Behold the Land

The Black Arts Movement in the South

James Smethurst

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781469663043, 9781469663036
• eBook ISBN: 9781469663050
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In the mid-1960s, African American artists and intellectuals formed the Black Arts movement in tandem with the Black Power movement, with creative luminaries like Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gil Scott-Heron among their number. In this follow-up to his award-winning history of the movement nationally, James Smethurst investigates the origins, development, maturation, and decline of the vital but under-studied Black Arts movement in the South from the 1960s until the early 1980s. Traveling across the South, he chronicles the movement’s radical roots, its ties to interracial civil rights organizations on the Gulf Coast, and how it thrived on college campuses and in southern cities. He traces the movement’s growing political power as well as its disruptive use of literature and performance to advance Black civil rights.

Though recognition of its influence has waned, the Black Arts movement’s legacy in the South endures through many of its initiatives and constituencies. Ultimately, Smethurst argues that the movement’s southern strain was perhaps the most consequential, successfully reaching the grassroots and leaving a tangible, local legacy unmatched anywhere else in the United States.

CHAPTER ONE

Ancestors

The Popular Front, Black Nationalism, Bohemia, and Black Art in the South before 1964

Like any other political or cultural movement, the Black Arts movement in the South has a long, almost infinitely extendable foreground. One could trace a southern “long Black Arts movement” back before the New Negro Renaissance and the Garvey movement (which had their southern manifestations), the “Women’s Era” of the turn of the century, Reconstruction and the creation of HBCUs in the South that taught literature and eventually established theater and applied arts departments, and the antebellum cultural offering of the Black folk in the slave South and Black abolitionists of the North to the expressive culture of the first Africans to come off the slave ships at Jamestown in 1619. If, as Amiri Baraka observed in Blues People, the disembarking African prisoners were not singing “The Saint James Infirmary Blues,” they no doubt were strengthened and consoled by music, stories, poetry, prayers, and so on.¹ In fact, one might even go back before disembarkation, as Sterling Brown did in his introduction to one of the famous “From Spirituals to Swing” Popular Front concerts in 1937 in which he argued that the origins of masking in African American culture could be traced back to the Middle Passage and the differing cultural expressions of the enslaved Africans above and below deck.²

The Southern Popular Front and the Origins of the Black Arts Movement: SNYC and Freedomways

However, while keeping this very long foreground in mind, a more immediate and crucial antecedent of the Black Arts movement in the South, one which in some important ways remained a living presence in the Black Power/Black Arts era, is what might be thought of as the extended Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s. The public manifestations of the southern Popular Front had, with a few notable exceptions, been crushed during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s in a wave of repression following the Progressive Party presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948. Nevertheless, the networks and sensibilities engendered by the southern Popular Front, particularly as expressed in the interface between HBCUs and community-based Black political and artistic efforts, persisted, especially in larger southern cities, such as Houston, New Orleans, and Atlanta.

The Popular Front nationally has often been considered, rightly, an integrated movement led by an integrated but predominantly white CPUSA with an integrated but mainly white leadership. However, in most of the South this situation was reversed. The Popular Front and the CPUSA there were far blacker than in the North and the West with a leadership that was significantly African American. The Communist Left in the South had a deep engagement with African American culture and radical traditions, including Black nationalism and Christianity, as well as a closer relationship with Black and white Socialists than was generally true in the North, prefiguring the cooperation and cross-pollination of different Left and nationalist strains in the region during the Black Power/Black Arts era. For example, the leftwing Highlander School in Tennessee was born out of the collaboration by a Socialist, Myles Horton, and a Communist, Don West, and featured such collaborations throughout its history. In fact, with the decline of Garveyism and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the Popular Front became the most viable space for building radical African American institutions with a bent toward Black self-determination in most of the South.

The significant influence that this pre–Cold War southern Left exerted on the development of U.S. politics and culture outside as well as inside the region is a topic only hinted at by scholars, for the most part, but not really examined. This sort of hint can be found in Robin Kelley’s observation in Hammer and Hoe that the political soil that the Communist Left plowed in Alabama in the 1930s and 1940s yielded a crop that may have been stunted by McCarthyism, but that nonetheless surprised some civil rights workers who came South expecting to find nothing but barren ground—though other civil rights organizers, such as SNCC’s Bob Moses, were more aware of this inheritance as they drew on a network of Old Left contacts during their initial organizing efforts.³ So it is worth outlining some cultural legacies of the Popular Front in the South, sketching a few of the ways in which the southern Popular Front influenced the Black Arts movement in the South and beyond.

Young Black radicals in a variety of Popular Front organizations, particularly the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), promoted politicized African American arts and literature in the South during the 1930s and 1940s in ways that had lasting consequences. As with the militants of the later SNCC and the Black student movement of the 1960s, some of these SNYC activists had lived most or all of their lives in the South to that point, some had been born in the South but had moved elsewhere with their families during the Great Migration, and still others were almost entirely new to the region. Some were graduates of HBCUs; some were alumni of predominantly white colleges and universities; and some had little formal education.

The Cold War devastated the Popular Front in the South. This, of course, was true of all the regions in the United States, but in some places pockets of Left influence and Left-led institutions remained (e.g., the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the Bay Area and the Packinghouse Workers Union in Chicago). However, almost all the institutions of the Popular Front, with a few important exceptions, were crushed by federal, state, and local government harassment as well as vigilante violence. Even those that survived in one form or another, like the Southern Conference for Education Fund (SCEF) and its newspaper the Southern Patriot and the Highlander School, suffered serious losses. This environment of legal repression and violence forced many of the higher profile Popular Front activists, especially relatively open CPUSA members or supporters, to leave the region—or to move to a different part of the South from where the base of their activities had been. However, these transplanted activists drew on their earlier experience to help create new political and cultural institutions and organizations, such as the journal Freedomways, that in turn facilitated the creation of new radical African American initiatives in the South. These institutions also helped build financial and other sorts of material support for those initiatives from outside the South, where fundraising was always difficult—at least until African Americans began to win control of the governments of southern cities and exert influence in local and state public arts funding apparatuses. Also, many less prominent (or less openly connected to the Communist Left) rank and file participants in the networks of the Popular Front remained behind in Black communities and on HBCU campuses and often stayed in contact with those who were forced to leave.

When one considers the Popular Front and its impact, one is always faced with the issues of periodization and whether one is speaking of an era or an approach to political work, culture, and so on. The official policy of the Popular Front arose from the response of the Communist International to the Nazi rise to power in Germany in 1933, the subsequent smashing of the Communist Party of Germany (the largest outside of the U.S.S.R. at the time), and victories of fascist or semifascist movements throughout Europe and ended with the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in 1939. However, the Popular Front style of work and engagement with mass popular culture, both as aesthetic resource and critique (often simultaneously), as well as with folk and national traditions of the people (and peoples) largely characterized the Communist Left long past 1939.

In the U.S. South, where the CPUSA was largely (and often overwhelmingly) Black in most places, this style involved a new level of positive adoption, adaptation, and alliance with the institutions, rhetoric, music, literature, and beliefs of the Black church, given the centrality of the church and the cultural practices associated with it in nearly all African American communities there. It also entailed a new appreciation for secular Black expressive culture, particularly popular and folk music, as a medium for struggle for “Negro liberation,” social progress, and the fight against Fascism (which was seen as closely allied with Jim Crow segregation and the Klan). In terms of personnel, there was a network of activists and artists that included people closely affiliated with the CPUSA at one time or another, such as James Jackson, Esther Cooper Jackson, Louis Burnham, Dorothy Burnham, Edward Strong, Augusta Strong, Margaret Walker, Charles White, and Elizabeth Catlett, and others whose political sympathies were on the left but whose organizational affiliations are less clear, such as Hale Woodruff, John Biggers, Marcus Christian, and Samella Lewis (a visual artist and art historian who studied with Elizabeth Catlett at Dillard University in the 1940s).

Though, again, the official period of the Popular Front as an international Comintern strategy ran from about 1935 to the end of 1939, the Popular Front approach to political organization, iconography, and aesthetics characterized the domestic work of the Communist Left in the United States far beyond 1939, particularly in the South. For example, the names of the leftwing Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago, Jefferson School of Social Science in downtown Manhattan, and George Washington Carver School in Harlem continued to stake symbolic claims to U.S. democratic icons and democracy Popular Front–style in the 1940s and 1950s, despite moves left and right in the larger international Communist movement. Some of the most important examples of such claims in the South, such as John Biggers’s 1953 Houston mural The Contribution of the Negro Woman to American Life and Democracy and the naming of the Southern Patriot took place long after the official end of the Popular Front.

The Left-led SNYC became a linchpin of radical African American art and literature in the South, particularly outside of the campuses of HBCUs. SNYC was proposed at the first national meeting of the National Negro Congress in 1936 in Chicago. The 1937 inaugural meeting of SNYC in Richmond drew 500 delegates from a wide range of political, civil rights, labor, community, religious, and fraternal organizations. Leaders of SNYC included native southerners such as Virginians Esther Cooper Jackson and James Jackson and Alabaman Sallye Davis (mother of Angela Davis), children of the Great Migration such as Edward Strong (born in Texas and raised in Michigan), and northern transplants such as Harlemite Louis Burnham (born in Barbados but raised in New York) and Brooklynites Dorothy Burnham and Augusta (Jackson) Strong who had come South basically out of the CPUSA, the Young Communist League, and the Left-led National Student Movement. SNYC interacted with other Popular Front and progressive organizations. These included the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW—an interracial organization that had a strong African American presence), the Popular Democratic Party in South Carolina, the People’s Defense League in New Orleans, and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions (particularly such Left-led affiliates as the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, Food, Tobacco, and Agricultural Workers, United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America, National Maritime Union, United Office and Professional Workers, International Longshoremen and Warehousemen, and United Furniture Workers), and even some American Federation of Labor locals (particularly Black-led locals of the International Longshoreman’s Association and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.). This southern Popular Front political network also included civil rights workers, educators, ministers, and others in institutions and organizations that were not leftwing as such but open to the politically and economically democratic goals of the southern Popular Front. It is worth noting that while some might consider the ideology and ideals of the Popular Front to be essentially “liberal” or “reformist” and a retreat from a more consistent and principled revolutionary politics, the push for democratic labor rights, political rights, educational opportunity, and access to public resources that included African Americans on the basis of full equality was, in fact, a radical move in the South that demanded a fundamental transformation of society in the region. As during the era of the civil rights movement, such efforts also entailed enormous personal risk on the part of political activists, risking violence both from the state and from racist vigilantes.

SNYC headquartered itself in Birmingham, the premier industrial center in the South and a comparative southern stronghold of the CPUSA, particularly among Black steelworkers, miners, and sharecroppers in northern Alabama. It was active from Virginia to Texas. The initial administrative center of the CPUSA in the South lay not too far to the north in Chattanooga, where the Communist regional newspaper, the Southern Worker, was edited from 1930 to its demise in 1937.⁴ In 1939, SNYC organized what may have been the first off-campus southern African American visual arts show, in Birmingham, Alabama. It helped initiate two radical theaters, the People’s Theatre in Richmond and the People’s Theatre in New Orleans. The New Orleans theater staged Langston Hughes’s revolutionary “poetry-play” Don’t You Want to Be Free?, a play that Hughes would repurpose for the civil rights era and that would be staged by the FST as part of its first touring season in 1964. The SNYC-sponsored Puppet Caravan Theatre, which numbered the poet Waring Cuney (an early innovator of blues poetry along with Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown during the New Negro Renaissance) among its members, toured the South, presenting plays on voter registration and labor rights to farmers and farm laborers, anticipating the tours of the FST twenty years later. The SNYC published poetry in their journal Cavalcade and featured such poets as Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown at their events. SNYC also operated three cultural/educational/recreational centers in Birmingham, modeled on Harlem’s Popular Front Carver School.⁵

Despite contradictory images of the South as both the fount of African American culture and an artistic backwater, the Left African American arts scene supported by SNYC largely mirrored what was going on elsewhere in the country. The Black Left, particularly those artists and activists in and around the CPUSA, all across the United States were instrumental in the founding or strengthening of cultural institutions and the staging of arts events from Los Angeles to Harlem: art shows, galleries, theaters, concerts, poetry readings, study groups, schools, artists’ workshops, and so on. However, though SNYC worked closely with liberal and radical white southerners in the CPUSA, SCHW, League of Young Southerners, CIO, and other organizations, it was dedicated to the idea of building Black political and cultural institutions run by and for African Americans with an intensity that was unmatched anywhere—except perhaps in Chicago. It also reached out to prominent Black political, educational, and cultural leaders within and beyond the South, including W. E. B. Du Bois (who made his famous “Behold the Land” speech at the 1946 SNYC Columbia Youth Legislature in Columbia, South Carolina) and Dillard University president Albert Dent (father of the key southern Black Arts figure Tom Dent), forming a network of contacts that survived the demise of SNYC to a significant extent.⁶ As Erik Gellman notes, SNYC and the Black Popular Front in the South not only held an internationalist vision of the Black liberation struggle in the South but increasingly foregrounded international connections and alliances, particularly with anticolonial independence organizations and activists from Africa and Asia, anticipating similar ideological and material moves by southern Black Arts activists. For example, Esther Cooper Jackson attended the first World Youth Festival organized by the newly formed World Federation of Democratic Youth (an international late Popular Front organization) in London as a representative of SNYC. It was at that 1945 festival that Jackson met W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as a host of anticolonialist leaders from Africa and its diaspora.⁷ This meeting set the stage for Du Bois’s “Behold the Land” speech the next year and for a relationship with Du Bois that would last the rest of his life, as well as Jackson’s later connection with Du Bois’s second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, a bond that had important consequences for the founding of the journal Freedomways.

Cold War repression and internal struggle led to the dissolution of the SNYC in 1949 and the relocation of many of its leading activists and many of the most public leaders of the southern Popular Front outside the region, especially after the anti-Red hysteria following the Wallace presidential campaign in 1948. Quite a few, including James Jackson, Esther Cooper Jackson, Louis Burnham, Dorothy Burnham, Augusta Strong, and Edward Strong, eventually ended up in Philadelphia or New York, where some almost immediately became involved in Paul Robeson’s new newspaper Freedom, which, like the SNYC’s Cavalcade, was a Black Left political publication with a strong...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in Text
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Ancestors: The Popular Front, Black Nationalism, Bohemia, and Black Art in the South before 1964
• Chapter Two: Becoming Black, Becoming Southern: The Gulf Coast and the Rise of a Southern Black Arts Infrastructure
• Chapter Three: From Campus to Community: The Early Black Arts Movement in Atlanta
• Chapter Four: Black Arts, Black Studies, Black University: Washington, D.C., Nashville, and North Carolina
• Chapter Five: The Southern Black Cultural Alliance, the Neighborhood Arts Center, and the Institutionalization of Community-Based Black Arts in the South
• Conclusion: The Decline of Black Arts in the South, the Persistence of Black Arts in the South
• Gallery
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index