Spokesman of the Oppressed? Lorraine Hansberry at Work: The Challenge of Radical Politics in the Postwar Era

Abstract

Toward the end of the 1950s, mass media coupled with an ascendant discussion of racial democracy to create a prominent place for race talk in the mainstream. Lorraine Hansberry, previously under the tutelage of the Black Left, used her opportunity in the spotlight to denounce racial and gender discrimination and advance hard-hitting analyses of US domestic and foreign policy. Her expansive political vision—linking race and class struggle with the histories of women, Black Americans and colonial peoples abroad—not only marks her as a critical bridge between the civil rights and Black Power eras but also underscores her role as a crucial progenitor of the Black Arts and Feminist movements.

Keywords:

• Black left
• Black power
• celebrity
• Cold War
• feminism
• Lorraine Hansberry
• Paul Robeson
• public intellectual

Notes

“Robert Kennedy Consults Negroes Here About North,” New York Times, May 25, 1963; “Robert Kennedy Fails to Sway Negroes at Secret Talks Here,” New York Times, May 26, 1963; “Robert Kennedy Confers Today with Theater Men on Race Issue,” New York Times, May 27, 1963.

See Ben Keppel, The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), and Mary L. Dudziak, “Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War,” Journal of American History 81 (September 1994): 543–570.

“Robert Kennedy Consults Negroes Here About North,” New York Times, May 25, 1963.

Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 220.

Esther Peterson, Executive Vice Chairman of The President's Commission on the Status of Women, to Lorraine Hansberry, February 15, 1963, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, Estate of Lorraine Hansberry, Croton-on-the-Hudson, New York (hereafter referred to as LHE). I was able to review a box of Hansberry's papers while at the Estate in Croton-on-the-Hudson. The collection has been since transferred to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Originally published in 1967, The Crisis of the Intellectual tackled over forty years of the history of Black politics and thought. Nearly six hundred pages long, broken into twenty-eight chapters, fifteen of which were devoted to a group of post World War II Black artists in New York City that included Hansberry and her peers. With the keen eye of an insider, Cruse asked hard and important questions in a bold and iconoclastic style, but he painted his postwar generation with wildly polemical strokes. In his view, they were a bourgeois clique, the darlings of the “leftwing interracial set.” Their “middle-class” outlook and “integrationist” frame degraded their cultural contributions and delimited their political role in Black liberation struggles in the U.S. See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York: Quill, 1984), pp. 220, 267, 498. For a critique of Cruse that contextualizes the struggles of the Black postwar left see Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).

Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, p. 102.

Lorraine Hansberry cited by James Baldwin in To be Young Gifted and Black, p. xiv.

James Baldwin, “Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit,” Freedomways (4th Quarter, 1979): p. 272.

Baldwin, “Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit,” p. 272.

Lorraine Hansberry, “Miss Hansberry on Blacklash,” Village Voice (July 23, 1964): pp. 10, 16.

Steven R. Carter, “Lorraine Hansberry,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography Afro-American Writers After 1955 (Detroit: The Gale Group, 1985), p. 122. Also see Steven R. Carter, Hansberry's Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 262–263.

John Oliver Killens, “Lorraine Hansberry: On Time!” Freedomways (4th Quarter 1979): pp. 273–274.

The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) fought several well-known civil rights and civil liberty cases during the 1940s and 1950s. The organization also authored a petition to the UN in 1951, charging the U.S. government with genocide against African Americans under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Also see William Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide: An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 1991), pp. 157–158.

In 1951, for example, Lorraine Hansberry traveled to Mississippi as part of the CRC women's auxiliary, Sojourners for Truth and Justice, in order to boost the campaign of accused rapist and political prisoner, Willie McGee. As part of her activism she wrote a poem about McGee's wife, Rosalee, for distribution in leftwing periodicals. The Sojourners for Truth and Justice was initiated by Charlotta Bass, Shirley Graham, Louise Thompson Patterson, Alice Childress, Rosalie McGee. See Horne, Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), 87, 98, 208.

Loften Mitchell, Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro Theater (New York: Hawthorne Books, Inc., 1967), p. 177.

Author's interview with William B. Branch, December 1, 1999 (changes made in transcript during second interview on December 14, 1999), New Rochelle, NY.

Julian Mayfield, “Lorraine Hansberry: A Woman for All Seasons,” Freedomways (4th Quarter 1979): p. 266.

Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 138.

Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, p. 139.

Lorraine Hansberry to Mr. Fuller, July 12, 1962, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, LHE.

For work on the politics and aesthetics of the Popular Front see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London; New York: Verso, 1996); James Edward Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Keppel, The Work of Democracy, p. 3.

Esther Peterson, Executive Vice Chairman of The President's Commission on the Status of Women, to Lorraine Hansberry, February 15, 1963, LHE. Barbara Savage has shown that radio elicited the same kind of hope in new technology. Barbara Savage, Broadcasting Freedom, Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Wright (sic) to Lorraine Hansberry, September 19, 1958, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, LHE.

Carter, Hansberry's Drama, p. xii.

Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, p. 119.

Lorraine Hansberry, “Thoughts on Genet, Mailer, and the New Paternalism,” Village Voice (June 1, 1961): pp. 10–15.

Hansberry as cited in White, “The Talk of the Town,” pp. 33–35.

Hansberry, letter to the editor re: Porgy and Bess debate, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, LHE.

Loften Mitchell, Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro Theater (New York: Hawthorne Books, Inc., 1967), p. 138.

Hansberry, “Miss Hansberry on ‘Backlash,‘” p. 10.

Mayfield, box 1, folder 12, Julian Mayfield Papers, SCH.

Paul Robeson, “Speech to the CNA Convention January 26, 1952,” Reel 2, Paul Robeson Collection, SCH. Also see James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: A Laurel Book, Dell Publishing, 1972), p. 12.

Wright (sic) to Lorraine Hansberry, September 19, 1958, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, LHE.

Lorraine Hansberry as cited in E.B. White, “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker (May 9, 1959): pp. 33–35.

Hansberry as cited in Fisher, “Birthweight Low, Jobs Few, Death Comes Early,” pp. 3, 9.

Lorraine Hansberry, “Miss Hansberry on Backlash,” Village Voice (July 23, 1964): pp. 10, 16.

For an analysis of the iconic status of later black feminists see Joy James, Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999). Future research might find it extraordinarily fruitful to consider Paul Robeson as a cultural symbol in his own right, much as scholars have done with Malcolm X.

Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, p. 411.

Keppel, The Work of Democracy, p. 1.

Mitchell, Black Drama, p. 127.

Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984).

Benjamin Davis to Lorraine Hansberry, May 4, 1959, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, LHE.

Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, pp. 278, 284.

New York Time, April 9, 1959.

Mayfield, box 15, folder 9, Julian Mayfield Papers, SCH.

Baldwin, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, p. xix.

A personal letter written to Hansberry in 1961 by (then) LeRoi Jones explicitly drew on this likeness, for example, when he told her that she represented and “[spoke] for the American middleclass.” A Raisin in the Sun, as a number of scholars have argued, was hardly a sentimental view of middle-class assimilationist politics. The play popularized the relationship between the continent of Africa and African Americans in the diaspora and tackled segregation, poverty, and the struggle for intraracial solidarity in a family crisscrossed by ideological, gender, class tensions. And although LeRoi Jones would later revise his conservative assessment of the author, lauding Raisin as antecedent of the Black Arts movement and Hansberry as someone on the cutting edge of the struggles of the Black freedom, the point had been made. His early impression—along with others—helped shape an image of the playwright that would last nearly two decades. LeRoi Jones to Lorraine Hansberry, June 13, 1961, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, LHE.

She balked at the notion of writing in white face, arguing that images of the Black middle class challenged whites and deprived many of them of the sensational, minstrelsy-fed images of African-American life they sought. Nevertheless, this jab at her class status was ironic, particularly coming from LeRoi Jones. Jones had his own middle class subjectivity to consider—not to mention the fact that he had achieved celebrity himself with Dutchman and Blues People. More to the point, Jones would measure the subject of fame with frank sympathy, only to leave Hansberry out. “I write now, full of trepidation because I know the death this society intends for me,” Jones wrote. “I see Jimmy Baldwin almost unable to write about himself anymore. I've seen Du Bois, Wright, Chester Himes, driven away—Ellison silenced and fidgeting in some college. I think I almost feel the same forces massing against me, almost before I've begun.” It is worth noting that Jones' compassion circle extends exclusively to men. See Amiri Baraka, “LeRoi Jones Talking,” in Home: Social Essays (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1998), pp. 179–188.

For more on middlebrow sentimentalism in the context of postwar international affairs See Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

James Baldwin's growing affinity with Hansberry in the late 1950s begs for an extended analysis, one that I do not provide here. A careful analysis of her appropriation of sexual roles within the context of the postwar period awaits forthcoming biographical work as well as full and public access to her papers. Nonetheless, the circumstances of their initial meeting and their continued literary and political collaboration centered on a shared interest in sexual politics and cross-racial communication. The power Hansberry afforded women was not lost on Baldwin. As he recalled of their meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, Hansberry actively shifted the discussion away from the perils of Black manhood to the candid oppression of African-American women, a move Baldwin acknowledged if not sympathized with. Kenneth Clarke, “A Conversation with James Baldwin,” in John H. Clarke, ed., Harlem: A Community in Transition (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), p. 125. Audre Lorde and Baldwin would debate the importance of exploring gender discrimination in the Black community decades later; suggesting that Hansberry's impact on this score was partial. Lorraine Hansberry to the editor Commentary (March 5, 1963) written in response to Podhoretz's article “My Negro Problem and Yours” in Commentary (February 1963).

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Hansberry wrote several letters to two homophile publications, One and The Ladder, under the initials “L.N.” or “L.H.N.” Judging from the letter she wrote to The Ladder, Hansberry's sexuality worked to expand her understanding of the interrelated nature of oppression. Early on, she explicitly framed “homosexuality” as a “question of human rights.” Lorraine Hansberry, letter to the editor, April 18, 1961, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, LHE. Lorraine Hansberry, unpublished (unmailed) letter to the editor of One, April 18, 1961, and unpublished transcript entitled, “Simone de Beauvior and The Second Sex: An American Commentary,” 1957 as cited in Carter, Hansberry's Drama, p. 6. Robert Nemiroff has argued that Hansberry's sexuality was not “a peripheral or casual part of her life but contributed significantly on many levels to the sensitivity and complexity of her view of human beings and of the world.” Robert Nemiroff as cited in Carter, Hansberry's Drama, p. 6.

Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: WW Norton and Company, 2001), p. 183.

James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dell Publishing, 1972), p. 20.

Hansberry, To be Young, Gifted and Black, p. 220.

“And I am glad,” Baldwin hastened to add, “she was not smiling at me.” See Baldwin, “Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit,” p. 272.

Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, p. 201.

Killens, “Lorraine Hansberry: On Time!” pp. 275, 276.

Mayfield, “Lorraine Hansberry: A Woman for All Seasons,” p. 265.

Mayfield, box 21, folder 12, Julian Mayfield Papers, SCH.

Similar solicitations are on record for James Baldwin. Though it should come as no surprise that Baldwin's critique of Wright's Native Son, “Everybody's Protest Novel,” was popular propaganda fodder for anti-Communist publications at home and abroad.

Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999).

For an interesting view of the subject of gender and cultural imperialism in the Black diaspora see Jaqueline Nassy Brown, “Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space,” Cultural Anthropology 13 (1998): pp. 291–325.

Evelyn Eisenstadt to Lorraine Hansberry, January 8, 1962, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, LHE. The letter refers to a previous letter dated December 14, 1961. Also note attachment in Bob Nemiroff's handwriting, which reads: “Significantly, never signed or mailed.”

Patrice Lumumba was born in the village of Onalua in Kasi province, Belgian Congo on July 2, 1925. Thirty-five years later, this former postal clerk, intellectual, activist, and trade union leader became the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lumumba's arrest, imprisonment, and execution sullied many hands and research has only just begun to reveal the shared responsibility in his death. See Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London: Verso, 2001); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Also see movie Lumumba, directed by Raoul Peck (Zeitgeist Films, 2001).

Historian Brenda Plummer, in fact, has shown that a number of nationalist groups were in attendance that night, including members of the Universal African Legion, International Muslim Society, and the Brooklyn-based United Sons and Daughters of Africa. Plummer, Rising Wind, p. 302.

Hansberry, “Congolese Patriot,” letter to the editor, New York Times, March 26, 1961, p. 4.

Benjamin Davis to Lorraine Hansberry, n.d., Lorraine Hansberry Papers, LHE.

Mayfield, box 21, folder 12, Julian Mayfield Papers, SCH.

Julian Mayfield to Lorraine Hansberry, April 7, 1959, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, LHE.

Hansberry, To Be Young Gifted, and Black, pp. 249–250.

James Baldwin, interview, Black Scholar (December 1973–January 1974): p. 41.

Mayfield, box 21, folder 12, Julian Mayfield Papers, SCH.

Lerone Bennett and Margaret Burroughs, “A Lorraine Hansberry Rap,” Freedomways (4th Quarter, 1979): p. 229.

For instance, see Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Plummer, Rising Wind.

Gerald Horne and Manning Marable's scholarship on Black leftwing activity in the postwar period is longstanding and prolific. Other notable works that re-examine the postwar period include but are not limited to: Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Kevin Gaines, “African-American Expatriates in Ghana and the Black Radical Tradition,” Souls (Fall 1999): pp. 64–72; Peniel E. Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006) and Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour; Suzanne Smith, Dancing in the Streets, Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Penny Von Eschen, “Who's the Real Ambassador? Exposing Cold War Radical Ideology,” in Christian G. Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Cynthia Young, “Havana Up In Harlem: LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse and the Making of a Cultural Revolution,” Science and Society 65 (Spring 2001). For a good review of the history of Black Power scholarship see Peniel E. Joseph, “Black Liberation Without Apology: Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement,” The Black Scholar (Fall 2001): pp. 2–19.

Mitchell, Black Drama, p. 182.

Ossie Davis, Eulogy, Faith Temple Church of God, February 27, 1965.