The New Red Negro By James Smethurst New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.

A study of the diversity and complexity of African American poetry during the 1930s and 1940s, Smethurst’s The New Red Negro compellingly and subtly articulates a new view of this long-neglected period and genre of American letters. His particular, though not exclusive, focus is on the African American poets closely associated with or members of the Communist Party during its “Popular Front” period.

Smethurst addresses the relationship to the Communist left of African American poets such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucy Mae Turner, Ida Gerding Athens, Waring Cuney, Countee Cullen, Frank Marshall Davis and Margaret Walker. These poets attempted to blend “a revolutionary black nationalism with a sort of working-class integrationism within an internationalist framework.” This movement produced a uniquely authentic and working-class body of poetry, often with an internal dialogue reflecting the ideological, geographic and class diversity of its creators, that transformed African American letters, as well as US literature more generally.

Smethurst’s ability to illuminate the internal messages, dialogic conflicts and choruses, measures and aesthetics of African American working-class poetry establishes the quality of this book. Thoughtful and complex, though carefully argued so as not to test a reader’s patience, this book demonstrates the poetic forging of community, resistance to exploitation and a folk aesthetic that invoked and reflected Black lifestyles, thought patterns and cultural habits. Smethurst shows that despite disagreements over specific forms and subject matter, the poets of this period agreed on the necessity “of the survival of African Americans as a community being the main form of resistance to racial oppression.”

Part of this representation of community included critiques of mass commercial culture and the cooptation of Black culture as a commodity, as well as the social alienation and institutional and systematic oppression of African Americans. As a whole, these poets-as-critics sought to represent the possibility of community participation in the making of a vital culture, as well as reflect, their own authentic originality in that culture.

There are two poets that stand out in this excellent study. Sterling Brown and Gwendolyn Brooks rarely receive the attention in the academy they deserve except by those few scholars who study poets on the left and those who focus specifically on 20th century Black poets. And when these poets are studied, their relationships to the Communist Party (as activists, members and supporters) are usually ignored. Smethurst’s point isn’t just to demonstrate that these poets were Communists and produced quality poetry, but that the specific political formation of the Left in this period had a profound affect on the way they wrote, the subject matter they chose and how they viewed the process of writing. Working-class ideology, internationalism, resistance to conformity, celebrations of folk culture and collective struggle infused African American poetry in this period with brilliant new discourses, images, ironies, voices and characters.

Brown, most well-known for his volume of poems titled Southern Road (1932), began his career in the early 1930s and challenged what he saw as the high-brow culture usually intoned by the leading intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance. He accused them of ignoring the “Negro masses” in favor of what another African American writer and activist, William Patterson, would call the “aspirations of the rising petty bourgeoisie.” Brown’s own view of poetry’s special role was to record, reflect and reimagine the fragmentation of social life (especially intensified for African Americans) under capitalism into a new broad unity of humanity. Even more specifically, this anti-capitalist and internationalist vision was punctuated by the specific vision of a unity based in an authentic African American national identity and culture. His vision of community came at the especially difficult times marked by the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the geographical dislocation of the Great Migration.

Coming at the close of the period in Smethurst’s study, Brooks’ collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), documents the results of the Great Migration, focusing on the segregated Black community in Chicago’s historic South Side. Simultaneously intensely personal, floridly descriptive and fundamentally political, Brooks’ poetry conversed with, echoed and spoke back to other poets, African Americans, workers and women, and successfully invented and managed complex representations of a diverse social geography. Smethurst states that Brooks’ work, sometimes Whitmanesque, sometimes Shakespearean and usually quite original, challenged African American subjectivity, as well as community, in the search for space free of total colonization by the commodity fetishism of capitalism and the enticing “beauty” of oppressive whiteness.

This book also contains a chapter-length account of the development and complexity of the Communist Party’s positions on the national question that is well worth scrutiny and discussion.