The Other Blacklist

Starred review from January 27, 2014
In this groundbreaking book, University of Maryland literature professor Washington uncovers and recovers the “minimized, or omitted... influence of the Communist Party and the Left” in African-American arts and letters during the 1950s. FBI informants, she observes, were often “far more enterprising and thorough than most literary historians,” thus enabling Washington to retrieve details of “Black-Left history” absent from current anthologies. Focusing on six artists—novelist Lloyd L. Brown, graphic artist Charles White, playwright Alice Childress, poet and novelist Gwendolyn Brooks, novelist Frank London Brown, and novelist Julian Mayfield—her work aims to recast who we read and transform how we read. Her analysis of Brown’s Iron City as, in aspects, a parody of Wright’s Native Son, for example, illuminates both works, and her countering of the “force fed… tale of sudden and unprecedented conversion to blackness and radicalism” with “her earlier left-wing radicalism” adds fresh insight. Washington attends to the “range of relationships with the left,” from Communist Party membership to “idiosyncratic radicalism” and “silences and self-censorship.” “What if you put the black literary and cultural Left at the center of African American studies during the Cold War?,” Washington asks. Her thought-provoking reply opens a conversation. Illus.

November 1, 2015

Washington (English, Univ. of Maryland, College Park) provides an alternate look at McCarthyism through the lives of five African American writers and artists.

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