ST.01-Edwards 5/24/01 5:52 PM Page 1 Introduction THE “AUTONOMY” OF BLACK RADICALISM The interview with Grace Lee Boggs and the essays on W. E. B. Du Bois Brent Hayes and Richard Wright in this issue of Social Text are selections from a forth- Edwards coming collection of recent work on the history of black radicalism: Rethinking Black Marxism.1 The collection is intended to fill a gap in our understanding of the politics of black radical activity during the twentieth century and to respond to a sense that the remarkable wealth of new work on the subject has marked a significant shift in historiographic orientation. More than twenty years ago, a number of historians began to revisit the participation of African Americans in the U.S. Communist Party, chal- lenging the consensus of Cold War–period scholars, including Wilson Record and Harold Cruse, that—in the memorable phrase of Mark Nai- son—the story of blacks and communism was shot through from top to bottom with “manipulation, disillusionment, and betrayal.”2 The “new his- torians” of organized communism, working with a “willingness to acknowl- edge the indigenous influences on party politics,”3 offered a more san- guine view of the legacy of blacks in communism, noting in particular the sometimes subtle impact of African American radicals on party policy and practice at both the local and national levels.4 The growing body of scholarship that has emerged in the wake of this revisionist project has extended its focus on black participation in com- munist movements to take up the broader and interconnected field of black radical work, whether party-based or not, especially in the metro- politan centers of the West. The orientation of the historiography has largely shifted, in other words, from unraveling the intricacies of organized communism to elucidating the complex parameters of African diasporic radicalism in all its varieties.5 Recent work emphasizes, for instance, the common ground of radicalism inhabited in a place like Harlem in the 1920s by interacting and overlapping forces as diverse as Cyril Briggs’s African Blood Brotherhood, Marcus Garvey’s UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), the socialist organizing of A. Philip Randolph and the group linked to the Messenger, W. E. B. Du Bois’s nascent Pan- Africanism, Claude McKay’s internationalist “vagabond” Bolshevism, and the antiracist campaigns of Walter White and the NAACP. The short- Social Text 67, Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Duke University Press. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-pdf/19/2 (67)/1/513066/st01-edwards.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 ST.01-Edwards 5/24/01 5:52 PM Page 2 lived and still-mysterious African Blood Brotherhood has garnered a dis- proportionate amount of critical attention in this new work, as a “classic example” of an attempt to “organically conjoin Marxism and Black Nationalism,”6 precisely because it embodies for a number of historians the quickly shifting object of study that is black radicalism. As Winston James has recently argued, if New Negro radicalism in the 1920s moved along a continuum from the vehement nationalism of the UNIA to the “orthodox” socialism of the Messenger, the African Blood Brotherhood swung productively between these poles, maintaining “a rather unstable equilibrium,” but “at no point did it touch, let alone merge during its independent existence with, the politics represented at either end of the continuum.”7 There is a turn here, an attraction both to what we might term the autonomy of black radical groups and to their theoretical grap- pling—as fleeting or as fumbling as such work might be—toward a posi- tion and a praxis that would attend to both class and race in promoting social transformation.8 This historiographic shift is not only a departure from party-cen- tered considerations of radicalism; it is also a return: it indicates a renewed attention to the methodologies and strategies embedded within key works within the African diasporic intellectual tradition itself, such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938).9 Du Bois and James—in elucidating the “underground history” of a black diasporic engagement with and shaping of Western dis- courses of American postbellum Reconstruction, on the one hand, and eighteenth-century French revolutionary republicanism, on the other— both insist on understanding the specific contours of black radicalism. As Grace Lee Boggs recounts, James gave an influential speech in 1948 to the Socialist Workers Party convention in New York that may be the most forceful crystallization of this perspective. Distinguishing the work of his small pressure group, the “Johnson-Forest Tendency,” from previous positions on the “Negro Question” in the socialist movement—which tended to think of the struggles of black peoples against racism and oppression as subordinate to the class struggle, as outbursts of merely “episodic value”—James contends on the contrary: We say, number one, that the Negro struggle, the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggles; it has an organic political perspective, along which it is traveling, to one degree or another. We say, number two, that this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and is not led necessarily either by the organized labor movement or 2 Brent Hayes Edwards Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-pdf/19/2 (67)/1/513066/st01-edwards.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 ST.01-Edwards 5/24/01 5:52 PM Page 3 the Marxist party. We say, number three, and this is the most important, that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the prole- tariat in the Untied States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. In this way we challenge directly any attempt to sub- ordinate or to push to the rear the social and political significance of the independent Negro struggle for democratic rights.10 James insists on the autonomy of the “Negro struggle,” with its own “organic political perspective.” The movement, as he notes, is sometimes Marxist in character, sometimes anticolonial, sometimes “waged under the banner of democratic rights,” but in all these forms it has had an indelible impact on the shape of radical praxis. The “Negro struggle” is not merely influential, however: it is “constitutive” in the development of the proletariat and in the struggle for socialist revolution. James’s words are not just a call to action. Nor are they simply a rhetorical chal- lenge, calling the bluff of the Socialist Workers Party with regard to the “Negro question.” They also propose a historiography. They announce a project that is taken up in recent scholarship on black radicalism: to unearth and analyze the “deep historic roots” of the “independent Negro movement.”11 Recent work likewise follows up on a claim particularly evident in James’s work, that revolutionary movements “take forms that are often cultural and religious rather than explicitly political.”12 This is both a point about mass insurgency and an argument about artistic expression. Considering just how many black activists also wrote literature that engaged questions of radicalism (Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Lamine Senghor, C. L. R. James, Richard Wright), it becomes indispensable to take an interdisciplinary approach to a historiography of activity that is itself so resolutely interdis- ciplinary. This is an issue that Alys Weinbaum takes up directly, for the multifaceted output of W. E. B. Du Bois poses this issue perhaps more markedly than the work of most other twentieth-century black intellectu- als. Why, in his move away from liberal antiracist activism toward the more explicitly Marxist analysis that would bloom in Black Reconstruction and Dusk of Dawn, does Du Bois in 1928 write a novel, and more specifi- cally a “romance”? Weinbaum begins to answer this question with her incisive reading of the way Du Bois’s figure of the “black All-Mother” allows an evocation of what she terms “racial globality”—and allows him to broach in his fiction issues being debated in black nationalist circles and in the Communist International. In this sense, the literary may represent, as Sylvia Wynter has argued with regard to the “blurred genre” of C. L. R. James’s 1963 “autosociography,” Beyond a Boundary, the “condition of Introduction 3 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-pdf/19/2 (67)/1/513066/st01-edwards.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 ST.01-Edwards 5/24/01 5:52 PM Page 4 An important possibility of the emergence of a doctrine.”13 In recent literary historical work on black radicalism, this approach strives to attend to the complex- feature of the ity of such a relationship, without conceiving the literary to be simply propaganda or program—that is, a kind of cauldron for “real” political common ground praxis, socialist struggle, and direct action.14 This approach is now being elaborated in terms of other forms of cultural expression, particularly in of black an exciting explosion of work on the politics of black music.15 radicalism is that At the same time, the work of Du Bois and James inaugurates another shift in focus from the nation-state to a transnational or Pan-African frame it is consistently of reference, a shift that has been integral in recent scholarship on anti- colonialism and black internationalism.