J. SAUNDERS
ROGERS, J. A.
SCHUYLER, GEORGE S.
SMITH, WILLIAM GARDNER
WARD, THEODORE
WHITE, WALTER
WRIGHT, RICHARD

----------------------------

The FBI as Literary Critic

Chicago Humanities Festival

Perhaps the most surprising of J. Edgar Hoover’s many obsessions was his interest in African American writing. Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, Hoover and his G-men tried to anticipate political unrest through close readings and interpretations of such authors as Claude McKay, Richard Wright, and Sonia Sanchez. Washington University professor William J. Maxwell uncovers this long-hidden chapter in the history of American surveillance and American literature.

Cultural and Political Historian William J. Maxwell On the Notorious Role of the FBI in Spying On And Attempting To Supress African American Writers And Their Work from 1919-1972

All,

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING CRUCIAL INFORMATION. THEN READ THIS NEW GROUNDBREAKING BOOK AND PASS THE WORD...

Kofi

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10321.html

F.B. Eyes:
How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
by William J. Maxwell

Hardcover | 2015 | $29.95 / £19.95 | ISBN: 9780691130200
384 pp. | 6 x 9 | 

Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover’s white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI’s hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau’s intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem’s renaissance and Hoover’s career at the Bureau, secretive FBI “ghostreaders” monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover’s death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau’s close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as William J. Maxwell reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century.

Taking his title from Richard Wright’s poem “The FB Eye Blues,” Maxwell details how the FBI threatened the international travels of African American writers and prepared to jail dozens of them in times of national emergency. All the same, he shows that the Bureau’s paranoid style could prompt insightful criticism from Hoover’s ghostreaders and creative replies from their literary targets. For authors such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Sonia Sanchez, the suspicion that government spy-critics tracked their every word inspired rewarding stylistic experiments as well as disabling self-censorship.

Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, F.B. Eyes is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature.

William J. Maxwell is associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars and the editor of Claude McKay’s Complete Poems.

Endorsement:

"Anyone who spies William J. Maxwell's latest book is sure to have her or his eyes pop. F.B. Eyes is a fascinating study of the FBI's decades-long surveillance program targeting the who's who of the African American cultural scene. What we read as art, Hoover's G-Men coded as threats. In poring over black writers' output across the long arc of the civil rights struggle, the FBI's 'ghostreaders,' as diabolical as they were paranoid, added layers of weight to--and in some cases informed--the African American literary canon, which Maxwell reveals in an irresistible narrative steeped in investigative research."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

"F.B. Eyes is an exciting and important read: part detective story, part intelligence history, and part revisionist theory of black modernism. Throughout, William J. Maxwell proves to be a more rigorous and ingenious 'ghostreader' than Hoover ever was."--Mary Helen Washington, University of Maryland, College Park

"In this meticulously researched study, William J. Maxwell demonstrates how the luminaries of twentieth-century African American literature preoccupied the 'ghostreaders' of Hoover's FBI, who became some of the most assiduous critics of modern black writing. While making clear the abuses of FBI surveillance, Maxwell also illuminates the fascinating ways in which African American authors incorporated a critical awareness of spying into much of the literature they produced."--Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago

"Full of surprises of fact and interpretation, often wittily and memorably formulated, this awe-inspiringly well-researched book offers a completely new approach to FBI spying on black writers and to the readerly and scholarly habits of Hoover’s G-Men, who perversely come across as rather pioneering critics of African American literature. This book is an absolute delight to read."--Werner Sollors, Harvard University

More Endorsements

Table of Contents

Subject Areas:

American History
American Literature
Comparative Literature

The F.B. Eyes Digital Archive presents high-quality copies of forty-nine of the FBI files discussed in this book: http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-691-13020-0

F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
by William J Maxwell

At 1,884 pages, James Baldwin’s FBI file is the fattest among the “51 files on individual African-American authors and critics active during the Hoover years, 1919 to 1972” scrutinized in this bold, provocative study. Maxwell (New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars) uses the documents to probe the FBI’s “institutionalized fascination” with black authors like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Other writers treated here in depth include Claude McKay (“the earliest Afro-modernist author to impress his way into his own FBI file”), Richard Wright, John Williams, and Lorraine Hansberry, but going by this account, few, if any, working African-American writers entirely slipped past the FBI’s gaze during Hoover’s tenure. Maxwell weaves a complex narrative tapestry, incorporating the life stories of both Hoover and the FBI, as well as WWII-era harassment of the black press, the impact of McCarthyism, and the “utility of New Critical close reading” to FBI agents required to practice an unlikely kind of literary criticism in the pursuit of “subversives.” Scholars will find this densely written work a powerful take on African-American literature. Maxwell’s passion for the subject spills onto every page of his detailed, persuasive documentation that “the FBI [was] an institution tightly knit (not consensually) to African-American literature.” (Jan.)

http://chicagohumanities.org/events/2014/journeys/the-fbi-as-literary-critic
 

"The FBI as Literary Critic":

WILLIAM J. MAXWELL SPEAKS AT CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL OCTOBER 26, 2014 ON THE ROLE OF THE FBI IN SPYING ON AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITERS FROM 1919-1972
 
Journeys
Chicago Humanities Festival

The FBI as Literary Critic

VIDEO: William J. Maxwell

 

Perhaps the most surprising of J. Edgar Hoover’s many obsessions was his interest in African American writing. Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, Hoover and his G-men tried to anticipate political unrest through close readings and interpretations of such authors as Claude McKay, Richard Wright, and Sonia Sanchez, among many others. Washington University professor William J. Maxwell uncovers this long-hidden chapter in the history of American surveillance and American literature.

This program is presented in partnership with the Center for the Humanities at Washington University.

Image by Annie Dipert

Speakers and Performers

William J. Maxwell

William J. Maxwell is associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. An authority on the intersection of African American literature and American political history, he is the author of the award-winning book New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism between the Wars. His latest book, F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, based on 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, will be published by Princeton University Press in January 2015.

CHF Suggests
Related links and resources for further study
Leaders And Thinkers

William J. Maxwell
Faculty page at Washington University in St. Louis
Good Reads

Total Literary Awareness: How the FBI Pre-read African American Writing
Online Resources

FB Eyes [podcast]

This program is presented in partnership with the Center for the Humanities at Washington University.

This program was recorded on October 26, 2014 as part of the 25th Anniversary Chicago Humanities Festival, Journeys: http://chf.to/2014Journeys

See upcoming CHF events: http://chicagohumanities.org/

Help us subtitle and translate our videos: http://www.amara.org/en/profiles/vide...

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Like CHF on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/chicagohumani...

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New Books by Mary Helen Washington and Malcolm X On the Black Left, African American Literature, the Cold War, Social Revolution, And the Global Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism

The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s
by Mary Helen Washington

Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher:   Columbia University Press

April 8, 2014

ISBN-10: 0231152701
ISBN-13: 978-0231152709

Editorial Reviews:

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Considering that any effort to achieve racial equality was viewed as subversive in the Cold War era, is it any wonder that so many black artists and writers were viewed as Communists? Yet very little has been written about the black artists and writers who were surveilled, investigated, and blacklisted because of their beliefs and their work. Literary scholar Washington remedies that neglect with this engrossing look at six artists. Though some were Communist Party members and others not, they were all drawn to the Left’s appreciation of black folk culture and support for the ideal of self-determination, themes that figured prominently in their work. Washington profiles novelist and essayist Lloyd L. Brown, visual artist Charles White, playwright and novelist Alice Childress, poet and novelist Gwendolyn Brooks, novelist Frank London Brown, and novelist and activist Julian Mayfield. Tapping archival material, biographies, interviews, and FBI files, Washington examines his subjects’ aesthetic and relationships with other writers and artists and the black community as well as their frustrations with and ambivalent feelings about the Left. Photographs of the artists and their works and pages from FBI files enhance this compelling look at artists and writers who became part of the vanguard of the progressive politics and civil rights movement of the 1960s. --Vanessa Bush

Review
 

"A wonderful combination of careful research, adept historicizing, and insightful close reading. Mary Helen Washington's book brings needed critical attention to understudied figures and helps readers rethink the careers of others whom they believe they already know."

(James Smethurst, author of The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance and The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s)

"[A] compelling look at artists and writers who became part of the vanguard of the progressive politics and civil rights movement of the 1960s."

(Booklist (starred review))
 
"Groundbreaking...thought-provoking."

(Publishers Weekly (starred review))

See all Editorial Reviews

Review

"A groundbreaking and eye-opening study. In Washington's sure hands, biography, politics, and cultural history combine to open new intellectual vistas."

(Alan M. Wald, University of Michigan)

About the Author
 

Mary Helen Washington is a professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has been a Bunting Fellow at Harvard University and has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the editor of Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by Black Women Writers; Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers; Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women; and Memory of Kin: Stories of Family by Black Writers.

NEW BOOK:
 
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15270-9/the-other-blacklist
 
The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s
by Mary Helen Washington
Columbia University Press

April, 2014
Cloth, 368 pages, B & W Photos: 28
ISBN: 978-0-231-15270-9
$35.00 / £24.00

Mary Helen Washington recovers the vital role of 1950s leftist politics in the works and lives of modern African American writers and artists. While most histories of McCarthyism focus on the devastation of the blacklist and the intersection of leftist politics and American culture, few include the activities of radical writers and artists from the Black Popular Front. Washington’s work incorporates these black intellectuals back into our understanding of mid-twentieth-century African American literature and art and expands our understanding of the creative ferment energizing all of America during this period.

Mary Helen Washington reads four representative writers—Lloyd Brown, Frank London Brown, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks—and surveys the work of the visual artist Charles White. She traces resonances of leftist ideas and activism in their artistic achievements and follows their balanced critique of the mainstream liberal and conservative political and literary spheres. Her study recounts the targeting of African American as well as white writers during the McCarthy era, reconstructs the events of the 1959 Black Writers’ Conference in New York, and argues for the ongoing influence of the Black Popular Front decades after it folded. Defining the contours of a distinctly black modernism and its far-ranging radicalization of American politics and culture, Washington fundamentally reorients scholarship on African American and Cold War literature and life.

Related Subjects

American History
American Literature
Art History
Literary Criticism and Theory

About the Author

Mary Helen Washington is a professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has been a Bunting Fellow at Harvard University and has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the editor of Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by Black Women Writers; Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers; Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women; and Memory of Kin: Stories of Family by Black Writers.

https://www.abhmuseum.org/new-malcolm-x-diary-reveals-a-revolutionary-optimist/
 

New Malcolm X Diary Reveals a Revolutionary Optimist

On the 50th anniversary of the founding of his Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm X’s powerful ties to Africa and African leaders are explored.
 
BY TODD STEVEN BURROUGHS
July 1, 2014
The Root

Malcolm X on March 26, 1964
U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT MAGAZINE PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

 

While many in the civil rights movement community this summer are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, another important half-century milestone—and a significantly blacker, more radical one—was recently acknowledged in New York City: the founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm X’s political organization.

If Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of domestic social equality turned into a nightmare, Malcolm’s vision for black Americans to join the international community of Africans as an anti-Western bloc was quickly stifled with his 1965 assassination. The OAAU—patterned after the OAU, the Organization of African Unity—represented Malcolm’s domestic and international potential, a painful addition to the pile of 20th-century black historical what-ifs.

“Brother Malcolm was internationalizing the movement,” said event organizer A. Peter Bailey, who was only in his early 20s when he edited the OAAU’s newsletter, The Blacklash. “He was on a conscious effort to connect the struggle against racism in America to the struggle against colonialism internationally, especially in Africa.”

The OAAU event, which took place on June 28—the to-the-day 50th anniversary—at the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center (the former Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm was assassinated), came in the wake of a newly published diary of Malcolm X. The book, edited by journalist-historian Herb Boyd and writer Ilyasah Al-Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s six daughters, is called The Diary of Malcolm X: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, 1964. Finally freed from scholarly microfilm, the diary has been the subject of a court case between the authors and the publisher, Third World Press, and Malcolm’s other five daughters, who did not sign off on the book’s publication.

Malcolm’s diary paints the picture of a man eager to find his religious and political centers. Most of the first half of the book details his much-talked-about trip to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, while the second half—which takes place after the OAAU founding in New York—is more about his travels to Africa, where he meets more than 10 heads of state and is treated like a de facto ambassador of black America.

He had multiple goals: to educate the African leaders about the plight of African Americans; to get African leaders to denounce the United States because of Jim Crow and its accompanied violence, with the possibility of bringing the U.S. before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights; and to unite the Muslim and African worlds against Western imperialism, especially what Malcolm called “dollarism,” the funds the U.S. gave out to help, and ultimately silence, much of the Third World during the Cold War.

Malcolm was not allowed to address the 1964 OAU meeting in Cairo, but he did write and pass around a memorandum there detailing American racism. The OAU, in turn, did release a public condemnation of the United States for its treatment of African Americans.

“I find all the African delegates at all levels are strongly sympathetic to our cause,” he writes in a Wednesday, July 15, entry. “But American propaganda through the USIS [United States Information Service] has been powerful[,] influencing most of them to think we hate Africa & don’t identify with her in any way. Most of them are shocked by my strongly pro-African sentiments—shocked and elated.”

Bailey, who has written a new memoir of his time with Malcolm X, called Witnessing Brother Malcolm X, the Master Teacher: A Memoir, says of the period, “J. Edgar Hoover turned green when he heard of that [OAU] resolution.” He emphasized that Malcolm, whom he called a master of propaganda, stuck a needle in the eye of the United States with that act, making it harder for America to be seen as a bastion of democracy.

“He [Malcolm] was a black nationalist. He said it enough times,” said former OAAU member Earl Grant, now 84. “He was what people today would probably call an African nationalist.” Malcolm, said Grant, was in the tradition of black human rights activists such as back-to-Africa preacher Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, the crusading journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells, and the proto-Garveyite intellectual Hubert Henry Harrison.

The New York City event, during which letters and documents of the OAAU’s tenure were read, had a feeling of radical, analog nostalgia. It was both quaint and important to briefly revisit the days when people wrote and mailed letters and had telephone-exchange names. The period was one of great optimism, when all parts of the movement, radical to moderate, thought they were going to win and reshape America and the world in some fashion.

The OAAU and the diary were both part of that ’60s revolutionary optimism. The OAAU was much more than a paper organization but less than a fully functional protest group. The diary, as a collection of literal notes, gives us important insights not only into Malcolm’s thinking but also into his militant, anti-Western, anti-imperialist actions.

The more that can be learned about Malcolm’s domestic and international political goals, the less it will be said that all he did was make speeches in Harlem while others in the movement did concrete work. As black America approaches the 50th anniversary of his assassination next Feb. 21, these clarifying details can allow for much-needed new discussions about Malcolm now and beyond.

Todd Steven Burroughs, co-editor, with Jared Ball, of A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X, is a freelance writer based in Hyattsville, Md. He has taught at Morgan State and Howard universities. He can be reached at toddpanther@gmail.com.

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