Vito Marcantonio Forum Kicks Off Rebel Girl Series with "Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Why Now?"

 

Professor Mary Anne Trasciatti gave a March 7, talk launching the second edition of civil rights activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s “My Life as a Political Prisoner.” 

The zoom event represented a first collaboration between the Vito Marcantonio Forum and Claudia Jones School for Political Education; “two educational and cultural political organizations sharing a vision that history matters,” said moderator Maria Lisella. 

Reissued by International Publishers, “My Life as a Political Prisoner: The Rebel Girl Becomes No.11710,” was first published as “The Alderson Story.” 

Trasciatti, who is a professor of writing studies and rhetoric at Hofstra University, and president of Remember the Triangle Coalition,is currently writing a book on Flynn for Rutgers University Press. 

She also contributed the forward to the new edition of Flynn’s prison memoir, which came out in 1963, one year before its author died. “Her experiences at the penitentiary for women is what the book is about,” Trasciatti told the online audience. 

The professor began with a discussion of Flynn's life and work. Born in 1890, her parents were socialists and fighters for Irish freedom who moved in a radical milieu, which led to her youthful entry into the world of political activism.

“The material conditions of her poverty and struggle, as well as the ideological education she received from her family and her friends,” Trasciatti observed, “were the foundations for Flynn’s deep understanding of the inequalities that pervaded U.S. society and politics and of her broad international vision.” 

The professor spoke of a life divided in two parts; the first being “The Rebel Girl,” when Flynn adhered to syndicalist principles and direct action, rather than electoral politics. 

At 16, Flynn signed on with the Industrial Workers of the World union -- the Wobblies -- described by Trasciatti as, “an exciting and audacious group at the heart of some of the most important industrial labor actions of the early 20th century.” 

Flynn led free speech fights that shaped the IWW’s future campaigns on the issue. She played important roles in the Lawrence, Mass., “Bread and Roses” strike, the Patterson, N.J. silk strike, New York hotel workers job action, and the iron workers walkout on Minnesota’s Mesabi Range. 

She was arrested for being a member of the Wobblies after having left the union and escaped imprisonment by petitioning President Woodrow Wilson; an experience which spurred her founding of the Workers Defense Union to help in similar cases, and which often represented the only legal representation such defendants could find. 

The Rebel Girl’s unique talent was bringing a fractious left to the table with the liberal establishment. “She was instrumental in forging the liberal-radical alliance historians note was at the heart of the post-war civil liberties movement in the United States,” Trasciatti asserted. 

Flynn fought deportations and called, throughout her life, for political prisoner status in the U.S., where it does not exist. “Hence the title of her book, ‘My Life as a Political Prisoner,’” Trasciatti explained. 

In 1920, Flynn helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with which she worked for 20 years, before the association came to an end over her membership in the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (CP). 

In 1926, she suffered a breakdown when upon learning that her lover, the anarchist Carlo Tresca, had been romancing her younger sister and produced a child in the process. It was the last straw for a spirit exhausted from incessant advocating, agitating and traveling, according to Trasciatti.  

This precipitated a move to Portland, Oregon, where she lived quietly for 10 years with a friend before entering the second half of her career as a member of the Communist Party from 1947 to 1964. 

“These are the years when Flynn is no longer a girl, but still a rebel,” said Trasciatti. 

In 1961, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was elected to a three-year term as the CP’s first female chair. The fit between Flynn and the party was a natural one. In 1937, the CP was the most active, inclusive and exciting organization on the left, according to Trasciatti, who added, “She wanted to be in the fray.”

It helped that Flynn’s joining coincided with the Popular Front period during which coalition-building skills were at a premium. An anti-fascist going back to the 1920s, Flynn liked the CP’s dedication to that fight. 

Professor Trasciatti

Trasciatti explained how the late 1930s witnessed a “little red scare”; a period of rising anti-communism between the first big red scare at the end of World War I and McCarthyism. 

During the turbulence, anti-communists in the ACLU sought to dissociate the group from the Communist Party; to shed its radical past and embrace a politically neutral version of free speech, which many have applauded, but which Trasciatti characterized as “a problematic moment in the history" of the outfit.

In Feb. 1940, the organization passed a “Commu-Nazi” resolution, asserting the two ideologies represented one side of the same seditious coin. Neither political animal could sit on the ACLU board, because these credos undermined their commitment to civil liberties.

Flynn, the only communist on the ACLU governing body, was asked to step down, but refused; instead challenging the directors to both try and purge her, which they obliged in May 1940. 

“Ponder the irony,” Trasciatti observed. “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had been an anti-fascist since 1923, before anybody else on the ACLU executive committee, and now the ACLU was telling her that her political ideas were as dangerous as fascism. That cut deep.”

Her ouster, Trasciatti said, gave a liberal seal of approval to anti-communism and set the stage for everything that followed in its name. 

In 1976, the ACLU expressed its organizational regrets over the move.  

Also in 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act; the first peace-time, anti-sedition law enacted since the Alien and Sedition Act of 1789. 

Known as the Smith Act, the bill made it a crime to undermine the morale of the U.S. military or advocate overthrow of the government by violence, and required the registration and fingerprinting of all adult, noncitizen residents. 

“The path towards internment,” observed Trasciatti. 

The CP opposed the law throughout its enactment as anti-immigrant, antithetical to civil liberties, and unAmerican. The party urged President Franklin Roosevelt not to sign it. 

“The law proved a potent weapon against the left,” said Trasciatti.   

The first significant indictments came in 1941, against 39 members of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party. Some defendants were Teamsters and Trasciatti cited literature suggesting the union colluded with the government to remove them from the syndicate. 

The trial, “a travesty,” according to Trasciatti, was one of political ideas that set a very low bar for seditious speech and resulted in 18 defendants being sentenced to a year, or more, in prison. 

The Communist Party did not work on behalf of the defendants, as they were Trotskyists, but not long after World War II, it too became a target of Smith Act prosecutions. 

In 1949, 11 CP leaders were arrested, tried and convicted. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn chaired the party’s Smith Act Defense Fund to raise money and generate sympathy, but “it was a really tough sell in that political environment,” Trasciatti remarked. 

In 1951, a second group was arrested, including Flynn, Jones, Betty Gannett and Marianne Baccarat. 

At trial, Flynn acted as her own counsel. “She had an interest in legal affairs, but more importantly, her book makes clear how nobody wanted to defend these people,” said Trasciatti. 

Flynn’s speeches in court, she continued, “offer a stirring indictment of capitalist justice and defense of the right of Americans to their own political beliefs and opinions.” 

Memoirs

Nevertheless, in 1953, all of the defendants were found guilty. Flynn’s sentence was 28 months in the Alderson Penitentiary for Women, and these months yielded the book under consideration. 

The title, Trasciatti noted, reflects Flynn’s longstanding commitment to civil liberties. 

“She acknowledges that there are political prisoners in the U.S., that we incarcerate people for their ideas, and for the things they say, not the things they do. That recognition is part of what sustained her through imprisonment,” said Trasciatti. 

Flynn acknowledged her fellow political prisoners, the professor asserted, not to call attention to the plight of communists, or other imprisoned political activists, rather to highlight the inhumanity of what passed for justice in the U.S.,as experienced by the ordinary women she found herself surrounded by, and to call for change. 

“Many of the topics she addressed in the book make it feel like it could have been written yesterday,” Trasciatti observed. 

These included the dehumanizing effects of incarceration, the creep of militarization into the prison system, the class composition of the jailed population, and the understanding of incarceration as a racist institution. 

She railed against the exploitation of prison labor, and took the position that “addiction is a disease not a moral failure. A very forward thinking approach,” said Trasciatti. 

“My Life As…" she added, presents a rare personal account of what it’s like to be a woman behind bars. 

Trasciatti quoted Angela Davis who wrote in “Women Race, and Class,”  “[The book] reveals a new political maturity and a more profound consciousness of racism. As a leader of the Communist Party, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had developed a deep commitment to the black liberation struggle, and had come to realize that black peoples’ resistance is not always consciously political. At Alderson, she made friends more easily among the black women in prison than she did among the white inmates. And the black women, in turn, were more receptive to Elizabeth. Perhaps they sensed in this white woman communist an instinctive kinship in the struggle.”

Although 28 months in prison were undoubtedly hard on an older woman, Flynn left unbowed, “formidable,” said Trasciatti.  

Flynn died in Moscow in 1964. 

The presentation can be viewed in its entirety at https://youtu.be/3BhN9Nvh3RQ

"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio" can be found here: MARC LIVES

Marc on the Smith Act

Rep. Vito Marcantonio had no use for the Smith Act.

Marc told the House, in debate over the bill: “In a period as trying as this period, the test of democracy lies in the ability of that democracy to maintain its liberties, to preserve those liberties, and to have more freedom rather than less freedom.” 

Rep. Joseph Gavagan (D-N.Y.) asked Marcantonio if a democracy didn’t have a right to defend itself, which was something like a fastball down the middle that wasn’t so fast.  

“A democracy has a perfect right to protect itself,” said Marcantonio, “but remember this: you are not protecting democracy by this legislation. Spies and saboteurs will not register nor submit to fingerprinting… I believe spies and saboteurs and anybody who engages in illegal activity should be immediately apprehended and severely punished. You do not accomplish that end by this bill. You only undermine American freedom.” 

Law already existed to root out spies and prevent sabotage, Marcantonio noted.

In “Vito Marcantonio: Radical in Congress,” Alan Schaffer wrote that to the East Harlemite, the Smith Act was nothing more than an attempt at legislative intimidation of the politically unpopular, especially that běte noire of the Congress, the radical left.” 

The imprisonment of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, among others, under the act confirmed Marcantonio’s suspicions. 

Marc was one of four congressmen who voted against the bill.

“Nothing illustrates the temper of the times more than that overwhelming defeat,” Schaffer concluded.  

"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be found here: MARC LIVES

Fiorello La Guardia and the Social Democratic City

 

The exclusion of Fiorello La Guardia’s leftist brand from his biography represents a gross distortion to the image of America’s greatest mayor, according to professor Gerald Meyer. 

New York City’s La Guardia is a beloved figure, Meyer stated, “But what’s left out his story is his leftism.” 

Meyer, a professor at Hostos Community College in The Bronx, N.Y., is co-editor of “The Lost World of Italian Radicalism,” and author of “Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician."So he has some experience with cases like La Guardia’s. 

The educator spoke March 18 at the New Haven Free Public Library’s “Books Sandwiched In:Virtual Author Talks,” on the subject, “Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and the Left.” 

The Little Flower’s leftism, Meyer asserted, was his motivating force, but in the retelling of his political career, across many biographies, is unfailingly cast aside. 

“It is also very belittling to La Guardia,” said Meyer. “It’s as if he didn’t have ideas when he was actually a brilliant man. He was an ideologue. His demands in Congress presaged the entire New Deal.”

The omission leaves an incomplete picture of the man as thinker, as visionary, and as an effective politician, Meyer stated.  

The talk tracked La Guardia’s life chronologically, and was divided into phases; the first being from his birth in 1882 until 1910, when he traveled to Europe and landed a job in Trieste. 

Youth as Key to Understanding 

Meyer contended that, more so than other larger-than-life historical figures, the keys to La Guardia’s formation are found in his youth. 

His father was an anti-clerical Jacobin and his mother an Italian jew with roots in Sephardic Spain. Upon arriving in America, the family Americanized; joining the Presbyterian Church and moving to Prescott, Ariz., where father played music in a U.S. Army ensemble. 

There, Meyer noted, La Guardia saw discrimination against Native Americans and immigrant laborers alike. His own indignities suffered as the lone Italian at school made him aware of what it meant to be an outsider, and to the fact he himself was an outsider. 

When the Spanish-American War ignited, La Guardia’s father, Achilles, was stationed in Tampa, Fla., where he contracted food poisoning from military rations that ultimately killed him. 

“La Guardia comes to view the system as responsible for his father’s death,” Meyer explained. 

The remaining family returned to Europe. La Guardia signed on at the U.S. Consul in Trieste and morphed into a linguist who could speak Croatian, Italian, and Yiddish. 

“It’s all going to make him a great man and a radical,” said Meyer. 

Against the Grain

Highlighted was one little-known incident that would foreshadow La Guardia-in-the-making. 

Trieste was an embarkation port for New York-bound immigrant passage. Those who trekked to the Adriatic coast had often broken themselves economically to get on the boat to America. Many times, Meyer noted, they were unceremoniously shipped home for not having been cleared medically, ruined. 

“Without permission, La Guardia wouldn’t let anyone on the boat who hadn’t had a physical, to prevent them from making the journey only to impoverish themselves,” Meyer recounted. 

The anecdote illustrates La Guardia’s ability to work against the grain, to do right, to find ways to benefit ordinary people, said Meyer.  

Upon his stateside return, La Guardia took a law degree and fell in with the radical literati who populated his Greenwich Village neighborhood. He ran for Congress and won, though he was not yet La Guardia fully formed. 

His primary influences, Meyer stated, were from the southwest: “Populism is ingrained in him. It was pro-people, not class-oriented, and didn’t seek the abolition of private property.”

After serving two terms in Congress, La Guardia enlisted to fight in World War I. He reentered politics upon his return as a New York City Alderman before launching a second run at Congress, this time from a district in East Harlem. 

With the Democratic Party city machines being the natural enemy of populists, and the Irish pols that ran them hostile to Italians, La Guardia signed on with the Republican Party and campaigned to victory. 

But the needs of his working-class district pushed La Guardia leftward, toward socialism. “And he took to it like a fish to water,” said Meyer. 

La Guardia’s hybrid ideology of urban populism focused on the regulation of corporate activity. “There really isn’t another like him,” Meyer stated. “His uniqueness was very valuable, but also hurt him, because he was, again, an outsider.”

That status meant La Guardia was starved of meaningful committee work. “So he took to the floor of the House and became a great orator, speaking on every imaginable issue, including agriculture. And there are no farms in East Harlem,” emphasized Meyer. 

“His radical voice becomes stronger and stronger,” he continued. “It’s about protecting. He talks about happiness and how people have a right to happiness. It’s not just materialistic. It’s humanistic in a very deep way.” 

Effectively ceding his seat to Vito Marcantonio, La Guardia ran for mayor of New York City on a Republican-Fusion-Progressive ticket, and won. 

Left Turn

“His actions are quite remarkable,” said Meyer. “His arrival as mayor coincides with the Great Depression and his marvelous collaboration with Franklin Roosevelt. His vision is breathtaking. He creates a social democratic metropolis, piece by piece.”

The great patrician, Roosevelt, "was crazy about La Guardia," Meyer noted. 

The mayor could see the value in New York’s surplus of very talented, unemployed persons, which made it a perfect recipient for Works Progress Administration money. 

“New York was a demonstration project which showed that government can work, that the money is not wasted,” said Meyer, who highlighted achievements in public housing, subway extensions, playgrounds, swimming pools, an opera house, sanitation strategies, and sewage infrastructure. 

“Nothing was left untouched and New York was transformed into the magnificent city we still have,” said Meyer. 

The year 1936 saw the formation of the American Labor Party as a way of capturing socialist votes that would not otherwise go to the Democrat Roosevelt. 

Meyer suggested the American Labor Party (ALP) was the most important third party in American history. Until it’s demise in 1950, with Marcantonio’s defeat, the ALP garnered about 15 percent of the vote, which gave it tremendous leverage on Gotham’s political playing field. 

“In East Harlem it was a majority party and the second largest in the Bronx,” according to Meyer. “La Guardia immediately joins up, along with Marcantonio: A fact so unknown, it is just shocking. Why wouldn’t the history books and biographies mention this?” 

Professor Meyer’s talk can be viewed in its entirety by clicking on the link below

Gerald Meyer Discusses Mayor Fiorello La Guardia | Books Sandwiched In - YouTube

"The Goodfather(A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be found here: MARC LIVES

Ranks and Files

  

The Vito Marcantonio Forum (VMF) has joined the resistance to closing an important cultural/education institution: 

Dear Friends, 

The Center for Puerto Rican Studies has served our communities as a leading research and policy institution and a model for connecting academic work with community needs. Its library and archives document the NYC Puerto Rican Diaspora. 

The City University of New York (CUNY) is now trying to cut Centro one piece at a time, which is alarming, especially in a period of renewed social movement for racial and economic justice. 

Please click on the link to sign the petition. 

Gerald Meyer, VMF Co-Chair 

tiny.cc/savecentro 

VMF members continued, throughout the pandemic, to emphasize the links between cultural expression and political activity with forays into journalism, poetry and criticism. Such activity was not limited to the members and works mentioned forthwith. 

Gerald Meyer’s piece, Alice Neel: Painting People Left Out of the Picture | The Indypendent in “The Indypendent.”

VMF members Roberto Ragone and Stephen Siciliano penned for a March 20 edition of L’Idea Magazine, Italian Americans: The Progressive Tradition-Reflections on Gerald Meyer’s Presentation at the New Haven Public Library

VMF member Maria Lisella conducted a six-week workshop, “A Prompt, a Poem, and Poets," which appears to have resulted in the subsequent formation of a “Thursday Morning Poets” group buzzing with ideas and plans. 

The sessions were done in conjunction with the Queens Public Library. 

The Zoom meetings ran 90 minutes and attendees warmed up with a read poem, a brief writing exercise in response to a prompt, and then 30 minutes to write a poem from a second prompt.

Those who chose to share, and most did, were the recipients of commentary, if there were any and the energy was friendly, positive and, at times, emotional.

Hit us up with your projects highwayscribery@sbcglobal.net

"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be found here: MARC LIVES

Vito Marcantonio Forum to Reprise "Martyrs of McCarthyism" Saturday at Mulberry Street Library

From left to right: Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Rep. Vito Marcantonio.

The Vito Marcantonio Forum (VMF) will reprise its multimedia event "Paul Robeson and Vito Marcantonio: Victims of McCarthyism," Saturday, Feb. 22 at the Mulberry Street Library. 

The event, which entails a screening of a Dec. 7 symposium convened by the VMF and held at Penn South, will feature a question and answer section afterward. 

The symposium included a lecture, theatrical reenactments, and music. Maria Lisella acted as moderator. Stephen Siciliano gave a talk entitled "Paul Robeson and Vito Marcantonio: Fighters from the Start." 

Professor Gerald Meyer followed with a discussion and sampling of Paul Robeson's interpretation of Negro spiritual and "sorrow songs." 

Actor Roberto Ragone rendered a speech by Marcantonio defending Dalton Trumbo and his cohort in the Hollywood Ten. 

Ragone then joined actors Art Bernal and Bernard Johnson in a reenactment of Robeson's appearance before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. 

Johnson followed with an interpretation of Robeson's eulogy at Marcantonio's funeral. 

It was all captured on film and its viewing is open to the public. The event runs from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. The address is 10 Jersey Street, New York 10012. 

"The Goodfather (A Novel: The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can found here: MARC LIVES

Rubinstein on the Harlem Renaissance

"Swing Landscape" by Stuart Davis, 1938.  

In American Literature Root and Flower, Annette Rubinstein conducted an wide review of Harlem Renaissance writers, which Marcantoniana reprises here in recognition of Black History Month. 

Rubinstein, it must be noted, appears here by virtue of her role as an important lieutenant to Rep. Vito Marcantonio, a candidate on the American Labor Party line, and a prolific literary critic much-influenced by Marxist cultural scholar, Georg Lukács. 

As a regular player in Marcantonio’s East Harlem bailiwick, Rubinstein not only read her way through the literary Renaissance blossoming at the upper part of Manhattan Island, but can be suspected of having lived a bit of it, too. 

Booker T.

Rubinstein rolled out her analysis by describing the cultivated soil from which Harlem Renaissance writing sprung, starting with Booker T. Washington (1859-1915) whose autobiography, she wrote, “was probably read by, and to, more Blacks than any other single book except the bible.”

In that book Washington wrote that, “No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we allow our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”

W.E.B. 

Some educated Negroes, Rubinstein said, “resented [Washington’s] stereotypical image of the black man as, at best, a childlike and simple creature destined to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water, and unable to appreciate or desire an intellectual life.” 

The leading spokesman for this posture was W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). He was born in Massachusetts to a family not enslaved, but attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, the “Athens of the South,” where he became familiar with the more common plight of his race.

“I heard too in these days,” he recalled in his autobiography Dusk at Dawn, “for the first time the Negro folk songs. I was thrilled and moved to tears and seemed to recognize something inherently and deeply my own.” 

His chapter on what he termed “The Sorrow Songs,” begins: “They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days - Sorrow Songs - for they were weary at heart. And so, before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to them.” 

The difference in the two mens’ approaches to Black advancement was creatively summarized in a poem by Dudley Randall (1914-2000) and cited by Rubinstein:

“It seems to me,” said Booker T., 

“That all you folks have missed the boat 

Who shout about the right to vote. 

And spend vain days and sleepless nights

In uproar over civil rights. 

Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse, 

But work, and save and buy a house.” 

“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B. 

“For what can property avail

If dignity and justice fail? 

Unless you help to make the laws. 

They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause. 

A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot. 

No matter how much cash you’ve got. 

Speak soft, and try your little plan.

But for me, I’ll be a man.”

James Weldon Johnson 

Root and Flower treats essayist and editor James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) as one who, “somewhat bridged the gap between Dr. Du Bois’ rather formal academic taste and the deliberate unconventionality of the new bohemian Harlem.” 

According to Rubinstein, Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, aroused little interest when published anonymously in 1912, but made lots of waves when reissued under his true name in 1927. 

By Ralph DeCarava

The title refers to a light-skinned Negro who is an accomplished musician with a dream to develop Negro folk music through the application of his classical formation. Touring the American South, he is witness to a lynching and sickened by the occurrence, yet ashamed of belonging to a people so cruelly degraded. 

His light-skin tone permits the protagonist to take a “pass” on blackness and, instead, blend into the white world wherein he enjoys an empty and purposeless success. The novel, Rubinstein explained, was autobiographical only to the point where the protagonist takes the opposite tack to Weldon Jones’ real-life journey. 

Harlem in the ‘20s

According to Rubinstein, Du Bois and Johnson both prefigured, and played parts, in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Having treated the precursors and bridgers, she next detailed the environment in which African and African American arts thrived for a brief period. 

Harlem, she noted, was a final destination for many blacks drifting across America upon their return from World War I.

“They found,” Rubinstein wrote, “an already large black population, service jobs within easy reach of ‘downtown,’ a comparatively secure group of Negro longshoremen, the headquarters of the only substantial Negro union in the United States, the all-black Brotherhood of Pullman Porters, and a variety of jobs created by the almost two-hundred thousand person community itself.” 

There was, the critic observed, another “grimmer reason” for one specific influx of young southern black men into Harlem and that was their unwillingness, after having risked their lives in battle and experienced the pleasures of a desegregated France, to accept Jim Crow conditions on the homefront.  

In 1919 and 1920 there were 125 “recorded” lynchings across the United States, many of them involving the returned war veterans, and this stark reality also drove blacks seeking safety in numbers to Harlem. 

Race Welding

Geographically insignificant in terms of size, Harlem, nonetheless, became a place where African American identity started taking shape. 

Alan Locke (1886-1954), a literary critic and student of African and African American culture, saw in Harlem, “the laboratory of a great race-welding.” 

Locke wrote that, “Hitherto, it must be admitted that American Negroes have been a race more in name than in face, or to be more exact, more in sentiment than experience. The chief bond between them has been that of a common condition rather than a common consciousness, a problem in common rather than a life in common.”

One of the major factors [affecting the Renaissance] was a new attitude toward, and support for, black art, a new willingness to publish black writing and a new respect for both African and Afro-American folk material on the part of sophisticated, affluent whites.  

Much of the new respect for spirituals was due to the talent and powerful personality of singer, actor and Harlem resident Paul Robeson, who reintroduced them to the cultural world in Greenwich Village and England, though his enthusiasm was not always matched by other artists working to actualize the “New Negro.” 

By Ralph DeCarava

Wrote Robeson: “I found a special eagerness among the younger, and I am sorry to say the more intelligent Negroes, to dismiss the Spiritual as something beneath their new pride in their race. It is as if they wanted to put it behind them as something to be ashamed or - something that tied them to a past in which their forefathers were slaves.” 

Literary Debates

Harlem Renaissance writing was not monotone. The same skin color did not equate to the same set of ideas. There was debate regarding what the aims of black writers should be. 

“One of the most consistent was that centering about the responsibility of the writer to his people,” noted Rubinstein. “Here the ‘old guard’ had no doubt that a black writer must be concerned with the race image his books presented while many of the next generation revelled in the new freedom to write without regard to general conventions.” 

Yet youth did not translate into a common intellectual bond, either. 

“Some rejected the idea of drawing on either African or Afro-American folk material,” Rubinstein dissected the shifting zeitgeist. “Some felt that their poetry spoke for their people while others declared they were not Negro poets, but simply poets.” 

Among those she focused on was Claude McKay (1890-1948), author of Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Banana Bottom, which is about life in Jamaica and his best effort in Rubinstein’s estimation.

McKay, also a poet of note, ran with radical white writers in New York City, and wrote for communist periodicals only to later express disenchantment with the movement in a posthumously discovered, unpublished novel, Amiable with Big Teeth. 

Countee Cullen (1903-1946) produced four volumes of poetry including The Black Christ and the novel One Way to Heaven, an interpretative version of the Greek drama. 

Arna Bontemps (1902-1973) wrote the poem, A Black Man Speaks of Reaping and served as chief librarian at Fisk University for 20 years. He also published the novel God Sends Sunday, several volumes of black history, and the historical novel, Black Thunder. 

The Crash

The Renaissance flourished until the Depression dawned. “When the crash came in 1929,” wrote Langston Hughes (1902-1967), “white people had much less money to spend on themselves and practically none to spend on Negroes.”  

Hughes saw irony in life returning to a diminished default setting for African Americans when the party abruptly ended. “I was there and we had a swell time while it lasted,” he wrote. “But some Harlemites thought the millennium had come. They thought the race problem had been solved through Art.

“I don’t know what made any Negroes think that,” Hughes continued, “except that they were mostly intellectuals doing the thinking. The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.” 

Harlem Moves Left 

The long-time Marcantonio staffer asserted that, in its heyday, the Harlem Renaissance's artistic output did not much concern itself with socioeconomic issues, but that in the radical ’30s such awareness was inescapable. 

“By 1932,” reported Rubinstein, “almost half the families in Harlem were on relief. The hunger, homelessness, broken families, misery on every side, forced any sensitive or thoughtful writer to a new concern with the daily life of his people.” 

She cited James Weldon Jones who wrote, “There are dramatic values in Harlem too; but they have hardly been touched. Writers of fiction, white and black, have limited their stories to Harlem as a playground, and have ignored or not recognized the vital forces at work and efforts to cope with them.”  

Rubinstein’s critique put great stock in realist writers, which she defined as those, “Who know and are concerned with the vital current which moves steadily beneath the innumerable eddies and confusing crosscurrents of life’s surface.” 

The ’30s brought to Harlem the marked presence of the Communist Party. This represented, Rubinstein asserted, the first time a large and disciplined group of radicals had concentrated its attention upon the black community in the United States. 

“This awareness,” she explained, “led the Communist Party to encourage black artists, inviting their membership in the radical John Reed writers’ clubs and opening the pages of such publications as The New Masses and The Daily Worker to Negro writers.”  

Among them was Richard Wright (1908-1960), described by Rubinstein as a writer who was “the first to introduce the blues and other folk material into written poetry and who had never really lost touch with the everyday life of his people in the streets and tenements.”

We see again the importance Rubinstein placed on Lukács’ assertion in The Historical Novel that, “A writer’s relation to history is not something special and isolated, it is an important component of his relations to the whole of reality and especially society.” 

In the autobiographical “American Hunger, Wright wrote that, “With the exception of the church and its myths and legends, “there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist Party.”

He joined in 1933, also adhering to the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club. 

Wright wrestled with Party discipline and the complexities of its internal politics while standing firm throughout the ’30s, until 1940, when he published his most famous work, Native Son, which Rubinstein noted, “made literary history.” 

A publishing success, Native Son was criticized by the Communists for its depiction of protagonist Bigger Thomas, which they argued strengthened prejudicial stereotypes. Wright eventually left the Communist Party, detailing the rupture in “American Hunger:

“There existed in the Western world an element that baffled and frightened the Communist Party: the prevalence of self-achieved literacy. Even a Negro, entrapped by ignorance and exploitation - as I had been - could, if he had the will and love for it, learn to read and understand the world in which he lived. 

“And it was these people the Communists did not understand. The American Communists, enjoying legality, were using the methods forged by the underground Russian Bolshevik fire, and therefore had to have their followers willing to accept all explanations of reality, even when the actual situation did not call for it.” 

Three New Strains 

Rubinstein identified three new strains of thought laced throughout the work of Harlem’s black writers in the 1930s. 

She noted how Alan Locke had spoken caustically in the ’20s of Negro writers, “who got jazz-mad and cabaret crazy instead of getting folk-wise and sociologically sober.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

The first current addressed this bohemian bent by offering “a more intimate, realistic and respectful concern with the ordinary day-to-day life of black people in northern cities as well as in the rural south.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) became emblematic of this approach. The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel is an well-known example of the brand:

We real cool. We 

Left school We

Lurk Late We

Strike straight We

Sing sin We

Thin gin We

Jazz June We

Die soon. 

Brooks’ career would be capped by President Ronald Reagan’s 1985 appointment of her as U.S. Poet Laureate.

“The second theme that emerged with new force was history,” said Rubinstein “There was a great increase in serious Negro scholarship indicated by the establishment of such academic publications as the “Journal of Negro Education” and the “Negro History Bulletin.” 

This interest was reflected in the works of poets such as Frank Horne (1890-1974) and Melvin Tolson (1898-1966).

The third was interracial cooperation, the most important and most characteristic of the “Red Decade,” and symbolized by white Communists joining blacks who were risking their lives in trying to organize a sharecroppers’ union in deep Dixie. 

“In this heyday of black-white cooperation on the left there were a substantial number of Negro members in the industrial unions,” Rubinstein explained. “When a strike was called in the steel mills immediately after the war the management tried to hire black workers as scabs as they had done after the First World War. Instead of permitting themselves to be used that way, the black workers supported the union.” 

Wright would enjoy further success with Black Boy, but America denied him any interracial harmony he might have hoped for so that he moved to France and fell in with the Parisian existentialists who, led by Jean Paul Sartre, were trying to map a European path that avoided Soviet communism and American capitalism alike. 

The Beat Poet Jack Kerouac called the Negro, “the essential American.” In Wright’s work, and in that of those named above, and still others, not only is the veil lifted on what lies in “the souls of black folks,” but in the soul of America itself. 

"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be found here: MARC LIVES