Never to be Forgotten: A Life too Short

January 12 marked 60 years since the death of Lorraine Hansberry at the age of thirty-four. Hansberry was a brilliant intellectual and cultural worker who would earn the begrudging respect of the highest cultural gatekeepers, despite her activism in Communist and anti-racist circles. At a time in the early post-war period when lynching was commonplace and anti-Communism was in full crescendo, it was rare for anyone to risk membership or association, especially for a young African American from a prominent family on Chicago’s South Side. Most of her contemporaries were running away from Communism as fast as their feet would take them.

Her Communist activism on the Wisconsin-Madison campus coincided with her full support of the 1948 Henry Wallace Progressive Party campaign. Her commitment took her to New York, where she worked on Freedom, a newspaper created and contributed to by Black Communists and leftists, including Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Louis Burnham, John Oliver Killens, Lloyd Brown, and others (Freedom was the forerunner to Freedomways, an equally leftist publication brought to life in the civil rights era). That Hansberry enthusiastically jumped into this cauldron of ostracized and blacklisted African American intellectuals in 1951 at the age of 21 and at the height of Cold War hysteria is a tribute to both her courage and her integrity.

In 1957, Hansberry wrote the play, A Raisin in the Sun, a masterpiece that came to be associated with her name. Despite the racism of the times and the insularity of the theater, Hansberry became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway and the youngest playwright to win the prestigious NY Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959.

A Raisin in the Sun (a title taken from a poem by Langston Hughes) profoundly exposes the scars of racial oppression, not in a patronizing or crudely emotion-evoking way, but as social contradictions to be answered through struggle and liberation. It shares with Brecht’s theater universal messages expressed by the unique particulars of real, vulnerable, flawed, but evolving people.

The setting is a working-class Black family living in a poor neighborhood of segregated Chicago’s South Side. The death of the father brings a $10,000 insurance payout and the latent tensions from the possible realization of the family members’ different aspirations. The possibilities of escaping the neighborhood, of a safer, more comfortable home, a better environment for the grandchild, a higher education for the talented daughter, or an entrepreneurial venture for the son all arise. But those possibilities also become threatened by the allure of an attractive, but meager and insufficient payout earned from a life of labor.

The family matron wisely thinks of an investment in a new home as serving the whole family, but in an all-white segregated neighborhood, bringing forth further contradictions. She shares the common working-class dream of gaining a better life. When resisted by family members, she decides, with the wisdom of Job, to divide the settlement, providing a boost to all the dreams. After making a down payment on the house, she entrusted the money to her son, who recklessly gives all of the remaining money to his dishonest business associate.

With the money gone, the play could have become another scolding liberal morality play about victimization, dysfunction, and broken dreams.

Instead, Hansberry has the son meet the white homeowners’ racism, not with supplication but with dignity and defiance. It is not a story of individual redemption, but of finding family pride, familial solidarity, and in a small, but significant way, a commitment to a better world.

The play seamlessly addresses resignation, individualism, class, escapism, racial pride, family dynamics, and, of course, the full scourge of racism.

Because it is not about glass ceilings, elite access, or language policing, it is a good reminder today of the continuing oppression of Black workers and the poor.

Columbia Pictures remade Raisin into a film in 1961, retaining Hansberry as the screenwriter and winning many accolades. The American Film Institute counts the film version as one of their top 100.

Turner Classic Movies showcased the film this past January 20, for Martin Luther King's birthday.

Hansberry’s brilliance was apparent to all who met her. The electric, politically charged singer, Nina Simone-- a close friend of Hansberry-- beautifully performed the song To Be Young, Gifted, and Black as homage to her friend. A recording reached a wide audience in the late 1960s.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the power and integrity of Hansberry like her 1963 confrontation with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, organized by the celebrated writer, James Baldwin. Baldwin’s prominence prompted Kennedy to arrange an informal meeting with a group of civil rights activists to be assembled by Baldwin. Included in the small group were Jerome Smith, a young CORE freedom rider, who had been beaten and jailed in the South, along with Hansberry.

After hearing Kennedy recounting all of the actions that he claimed the Justice Department had undertaken in the desegregation battles, Smith differed sharply, citing the many times he had seen Federal agents stand by while his cohorts were beaten.

After Kennedy seemed shocked by this audacious response, Hansberry is said to have stated: "You've got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there. That is the voice of twenty-two million people" [pointing to Smith].

After Smith maintained that he would rather die than fight a war for the US, Hansberry addressed an appalled Kennedy: "Look, if you can't understand what this young man is saying, then we are without any hope at all because you and your brother are representatives of the best that a White America can offer; and if you are insensitive to this, then there's no alternative except our going in the streets ... and chaos."

After a lecture on how the immigrant Kennedy family suffered poverty, Hansberry walked out.

In a 1979 article in Freedomways, Baldwin warmly remembered that meeting and Hansberry’s contribution: “I must, now… do something which I have never done before: Sketch the famous Bobby Kennedy meeting… I want merely to suggest something of Lorraine Hansberry’s beauty and power on that day; and what the incomprehension that day’s encounter was to cause the nation and presently, the world.”

He recalled the meeting’s close: “The meeting ended with Lorraine standing up. She said, in response to Jerome’s statement concerning the perpetual demolition faced every hour of every day by black men who pay a price literally unspeakable for attempting to protect their women, their children, their homes, or their lives, ‘That is all true, but I am not worried about black men-- who have done splendidly, it seems to me, all things considered.’”

“Then she paused and looked at Bobby Kennedy who, perhaps for the first time, looked at her.”

“‘But I am very worried,’ she said, ‘about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on the that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham’.”

“Then, she smiled. And I am glad that she was not smiling at me. She extended her hand.”

“‘Goodbye, Mr. Attorney General,’ she said and walked out of the room.”

Leaving for another meeting, Baldwin remembers: “We passed Lorraine who didn’t see us. She was walking toward Fifth Avenue-- her face twisted, her hands clasped before her belly, eyes darker than any eyes I had ever seen before-- walking in an absolutely private place.

I knew I couldn’t call her.

Our car drove on; we passed her.

And then, we heard the thunder.”

Her commitment-- her complete commitment to social justice-- never ebbed, even facing her mortality. In the spring of 1964, months before her death of pancreatic cancer, she literally rose from a hospital bed to speak at a fundraiser for Monthly Review. She concluded:

As we all know, there is something which we might call the “civil rights game” going on in this country, and it is being played right now in Washington. It is a game in which individuals, and indeed whole classes of individuals, who are in every way imaginable committed to the perpetuation of the oppression of Negroes, pretend for a whole variety of fashionable reasons that they are not. A portion of those who play this game go so far as to pretend that not only are they against the present condition of Negroes but they would like to alter that condition for the better; and according to the rules of the game, they are designated by their co-players as civil rights champions and, depending on what is happening on a given day, they debate with one another on the best methods of stalling Negro demands for equality while appearing to be laboring on behalf of Negro equality. Naturally whenever Negroes assert that their situation is intolerable, these game-players point to the game which is going on and say that if those Negroes do not shut up they will stop playing altogether and reveal their true sentiments with regard to Negro freedom—which of course would be one of the healthiest things that could happen to this not-so-healthy country.

That is why I have come here this evening to celebrate with you the recognition of the fact that there is only one place from which that desperately needed pressure on the game is going to come when all is said and done. It’s going to come from 20 million discontented black people who, however, must be led by a new and presently developing young Negro leadership—a leadership which must absolutely, if the present Negro revolt is to turn into a revolution, become sophisticated in the most advanced ideas abroad in the world, a leadership which will have had exposure to the great ideas and movements of our time, a Negro leadership which can throw off the blindness of parochialism and bathe the aspirations of the Negro people in the realism of the twentieth century, a leadership which has no illusion about the nature of our oppression and will no longer hesitate to condemn, not only the results of that oppression, but also the true and inescapable cause of it—which of course is the present organization of American society. Monthly Review, 2015, Volume 67, Issue 01 (May)

A friend since her days at Freedom, the esteemed writer John Oliver Killens recalls: “To me, Lorraine Hansberry was a one-woman literary warrior for change-- qualitative and fundamental change.” He adds: “In my view, Lorraine was a Black nationalist with a socialist perspective… Have not all the revolutions of the 20th century been about national liberation? And haven’t they all been socialist revolutions-- Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam?”

But Hansberry was also an internationalist, he elaborates: “As with Robeson and Malcolm, her nationalism had an internationalist context that is reflected by one of her African characters in Les Blancs [her last play]. Tshembe tells the white man, Charles Morris:

I shall be honest with you, Mr. Morris. I do not ‘hate’ all white men-- but I desperately wish I did. It would make everything infinitely easier! But I am afraid that, among other things, I have seen the slums of Liverpool and Dublin and the caves of Naples. I have seen Dachau and Anne Frank’s attic in Amsterdam. I have seen too many raw-knuckled Frenchmen coming out of the metro at dawn and too many pop-eyed Italian children to believe that those who raided Africa for three centuries ever ‘loved’ the white race either."

Killens sums up Lorraine Hansberry, as if anyone could really sum up such a brilliant giant among Lilliputians:

Lorraine Hansberry was an extraordinarily articulate young black woman, committed to the struggle and very fast on the draw. Indeed, literarily and intellectually, she was one of the fastest guns in the East-- and her gun was for revolution and change. She was a humanist; she was anti-slavery (meaning she was anti-capitalist). The pity of it, and the loss to us, are that she was with us for so terribly short of a period. Who knows to what heights this courageous falcon might have soared? (Freedomways, fourth quarter, 1979)

A great loss, not to be forgotten…

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Essential Reading for the New Year

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Vincent Bevins and Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade, Jeff Schuhrke were maybe the two most important books that I read this past year. I have read many good books, many well written books, many timely books, but these were arguably the two most important books. 

They are important because they attempt to tackle questions that are neglected or only superficially discussed on the political left. They are most important because they surface popular assumptions that are among the greatest obstacles to the success of any authentically left project: spontaneity as an organizational philosophy and anti-Communism as political orthodoxy.

Recommended reviews of both books can be found on Marxism-Leninism Today here and here.  

Bevins’ book highlights the failure of impressive mass risings that rocked several countries and their ruling classes in the twenty-first century. He chronicles the objective conditions that inspired people to rise in opposition and in great numbers; he confirms the breadth and depth of the movements that arose; and he demonstrates how the movements fell far short of their goals, even resulting in setbacks.

In the cases Bevins studies, though the movements met with resistance, they melted away far before any final reckoning with that resistance. In his post-mortem-- based on many interviews with leaders, participants, and activists-- he concluded that a strong commitment to spontaneity, a rigid rejection of hierarchies, and a naive concept of participatory democracy hindered moving from demonstrations to successful social change, not to mention, revolutions. 

It is this prominence of neo-anarchism or radical democracy-- two ideologies that collapse, in practice, into one-- that doomed the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and many other promising movements that succeeded in bringing millions into action, but left the stage with little gain. 

While Bevins insists that he is only a journalist-- a reporter and interpreter of findings-- he strongly suggests that structure and leadership were the missing elements from mass struggles of this century. One cannot help but sense that he has something akin to a Leninist organizational model in mind, without an explicit endorsement. And why not? After all, weren’t highly organized, vision-driven, often worker-led parties the most formidable, the most successful movements for change, for revolution in the last century? 

Today’s tragedy is that a handful of sentences describing a grievous injustice on social media can bring mighty masses to the streets, but the reigning simplistic ideology of spontaneous, undirected, unfocussed action will go no further. Political demonstrations become exercises in mass therapy-- “performances” of democracy-- rather than goal-directed measures in a larger political program of change.

Of course, these same “spontaneous” risings are also easily hijacked by other political operators with a wholly different agenda, like the infamous color revolutions that have reshaped Eastern Europe and other places in the interest of imperialism. Where there are no organic leaders, where there is no master plan, leaders and direction will likely be supplied from somewhere else.

The student movements of the 1960s codified the idea of participatory democracy-- a decision-making approach that sought to engage everyone equally, renounced the idea of authority, and scorned traditional roles of leadership. But the world is not a college seminar room. Millions of workers and peasants have-- in the past-- deferred the role of leadership to those who have earned it from their dedication and sacrifices. They understood that a revolution itself is the most democratic act of all, breaking the bonds of domination and exploitation and opening the gates to popular rule. 

The overarching focus on democratic procedure-- an obsession of the privileged left-- too often dilutes the commitment to outcomes. The final lap of social change is the replacement of one system with another, the overthrow of one ruling order with another. If, as anarchists and liberals maintain, the democratic procedure is everything, then there is no need to prefigure an outcome. Instead, we can take it on faith that masses-as-a-whole will spontaneously choose the outcome that is best in some imagined, country-wide utopian townhall meeting of the future. 

Unfortunately, history gives us no example of great social change secured by consensus. Nor has a parliament ever handed working people a victory without the pressure of mass militancy. 

Behind the left cult of bourgeois democracy is a deeply ingrained anti-Communism. At the height of the Cold War, Communism, socialism, and even popular frontism came under vigorous attack throughout the capitalist countries and especially in the US. Association with progressive ideas advocated by Communists or the center-left popular front (including the New Deal) risked social isolation, job loss, even jail. Unless accompanied by a conspicuous disclaimer condemning Communism, progressive ideas such as labor rights, social equality, anti-racism, or even mild criticism of capitalism, were cause for ostracization. Few had the integrity to risk the consequences of the Cold War inquisition. Instead, even the most tepid reformism necessarily had to be presented with the tag “democratic” or “free” (to separate itself from Communism), as in “democratic socialism,” “democratic planning,” or “free trade unionism.”

As the worst of the inquisition resided, a “new left” was born that consistently paid homage to the official doctrine of anti-Communism. To the new generation of activists, the problem was not that the capitalist countries needed a radical, even revolutionary makeover, but that they needed their flawed democracies to be reformed, to be more “democratic.” Yes, the institutions were imperfect-- infected with racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, elitism, prejudices of all kinds, militarism, or corruption-- but they were sound and could be fixed with an injection of democracy. 

Fear of redbaiting-- dread of violating the secular religion of anti-Communism-- closed the door to the kind of really radical answers that working people had sought since the dawn of the industrial age. 

Which brings us to Jeff Schurhke’s important book, Blue Collar Empire. 

If the hope of a radically more just, more egalitarian, more humane society lies in the hands of the working class-- and I think it does-- then it cannot be shackled by the dogma of anti-Communism. Yet Schurhke shows that our organized US labor movement-- the AFL-CIO-- has been thoroughly infected with this disease-- a disease that incubated in the business unionism of Samuel Gompers, the American Federation’s founder, spread throughout the years of AFL craft unionism, and killed the promising spark of class-struggle unionism generated by the nascent CIO. 

We learn from Schurhke of the Cold War betrayal of global workers’ solidarity culminating in US labor’s sabotage of The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). We are told of the undermining of Communist and left-led unions throughout the world and the disasters that befell foreign workers as a result.

Anti-Communism wedded the AFL-CIO to the CIA stooges Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, and served as a litmus test for leadership, even participation in the AFL-CIO, effectively vetting the most militant, class-conscious organizers. Through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the AFL-CIO collaborated with only the most backward, US-friendly, anti-Communist international union leaders, spreading US dollars to deny workers the right to choose their own way forward.

Schurhke provides us with the most comprehensive account of the insidious AFL-CIO/CIA cooperation since George Morris’s long-out-of-print classic, CIA and American Labor (1967), a book that unfortunately received more attention from the CIA than from most of his contemporary labor historians.

Genuflecting to anti-Communism and mechanically disdaining organizational principles will inevitably cripple left movements today, as they have so often in the past.

For Bevins and Schurhke in their own words, interviews are available from Coming From Left Field: Bevins, Schurhke.

The authors underscore the obstacles to moving beyond the ugly choices currently available, as we enter a new and foreboding year.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com