Popular fronts: 'Negro Story' magazine and the African American literary response to World War II

African American Review, Spring, 1996 by Bill Mullen

Yet despite the perserverance of this view, many works have appeared in recent years to challenge it. Gerald Horne's Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois & the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963; Maurice Isserman's Which Side Were You On?; Robin D. G. Kelley's Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Depression; and most recently George Lipsitz's revised and updated study Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s have each demonstrated numerous examples of successful affiliation between black and "left" radicals in the 1935-1950 period. These range from progressive collaborations of black sharecroppers and Alabama Communists in the '30s, to the continuation of Communist Popular Front politics in African American literary culture into the early 1940s, to the remarkable insurgency of black labor unionism and anti-fascist, pro-black organizing during the war years. Cumulatively, these works suggest a need for close re-reading of the political, cultural, and literary record of relationships between African Americans and the U.S. left in the post-Depression era. More importantly, they suggest that black and left are not mutually exclusive terms in this period, and that African Americans did much to construct and re-constitute central definitions of American "radicalism" up to and through the beginnings of the Cold War.

This essay examines one heretofore ignored source which complicates, challenges, and adds to conventional wisdom about the plight of black and white radical writers and intellectuals of the 1940s. Negro Story magazine first appeared on the newsstands of Chicago in May of 1944. Sixty-three pages long, plainly adorned, the magazine announced itself as a bimonthly "magazine for all Americans" dedicated to the publication of short fiction about African American people. In "A Letter to Our Readers" in the inaugural issue, founding co-editors Alice C. Browning and Fern Gayden explained that in their own attempts to write short fiction, "the idea struck us that among thirteen million Negroes in America, there must be many who were eager to write creatively if they had a market" (1.1: 1). The editors also voiced a desire to use the short story as a tool of social uplift for black readers, and as a way to involve black literature in the national and international crises of the war:

We believe good writing may be entertaining as well as socially enlightening. . . . we emphasize the belief that the future of the world is at stake during this World War II. But we also believe that Negroes have a great opportunity to achieve integration with the best elements of our society. We, the editors, as Negro women, not only welcome the opportunity to participate in the creation of a better world, we feel that we have an obligation to work and to struggle for it. (1.1: 1; emphasis added).

The ideological tension between wartime patriotism and black social reformism evoked in these lines is symptomatic of a unique political and editorial crisis for African American writers and intellectuals of the early 1940s which Negro Story could not avoid. Not only did Gayden and Browning's polite manifesto mark their bourgeois enculturation as members of Chicago's relatively new "talented tenth" South Side black community, for whom only the War's eventual peace could preserve a newly hard-won prosperity, but the quotidian aspirations of the black Chicago majority literally mobilizing around them. Indeed, 1944 was a tumultuous year for the poor and working class of Chicago's black South Side, which had seen tremendous wartime swelling in the city's black population, met by bitter resistance from white-dominated industry, housing, and civic politics. In 1944 alone, fifty-seven anti-black work strikes occurred through the industrial North, including several in Chicago, despite and because of the increase by nearly one million of black defense and wartime civilian workers since 1940.(2) In response to both worker and union discrimination, Chicago workers had already formed at least two all-black unions - the National Alliance of Postal Employees and the Consolidated Trades Council, representing construction trade workers (see Murray). In March of 1944, prompted by widespread protest of discrimination against blacks in Chicago city housing and the continued application of restrictive covenants, Marshall Field, publisher of the Chicago Sun, convened the Mayor's Commission on Race Relations. The Commission's intention was to avoid a repetition in Chicago of what Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, referring to the massive June 1943 rebellion in Detroit by blacks restricted from access to public housing, termed another "Black Pearl Harbor" (see Anyplace 224).

Bontemps and Conroy's apt metaphor encapsulated the social unrest of wartime blacks in cities like Detroit and Chicago, whose internal subversions threatened to destabilize not only the war effort but also the racist social order upon which its militant nationalist psychology depended. It was this psychology that prompted the Chicago Defender, the second-leading black newspaper of the early 1940s, to compare Hitler's Aryan supremacist theories to American racist ideology against blacks, and to argue editorially throughout the early 1940s that "American Race Prejudice Must Be Destroyed" (Anyplace 107). It was also such strongly worded wartime militancy that had inspired in the early 1940s a government backlash against the black press. Attempted repression of its more militant voices had begun as early as 1942, when Archibald MacLeish, director of the Office of Facts and Figures for the Roosevelt Administration, convened a conference of black newspaper editors to ask that they tone down calls for racial reform in respect for national wartime unity. These threats were compounded by Justice Department visits to noncompliant black publications like the California Eagle, edited by Communist sympathizer Charlotta Bass (Finkle 121), as well as the vociferous Pittsburgh Courier, and by government accusations that militant black papers were taking funds from the Germans and Japanese (Ottley 265).(3)