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.

Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

Jules Dassin, Artist and Citizen: 1911-2008

All,

The following obituaries of the courageous blacklisted American director, writer, actor, and activist Jules Dassin, the maker of such wonderful and important films as Night and the City, Brute Force, The Naked City, Never on Sunday, and Rififi appeared on April 1. We pay homage to a man whose tireless dedication as artist and citizen always led him to fight for justice, creative expression, and political/aesthetic freedom and independence no matter where he was in the world and no matter what criminal "authorities" or governments tried to dictate otherwise. Goodbye Mr. Dassin. Your profound legacy can be found in both your life and work, which we deeply appreciate and honor.

Kofi

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/movies/01dassin.html?scp=1&sq=Jules+Dassin&st=nyt


Jules Dassin, Filmmaker on Blacklist, Dies at 96

By Richard Severo
New York Times
April 1, 2008

Jules Dassin, an American director, screenwriter and actor who found success making movies in Europe after he was blacklisted in the United States because of his earlier ties to the Communist Party, died Monday in Athens, where he had lived since the 1970s. He was 96.

A spokeswoman for Hygeia Hospital confirmed his death but did not give a cause, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Dassin is most widely remembered for films he made after he fled Hollywood in the 1950s, including “Never on Sunday” (1960), with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, whom he later married; “Topkapi” (1964), with Ms. Mercouri, Peter Ustinov and Maximilian Schell; and the 1954 French thriller “Rififi.”

But before his blacklisting he had also carved out a successful Hollywood career making noir movies like “Brute Force” (1947), a prison drama starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn; “The Naked City” (1948), an influential New York City police yarn that won Academy Awards for cinematography and editing; and “Thieves’ Highway” (1949), about criminals who try to coerce truckers in California.

Mr. Dassin’s last major effort before his exile was “Night and the City” (1950), a film shot in London starring Richard Widmark (who died last Monday) as a shady but naïve wrestling promoter and Francis L. Sullivan as a predatory nightclub owner. Some critics called it Mr. Dassin’s masterpiece.

“Dassin turned Londontown into a city of busted dreams and nightmare alleys,” Michael Sragow wrote on salon.com in 2000. “He mixed the fantastic and the real with masterly ease.”

The producer Darryl F. Zanuck had assigned the film to Mr. Dassin just as Mr. Dassin was to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He never did testify, but testimony by the directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle, who recalled Mr. Dassin’s Communist Party membership in the 1930s, was damning enough to sink his career.

Mr. Dassin left the United States for France in 1953 because, he said, he was “unemployable” in Hollywood. In Paris, unable to speak much more than restaurant French when he arrived, he encountered hard times and remained largely unemployed for five years. In need of money, he agreed to direct “Rififi,” a low-budget production about a jewelry heist. A memorable sequence is of the robbery itself, lasting about a half-hour and filmed without music or dialogue.

Mr. Dassin also acted in the movie, under the name Perlo Vita, playing an Italian safe expert. He won a best-director award for the film at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. By the time he wrote and directed “Never on Sunday,” a comedy about a good-hearted prostitute (Ms. Mercouri), the anti-Communist witch hunt in the United States had been discredited, and he had been accepted again.

Mr. Dassin also had a role in the movie, as a bookish American from — like Mr. Dassin himself — Middletown, Conn., who tries to reform the prostitute. His directing and screenwriting were nominated for Academy Awards.

The movie was a moneymaker and its title song was a hit, though some critics found the script predictable. Ms. Mercouri became Mr. Dassin’s second wife in 1966, two years after he directed her in “Topkapi,” another film about jewel thieves, the prize in this case being gems from the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul.

Jules Dassin was born in Middletown on Dec. 18, 1911, one of eight children of Samuel Dassin, an immigrant barber from Russia, and the former Berthe Vogel. Shortly after Jules was born, his father moved the family to Harlem. Jules attended Morris High School in the Bronx.

He joined the Communist Party in 1930s, a decision he recalled in 2002 in an interview with The Guardian in London. “You grow up in Harlem where there’s trouble getting fed and keeping families warm, and live very close to Fifth Avenue, which is elegant,” he told the newspaper. “You fret, you get ideas, seeing a lot of poverty around you, and it’s a very natural process.”

He left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler.

In the mid-1930s, Mr. Dassin studied drama in Europe before returning to New York, where he made his debut as an actor in the Yiddish Theater. He also wrote radio scripts.

He went to Hollywood shortly before World War II erupted in Europe and was hired as an apprentice to the directors Alfred Hitchcock and Garson Kanin. Soon he was directing films for MGM, including “Reunion in France,” a Joan Crawford vehicle with John Wayne in which her character comes to believe that her fiancé is a Nazi collaborator.

His later movies were often joint efforts with Ms. Mercouri. They included “He Who Must Die” (1957), about life overtaking a Passion play in a village on Crete; and “La Legge” (1959), a noirish melodrama with Gina Lollobrigida, Marcello Mastroianni and Yves Montand.

One film without Ms. Mercouri was “Up Tight!” (1968), a remake of a John Ford classic, “The Informer,” set in a poor black neighborhood, with a script by its star, Ruby Dee. It was Mr. Dassin’s first film in the United States since he had left.

The year before, Mr. Dassin had directed the Broadway musical comedy “Illya Darling,” based on “Never on Sunday,” for which Ms. Mercouri was nominated for a Tony Award. The couple lived in Manhattan during the run.

The same year, 1967, Ms. Mercouri, an ardent anti-Facist, lost her Greek citizenship for engaging in what Greece’s rightist government called “anti-national activities.” In 1970, Mr. Dassin was accused of sponsoring a plot to overthrow the junta. The charges were later dropped.

When the regime lost power in 1974, he and Ms. Mercouri returned from exile, which had been spent mainly in Paris. Ms. Mercouri entered politics, becoming a member of Parliament and later culture minister. They had homes in Athens and on the Greek island of Spetsai. Ms. Mercouri died in 1994. They had no children.

Mr. Dassin’s first marriage, to Beatrice Launer, from 1933 to 1962, ended in divorce. Their son, Joseph, who became a popular French singer, died in 1980. Mr. Dassin is survived by two other children from his first marriage, Richelle and Julie Dassin, an actress, as well as grandchildren.

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Dassin ran the Melina Mercouri Foundation, which tried to induce the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles, sculptures taken from the Parthenon nearly 200 years ago. In September, a museum is set to open at the foot of the Acropolis displaying plaster casts of the works.

Mr. Dassin ended his directing career in his late 60s on a disheartened note, when his film “Circle of Two” (1980) — about an aging artist (Richard Burton) who is infatuated with a teenage student (Tatum O’Neal) — did poorly at the box office. Mr. Dassin never made another film.

He had always been demanding of himself and often critical of his own work. In 1962, with his best films largely behind him, Mr. Dassin told Cue magazine: “Of my own films, there’s only one I’ve really liked — ‘He Who Must Die.’ That is, I like what it had to say. But that doesn’t mean I’m completely satisfied with it. I’d do it all over again, if I could.”


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company


Director Jules Dassin Dead at 96

Connecticut-born director Jules Dassin, who achieved his greatest fame after being blacklisted in the U.S. in the 1950s and becoming an exile abroad, has died in Athens at the age of 96. After leaving the U.S., he initially moved to Paris where he met and later married Greek actress Melina Mercouri. She starred in his most celebrated film, 1960's Never on Sunday, which he wrote and directed. He became such a part of European cinema in the years that followed that many Americans pronounced his name as if it were French. He and Mercouri settled in Greece following the overthrow of the military junta there in 1974, where they became one of the country's best loved couples. Mercouri eventually became the country's culture minister and Dassin became a Greek citizen. Mercouri died of lung cancer in 1994.

Director Jules Dassin Dies
1 April 2008 (WENN)

Filmmaker Jules Dassin has died following a short illness. He was 96. The American director passed away in an Athens, Greece hospital on Monday. Dassin, who is best known for his Oscar-winning 1960 movie Never On Sunday, was married to the late Greek actress and culture minister Melina Mercouri. Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis says, "Greece grieves the loss of a rare human being, an important creator and a true friend. His passion, energy, fighting spirit and nobility will never be forgotten." Dassin started his career as an actor and theatre producer; his breakthrough came when he became an assistant to legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. He moved to France in the early 1950s after he was named as part of Hollywood's "communist faction" during a House Of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing. Dassin went on to marry Mercouri, who starred in his Never On Sunday, which won the Oscar for Best Original Song and for which Dassin received two Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Writing, Story And Screenplay.