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The University of Chicago Knock On THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO KNOCK ON ANY DOOR: THE RISE AND FALL OF INTEGRATION IN AMERICAN CULTURE, 1911 - 1972 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY KOREY GARIBALDI CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2016 Copyright © 2016 by Korey Garibaldi All rights reserved Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….iv Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: The Strange Career of the American “Literary Renaissance,” 1911 – 1933………………………………………………………………………………………15 Chapter Two: “Some of My Best Friends Are Books”: Children’s Literature, World War II, and the Problem of Social Tolerance…………………………………………………46 Chapter Three: White Lives, Knock on Any Door, and Foxes of Harrow, Redux……....95 Chapter Four: Who, and What, Was “Negro Literature” in the 1950s?..........................140 Chapter Five: The Fall of Integration in American Culture, 1958 – 1972……………..192 Conclusion………………………………………………………………...……………240 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………...….242 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS More people, places, and organizations have contributed to my graduate studies at the University of Chicago than I can possibly give proper credit to here. Generous financial support for my research and writing in recent years has been provided by the University’s Division of the Social Sciences; the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture; the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; the Department of History’s John Hope Franklin Research Travel Grant; and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. The departments of History and English at Chicago were important supplements to the many generative conversations and engagements made possible by the CSRPC, the CSGS, and the Social History Workshop. My dissertation committee deserves special thanks for both listening to my ideas and guiding my research from my first year of coursework onward. Kenneth Warren was gracious enough to help direct a dissertation that has greatly benefited from his literary expertise. Thomas Holt inspired me to ground my ideas by paying closer attention to institutions and within the traditions of the historical discipline while never asking me to abandon my focus on writers or fiction. Before I even arrived as a graduate student in the Department of History, Adam Green’s scholarship provided a model for my research. As the chair of my committee, Adam has read many more drafts than I care to admit, and asked many more questions than I have been able to answer. A number of new and old friends and colleagues have remained steady interlocutors both in and away from graduate school. A special thanks to: Emilio Comay del Junco, Diana Schwartz, Tessa Murphy, Chris Dingwall, Ricardo Rivera, Audun Hellemo, Phillip Henry, Renata Limón, Emma Broder, Kate Wulfson, Kai Parker, Ashley Finigan, Oliver Cussen, Katy iv Schumaker, Dan Webb, Keith Hernandez, Jason Ruiz, Corey Rateau, Morgan Ng, Eli Davidow, Jackson Davidow, Swathi Reddy, Gautham Reddy, and Patrick Dexter. Of the many things I have counted on from my mom and dad, their patience and encouragement have been important sources of strength over the past seven years. Love and thanks to you both for reminding me to enjoy myself. v ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the generations of popular black writers that initiated the process of desegregating the U.S. publishing industry from 1919 – 1972. The study argues that by exploring their and others’ myriad, fitful efforts to produce “universal” American culture between these years, an historical genealogy for “African American literature,” created by African Americans, emerges. Because modern black cultural nationalism would not take off—or be appreciated or supported in earnest—until the mid-1960s, the bulk of the study traces the shifting and capricious “raceless” media landscape African American writers navigated from 1940 through the 1950s. By working against popular and scholarly works that consider “Negro literature” in racially segregated terms, the dissertation questions how black writers, who increasingly sought white Americans as possible audiences between these years, developed new techniques as they established, validated, and asserted their humanism. The dissertation seeks to fill an historiographical gap in knowledge on popular African American writing between the 1920s “Harlem Renaissance” and the 1960s Black Arts Movement in its exploration of how white editors and publishers prepared to bring new voices into American culture, but only conditionally. Better remembered black writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison are put into conversation with writers that are less celebrated today— even though they were equally, if not more famous at mid-century—such as Frank Yerby and Willard Motley, the author of Knock on Any Door (1947). The study demonstrates that focusing on a loose cohort of popular black writers during the mid-twentieth century enables the recovery of the mechanics by which black voices were integrated across American culture, even when they were not always affirmed as such. In sum, the dissertation argues that black writers that succeeded in meeting the “universal” cultural standards white Americans demanded, such as vi Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin, emerged as intellectual leaders in establishing higher standards for how African Americans should be engaged as fellow citizens. ns moved in this direction over these years. vii INTRODUCTION “I do not doubt but there are some in this audience who are a little disturbed at the subject of this meeting, and particularly at the subject I have chosen. Such people are thinking something like this: ‘How is it that an organization like this, a group of radicals trying to bring new things into the world, a fighting organization which has come up out of the blood and dust of battle, struggling for the right of black men to be ordinary human beings—how is it that an organization of this kind can turn aside to talk about Art? After all, what have we who are slaves and black to do with Art’” —W.E.B. Du Bois, 1926 This dissertation examines the history of African American inclusion in the nation’s avant-garde letters, children’s literature, popular novels, and Hollywood films from the early 1910s through the Black Arts Movements in the early 1970s. It argues that between these years, a broad cohort of black and white writers, publishing professionals, periodicals, books, and films were sizeable—and often key—forces in the reconsideration of interracial conduct and racial pluralism in the United States. Offering somewhat of a challenge to historians that have emphasized political and physical interactions as predominant factors in the struggle for civil rights in the U.S., this study follows literary scholars in questioning how texts and virtual representation figured into this struggle. 1 The study’s commitment to a broad racial lens in its narratives and analyses of cultural phenomena related to the fitful segregation and desegregation of American and African American thought over the twentieth century is somewhat unusual. Until recently, commentators on and scholars of African American literary history in particular have often failed to adequately interrogate how and why a remarkable number of authors and texts are either included or excluded from this curiously rigid canon. Most prominently, popular and acclaimed black 1 For a recent survey of developments in scholarship that have led to an increase in the “rigor and precision of how black literature and culture operate in the political realm,” and its consideration of “how this cultural production, which some commentators frame as almost teleologically emancipatory, sometimes serv[ing] reactionary ends,” see Vaughn Rasberry, “Black Cultural Politics at the End of History,” American Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter 2012), 796 – 813. 1 American literary figures such as W.S. Braithwaite, Jean Toomer, Willard Motley, and Frank Yerby are often framed and described as distinct from—rather than representative of—the African American literary tradition. More frequently than not, these writers have been accused of avoiding racial protests, celebrations, and African American literary themes more broadly. As such, their professional endeavors have generally been categorized as different from the literary productions of their widely acclaimed black colleagues and contemporaries such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka. Both historically and more recently, these binaries have also given the misimpression that racial protest and easily identified commitments to black communities were static characteristics of authors usually represented—or seen as representative—of the Africa American cannon. Thus comparatively little attention has been given to the resistance Baldwin encountered in attempting to publish his now widely- celebrated Giovanni’s Room, Wright’s “white-life” novel Savage Holiday (1954), or Baraka’s critical sponsorship of the Beat Poets. 2 The study historically situates these and dozens of other writers, texts and literary initiatives that transcended racial boundaries from the 1910s through the early 1970s by examining how and why the structures of the publishing industry changed between these years. 2 Recent scholarship in the literary field has explained how black literary production changed and increasingly incorporated new themes, especially
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