The Black Radical Imagination

Alan Wald

No Race, No Country:
The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright
By Deborah Mutnick
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025, 312 pages, $13.37 paper, $36.20 hardback.

Baldwin: A Love Story
By Nicholas Boggs
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2025, 720 pages, $23 paper, $36 hardback.

Survival is a Promise:
The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
By Alexis Pauline Gumbs
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2024, 528 pages, $18.60 paper, $25.60 hardback.

Something to Do with Power:
Julian Mayfield’s Journey Toward a Black Radical Thought, 1948–1984
By David Tyroler Romine
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025, 304 pages, $25.90 paper, $39.85 hardback.

I. Creative Resistance

COMING OF INTELLECTUAL age in the early 1960s, I was one of those whose “doors of perception” were progressively cleansed of the middle-class socialization typical of an American childhood in the McCarthy years. Nonetheless, my awareness that something was gravely amiss in the “Ozzie and Harriet” conformity of the “consumer’s republic” of Eisenhower and Kennedy did not derive from psychedelic drugs.

Instead, my source was close encounters with the avantgarde, Left-wing Black Art of the post-World War II era. This was a cultural undercurrent of the burgeoning new radicalization at work in the interstices of the prevailing Cold War climate, a percolating resistance that opened one’s mind and imagination to vistas promising a more authentic and meaningful life.

At first, there were books surreptitiously circulated by a friend from Hebrew School and a sympathetic public-school teacher; these awakened my social consciousness through the brutal clarity of protest novels authored by Chester Himes and Richard Wright.

Then came the cool jazz and bebop heard late at night on the New York radio show of disc jockey “Symphony Sid”; these acquainted my emotions with the subdued intellectual melodies of Miles Davis and the frantic pace of Dizzy Gillespie.

Both artistic genres provoked an instantaneous political and affective resonance, as if the artists were messengers from a vitally different America telling me that there were unresolved contradictions in American life and that things had to change. Fiction and music were articulating a more profound and truthful reality about the existence of “others” — the poor, people of color — beneath the surface of the ordinary, daily life I was experiencing.

Imaginative literature was the main draw, and over time the catalogue of African American writers attracting me grew to a daunting size — poets, playwrights, autobiographers, scholars and critics.

Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Margaret Walker revealed ways of life mostly concealed in that period, narratives not just of victimization and oppression, but of multiple forms of creative resistance, historical consciousness, coded meanings, and communal solidarity.

The Jazz that was essentially the soundtrack of my adolescence (John Coltrane, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk) provided an aesthetic counterpart. It was one of improvision, syncopated rhythms, call and response, and the repetition and revision known as “signifying.”

In college and graduate school, the more I read about the novelists, poets and playwrights, the more I began to understand them as a significantly interconnected cast of characters with a political commonality originating in the Marxist Left.

Most had passed through various connections with the U.S. Communist Party (CP-USA) at some point in the 1930, 1940s and 1950s, and specifically the South Side Writers Group, Committee for the Negro in the Arts, and the Harlem Writers Guild.

Even when brief, their associations became emotional and intellectual points of reference for much that came after. For them, the attraction to Communism was the opposite of the brutal authoritarianism of the USSR so well-documented today; the allure was a phase of visionary hope and idealism, and an interracial solidarity proven by courageous CP-USA activism in unions, the community, the anti-colonial struggle, and on the battlefields of Spain.

All the writers eventually came to an organizational disillusionment with the CP-USA itself, and in most cases with the Stalinist model as well. Yet a Marxist sensibility persisted so that they and their art were profoundly marked by the episode.

By and large they continued to wrestle in their writing over the following decades with conditions, experiences and issues linked to that idealism, generating a rich repertoire of concepts and concerns that continue to resurface in the present. At best their fiction, drama, poetry and essays disclose an unapologetic depiction of U.S. culture in all its complications and contradictions, digging deep into the reality of a class society that structures inequality along with gender and race.

By 2026, the scores of cultural figures of what one might call the “African American Old Left” are practically all deceased, but their cumulative work comprises a mosaic of collective memory that many readers and socialist activists still find precious. The subject of this review essay is a selection from the multiplicity of the growing body of afterlives produced mainly by the biographers and critics of the writers.

II. Guardians of Memory

In a certain sense, studies of this type now serve as guardians of memory. And it is fascinating to place them in comparative perspective, because the authors apply very different lenses to what is more-or-less the same generation of lives, writings and political experiences.

This is surely the case with the latest crop: two full life-cycle biographies focusing on lesbian-feminist poet Audre Lorde (1934-92) and writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924-87), and two critical studies treating novelist and Black Power militant Julian Mayfield (1928-84) and Marxist novelist Richard Wright (1908-60).

All had singular but nevertheless intense associations with the CP-USA at critical junctures in their development as writers. The first two participated in CP-led classes and writing groups when young, and contributed to affiliated publications (New Masses, Harlem Quarterly, Freedomways); the last two held formal membership in the CP-USA for nearly a decade each.

The unifying thread in all these studies is that life generates art; that is, the creative imagination alchemizes one’s experiences — real and imagined — into one’s writing. The essential problem for the biographer and critic is to determine what matters and what doesn’t.

Three of the subjects are incontestably big stars in the constellation of African American radical writers — Wright, Baldwin and Lorde. Mayfield’s name, in contrast, is not widely known but he contributed critical ideas and a record of activism that helped to shape the movement.

The Baldwin and Lorde books are doorstop tomes (totaling well over 500 and 700 pages) from the same commercial press (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), and the other two are solid but modest (around 300 pages) from the same academic publisher (University of North Carolina Press).

Wright and Baldwin of course have been the subject of a kazillion earlier studies (essays, dissertations, monographs) and several biographies, and Lorde was given a very full biographical treatment by Alexis De Veaux 20 years ago in Audre Lorde: Warrior Poet (2006).

What’s critical to this present assessment of four books published in 2024-25 are the mutations in the reputations of the various writers, along with shifts in the evolution of scholarly technique. The reputational aspect is most pronounced when one compares the evolution of the stature of Wright and Baldwin, now quite the reverse from what it was in the mid-20th century.

III. Structural Oppression & Prophetic Speech

Richard Wright came to notoriety, perhaps unfairly, as primarily a founding figure of what was called “protest literature” — writing aimed at inciting anger and then action regarding social injustice. His first book-length publications, the short stories in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), the novel Native Son (1940), the documentary Twelve Million Black Voices (1941) and the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), were the groundwork of this reputation.

His second novel, The Outsider (1953), published while living in exile in Paris, was a beguiling effort to step into a new realm of complex thinking but brought negative reviews and remains poorly understood. His subsequent, paradoxical non-fiction writings on colonialism (Black Power [1954], The Color Curtain [1956] and White Man, Listen [1957]), only added to the confusion as his denunciations of Western capitalist exploitation were coupled with a skepticism about the capacity of African culture to resist.

Serious and weighty, with a Marxist emphasis on the structures of social oppression, Wright never shied away from the violence that came with white supremacy. Baldwin, who began as something of a mentee of Wright and followed him to Paris in 1948, came to prominence with an unexpected (and rather ungrateful) condemnation of the protest tradition and Wright as its avatar in his 1949 essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel.”

Although both men drew on African American experience and culture, Theodore Dreiser was a major inspiration for Wright’s naturalist technique, and Henry James attracted Baldwin for his psychological depth and subtlety of language.

Baldwin’s first novel, the autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was celebrated for its emotional nuance but Baldwin clearly did not displace Wright’s status as the outstanding Black writer addressing the political and sociological architecture of racial and class oppression. Moreover, when Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room was published in 1956, its focus on queer love between white characters was widely seen as a further retreat from tackling racial domination in fiction.

On the other hand, it was the 1955 publication of the essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, that established Baldwin as a new and different voice in Black culture. His notoriety as a Black spokesperson stemmed from his non-fiction essays using personal and prophetic speech to explain how oppressor as well as oppressed are both deformed by racism.

IV. Falling into Eclipse

After Wright’s early death in 1960, Baldwin, who had returned to the United States in 1957, became increasingly visible in the U.S. civil rights movement. As an essayist and journalist, he covered the 1963 march on Washington and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March.

Baldwin met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, allied with the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), shared platforms with Martin Luther King, and associated with Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.

In 1963 he published the best-selling non-fiction essays in The Fire Next Time and in 1965 held a famously televised debate with the conservative William F. Buckley in Cambridge, England. During the late 1960s Baldwin progressively linked the Civil Rights movement to global struggles against white supremacy (Algeria, Africa) and talked of revolution in his essays.

Yet his reputation persisted as mainly an ethical critic and interpreter of psychological issues. The 1962 publication of Another Country was well-received, but the novel focused on personal aspects of race and sex, reinforcing that perception of Baldwin as the voice of moral conscience rather than a rigorous intellectual.

Consequently, by the end of the 1970s, Baldwin had drifted from center stage. He spent an increasing amount of time in Turkey and then France. A new generation of Black women writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker came to prominence. Reviews of his final books were lukewarm, suggesting that the writing was too didactic and rhetorical.

The work of Wright, too, fell into eclipse. There were allegations of misogyny in his fiction and a perception that his prose was heavy-handed in comparison to Ralph Ellison’s modernist style. In contrast to the Black Arts movement championed by Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez, Wright seemed more interested in shocking a white liberal readership than promoting African American nationalist culture.

V. Second Looks

By the 1990s, however, all this was changing yet again. What transpired were shifts in academic study along with the evolving political climate, mutually affecting the approach to and standing of the two authors.

Undoubtedly Baldwin has benefitted the most from the growth of newer fields of Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Whiteness Studies, and Affect Studies (emphasizing the social dimensions of feelings and emotions). These now gave him the quality of a writer who had been ahead of his time. The success of the 2016 documentary about Baldwin, I am Not Your Negro, added to his revival.

This means that an increasing number of younger critics have returned to Baldwin’s fiction, plays and essays. An inspirational second look has resulted in new admiration for Baldwin’s prescience in the treatment of sexuality and power, whiteness as a structure of emotional investment, his analysis of colonialism, and his transatlantic perspective.

For Wright, his reputation remains solid but he is now much overshadowed by his younger rival, even as scholarship about his life and work has expanded mostly within conventional methods. The relationship between modernism and naturalism in his writing have been revisited, the intersection of Marxism and Existentialism reconsidered, and the influence of older authors (i.e., Dostoyevsky) reassessed.

Moreover, as with Baldwin, Wright’s anti-colonial and global dimensions have invited more sympathetic attention, and his image as a narrow “protest” writer has given way to that of something of a transnational Black intellectual.

Additionally, a brief boost to Wright’s standing came with the surprise 2021 publication of The Man Who Lived Underground. This was a manuscript from 1941-42 that not only resonated with the Black Lives Matter protests critical of police brutality that culminated in May 2020 but also drew attention to his experimental techniques and philosophic depth.(1)

The new books by Deborah Mutnick, Professor of English at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University, and Nicholas Boggs, an independent writer, illustrate the present-day reputations of both authors and the impact of the latest methodological emphases. Although conceptually distinct and often at odds, Mutnick and Boggs share an urgent desire to reclaim texts beyond the canonical ones and insist that the writing of Wright and Baldwin speak uncannily to the present moment.

VI. Reassessment and Recovery

Mutnick’s marvelously titled No Race, No Country is part biography of a complicated author, part analysis of Wright’s numerous remarkable writings, and part history of anti-racist radicalism during three decades of wrenching political transformations. Tenaciously and competently researched, it provides a clarity and coherence that skillfully subverts the many preconceptions in circulation that have in some quarters pigeon-holed Wright as intellectually crude, sub-literary, and overly sociological.

Moreover, the theme that Wright’s work unfalteringly troubled predetermined identities of race and nation, demystifying these categories from a Black internationalist perspective, is captivatingly argued.

Mutnick’s is surely the most comprehensive critical study so far, distinct in its encompassing up-to-date perspectives on Wright’s life and work, a consideration of unpublished manuscripts, and original archival findings. Very often one comes across thought-provoking observations such as Mutnick’s comparison of the treatments of Black history by the characters Boris Max and Cross Damon. (151)

What is particularly compelling is the tight organization and precise, innovative focus of the seven central chapters that meld multiple elements. As Mutnick explains of Wright’s fiction: “His genius as a writer was to fuse experience with a Marxist sociology of race, class, and, less consistently, gender in fast-paced stories blending naturalist, modernist, pulp, and surreal genres.”

In Wright’s travel and nonfiction volumes, “he drew on ethnographic and journalistic skills learned as a federal writer in the FWP [Federal Writers Project] and as a reporter for [the CP-USA’s] New Masses and Daily Worker.” (9)

The volume gets off to a rather astonishing start by presenting the protagonist of The Man Who Lived Underground, Fred Daniels, as a doppelganger to Native Son’s Bigger Thomas, then tracks “the geography of his life and work” (10) in the United States and abroad, followed by a study of his relationship to Marxism in the CP-USA and afterward.

Perhaps the most distinctive chapter is the fourth, concerning Wright’s research and writing on the Illinois and New York Federal Writers Projects, “Rediscovering America as a Black Federal Writer.” More than any previous scholarship, these pages are clarifying and insightful for the manner in which Mutnick shows how Wright was trained in methodologies he would appropriate for his own later work.

Chapter five begins by spanning Wright’s early poetry of the 1930s and his travel writing of the 1950s, but also pursues his treatment of gender and female characters in several texts including the unpublished novel, “Black Hope.” Chapter 6 “re-reads Wright from an ecocritical/eco-socialist vantage point in relation to his travel books as well as some of his earlier works, his involvement in anticolonial movements, and his critique of empire.” (11)

The concluding Chapter 7 goes into previously neglected and misunderstood writings of Wright’s final period, including the unpublished “Island of Hallucinations,” the poorly received The Long Dream (1958), some short fiction, and his haiku poetry. While I must confess that No Race, No County doesn’t entirely demystify the perpetually enigmatic aura that has always surrounded Wright for me, it’s hard to imagine a work more successful in its goal of reassessment and recovery.

VIII. The Personal and Creative

One oddity of No Country, No Race, however, concerns the claim on the featured jacket blurb that the book is “an invaluable resource from which to trace the confluence of Wright’s personal experiences and creative ingenuity.” In fact, Wright’s personal experiences border on a void in this book when it comes to his intimate being.

The shadings and contradictions of the inner life of this complicated person are sometimes mentioned, but insufficiently written in for a study that aspires to be an expansion of our appreciation of his thinking. Art derives from an emotional makeup as well as a formal belief system.

To be specific, Mutnick is adept at presenting discussions of his female characters in a largely successful effort to defend his understanding of “triple oppression” (compound discrimination by race, gender, and class); yet the palpable literary connections between Wright’s own very active and complicated love/emotional life and the treatment of gender in his writing are mostly glossed over with a few generalizations.

This apparent incuriosity is strange due to the crucial role in understanding the creative process afforded by biographical inquiry: Its ability to reach into the most confidential and personal realms of life, imperative because many aspects and episodes in one’s writing are born of private experience along with the public.

Sometimes not all the facts revealed about even a much-admired person’s life are convenient, especially when there is behavior reflecting poorly on the subject’s propensity for selfishness and ego gratification.

Nonetheless, using documented research to enter the veiled precincts of Wright’s intimate life is not the same as recounting, for example, the prurient details of the Kenneth Starr Report on Bill Clinton to scandalize and discredit. It is about understanding how interrelated the personal, the political, and the creative imagination can be.

The subject is tricky and requires caution, not unfounded speculation. It is normal now for scholars of Ernest Hemingway to address what is known about the gender fluidity of his relationship to his fourth wife (Mary Welsh Hemingway) as crucial to understanding the posthumous The Garden of Eden (1986). Or for scholars of T. S. Eliot to focus on the centrality of T. S. Eliot’s acknowledged sexual estrangement from his first wife (Vivienne Haigh-Wood) to help unravel The Waste Land (1922).

A similar methodology is warranted when we consider the rather shocking gender dynamics at work in a controversial and wildly overwrought text like The Outsider. Here, and no doubt elsewhere, many episodes from Wright’s two marriages and numerous, documented pre-marital and extramarital affairs are reworked tellingly into the events.

Mutnick readily identifies political associates as inspirations for literary characters (Oliver Law, John P. Davis). Yet the many important women in his romantic life are absent from Mutnick’s analysis as human beings; she only mentions the bare facts that he married persons with the names of Dhimah Rose Meadman and Ellen Poplar.

IX. Messy Matters of the Heart

As if an act of overcompensation, Nicholas Boggs structures Baldwin: A Love Story entirely around the theme of Baldwin’s four primary love relationships: the modernist African American painter Beauford Delaney (1901-79), the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger (1932-2010), the Turkish director and actor Engin Cezzar (1935-2017), and (in a fresh revelation) the French painter Yoran Cazac (1938-2005).

Although much of this material concerns messy matters of the heart, one must acknowledge that Boggs’ narrative is marvelously deft and reported with poise. Boggs centers Baldwin’s intimate relationships — especially with men — as fundamental rather than subsidiary to his life and work. Boggs’ appreciation of Baldwin’s queer liaisons, and occasionally heterosexual ones, are far from biographical footnotes but are shaping forces in his art, exile, and emotional life.

There is also an overriding argument: Baldwin was primarily attracted to white, bisexual men who were married to (and apparently preferred) women, thereby frustrating his own need for a permanent marital-like relationship. Although he was not drawn to gay rights or a gay community, he longed for a family and regretted that he never had children.

This artistic impact of Baldwin’s intimate and emotional life is found not only in works such as Giovanni’s Room, for which Happersberger is crucial. In Another Country, where Eric Jones is inspired by Cezzar, queer desire destabilizes heterosexual norms and addresses the erotics of racial conflict.

Just Above My Head (1979), which reflects some of Baldwin’s passing affairs with younger men, explores Black gay love as artistically generative in the career of a gospel singer. Several different novels seem to be informed by Baldwin’s feelings about Cazac’s alternating presence in his life, including If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) as well as Just Above My Head.

All this narrative reconstruction through liaisons and emotional structures is partly a much-needed corrective; earlier biographies, although not silent, were comparatively muted or euphemistic regarding Baldwin’s sexuality, often foregrounding race and politics. At the same time, Boggs does not make eroticism itself dominant in all these intimate associations, especially with Delaney.

In fact, the involvement with Delaney was apparently not physically sexual, although the painter was crucial for presenting the teenage Baldwin with a model of Black queer affirmation. But love is the most pronounced theme of Baldwin and is broadly treated to denote not only sexual desire but heartbreak, dependency, betrayal, suicidal episodes and devotion, all of which seep into his fiction.

For me, the methodological question in this kind of work is whether the biographical details of Baldwin: A Love Story effectively illuminate the writings as well as the personality of the subject. I find the book at its best when Boggs weaves the analysis of the Baldwin’s romantic frustrations into the writing — fiction as well as non-fiction — to provide new insight into his narrative choices, delineations of characters, and above all his intellectual journey.

But there are other places when Baldwin reads like a retrospective appointment diary with endless citations of day-to-day details of visits and visitors, letters written and received, encounters with transient hustlers, travel plans made and cancelled, and interviews and speaking engagements.

X. Queer Black Troublemaker

For those trained in the academy that Richard Ellman’s James Joyce (1959; revised 1982) is the GOAT of literary biographies, the poet and independent scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival is a Promise pushes the envelope even further than Boggs.

Gumbs has been alternately described as a “Black feminist love evangelist” and a “Queer Black troublemaker,” and she memorializes Lorde in the subtitle, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, which clearly echoes Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010).

The difference in meaning is that the cells taken from Lacks’ cancerous tumor in 1951 (known as HeLa cells) outlived Lacks for decades as they were reproduced in laboratory culture. Gumbs’ argument is that Lorde’s work and presence posthumously continue to offer spiritual guidance: “she died before I met her [but] she shows up in the lives and actions of countless devotees across space and time.…” (14)

Moreover, Gumbs describes her book as a “quantum biography,” which is her term for a form of life-writing inspired by quantum physics — where particles do not behave in strictly linear or predictable ways.

The analogy might be disconcerting, if not intimidating, for those who recall the German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein calling quantum physics “spooky action at a distance,” and Danish theoretical physicist Neils Bohr quipping, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”(2)

So reader be warned: If one is dependent on an overarching chronological narrative and thematic consistency, the earlier biography by De Veaux might be one’s first choice. On the other hand, in Gumbs’ hands the quantum method provides subtle twists of the lens to brings out different shades of Lorde’s thought through a vision of the natural world with humans included but not elevated.

Lorde, depicted as the ultimate “Feminist Kween,” is not to be understood primarily by dates, archives, or conventional narratives so much as emotional attachments, human and natural bonds, and living memories: “This is not a normative biography linearly dragging you from a cradle to a grave….This is a cosmic biography where the dynamic of the planet and the universe are never separate from the life of any being.” (14)

Most contemporary radical activists have encountered passages from Lorde’s poetry and prose that address systematic oppression, the need to resist, and intersectionality: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” “Your silence will not protect you,” and “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence… it is self-preservation.”

Far fewer have made their way through the 488-page The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997) to understand how Lorde aspired to bridge her identities as Black lesbian, socialist, warrior and mother.

Lorde’s poems are widely recognized as vibrant, powerful and moving. Gumbs treats some of them line-by-line, as in the instance of “Power” (1978), written in response to a white police officer’s killing of Clifford Glover. It is admired as an example of literary form disciplining political rage. Many of Lorde’s works, such as “Coal” (1968) are viewed as sparkling and audacious, but Gumbs’ is a more numinous account, imparting deep-seated spiritual attributes.

Lorde’s writing is testimony to how she deployed difference as a creative force for mediation; exercised the erotic as a source for female power and creativity; and made use of spiritual traditions from Africa and the Caribbean to reshape Black feminist poetics. Moreover, a careful reading of her essays “Open Letter to Mary Daly” (on the privileges and blind spots of white feminists) and “The Cancer Journals” (about marginalized people creating meaning in the face of violence and death) are indispensable parts of her legacy.

The essential biographical facts are presented but woven into a broader meditation on her impact. Born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants from Barbados and Grenada as “Audrey Geraldine Lorde,” she attended Catholic schools and then Hunter College High School for intellectually gifted young women. Having produced poetry from a very young age, she was immediately drawn to outsiders and radicals. In the early 1950s she encountered the lesbian scene in the East Village while working at various jobs.

Lorde’s primary radical political activity at this time was as a member of the Committee to Defend the Rosenbergs (Communists accused of conspiracy to commit espionage). She attended meetings of the pro-Communist Harlem Writers Guild, although an association must have begun earlier as she published the poem “Recompense” in its journal Harlem Quarterly, in 1950.

After the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953, she felt that the anti-Communist atmosphere was so intense in the United States that she relocated to Mexico City for a year. There she was a student and traveled in pro-Communist circles. Upon her return to the United States, she studied for an MA in Library Science from Columbia and in 1962 married a gay white lawyer (Edwin Rollins) with whom she had two children.

In 1968 her career as a poet was launched with the publication of First Cities, and she was appointed poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College. That same year her political activities became more pronounced through engagement with the Civil Rights Movement and she also began a two-decade romantic relationship with white psychologist Frances Clayton (1927-2012). Together they raised Lorde’s children and collaborated on anti-racist workshops, after which Lorde partnered with Dr. Gloria Joseph, a Black Caribbean feminist writer and activist.

When Lorde arrived with Clayton in New York, she launched a long teaching career at the City University of New York, also associating with the Combahee River Collective, Kitchen Table Press, and Sisters in Support of South Africa.

In 1984 she had a visiting professorship in West Berlin and in 1985 traveled to Cuba as part of a delegation of Black women writers. From 1991 to 1992, when she died of breast cancer, she was State Poet of New York.

This is only a fragment of her life and activities, as the real focus of Survival is a Promise is not so much on what happened to Lorde previously — and when and why — but her presence now. As with Boggs’ Baldwin, the continuation of thought, and connection of the present to the past, are spiritual resource for our own moral clarity.

That is why Gumbs advises, “Read this book in any order you want, knowing it will reach you on a personal and a cosmic scale. Read these chapters like a collection of poems that speak in chorus in all directions. Understand each word as an opportunity for Audre’s fierce love, which is the same love that birthed the volcanoes and split the continents, to reach you.” (15)

XI. On the Front Lines

To some, Survival is a Promise may seem more séance than life history, although it effectively conjures Lorde’s presence through a collage of connections and associations. In contrast, Something to Do with Power is a book that has my name written all over it, inasmuch as I am a specialist in minor and often misunderstood literary radicals.

The author of this outstanding critical analysis is David Tyroler Romine, of the History Department at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, and the volume’s subject of Julian Mayfield is not merely neglected.

Mayfield was also a highly significant and productive cultural activist in many areas, as well as a committed revolutionary who traversed Communism, Black nationalism, and Internationalism on several continents. His life was an ongoing effort to understand how Black people could obtain and wield political power globally — not merely achieve formal civil rights.

I am far from the only scholar who has made use of his vast archives at the Schomburg Center for Black Research in Culture in Harlem and have hankered for many years to see a book-length study.(3)

Romine’s singular achievement lies not only in his reconstruction of Mayfield’s intellectual development, but in presenting Mayfield as a crucial mediator among Black radical currents in the Cold War, who progressively and consistently addressed the power of the state and white supremacy through cultural as well as revolutionary political practice.

Actor, playwright, novelist, journalist, teacher, activist — you name it and Mayfield was on the front lines in this brilliantly braided biographical and political study. Each chapter reviews a distinct episode in Mayfield’s intellectual, political and geographical journeying.

Chapter 1 shows how, born of working-class parents in South Carolina and growing up in segregated Washington D.C., Mayfield, like Lorde, began writing as a child. He first encountered Black literature when he came across Richard Wright’s Black Boy while working at the Library of Congress at age 16.

After high school graduation, Mayfield joined the army for a tour of duty in Hawaii and the Philippines but received a medical discharge in 1947. He briefly attended Lincoln University but in 1948 relocated to New York City where he joined the milieu around the CP-USA and took courses at its Jefferson School of Social Science.

He simultaneously studied drama and in 1949-50 had roles in Left-wing plays that included John Wexley’s They Shalt Not Die, William Branch’s A Medal for Willie, and Kurt Weil and Maxwell Anderson’s Lost in the Stars. He also wrote several plays of his own and directed others.

Politically he was active in defense committees on behalf of Willie McGee (executed for allegedly raping a white woman), the Martinsville Seven (also executed for allegedly raping a white woman), and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. He was a member of the Harlem Writers Guild and Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA). He also wrote for Freedom newspaper and served on a security detail for concert artist Paul Robeson.

By Chapter 2, the situation was changing. In 1954 Mayfield, now a CP-USA member, had a falling out with the CNA over personal matters, married Dr. Ana Livia Cordero and relocated with her to Puerto Rico. For the next three years he developed a deeper anticolonial and transnational political consciousness as he worked in radio, television and journalism while writing two novels. These were published as The Hit (1957) and The Long Night (1958), both about the numbers game.

By 1959, in Chapter 3 Mayfield and Cordero were back in New York with a son. Having broken with the CP-USA in 1956, following the 20th Soviet Communist Party Congress revelations of Stalin’s crimes, Mayfield completed his major work, The Grand Parade (1961), a novel critical of the limits of the movement for desegregation in a border state community.

Mayfield’s move further toward the new movement of Black Power is covered in Chapter 4. He published influential essays skeptical of integrationist politics and Martin Luther King’s nonviolent strategy.

On the first anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, Mayfield and Cordero traveled to Cuba as guests of the Castro government where he had a fateful meeting with Robert F. Williams (1925-96). Williams had been suspended from the presidency of the Monroe, North Carolina Chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) due to his advocacy of armed resistance against the Ku Klux Klan.

Back in New York after August 1960, Mayfield was among the group of Black activists and intellectuals who welcomed Fidel Castro to Harlem and later helped draft a full-page advertisement for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Then, when the governor of North Carolina ordered Robert F. Williams and his supporters arrested on charges of armed insurrection, Mayfield drove the Williams family out of the South in his own car. Williams went into exile in Cuba, and Mayfield fled to Canada and later to Ghana.

Chapter 5 surveys the nearly five years Mayfield functioned as the unofficial leader of the African American community in Ghana with regular contact with President Kwame Nkrumah. Mayfield’s work was as a writer and editor and he founded the African Review, an international magazine of political and economic affairs.

In 1964, Mayfield was host to Malcolm X in Ghana during the latter’s trip to West Africa and helped organize the first international branch of Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity. Mayfield, now separated from Dr. Codera, left Ghana three weeks before the military coup which overthrew Nkrumah’s government in February 1966.

Mayfield then returned to the United States, and Chapter 6 follows his further engagement with the Black Power movement. At this time he started a teaching career, first at Cornell University and then in the Albert Schweitzer Program in the Humanities at New York University. Articles and essays addressing the politics of the period were widely published in the Nation and Negro Digest as well as in books such as The Black Aesthetic (1970).

Chapter 7, in my view among the most fascinating in the book, carefully covers his role in the production of the film Uptight (1968). It was directed by blacklisted screenwriter Jules Dassin (1911-2008) and starred activist actress Ruby Dee (1922-2014) and Mayfield, all of whom collaborated in reworking the narrative.

Romine effectively captures the complex politics of what was in fact an updated version of Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 novel The Informer, also a 1935 film by John Ford. In its depiction of a standoff between nonviolent activists of the Martin Luther King tradition and new Black Power militants suggestive of the Black Panthers, the film submits that neither group has all the answers.

Romine provides a summary of an episode in which the film dramatizes what were Mayfield’s views at that time: “The militants agree to leave the civil rights march alone, and Kyle [the integrationist leader] agrees to protect their identities and refrain from exposing them to the police. In writing this scene, Mayfield, Dassin and Dee refrain from moralizing this confrontation. Each activist group offers arguments consistent with their real-life inspirations, and their dialogue is grounded in current events and intellectual discourse.” (137)

Considering this stance of dissatisfaction with all wings of the U.S. Left, Mayfield unsurprisingly returned to an expatriate life in 1971. He was inspired by his artist and cartoonist friend Tom Feeling (1933-2003), who had recently taken the position as a planning officer in the Ministry of Education in Guyana, South America. Prime Minister Forbes Burnham offered Mayfield a post as a special adviser in his Ministry of Information where he would also work in the Ministry of Culture.

At this point Mayfield married his second wife, Joan Cambridge, a Guyanese writer and colleague, in 1973. Meanwhile, the industrious Mayfield was preparing a film script based on the life of Henri Christophe, a leader of the Haitian Revolution. This was along with the actor and opera singer William Marshall (1924-2003) as producer and star, a collaboration Romine discusses in Chapter 9.

Mayfield left Guyana in September 1974, and Romine’s brief Epilogue covers the last nine years of his life. It was a difficult period for Mayfield of short-term untenured academic appointments and many unfinished literary and film projects.

By the fall of 1975, he was working as Lecturer in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Maryland in College Park and then was awarded a Senior Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to teach American Studies in Germany for the academic year 1976-77. After a short return to the University of Maryland, he became Writer-in-Residence at Howard University from the Fall of 1978 until the time of his death.

Romine completes his study with a 1979 quotation from Mayfield that justifies the central theme of his political and cultural life: “I have got, I am certain, a certain power fixation. I am fascinated now and have been for many years by Black people who wield power — to any extent.”

Romine concludes that for Mayfield, power “was the solution to the suppression of African-descended peoples and would, he believed, come only to those who sought it out.” (198)

XII. New Renditions

New renditions of the lives and works of those who forged the Black radical imagination in the mid-20th century necessarily reflect the concerns of contemporary scholars. Although Boggs’ and Gumbs’ books are elegantly and empathetically written, their elevation of personal connections over chronology suggests that we are in a new era of biographical methodology.

The perception of the past is, at all times, an expression of a particular present. At this moment it appears as if a portion of academics are committed to prioritizing feelings, identity and personal motivations that have features of being a counterpart of the “subjectivist turn” so aptly discussed in Enzo Traverso’s Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography (2022).

Traverso sees this as shift in Western thought, where the author’s personal motivations and feelings have encroached on the earlier goal — one not always realized — of third person objectivity. In an increasing number of biographical studies, it seems that the aspiration of being objective, exhaustive and definitive in the manner of Ellman is being overtaken by a growing interest in experience, interiority, and relational life.

Yet, in my assessment at least, Mutnick’s No Race, No Country and Romine’s Something to Do with Power more than hold their own because over-emphasizing private experience can also depoliticize the past. A disproportionate focus on the personal can obscure structures of oppression that must be addressed if the aspirations of the radical Black writer are to be fully appreciated.

A personalist framework itself can be the problem, but switching to a more historical mode is not always the entire solution. Mutnick is exemplary for providing an effective Marxist illustration of critical advocacy: flowing, detailed, and persuasive. Nevertheless, while she convincingly describes “poetics” — the principles, structures and techniques behind literature — as influenced by material circumstances and ideology, her application of this perspective can at times be reductive.

For example, she mechanically attributes critics of Wright’s style (for prolixity, repeated mannerisms, flat rhythms) to “bourgeois” ideology and “racist” politics. (4) Yet the harshest critic may have been radical Black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois who characterized Wright’s writing as “patently and terribly overdrawn” as well as well as overly focused on “meanness, filth, and despair” (New York Herald Tribune Books, 4 March 1945).

The point is that literary taste regarding style is mediated by many factors. A simplistic explanation for a critic’s predilections that depends on invidious correlations to class and race bias are what has given Marxist criticism a bad name. Instead of slapping on such labels (including “anticommunist”) to discredit one who offers a stylistic objection, the presentation of evidence would be more compelling — which is what Mutnick does quite efficaciously in regard to matters of Wright’s content. On the other hand, if one is looking to pursue the landscape of the political commitment that gives so much of this writing a dynamic resonance in 2026, it seems that many of relevant factual details are curtailed in the biographies by Boggs and Gumbs.

Both Baldwin’s and Lorde’s pro-Communist associations are given remarkably short shrift compared to what is available in Bill Mullen’s James Baldwin: Living in Fire (2019)(4) and De Veaux’s Warrior Poet, even as the material in those excellent earlier volumes could still use further investigation.

This is not to suggest that Boggs and Gumbs egregiously distort the narrative of the lives of Baldwin and Lorde. To the contrary, by looking at their work in fresh ways they sometimes come closer to seeing the writing through the eyes of the authors, looking at the human reality beneath the literary and political personas.

Some readers may bristle at what seems an overdose of subjectivism, but new, intimate, fine points help us better understand rhetorical choices and address hitherto neglected tensions in the novels and poems.

XIII. The “Dual State” is Collapsing

What is decisive, however, is that none of these four studies read like requiems for art of a bygone era. Part of the reason may be that certain of the kinds of discrimination and brutality that happened mainly to African Americans in the past are happening to others today in our increasingly authoritarian society: Violent agents of the state are invading local communities; longstanding legal rights are being cast aside; and public executions are carried out by people with badges.

The famous “dual state” theorized by Max Fraenkel — with one part of the population seeming to function under normal rules that don’t apply to another (the poor, people of color) — is collapsing before our eyes, perhaps internationally.

What had been happening to these “others” for centuries — the arbitrary violence and attempt at dehumanization especially directed at African Americans — is becoming a national emergency as even middle-class whites are gunned down in the streets. Meanwhile, Rightwing and white supremacist forces are reshaping education, government, and other institutions as they did in the Cold War when Black radical writers of the Old Left were highly productive.

Thus, these four new studies evocatively recall the first encounters with African American writers and music that changed my life 65-years ago. In their various ways, they open the door to the clarifying vision of a more authentic and complicated world that is revealed by the Black radical imagination. The unresolved contradictions of U.S. history that these writers disclosed in the past are reverberating louder than ever today.

Notes

1. See Wald, “Protesting the Protest Novel”: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc216/protesting-the-protest-novel-richard-wrights-the-man-who-lived-underground/
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2. Einstein, A. (1947, March 3). Letter to Max Born. In The Born-Einstein Letters: Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max Born from 1916 to 1955 (I. Born, Trans.). Macmillan, 1971. (Original work published 1947). Variations on the quote widely attributed to Bohr exist in many places, but there seems to be no written version by himself.
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3. From an examination of these papers, my sense is that Romine’s book is only the beginning of what should be additional studies of Mayfield and the printing of his many unpublished manuscripts. Two earlier books also contain valuable, and somewhat different, material on Mayfield: Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (2006) and Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (2014).
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4. See Mary Helen Washington’s review in: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc210/james-baldwin-for-our-time/
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May-June 2026, ATC 242