11-21-05, 9:52 am
Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953 Stacy I. Morgan Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2004
Since the early 1990s, academic scholars have re-opened an examination of the contributions of left and Communist artists, poets and writers to US culture. Scholars such as Paula Rabinowitz, Barbara Foley, Alan Wald, Cary Nelson, Constance Coiner, Paul C. Mishler, Kate Weigand, Robbie Lieberman, Bill V. Mullen, Michael Denning, Gerald Horne, William Maxwell, and James Smethurst have produced a tremendous and brilliant body of work that distinguishes itself by shedding Cold War biases that prevented an older generation of scholars from viewing the subjects of their investigation and research with a degree of sympathy, or even as political allies. While not all of this new scholarship is in strict agreement on every political question, it is nevertheless enormously important for having resurrected a nearly forgotten moment in US cultural history.
To this body of worthy research can now be added the recent book by Stacy I. Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism. Morgan's book fits neatly into this growing body of scholarship, but with a special focus on the contributions of 'social realist' writers, poets, and artists who were African American. Additionally, the book effectively transcends the artificial time frame invented to hem in radical writers and the contribution they made. Usually studies of this current of US culture have been strictly confined to the 1930s. Morgan stretches the scope of his study into the 1950s, although he admits there is also an element of artificiality to his own time frame, and bemoans the lack of space that prevents him from advancing further chronologically.
By way of definition, Morgan states that practitioners of social realist art and literature held a participatory view of the work they did. They 'seem to have shared a profound faith,' writes Morgan, 'in the capacity of cultural work to leverage transformation in the social and political sphere.' Morgan adds that the social change they sought to participate in and helped generate by their writings were biased politically in favor of working people. Another important element of Morgan's view of social realism is that its cultural practitioners viewed their work not only as 'activist' and making a contribution to social change/revolution, but that they also viewed themselves as artists and writers as actively involved in a struggle to shift the balance of power in the art and literary world in favor of working class artists.
In Morgan's book, academic and non-academic readers will find extensive examinations of the novels of William Attaway (Blood on the Forge), Ann Petry (The Street), Willard Motley (Knock on Any Door and We Fished All Night), Lloyd Brown (Iron City), as well as the more famous novels by Richard Wright. Each of these writers matured or gained writing experience while affiliated with or actively involved with the Communist Party USA, or the large number of organizations started by Party members and allies. Likewise, poets such as Frank Marshall Davis, Margaret Walker, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, and Melvin Tolson helped redesign the emotional landscape of language and made poetry the 'medium...that for social realists most intensely sounded the clarion calls for revolutionary change.'
By far the biggest and most unique contribution of Morgan's book, however, is its examination of the field of social realist art. The murals, drawings, block prints, and other media of Charles White have earned him a rightful place among the best of the social realist artists. White moved with his family from the South to Chicago, where his father found employment in the city's steel mills. White found himself unable to receive artistic training, which was reserved for economically privileged whites. He soon came under the mentorship of the African American artist George Neal and studied alongside other Chicago notables such as Margaret Burroughs. White also was partially self-taught, having habitually haunted Chicago's galleries.
White came to align himself with the left and the Communist Party after he learned of its leadership in the campaign to free Angelo Herndon, an African American labor activist wrongfully imprisoned on charges of incitement to insurrection in Atlanta, Georgia. (Herndon's real 'crime' was that he had organized a campaign in Atlanta against lynching, which white Atlanta authorities apparently viewed as part of their 'duly constituted authority'). White joined the campaign to free Herndon and eventually to free the Scottsboro Nine.
White also became deeply involved in the struggle to eliminate racial discrimination against Black artists. During the Depression, the federal government established several New Deal projects, including the Works Progress Administration, to employ artists and writers. White joined the WPA in the late 1930s but found quickly that most projects were being assigned to white artists. White and several other Black artists joined the Artists' Union and began to picket community centers funded by the WPA that excluded Black artists. Eventually the government relented, and a new center was opened that now housed many younger Black artists.
Another young artist and contemporary of Charles White was Elizabeth Catlett. Having grown up in the South and studied in New Orleans, Catlett moved to Chicago by the mid-1940s. There, Catlett aimed her considerable talents against lynching and hate crimes, and was active in the fight for full equality. Catlett used familiar imagery to relate a historical narrative and rebuke those who benefited from institutional racism. But Catlett refused to confine her political voice to the canvas. She could be regularly found at public demonstrations against lynching and racist discrimination.
In addition to these two icons of Black art, Morgan includes examples of the work of Charles Alston, Hale Aspacio Woodruff, John Biggers, Hughie Lee-Smith, John Wilson, Raymond Steth, William E. Smith, and Wilmer Jennings. Deploying various mediums and styles, these artists provided realistic depictions of African American lives and struggles. These artists and their work were closely connected to the social conditions in which they lived. They were deeply troubled by the squalor and corruption of capitalism. For this reason, art for them could not simply be a passive receptacle of idealized beauty, but needed to be an active medium through which the artists could help transform the world.
Morgan's work is a significant contribution to the new scholarship in this field and deserves careful and wide study.
