A few weeks before it premiered on Broadway to great acclaim, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun received an anonymous review at the behest of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover . Written by a Bureau agent who attended the drama’s pre-Broadway engagement in Philadelphia, the report concluded that Raisin “contains no comments of any nature about Communism as such,” possibly allaying Hoover’s fears that the play might be “controlled or influenced by the Communist Party.” 1 New York drama critics also found no propaganda, Communist or otherwise, in Hansberry’s play. They were relieved that Hansberry depicted honest, human, and humorous situations, without recourse to protest. The New York Post found Raisin evinced “no abnormal exploitation of the current racial situation.” 2 Most mainstream press coverage saw Raisin as an affirmational play, assuring white audiences that Negroes were just like them in their universal longing for the American Dream.
Yet the FBI’s clandestine presence in Raisin’s audience and Hoover’s personal attention to a neophyte dramatist reveal a more complex narrative about Hansberry and her most famous work than the reviews disclose. Hansberry, a radical, lesbian feminist, composed A Raisin in the Sun as a critique of heteropatriarchal capitalism and Western imperialism. The specific, racial obstacles facing the Younger family were not universal but particular barriers deriving from American slavery and Jim Crow. The play’s ending, which sees the Youngers on the brink of moving into the white neighborhood Clybourne Park , was read as a happy one, yet Hansberry consistently compares the Younger’s occupation of a home in hostile territory to the violent clashes happening across a rapidly decolonizing African continent. Hansberry forged her black left feminist ideology among a cohort of New York-based black radicals, such as the blacklisted performer Paul Robeson . 3 In addition to stints at radical press outlets—Robeson’s black Marxist newspaper, Freedom , and the Communist Daily Worker—Hansberry’s early writing efforts include a play coauthored with the leftist writer Alice Childress. Their play was mounted in support of a left-wing feminist group, the Sojourners for Truth and Justice , of which Childress was a key member, and whose activism was centered on obtaining equity for black people around the world. 4 Childress and Hansberry’s play recounts the history of African Americans, ending with a call for justice for Rosa Lee Ingram , a black woman in rural Georgia imprisoned for killing a white man in self-defense, around whose case the Sojourners for Truth and Justice mobilized. One of the play’s actors was Harry Belafonte , who was trained in the left-leaning American Negro Theatre alongside Raisin’s Broadway stars, Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier —all of whom evolved into radical civil rights activists. Raisin was touted as Hansberry’s individual achievement and a universal story about people who just “happened to be Negroes,” rather than a protest drama. 5 Yet, as Hansberry’s FBI file confirms, she was a leader among a generation of black leftist theatre workers whose protest art was shaped by their resistance to racism and anti-Communism . The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939–1966: Staging Freedom documents Hansberry’s cohort of radical theatre artists dedicated to the dismantling of Jim Crow.
This study joins a wave of recent scholarship that acknowledges the rich history of leftist politics and its intersections with African American culture of the twentieth century. Studies concerning black and interracial literature and theatre of the twentieth century by Chrystyna Dail, Brian Dolinar, Cheryl Higashida, Gerald Horne, Kathlene McDonald, James Smethurst, Alan Wald, Mary Helen Washington, and others have demonstrated what Washington identifies as “the central role of the Communist Party and the Left in the shaping of mid-twentieth-century African American cultural history and aesthetics.” 6 During the “Red Decade” of the 1930s, theatre artists were swept up in the fervor of antifascism and buoyed by the sponsorship of the Communist Party of the United States. The CPUSA’s cultural organs fostered the careers of radical black writers: Richard Wright and Theodore Ward were supported by the Chicago John Reed Club before taking their theatrical talents to New York City ; Lorraine Hansberry developed her aesthetic sensibilities while writing drama criticism for Masses & Mainstream ; and Alice Childress supervised the theatre committee of the CPUSA’s Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), during which time she oversaw productions of radical dramas, including the anti-war, feminist A Medal for Willie (1951), written by William Branch (who was blacklisted due to the play’s reputation).
The almost immediate canonization and de-radicalization of A Raisin in the Sun is a microcosm of civil rights theatre’s negotiation with Cold War anti-Communism . As red hysteria increasingly targeted black dissidents, radical theatre artists like Hansberry found innovative modes of expressing dissent while managing to mount significant productions of their plays. Bridging the rise and fall of McCarthyism , The Civil Rights Theatre Movement resists the “narrative of declining radicalism” that understands African American literary and theatrical figures—represented by such notables as Harold Cruse and Richard Wright—as disillusioned with the Communist Party and the American left. Indeed, as Brian Dolinar points out, figures such as Alice Childress, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson , and, of course, Hansberry, never broke from the left. 7 Most of the major black theatre artists of the civil rights era remained committed to a far-reaching Popular Front politics that yoked Jim Crow to American capitalism and Western imperialism.
The Cold War did, however, take an immense toll on radical theatre artists. Attending to the breaks and discontinuities, as well as the lives and careers destroyed because of anti-Communism , this study documents the ways in which artists of Hansberry’s cohort were subjected to the double jeopardy of Cold War blacklisting and racial discrimination. My study also demonstrates how theatre artists persevered in producing leftist and internationalist theatre on the margins of the Great White Way through the height of McCarthyism . Childress’s drama with music, Gold Through the Trees , and its production history best encapsulate the ways in which the left infused all aspects of civil rights theatre . Gold portrays black women as leaders of a worldwide revolution against white supremacy and colonialism, weaving together scenes from across the African Diaspora . Beginning in Africa with the start of the Atlantic slave trade, Gold Through the Trees moves through scenes depicting American slavery and Jim Crow, and concludes by depicting South Africans’ resistance to Apartheid in the 1950s. Gold Through the Trees was produced in Harlem by Childress under the auspices of the left-wing cultural organization the CNA . Glowingly reviewed by Lorraine Hansberry for Freedom , Childress’s drama was also praised in the CPUSA’s Daily Worker , whose reviewer noted with approval that Gold treated African characters respectfully—a rarity in mid-century theatre. 8
Indeed, by framing Gold Through the Trees with scenes of African women’s resistance to slavery on the one hand and Apartheid on the other, Childress helped to advance and emphasize a larger goal of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice . During the time, the black feminist radicals of the Sojourners were actively attempting to “forge ties with South African female anti-apartheid activists” alongside the radical anti-colonialist group the Council on African Affairs (led by, among others, Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois). 9 The April 1952 premiere of Gold Through the Trees was timed to coincide with the South African Defiance Campaign on the 300th anniversary of the Dutch landing. As evidenced in Gold Through the Trees, Childress’s politics were internationalist in scope, and her plays bear the marks of her close relationship with an older generation of black artists and intellectuals, particularly Shirley Graham Du Bois and W. E. B. Du Bois....