Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald

17. Remembering Nat Turner: Black Artists, Radical History, and Radical Historiography, 1930–55

From the early 1930s to the 1950s, radical black poets, novelists, painters, and playwrights associated with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its cultural sphere combined the leftist imperative of uncovering a revolutionary/people’s history of struggle in the United States generally with an older and more specifically black project of contesting the racist Bourbon and Dunning Schools that dominated the profession of history, rendering black people as objects instead of subjects, as acted upon rather than historical actors. These black radical artists aimed not only to retell and reframe mainstream historical accounts with black people at the center as activists and leaders in the struggle to determine their own destiny, but also to rethink how and why and for whom history is told. To trace the trajectory of African American expressive art in the twentieth century, then, is to rethink our understanding of radical artistic production in the United States in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s in terms of both periodization and regional centers of that production. For example, we might be surprised to discover the radical public art of John Biggers in Houston during the heyday of the McCarthy era or of Hale Woodruff in Alabama in 1940 and adjust our ideas about the South and the history of radical expressive culture accordingly.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the field of US history was dominated by white males who were racist by either omission or commission. U. B. Phillips was the dean of historians of the antebellum South. His take on slavery was basically that the peculiar institution was regrettable, but once the kidnapped Africans were transported here, well, what were you going to do, because they were too helpless to have survived on their own. In his accounts, slavery was a relatively benign if financially impractical institution that would have faded away of its own volition without the violent and unnecessary upheaval of the American Civil War. William Dunning (one of Phillips’s teachers) and the Dunning School of historians portrayed Reconstruction as a singularly corrupt and undemocratic regime forced on victimized white southerners by northern white carpetbaggers and treacherous southern white scalawags and their sometimes childlike, sometimes brutish African American lackeys. More liberal leading historians, such as Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner, downplayed the importance of race and indeed slavery in the development of the United States, ceding that territory largely to Phillips, Dunning, and their ilk. The mainstream historians’ organizations, notably the American Historical Association, were indifferent, when not actually hostile, to black (and radical) historians.[1] Despite some challenges to the Bourbon School of slavery and the Dunning School of Reconstruction by Howard Beale, this racist scholarship dominated the history profession and teaching on secondary and college levels at least until C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956).

While African Americans were not precisely absent from the scholarship of these mainstream historians, they were present as a relatively static group on which historical actors (read: great white men) acted, whether in the eras of slavery, Reconstruction, or Jim Crow. There were, of course, black historians who contested the Bourbon School in the early twentieth century, most famously Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), which established Negro History Week (now African American History Month) precisely to highlight African Americans as historical agents rather than a sort of inert social material. By the 1930s, the ASNLH and Negro History Week came to have some significant influence on the curriculum of black schools in the South but almost none in the academic world outside of historically black colleges and universities.

These circumstances often inspired in black artists a particular sense of obligation to present narratives and interpretations of historical events—be they Nat Turner’s revolt, African American participation in the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow counterrevolution, and so on—as interventions in the field of history. These interventions also served a historiographical function. They said something about what that field had been and was—and for what purpose, for what audience, and by what methods historical narrative had been recounted and interpreted. At the heart of these interventions was the desire to show African Americans as historical agents whose efforts were aimed specifically toward the liberation of black people in particular and the expansion of US democracy in general. One can see this history and historiographical imperative among black artists at least as far back as the late nineteenth century. Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy was as much a black revision of the proto-Bourbon accounts of the slave era, the Civil War, and Reconstruction as it was a call for African American unity to defend the advances of Reconstruction in the face of the emergent system of Jim Crow segregation. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century poems about the Civil War and black soldiers, such as “The Colored Soldiers” and “W’en Dey ‘Listed Colored Soldiers,” argued for the maintenance and expansion of black citizenship through historical remembrance and interpretation, countering reconciliationist efforts to bring together white Union and Confederate veterans, both actually and symbolically, while excluding black veterans and avoiding the subject of slavery. African American historical pageants often presented broad panoplies of African-descended people in the United States. Particularly notable as a forerunner of black 1930s historical art is W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1915 pageant The Star of Ethiopia, which included African American vernacular music (mostly the spirituals) and African-inspired music, anticipating Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to Be Free?[2]

This black imperative to set straight popular and scholarly histories of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow intersected with efforts by the CPUSA and its supporters to uncover and promote a decidedly nonbourgeois revolutionary tradition in the United States during the CPUSA’s Third Period. The term “Third Period” refers to Stalin’s prediction of a catastrophic worldwide capitalist crisis following an earlier crisis during and immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I (the First Period) and a relatively short span of economic stability during the 1920s (the Second Period). The onset of the Great Depression made Stalin seem prescient. One central tenet of Third Period ideology was that the international working class would look for radical solutions to the crisis. The danger, argued Stalin and the Comintern, was that they might be misled back into capitalism by various sorts of liberal and noncommunist leftist groups, especially the various social democratic groups. As a result, the world communist movement in the late 1920s emphasized the establishment of alternative workers’ institutions that were formally, thematically, and institutionally distinct from bourgeois culture, whether conservative, liberal, or even social democratic. One prong of this countercultural proletarian effort was the projection of an indigenous revolutionary history and of matching radical cultural traditions in the United States that were emphatically not bourgeois or liberal.

Also associated with the Comintern and Third Period ideology was the so-called Black Belt Thesis formally adopted by the Comintern in 1928. This position proposed that African Americans constituted a “nation” in the South (with a significantly shared history, culture, psychology, territory, and so on) with the right to self-determination up to and including the right to form an independent republic in the southern “Black Belt” where African Americans formed an often-overwhelming majority of the population. The thesis also postulated black people in the urban North as a “national minority” that should be fully integrated socially, culturally, and economically. One crucial aspect of the Black Belt Thesis is that it put the “National Question” and “Negro Liberation” at the center of the work of the CPUSA. In part because of these notions of the centrality of Negro liberation and the black nation, the more militant manifestations of black rebellion against slavery, Jim Crow, and racism—notably the slave revolts led by Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Singbe Pieh (aka Joseph Cinqué), and Gabriel (sometimes known as Gabriel Prosser)—were seen as exemplars of the true revolutionary tradition in the United States. Consequently, articles and editorials about slave rebellions and other forms of black resistance to slavery appeared in major political and cultural organs of the CPUSA, such as the Daily Worker and New Masses.

African American slave revolts, black efforts to maintain and even extend Reconstruction, and early black direct-action opposition to Jim Crow continued to have iconic status within the Communist Left.[3] As has been much noted, the Popular Front era tended to emphasize a broad democratic contest with fascism and right-wing reaction over a strictly proletarian struggle. Though the official period of the Popular Front as an international Comintern strategy runs from about 1935 to the Hitler-Stalin Pact at the end of 1939, the Popular Front approach to political and cultural organization and aesthetics characterized the domestic work of the Communist Left in the United States far beyond 1939. One can see this approach in African American art in Paul Robeson’s 1939 version of Earl Robinson and John Latouche’s “Ballad for Americans” and in John Biggers’s 1953 Houston mural The Contribution of Negro Women to American Life and History. Both works were important and radical in their ways, and Biggers’s mural had a certain revolutionary side too. The revolutionary heroes Nat Turner, Gabriel, Harriet Tubman, and so on did not vanish during the Popular Front. In fact, it was in the work of black artists that the revolutionary historical strain most often persisted and reached much larger audiences through the growth of public art during the Popular Front era, a phenomenon connected to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project (FAP) in writing, theater, the visual arts, and music. That strain persisted in African American public spaces including schools, colleges, universities, YMCAs, and libraries well after the end of the FAP, as can be seen by John Biggers’s Houston murals in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The great black radical landmark in historical studies of the 1930s was W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 Black Reconstruction. Du Bois examined Reconstruction as a failed proletarian revolution in which the impetus and leadership came not from the top down (from outside agitators, carpetbaggers, radical white Republicans, and so on) but instead from the radicalized black masses and indigenous southern black leadership who were able to assimilate various “outside” liberatory ideas and practices with their own. While the genesis of this study dated back at least to 1909 and a paper he delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, it differed from this earlier work in its efforts to assimilate Marxist ideas and methodologies, particularly Third International Leninist Marxism. Despite the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution on Black Reconstruction, Du Bois projected African Americans not simply as political actors or ideological recipients but also as formulators of a revolutionary tradition in the United States. In this account, the ability to take in useful formulations and concepts and make them their own again demonstrates not the influence of outside (read: white) manipulators but the intellectual capacity of the black masses and their organic leaders, much as in the European revolutionary traditions. After all, people seldom talked, or talk, of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as being under the influence of outside French socialist and British economic agitators. Despite the impact of Third International Marxism on Black Reconstruction, the CPUSA tended to be very critical of Du Bois’s study, seeing it as misapplying historical materialist analysis—though the vehemence of this critique was likely as much due to lingering Third Period ideological distrust of Du Bois as a former liberal “misleader” as to actual ideological difference. Still, Black Reconstruction was a crucial event in the development of black Marxist history and historiography because the book is almost as much about the history profession as the actual historical record of Reconstruction.

Arna Bontemps’s 1936 Black Thunder, a novel about Gabriel’s failed turn-of-the-nineteenth-century slave revolt in Virginia, takes much the same stance as Black Reconstruction. Barbara Foley has very helpfully characterized the novel as a “proletarian social novel,” which is a multiply yet collectively narrated dialogic chronicle of simultaneous and interconnected events.[4] Among other things, the novel engages the complexity of the African American community in the antebellum South, showing a range of classes, complexions, crafts, statuses (free or enslaved), and gender roles as ideological positions inflected by those differences. In part, we get a tutorial about the difficulties of making a revolution, with both the strengths and weaknesses of Gabriel and his lieutenants on display as well as what we might think of as a principled traitor and unprincipled traitors among the slaves. The novel is both a history and radical historiography. In other words, Bontemps is telling a story that is truer and more accurate than what passed for scholarship on slavery in the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. And that mattered a lot to him and to his readers.

It is also important how Bontemps represents the relationship of the rebels to revolutionary ideology. As always, the slaveowners and the state look for the outside agitators, the Jacobins, the foreign revolutionaries:

In this case, there really is a foreign revolutionary in the form of the exiled French Jacobin printer Monsieur Creuzot as well as in the radical white “natural rights” advocate and lawyer Alexander Biddenhurst. And clearly the discussions of Creuzot and Biddenhurst are shown to have an impact on Gabriel and, by extension, his fellow rebels. However, it is also clear that Gabriel and company do not take on these ideas blindly but instead process them and make them their own, combining them with already existing ideas and practices of theirs—again, much as Marx did with non-German political theory and economics. By the end, it is clear that Creuzot and particularly Biddenhurst have gotten more from Gabriel and what is seen as the continuing black liberation struggle than Gabriel and company have gotten from them. As Alan Wald notes, it is the black revolutionaries and their ideological synthesis that guide the rebellion, not the white radicals, whose ideas prior to their engagement with the black revolution remain on the level of abstraction, at least in the United States.[6] In fact, these white radicals are in some senses ambivalent about this incipient revolution in which they and their ideas are not in the lead. However, they recognize that they must support, indeed follow, Gabriel and the other black rebels or be complicit in the counterrevolution of the slavocracy: “‘We cannot escape it,’ he said at length. ‘There is a struggle that takes us in. It takes us against our will. There is no escape for men of conscience.'”[7]

The specter haunting the slavocracy is the nightmare suspicion that the outside agitator explanation does not in fact explain that the revolt is a black initiative, that black people are not malleable material. If there is a major inspiration for Gabriel’s revolt that originates beyond the shores of the United States, its source is not in Europe but in the Americas, and it springs not from white or even mixed-race radicals but from unequivocally black revolutionaries. In short, the shadow of Haiti and its revolution, the subject of Bontemps’s 1939 novel Drums at Dusk, hangs over them. The name of Toussaint L’Ouverture is a sort of mantra of fear (for most of the white characters) and hope (for the black and a few white characters) in Black Thunder. Thus, we get a vision of a US revolutionary history (and the US present of the Scottsboro case, Angelo Herndon, the Sharecroppers Union, and so on) in which not only black issues but also black leadership are at the center.

Those who are inclined to think of the Popular Front as a move away from revolutionary cultural politics might see Black Thunder as a product of the liminal moment between Third Period and Popular Front leftist ideologies, hence explaining its unabashedly revolutionary (or nationalist revolutionary) sentiments as a sort of residual proletarianism. Such people might be surprised to find much the same sentiments and framing of black struggle by artists in what we might think of as the high Popular Front era. Langston Hughes’s 1938 “poetry-play” Don’t You Want to Be Free? is a genre- and media-bending mash-up of drama, black music, and dance that, as the production notes say, endeavors “to capture within the space of an hour the entire scope of Negro history from Africa to America.”[8] There was some precedent in African American expressive culture for this mixture of genre and media in the black pageant movement, notably in Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia. Another example descended from the black pageant tradition were the score and libretto by Shirley Graham (later an important Left activist and dramatist herself) for the opera Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro, commissioned by the Stadium Opera Company, then the leading opera company of Cleveland. The opera combined music, dance, and theatrical spectacle to represent the arc of African American experience from the Middle Passage to the present. It was performed twice in 1932 to large crowds in Cleveland but apparently was not performed again. There is no evidence that Hughes attended the opera, though given his ties to Cleveland and the mutual connection of Hughes and Graham through Cleveland’s Karamu Theatre, it is hard to believe that he did not know of it. While Graham’s opera was certainly in more of a high art modality, incorporating black folk and popular elements after the manner of composers R. Nathaniel Dett and William Grant Still, rather than trying to present them more directly as did Hughes, it did provide a model of which Hughes was likely aware.

As in his friend Bontemps’s novel, Hughes projects a history of interracial struggle against oppression, linking racial or national oppression to class exploitation but with African Americans significantly in the lead, doing much to shape the struggle and, indeed, providing some of the most glorious episodes of that struggle from the slave era to the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.[9] While Hughes names some of the “democratic” icons famously associated with the Popular Front—most notably perhaps Abraham Lincoln—many of the icons of the earlier “revolutionary” period, such as Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown, are invoked as well. The tone of the play is more in the mode of the United States fulfilling its democratic potential or the aspirations of Hughes’s “Let America Be America” than that, say, of the more starkly revolutionary poem “One More ‘S’ in the U.S.A.” Yet it ends with a crowd of black and white workers showing “the power of the worker’s might” and shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”—directly echoing the finale of Hughes’s unabashedly proletarian 1931 play Scottsboro Limited, where the audience joins with the Scottsboro defendants and black and white workers in shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Don’t You Want to Be Free also engages the relationship between art and history, how history has been and might be told, and what counts as historical evidence. In other words, it is as much historiography as it is history. First, the play incorporates previously published poetry by Hughes, including poems that have not been generally seen as particularly historical, such as some of his signature blues pieces. These poems are contextualized in the play as illuminating a range of historical moments. In short, what is offered is a leftist historicist reading of Hughes’s work (and, by extension, that of his black contemporaries) in which that work both illuminates and is illuminated by history. Second, the play’s interpolation of black music (spirituals, work songs, blues, jazz, and gospel), storytelling, and dance as well as literature makes an argument for radically broadening notions of what constitutes (or should constitute) historical evidence in order to produce a true (or truer) account of African Americans in the United States. Given the centrality of ideas and hierarchies of race as well as the economic centrality of black labor in the founding and development of the United States, then, what one is talking about is a true (or truer) history of the United States generally as opposed to those often liberal historians who largely ignored race. Echoing Frederick Douglass’s famous observations about the nature of slave music in his autobiographies and anticipating Amiri Baraka’s more elaborated historical claims in Blues People, Hughes (a major influence on Baraka) suggests that black popular and folk art and forms encode within them an account and interpretation of historical events. Obviously, the use of such black cultural objects is a common, if still somewhat disputed, move in the history profession over the last thirty or so years but was far from standard operating procedure in the 1930s.

The play goes on to propose that beyond its role as evidence, art—particularly popular art—has a dialectical relationship with history and the history profession. Popular culture, whether in the readings of Reconstruction in, for example, the plantation stories of Thomas Nelson Page or D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (with its combination of the plantation genre, coonery, black-face minstrelsy, and Lost Cause mythology) or Hughes’s play, have had profound impacts on the public framing of history, even by professional scholars (whether Phillips, Woodson, or Du Bois) who, in turn, provided grist for these popular culture representations and recountings.

Something similar is at work in the visual artist Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals, which he painted at Talladega College, a historically black school in Alabama, during the late 1930s, publicly showing them in 1940.[10] Woodruff was the founder and head of the arts program at Atlanta University. He encouraged his students to unsentimentally focus on local black workers, small farmers, and sharecroppers, leading him and the circle of artists he mentored to become known as the “Outhouse School,” due to their penchant for including outhouses in their rural landscapes. Woodruff’s program was a major beachhead of the Popular Front in the South and made Atlanta a hub for black visual artists.

As with Don’t You Want to Be Free, there is a certain way that one can see the Amistad murals as keeping with a popular democratic struggle strain of the Popular Front. However, it is also hard to look at the panel of the actual shipboard rebellion showing the captive Africans overpowering and preparing to slaughter the slave ship’s crew and not see a militant action of revolutionary self-determination in the spirit, again, of the Haitian Revolution. To paraphrase Robert F. Williams, one might retitle that panel “Mutiny on the Amistad” as “Negroes with Machetes.”[11] It is certainly possible to see more of a popular democratic iconography in the subsequent court scene. Even here, though, it is important to note that it is Singbe who is in the forefront, with his arms implacably folded and a stern, proud expression on his face, unlike the faces of his white attorneys Lewis Tappan or John Quincy Adams, leaving no doubt about the real leader of the struggle. In short, one is presented with both a revolutionary history with black people (and black workers, one might add) in the leadership of a multiracial (and multiclass) alliance that provides to or provokes in its audience not only a certain historical knowledge and consciousness but also a way of examining and understanding the bases of how history is represented or written and to what ends that history is deployed. The mural also raises the question of what happens, to paraphrase Mary Helen Washington’s 1997 presidential address at the American Studies Association’s annual meeting, when you put African Americans at the center of the field of history.[12]

Like Woodruff, Elizabeth Catlett played an important role in the creation of what might be thought of as an artistic black Popular Front in the South, first at Dillard University in New Orleans and later at Hampton Institute in Virginia. While she never had the institutional power that Woodruff or her student John Biggers had, she nonetheless was an inspiring teacher and, indeed, an inspiration for African American artists working in a wide variety of media and genres from the 1930s until her death in the twenty-first century. She created “I Am the Negro Woman,” a series of linoleum cuts, in 1946 and 1947 for the communist cultural journal Masses and Mainstream while in Mexico studying at the left-wing Taller de Gráfica Popular.[13] What is perhaps most obvious about the series is the presence of what one would now call an intersectional analysis in which we see black women as workers (both urban and rural), mothers, educators, and political leaders who face the triple oppression of race, class, and gender as articulated in theoretical writings by black women Communists, notably Claudia Jones, as well as in the work of both male and female black radical artists.[14]

Figure 17.1. I am the Negro Woman, 1947, Elizabeth Catlett. Linocut on paper, 5½ x 5 in. Accession number 2011.1.172. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Art by Women Collection. Gift of Linda Lee Alter.

The series consists of fifteen linocuts: three featuring well-known historical figures (Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth); eleven with unnamed black women who, among other things, labor, study, organize workers, suffer from Jim Crow in the South, endure gross discrimination in the North, and play music; and one with the full body of a black man who has been lynched (and the dangling legs of three other victims of lynching). She gives particular focus to the faces of the black women, often with one woman foregrounded in the company of other black women, creating a dynamic, one might say dialectical, relationship between the individual and the collective that characterizes the series as a whole. (In the one featuring lynched black men, titled “And a Special Fear for My Loved Ones,” the focus is on the trunk of the body and on dangling legs, not the face.) As in Hughes’s play and John Biggers’s Houston murals, it would appear that the cuts are bifurcated into those that essentially document the present and others that represent a vision of the past, a history.

Figure 17.2. In Phyllis Wheatley I proved intellectual equality in the midst of slavery, 1946, Elizabeth Catlett. Linocut on paper, 9½ x 6½ in. Accession number 2011.1.120. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Art by Women Collection. Gift of Linda Lee Alter.

However, again, the presence of the overtly historical figures of Wheatley, Tubman, and Truth suggests that black women laboring in the present are historical actors in a continuum stretching back at least to the slave era. Again, as with Bontemps, the series not only suggests a counterhistory to that of the mainstream but also revisits and revises notions of what might count as historical evidence and which events might be significant. In doing so, it anticipates the new social history that would only gain real traction in the US academy under the pressure of black studies (and other manifestations of ethnic studies) and the culturally inflected labor history from below most closely associated with E. P. Thompson and such US devotees of Thompson as David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman (former Communists who never abandoned the Left). One might say that Catlett honors and invokes the revolutionary and Popular Front icons of Tubman and Truth (with the interesting inclusion of Wheatley, who is rarely present on lists of revolutionary black ancestors) while complicating what might be seen as a “great woman” theory of history. What one sees, then, is not simply a litany of heroines but a more dialectical relationship between leadership and the grass roots in which the familiar icons are placed in the context of, and on par with, everyday black women and in which there is a dynamic interplay between the individual and the collective.

Like Atlanta University, Hampton Institute in Virginia, where John Biggers enrolled in 1941, was a beachhead of the black Popular Front in the South. At Hampton, Biggers encountered and was deeply influenced by a leftist refugee from Nazism, Viktor Lowenfeld. Lowenfeld became Biggers’s primary adviser, but Biggers was mentored as well by Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett, both closely connected to the Communist Party and sharing Woodruff’s commitment to representing the struggles of urban and rural southern black communities as well as what might be considered the revolutionary tradition in African American history in public art. Lowenfeld, White, and Catlett encouraged Biggers to see his art not as individual expression but as voicing a collective African American culture of struggle: “I began to see art not primarily as an individual expression of talent, but as a responsibility to reflect the spirit and style of the Negro people.”[15]

Biggers’s amazing set of murals in public spaces and black institutions in Houston, which were commissioned from the early 1950s to the 1980s, display his journey from the Popular Front to the Black Arts Movement. The seeds of Black Arts, with a deep engagement to an African diasporic spirituality and sensibility, are clearly visible early on in Biggers’s murals, while his Popular Front artistic origins, with the close linking of a local class-based perspective to the international, never really disappear.

Of course, to a considerable degree, the nature of each mural commission significantly influenced its content and ideological stance. One of Biggers’s early commissions in Houston was the 1953 The Contribution of Negro Women to American Life and Education at the Blue Triangle YWCA. With a slightly cubist emphasis on planes and angles, it compresses a range of stories from slavery to the Jim Crow era into a historical mosaic, much as Diego Rivera did in his Detroit Industry murals. As in the work of Biggers’s mentor Catlett, one sees the presence of the same intersectionality articulated by Claudia Jones and other black Communists and leftists in the late 1940s and 1950s. One also notices in Biggers’s work, as in that of Catlett, Bontemps, and Hughes, the linkage of everyday people with more familiar icons, most prominently Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth (again, also featured in Catlett’s Negro Woman series).

A commission from Local 872, a black local of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), is also clearly in the black Popular Front vein. While the national leadership and structure of the ILA was often corrupt and promoted the Jim Crow segregation of its locals, that arrangement allowed black stevedores in the South to run their own locals and promoted the growth of a progressive African American leadership of the ILA in the South that continues to this day. The 1957 mural that Biggers painted in the Local 872 union hall was, like Woodruff’s Amistad series, clearly within the black Popular Front public art tradition in which Woodruff, Catlett, Charles Alston, Charles White, and Jacob Lawrence worked. Again, in a cubist-inflected mode, dignified and hardworking black longshoremen labor in the foreground of the mural while militant strikers are being urged on by a black orator in the background. One might find it hard to believe that such a militant black prostruggle mural could exist in a union hall in a conservative Jim Crow Texas city in the depths of the Cold War when northern-based radical black institutions, such as the National Negro Labor Council and the journal Freedom, had collapsed. But the mural’s existence, in addition to creating a challenge to the practice of the mainstream profession of history before the appearance of Kenneth Stampp’s 1956 The Peculiar Institution, might also cause us to rethink some of our assumptions about the disappearance of Left influence during the Cold War era, especially in the African American community.

As a result of a greater engagement with African culture, art, and politics, Biggers’s work gradually moved away from his Popular Front social realist mode toward what might be thought of as an Africanist magical realism rooted in West African folklore and style. One example is his 1966 Birth from the Sea, commissioned in 1964 by a public library in the oldest black neighborhood in Houston. Even in Birth from the Sea one does not simply see a black Venus rising on a half shell, as might be predicted from the name. Instead, in many respects the mural is as organized around labor, particularly fishing and the processing of fish, as it is culture—though it is not likely that Biggers would separate labor and culture. In short, the Popular Front lingered. It is also worth noting that the seeds of this mythic rendering of black women dressed in white and emerging from water, which draws on black Christianity and the traditional African deities (particularly the Yoruba Yemoja), was already present in his Sharecroppers mural, which he painted in 1946 and 1947 at Penn State University.

To close, I circle back to the 1930s and the poem that gave the title to this essay, Sterling Brown’s “Remembering Nat Turner.” Brown’s poem was part of his long unpublished collection No Hidin’ Place, a volume that was finished in the mid-1930s but rejected by Harcourt, Brace, the publisher of his first book, Southern Road. The setting of the poem is Southampton County, Virginia, site of the uprising led by Turner. The speaker of the poem, whom the reader is led to identify with Brown, and some companions question local black and white people about Turner. The African Americans are unable to recall Turner, says the speaker:

The Negroes had only the faintest recollections:

White people remember after a fashion but are in error about practically all the particulars—among other things, melding Turner’s story with John Brown’s:

The speaker “returns” to the site of Turner’s rebellion, knowing the fact of Turner’s rebellion, but also knowing, unlike the white people, of the need for local African American tenant farmers to remember Turner, to have an elaborated historical narrative to put themselves (and their ancestors, such as those who revolted) at the center of this history, and to understand the uses and abuses of historical representation.

This knowledge makes the revolutionary black artist a version of Antonio Gramsci’s organic intellectual, perhaps an organic historian—that is to say, not simply one who is from the working class or an oppressed minority and has found a position in the mainstream intelligentsia while retaining some connection to her or his past but an intellectual-scholar-artist generated by the class, the oppressed people, to serve its needs and further its liberation—in this case through the generation of a history and methods of telling and defending histories that are truer and more in the interest of the African American people than what exists either in the mainstream profession or popular culture. This left-wing artistic practice of revolutionary history, which presented simultaneously both a new narrative and a methodological critique, remained an important feature of African American expressive culture through the late civil rights and Black Arts eras and beyond and marked, for example, Margaret Walker’s 1966 novel Jubilee (a work begun in the Popular Front era by a onetime CPUSA member) and the black mural movement that began with the Wall of Respect painted in Chicago in 1967 (and was in part the brainchild of William Walker, a muralist who had a connection to Elizabeth Catlett through his mentor Samella Lewis, a former student of Catlett’s). Revolutionary history appears as well in the post–Black Arts neoslave narratives, such as Sherley Ann Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), that were such a large part of the explosion of writing by black women in the late 1970s and 1980s. In short, this line of radical black history and historiography marked an enduring influence of the Communist Left on US culture long after the institutional decline and isolation of the CPUSA.