The editor’s pressure on Brooks to soften her racial critique has to be understood in the context of the late 1940s and early 1950s “official antiracist liberalism” (Melamed 2011)²—a push to stymie race radicalism and substitute an official race order that would ignore material inequalities, restrict the terms of antiracism, and promote “progress” narratives. The CIA was operating domestically as well as internationally to carry out its policies of containment and repression, diligently and deviously infiltrating and manipulating African American cultural institutions. Cold War ideologies, often disseminated through the culture industry, permeated every facet of American life, most notably the film industry. Operating through the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI), the FBI investigated Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, filing detailed reports on movies they deemed subversive. The Bureau objected particularly to those movies that portrayed Blacks in too positive a light or attributed racism to decent white “American” characters or were concerned with changing racial dynamics. In the massive drive to ensure and justify the elimination of left-wing dissent, anticommunism and antiBlackness were installed as permanent features of US democratic structures (Noakes 2003: 728–49). When we view Brooks purely through the lens of Black nationalism, we are unable to make sense of her more expansive and eclectic left-wing radicalism—a radicalism equally concerned with the subjects of “mass culture, social hierarchies, gender oppression and the plight of workers” as with race. This work is an attempt to move beyond a restrictive Black nationalist focus and to reestablish Brooks’s participation in a long left-wing literary radicalism that extended from the 1940s into the 1970s and beyond.

Although Brooks was probably never a member of the Communist Party, she was an active part of a cast of progressives, including many communists and communist-influenced groups, that formed the Black Left Cultural and Political Front in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. In the reports of Gwendolyn Brooks’s cultural and social activities in the 1940s and 1950s, there are always a fair number of communists and leftist radicals dotting the landscape. However minimal and provisional her early left-wing political affiliations might have been, Brooks was at the center of the Chicago Negro Left Front in the 1940s, a Cultural Front whose politics the literary historian Bill Mullen describes as “independent of the Communist Party but largely symbiotic with its popular front objectives and aspirations” (Mullen 1999: 10). The literary historian James Smethurst also situates Brooks within most of the important cultural networks of the Left—from the Left-led National Negro Congress and the League of American Writers to the Left-influenced SSCAC and the Left-led United Electrician and Machine Workers Union and to the left-wing editors and writers who promoted her early career (Smethurst 1999: 165). Even Brooks’s friend Haki Madhubuti, the Black nationalist poet and cultural critic, who disparages the significance and influence of the Left in Brooks’s life, acknowledges that the Left was at least a brief stop on her career path: “She was able to pull through the old leftism оf the 1930s and 1940s and concentrate on herself, her people and most of all her ‘writing’ ” (Madhubuti 2001: 82). The consensus among scholars оf the Left is that Brooks was a part of a broad coalition of mainly Black artists, writers, and community activists who were making their own history of radical Black struggle, which exceeded, transformed, and expanded Communist Party–approved aesthetics but could not be divorced from its influence and support (Madhubuti 2001: 81–96). In the work Brooks produced during the Cold War 1950s, mainly her 1953 novel Maud Martha and the poems in her 1960 volume The Bean Eaters, she managed to balance a Black leftist political sensibility with an investment in modernist poetics that produced what I call her leftist race radicalism.

The friends and colleagues Brooks socialized with in the 1940s and 1950s—visual artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, Margaret Taylor Goss (later Margaret Burroughs), the sculptor Marion Perkins, and writers Ted Ward, Langston Hughes, Frank Marshall Davis, and activist Paul Robeson—leftists, communists, and fellow travelers—are remembered in one-and-a-half pages in Report as “merry Bronzevillians,” with no reference to their politics; they may be party guests and partygoers but never Party members. In an essay Brooks contributed about Bronzeville to the charter issue of the magazine Chicago in 1951, published by the Mayor’s Committee for Economic and Cultural Development, she covered a wide range of Black life in Bronzeville, beginning with the stories of the economically depressed and the consequences of poverty on children. As an epigraph she included six poems that critique poverty, war, and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers. Then she turns to “another picture of Bronzeville,” the exciting parties there, specifically noting that she did not mean the “typical” Black bourgeois ones, which she called, ironically, “soulless,” but the “mixed” parties that included whites and Blacks. Though, as in Report, she did not label them politically, many of whom, like the host, sculptor Marion Perkins, were avowed communists or deeply Left enough to be considered fellow travelers: Ed and Joyce Gourfain, writer Willard Motley, Margaret and Charles Burroughs, were progressives strongly attached to the Left or in the Party. Joyce Gourfain was a former lover of Richard Wright, and both Gourfains knew Wright from their days in the John Reed Clubs; both were certainly Communist Party members (Wald 2012). Both Margaret and Charles Burroughs were close to the Party, and Brooks hints at that in Report, describing Margaret’s radicalism with a dictionary definition: “a rebel, [who] lived up from the root” (Brooks 1972: 69). Lester Davis, named in the Brooks article as a Chicago teacher, photographer, and journalist, was also at the time the executive secretary of the Chicago Civil Rights Congress, a position that would have gone to a Communist Party member or close ally. Richard Orlikoff was a leftist attorney who defended an Abraham Lincoln Brigade member (Cohen) against House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigative committee of the House of Representatives. Also there were the African American physicist Robert Bragg, later a member of the faculty of the material science department at Berkeley, and his wife Violet. In the oral interview Bragg did for the Berkeley archives, he speaks of his attraction to communism and his early friendship with Brooks, probably through the NAACP Youth Council, describing himself as “a closet radical” (Bragg 2005). The only reference Brooks makes to the politics of these mostly leftist merrymakers is a series of ironic and mocking comments that imply but downplay the political tenor of conversations among these progressive Black and white intellectuals. In her typically elliptical commentary, Brooks reports that during those conversations, “Great social decisions were reached. Great solutions, for great problems” were debated over “martinis and Scotch and coffee.” In the photograph that accompanies the front page of the Chicago article, Margaret Burroughs is strumming her guitar “for her artist-writer friends,” and Brooks, who was often in the midst of such parties, was, as we see from these alternative “reports,” at least for a time in the late 1940s and early 1950s, comfortably situated among the Chicago Marxist bohemians (Figure 1).