Black Marxism, Creative Intellectuals and Culture: The 1930s

Black Marxism, Creative Intellectuals and
Culture: The 1930s
Tracy Flemming, Ph.D.
tracy.flemming@gmail.com
Houston, Texas
The collision between the black radical tradition and Enlightenment-derived Marxism left both
transformed. Marxism, in the same way as many world religious traditions, was transformed by
the historical and cultural matrix of each group that adopted it.
– Michael Dawson, “Black and Red: Black Marxism and Black Liberation”1
This comparative essay focuses on the relationship between theory and practice in the
cultural work of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright during the 1930s. It particularly assesses
Hughes’s “To Negro Writers” (1935) and Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) and
engages some of their respective writings during this period, such as (for Hughes) short stories
and political plays and (for Wright) selections from Uncle Tom’s Children. The 1930s was a
period that presented an altered political landscape in the United States for (among others)
African Americans. It was the era following the immediate effects of the First World War; the
waves of southern Black migrants in flight from post Reconstruction and Jim Crow nightmares
and in search of the “land of hope;”2 the flowering of Black artistic expression in Harlem; the
romantic nationalism of Garveyism and the Universal Negro Improvement Association; and the
New York Stock Exchange crash of 1929. Indeed, the vicissitudes of particularly the Roaring
Twenties politicized the American landscape.
This essay, while narrow focus, allows us to concentrate on issues that have been
particularly interesting for students of African American letters, offering an exploratory snapshot
of African American intellectual history. Langston Hughes’s suggestion that African American
writers can do “certain practical things … through their work” captures the essence of his widely
acknowledged radicalism during the 1930s and his “move increasingly towards fiction” – a
trend, according to Arnold Rampersad, that “younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance”
followed after “earlier successes … as poets.” Susan Duffy contends that Hughes’s “embrace of
the political Left in the 1930s coincides with two events”: his split with his white patron,
Charlotte Mason – a phenomenon that Hughes brilliantly fictionalizes in his “The Blues I’m
Playing” (1934) – and the case of the Scottsboro Nine (1931), the episode that Hughes
dramatizes in Scottsboro, Limited.3
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I suggest that Hughes’s “fellow traveler” position played a critical role in his efforts to “reveal to
the Negro masses … [their] potential power” in a manner fundamentally different from Richard
Wright, who was deeply influenced by communism during the 1930s. Because Hughes was a
part of the younger Harlem “Renaissance” intellectuals, and due to his general cognizance of
earlier Black intellectual traditions, I argue that Hughes’s goals for the Black intellectual’s role
during the 1930s was far more grounded, at least for African Americans, than Richard Wright’s
cultural work during this period.
Wright’s concentration on “the problem of nationalism” can certainly be read as an early
indication of what Cedric Robinson observed as Wright’s realization of the limits of Marxism for
Black (and other non-Europeans) peoples. As opposed to the common focus on Wright’s shift
away from communism, and particularly Robinson’s ground-breaking focus on Wright’s place
within the “Black radical tradition,” I suggest that both Wright’s adherence to Communist Party
orthodoxy and subsequent misunderstanding of not only Black “folk” culture as being
nationalistic, in addition to his apparent lack of awareness of Black intellectual life before
“Harlem was in vogue,” are crucial issues to understanding the relationship between Marxism
and Black culture during the early twentieth century. Indeed, Wright utilized Black folk cultural
expression – interpreted by him as being nationalistic – in his Uncle Tom’s Children. It does not
appear to be an overstatement to suggest that Wright’s communism, while clearly a radical
political stance, also blinded him to the fact that folk culture was frequently not (Black)
nationalistic. This is not to suggest that Wright’s conceptions of nationalism were not in accord
with the Community Party’s notion of “proletarian nationalism” – indeed, it was. However, Rob
Bush’s observation regarding the “mechanical position” of the Party on the “Negro National
Question” is precisely my point. Bush argues:
I do not think that a revolutionary movement can be built without the significant
participation of the working class, but it is necessary to mobilize other sections of the
population as well. When the lower working class is an ethnic subproletariat,
nationalist-
oriented intellectuals have to be involved in the struggle. And as [Harold] Cruse pointed out, it
is illusory in such cases to want a “national question”
without
nationalism
(or
national
consciousness).4
Although several Black intellectuals did join the Community Party (including Wright) or were
involved with Party activities as fellow travelers (such as Hughes), Bush’s insistence that “[t]he
attacks on the middle-class membership of the NAACP and the Urban League were, it would
turn out, counterproductive” – particularly during Communist Internationalist calls for a “united
front against fascism” – raises the fundamental issue of what Michael Dawson regards as the
Community Party’s “uneven” work “when it came to questions of culture.” Indeed, “the
spectacle of black cadres dressed like Russian peasants attacking a church in a black Chicago
park” would undoubtedly strike many Black observers “as at least ludicrous if not offensive.”5
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The Communist Party, according to Dawson, “proved to be the organizational vehicle for
the most sustained organizational attempt by African Americans to develop an Afrocentric
version of Marxism within a doctrinaire organization.” As opposed to the small number of Black
members during the 1920s, the Community Party experienced a significant increase in African
American membership and interest during the 1930s.6 Dawson contends that the small number
of Black cadre during the 1920s resulted from a myriad of factors, including Garveyism’s
continued popularly during the early twenties, “black suspicion of whites in general and white
workers and leftists in particular,” and the internal conflicts of Community Party officials
regarding the “Negro National Question.” Dawson suggests that the 1928 Comintern resolutions
“called for self-determination, but nowhere were African Americans characterized as an
oppressed nation;” rather, “trade-union organizing” and “shallow” attention to Black women
were emphasized, “without specifying the nature or existence of a black ‘nation’.”
By the 1930 resolutions, which would in theory govern the CPUSA for years to
come,
self-determination was expressly tied to the black-belt nation in the South that had the right to
“governmental autonomy”. Organizing among blacks in the
North was to operate under
the slogan “equal rights” for blacks. In either case, there was still an anti-autonomy line in the
1930s resolutions … “It is advisable for the Communist Party to abstain from the establishment
of any specific Negro organizations, and in place of this to bring the black and white workers
together
in common organizations of struggle and joint action.”7
Dawson’s argument, here, runs counter to Robin D.G. Kelley’s assertions that the 1928
resolution recognized Blacks in the American South as a nation with the right to partake in self-
determining national struggle.8 While the question of Black (national) self-determination was
certainly not an issue that American communists debated alone – indeed, Kelley points out that
V.I. Lenin’s works completed between 1915-1917 “suggested that blacks constituted an
oppressed nation”9 – it was clearly a debate whose results influenced the Black members and
supporters, particularly intellectuals during the 1930s.10
Nell Irvin Painter’s “doubt that anyone ever joined the Communist Party on strength of
the self-determination theory alone” supports both Dawson’s and Kelley’s suggestions that the
Community Party’s progressive, anti-racist actions largely resonated with the immediate
concerns of Black creative intellectuals; in regards to southern Blacks, Painter maintains that
“[i]t was the Party’s more pragmatic activities that succeeded in attracting (if not holding) large
numbers of southern blacks during the 1930s.”11 This attraction applied to Black creative
intellectuals such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, two of the most visible, but in many
respects different, “Negro” writers. Not only did their relationships with the Community Party,
as well as to earlier Black intellectual traditions, diverge, but their influences as Black writers led
them to compose manifestos for future Black writers.
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For both artists, the written word was to be a weapon for writers who hailed from communities
reeling from the affects of oppression and terror in the so-called land of the free. A comparison
of their work reveals not only the undeniable dual influences that Marxism and the actions of the
Community Party on Black creative intellectuals, but it also reveals that Black intellectuals’
ideological proximity to earlier Black intellectual traditions sharply affected their poetics.
Langston Hughes’s “Racial Mountain”
Although composed in 192612, any serious analysis of Hughes’s writings during the
1930s has to take into account his “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”13 Considered as
his “landmark essay” by Arnold Rampersad, this essay, while it anticipates (as well as
contradicts14) many of the themes in Hughes’s “To Negro Writers” (1935), captures not only
Hughes’s “spirit of individuality” and sense of pride in his “racial background,” but it also
provides clues to Hughes’s fellow traveler status as reflected in his cultural work during the
1930s.15 In lieu of slavishly mimicking “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art”
and seeking “an Episcopal heaven,” which Hughes contends young, future Black artists are
acculturated to do by “what I suppose one would call the Negro middle class,” Hughes urges the
Black artist to (dis)cover “the beauty of his own people.”16 Such initiative would presumably
lead to a deep appreciation of the “so-called common element,” whose experiences would
provide the raw materials necessary for artistic creativity – in effect, “a true Negro art in
America.” The most crucial element of this piece by Hughes, for our purposes, is his reference
to previous Black intellectuals and their work, such as “the fine novels of [Charles W.] Chesnutt”
and “the humor of [Paul Laurence] Dunbar’s dialect,” in addition to W.E.B. Du Bois and Jean
Toomer (whose Cane he refers to as “excepting the work of Du Bois … contains the finest prose
written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of [Paul] Robeson, it is truly racial.”).17
This prelude of sorts to his work in the 1930s clearly indicates Hughes’s intellectual
background, particularly his familiarity with the writings of earlier and contemporaneous Black
writers. Paul Laurence Dunbar is an especially interesting influence on Hughes, and his “Ode to
Ethiopia” and ideological position within the “discourse of uplift” has been the subject of
historical studies.18 The use of Black “folk” dialect, the seeming pessimist and satiric portrayals
in “Slice Him Down”19 and “Why, You Reckon?”20, as well as the trenchant critiques of racial
and class oppression found in “Slave on the Block”21 and “Cora Unashamed”22 can be found in
the works of Hughes and Dunbar.23 For example, “Slice Him Down” and “Why, You Reckon?”
can both be read as Hughes’s characterization of not so much as Black nihilistic behavior, but as
depictions of the outcomes of alienation and systemic denial of the fruits of the idealized
American Dream. In “Why, You Reckon?”, Hughes portrays a dog-eat-dog world, but the White
victim of a “crime” committed by two “hongry” Black men (one of them more “dishonest” than
the other) actually enjoys the experience of being mugged:
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“Gee this was exciting,” said the white fellow, turning up his tux collar.
“This was thrilling!”
“What,” I says.
“ … This was the first time in my life I’ve ever had a good time in Harlem.
Everything has been a fake, a show. You know, something you pay for. This was real.”
After assuring the White fellow that he would be pleased to be in his economic position and
departing, the puzzled narrator asks, “What do you suppose is the matter with rich white folks?
Why you reckon they ain’t happy?”24 Hughes’s call for Black writers to “reveal to the white
masses those Negro qualities which go beyond the mere ability to laugh and sing and dance and
make music,” is powerfully reflected, for example, in “Why, You Reckon?” In addition, even
when Hughes did in fact include these aspects of Black cultural expression in his work during the
1930s, he attempted to move beyond reincarnations of minstrelsy. His political plays, a genre
which necessary complicates my narrative of Hughes's fellow traveler status, also represent a
praxis that is consistent with his theories that remained grounded in a deep understanding of
Black culture and, just as importantly, his conception of the role of the Black creative
intellectual.
Noted as the most frequently mentioned of all of his plays “by scholars when they
address Hughes’ [sic] ties to the political Left,” Susan Duffy contends that the characters in
Angelo Herndon Jones “represent a substrata of society: prostitutes, unemployed workers, unwed
mothers, corrupt police (black and white), and evicted tenets.”25 Their lives are “dark and
sordid,” and they are eventually given “hope and inspiration” by the “spirit of Herndon.” To
Duffy, Hughes uses Herndon as a cover for discussing inequality, and he uses leftist politics to
“elevate” Herndon to “folk hero status.”26 While my reading of the play differs in some respects
from Duffy’s, it should be pointed out that Angelo Herndon – a Black Georgia Communist
sentenced eighteen-to-twenty years on a chain gang for allegedly inciting a riot – provided his
own account of his conversionary experience with Communism, which is quite interesting; one
can argue that his earlier religious “training” (so to speak) is reflected in his narrative.27 Angelo
Herndon Jones clearly contains components of Hughes’s “To Negro Writers,” especially his
insistence on interracial unity and struggle on a “solid” as opposed to “nebulous” basis, and this
seems to more than suggest that he does not intend for the characters in his text to be viewed as
simply a “substrata of society” in the manner that Duffy maintains. On the surface, this play is
essentially a piece that is in accordance to “standard” Communist Party literary orthodoxy.
Buddy Jones, “a young Negro worker,” and “his pal” Lank are both unemployed and in search of
work. They both anxiously anticipate Herndon’s upcoming visit – the “messiah,” if I may – that
is represented as an illuminated poster, a voice, and the future (i.e., Buddy and Viola’s expected
“son”). References to “comrades,” “the working class,” and “incendiary literature” are also
made. It would be nonsensical to ignore the “politically” leftist aspects of this play.
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Yet, one of the most striking dimensions of this play is that even with the prevalence of female
characters, masculine themes dominate. In particular, none of the women exhibit or can even
imagine visions that transcend immediate concerns. Thus, one can argue that this play definitely
contributes to the masculinist aspects of the Black Marxist tradition.28
This is not to suggest that Hughes portrays women in a completely dismissive manner. In
fact, one of the most progressive elements of this play is Hughes’s inclusion of Black women –
and most surprisingly prostitutes – as a part of the exploited working class; moreover, these
characters demonstrate a level of consciousness that signifies Hughes’s fellow traveler position.
It is important to note that these very same members of a “substrata of society” possess a
grounded understanding of navigating dire realities and (at least partially) recognize causal
elements of their respective sufferings. For example, Lottie, a “streetwalker” who refers to the
image of Herndon as “this hot papa’s picture,” pays a “Negro Cop” – “Sweet Papa Big Billy”
who “never forgets” – in order to persuade him to “leave [her] be.” She later informs Sadie Mae,
another streetwalker, that “Between the cops and the pimps, we don’t never have nothing.”29
Viola, Ma Jenkin’s (“an old washerwoman”) daughter, is a liminal character between Buddy’s
(and by extension Herndon’s) revolutionary vision and the prostitutes’ immediate concerns.
During an argument with her deeply religious mother over her (Viola's) pregnancy, she exclaims,
“That’s all you ever tell anybody—is to be careful. Why can’t you tell us how we can get
married, how we can get jobs, how we can live, or something useful?” Of course, Ma Jenkins
responds that “De Lawd’ll tell you that, daughter.”30 Upon Ma Jenkin’s eviction from her
apartment due to delinquent payment (and poverty), Sadie Mae, after finding the evicted elderly
woman and her belongings on the street corner and in an effort to assist her, informs others who
have gathered to aid the woman that “[She’s] gonna try and make a dollar tonight to give this old
lady so she can get herself a room.”31 A final example can be found in Lank, who, upon being
asked by a group of detective who raid his and Buddy’s apartment about “incendiary literature”,
exclaims
What you talkin’ about, man? I don’t need to read no books to know I’m hungry …
I
don’t need to read books to know I ain’t got no job, to know I’m black, to know they ain’t no
chance for me.
Lank’s proclamation, unsurprisingly, provokes a sharp “Shut up! Where’s Buddy Jones?” from
one of the detectives (Lank responds, “I ain’t his mammy.”), who then warns him against
attending “them Herndon Jones meetings, and everything like ‘em.”32
Susan Duffy’s assertion that Angelo Herndon Jones “serves a parable for conversion to
the cause of leftist labor,” then, is partially correct. While beyond the scope of this essay, it is
arguable whether this play is indeed the “most radical” or “most compelling” of the political
plays in her collection.33
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In regards to subaltern or marginal characters – defined, here, as those characters other than
Buddy Jones, Viola, and possibly Lank – the potential radicalism of these characters is
something that I consider to be one of Hughes’s most substantial, radical contributions. Angelo
Herndon Jones is far more than a standard Marxist play – it reveals the subjectivity of a creative
writer whose position was one that was committed to both leftist politics34 as well as to a more
concretized understanding African American dilemmas.
Richard Wright: Theorizing about a Backward “Folk”
How do Negroes feel about the way they have to live? How do they discuss it when alone
among themselves? I think this question can be answered in a single sentence. A friend of mine
who ran an elevator once told me:
“Lawd, man! Ef it wuzn’t fer them polices ’n’ them ‘ol lynch-mobs, there wouldn’t be nothin’
but uproar down here!”
–Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”35
In “Blueprint for Negro Writing,”36 Richard Wright conveys his ideas on the role of
Black creative intellectuals and charges these intellectuals to move beyond the prior “so-called
Harlem school of expression.” The central issues that Wright is most concerned with in this
skeletal “blueprint” for Black writers are Black cultural nationalism and its relationship to Black
“folk” culture. Negro writers must not only grapple with “the nationalist aspects of Negro life”
that are most noticeable in social institutions and folklore, but they must also strive to transcend
them. According to Wright, the most important aspects of Black nationalism can be found in its
cultural manifestations, as opposed to its political implications. Such nationalism is most
powerfully reflected by the Southern Negro or in the transplanted cultural remnants found among
Southern migrants in Northern urban centers, such as Chicago and Harlem (New York).37 In
order to transcend the narrow confines of nationalism, Black writers must also “possess and
understand it.” Only then will Negro writers be able to utilize the tools of an international vision
– in this case “a Marxist conception of reality and society” – in the initial stages of their unique
contribution to international social and political change in an ever changing “modern” capitalist
era.38
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Wright’s concentration on “the problem of nationalism” can be read as an early
indication of what Cedric Robinson observed as Wright’s realization of the limits of Marxism for
Black (and other non-Europeans) peoples.39 As opposed to the common focus on Wright’s shift
away from Communism, and particularly Robinson’s groundbreaking focus on Wright’s place
within the “black radical tradition,” I suggest that both Wright’s adherence to Community Party
orthodoxy and subsequent misunderstanding of not only Black “folk” culture as being
nationalistic, in addition to his apparent lack of awareness of Black intellectual life before
“Harlem was in vogue,” are crucial issues to understanding the relationship between Marxism
and Black nationalism during the early twentieth-century.
Wright’s focus on the Black folk culture-as-nationalism is rooted in the changes within
the Communist Party regarding “aesthetics and some of the cultural work produced by African
Americans radicals from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s.”40 In an examination of the changes
within the Communist Party regarding the “Negro Question,” Robin D.G. Kelley makes a strong
case for the ability of Black radicals to situate themselves in the Communist Party. According to
Kelley, the 1922 decision by the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern essentially regarded
Africans Americans as a domestically colonized nation and their plight as necessarily anti-
imperialist.41 The “most successful black nationalist mass movement in the history of the United
States,”42 Garveyism, was one which the Communist Party could not ignore. To be sure, this
does not suggest that the Community Party of the United States of America fully embraced
Black nationalist movements as they stood. Their efforts to “redirect Garveyism,” as Kelley
notes, were unsuccessful during the mid-1920s.43 However, the Communist Party’s mechanistic
perceptions of Black “folk” culture as (according to Kelley) “virtually everything black people
did,”44 created critical space(s) for cultural expression that would have been censured as “petty
bourgeois chauvinism” prior to debates on the “Negro Question.” The significant point is that
Black writers in Communist Party publications did not simply promote integration, as Harold
Cruse argued in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.45 Rather, the line(s) separating Black
cultural nationalism and internationalism became blurred and, as Kelley illustrates, casts a very
new light on “traditional” perceptions of Black communists.
Richard Wright’s 1937 “Blueprint,” then, reflected the Communist Party’s
internationalism, which theoretically transcended racial solidarity. His creative practice, such as
the selections which appear in Uncle Tom’s Children (HarperPerrenial expanded edition),
illustrates Wright’s efforts to put argumentation into practice.46
According to Richard
Yarborough, all the selections in Uncle Tom’s Children reflect the most significant influences on
Wright at the time, such as communism, “Chicago” sociologists, naturalists, and even Langston
Hughes; these selections also reflect themes that he drew upon throughout the rest of his literary
career.47 In declaring that “Uncle Tom is dead!” with Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright, along with
the “countless black authors who followed in his wake,” further compounded an already
ahistorical myth.48 This is, arguably, critical to Wright’s view of attempting to deal with Black
folk culture (or, to Wright, nationalism). Indeed, “the lines between the cultural and political are
not particularly clear, especially when oppression prevents ‘normal’ means of political
expression.”49
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Partha Chatterjee’s powerful argument that “two domains” exist within colonial societies (as
well as states where racialized groups are dominated) – “the material and the spiritual” – is an
engaging one. Chatterjee suggests that within the “domain of spirituality” exists a cultural
(religious, linguistic, etc.) space where components of a discursive ideological framework –
indeed, in many cases an alternative historical narrative50 – can be developed by dominated
subjects.51 The Communist Party’s implicit consideration of this did not include a sophisticated
understanding of culture in regards to African Americans; Wright’s theorizations on the “folk”
and the “national question” is an example of this type of approach to African American culture.
While the majority of Black characters in the five stories in the text are the antithesis of
the mythical Uncle Tom, the fact that they are descendents of enslaved people appears to be an
issue of much anxiety to Wright, for he does not perceive African Americans as anything but
“traditional” peasants who are innocent (and, in effect, unprepared) for “modern” realities. How
else can we explain Sara’s seeming inability to cope with her encounter with both a White
traveling salesman and a graphophone, (“modern”) technology which transmits not only the
commodified rhythms of the Gospel, but her, too, to another world, causing her sense of reality
to lull and be exploited?52 For Wright, who was certainly familiar with the Jim Crow Southern
order of things, Black peasants were “imprisoned” in a system “built upon a plantation-feudal
economy”: the cultural manifestations that he perceives as “nationalism” are essentially reactions
to this system of exploitation.53 It is his objective to capture such characteristics in his creative
writings, namely through his utilization of “the fluid state of daily speech” and depictions of
Black religiosity, as opposed to adhering to a “simple literary realism which seeks to depict the
lives of people devoid of wider social connotations.”54 To be sure, who can seriously criticize
Wright for the latter?
Wright’s lament against “Negro writing in the past,” while a noteworthy political
intervention, was a gross misrepresentation. It is clearly a political intervention in that his
attacks on the prevalence of patron-relationships during the Harlem Renaissance and their
stifling effects on Black creative intellectuals. His effort to deal with “folk” culture as part of an
international political movement, as opposed to exoticism, is a fundamental element of his
argument. Yet, Wright’s and prior New Negro writers’ perceptions of Black “folk” culture are
also strikingly similar, for the basic assumption was that “folk” was the opposite of “modern.”55
However, we now know that “terms like ‘folk,’ ‘authentic,’ and ‘traditional’ are socially
constructed categories” and that failures to deconstruct “the reproduction of race, class, and
gender hierarchies,” inherent in the maintenance of modernism’s “boundaries,” only reinforces
the power of hierarchical dichotomies.56
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A more fundamental problem, and somewhat fairer criticism, is Wright’s notion of “folk”
culture-as-nationalism, which reveals his unawareness of earlier forms of Black cultural (and
political) nationalism dating from the end of the eighteenth century and extending beyond
Harlem.57 Such an awareness would have forced Wright to seriously consider the underlying
reasons behind the Victorian displays of racial pride by Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro
Improvement Assocation, for Garveyism was arguably the final culmination of a tradition of
bourgeois Black nationalism that was rooted in exalting past grandeur of “African civilization”
and the contemporaneous place of persons of African descent in the “Caucasian milieu.”58 It is
important to note that even these earlier (racial) nationalistic intellectuals did not have a remote
appreciation for “folk” culture and that “New Negro” writers frequently exoticized the “folk,”
which Wright correctly pointed out. But it is even more important to theorize about the
discontinuity among the Black intellectual strata from the nineteenth century to the twentieth
century – something which Wright attempts to address but ultimately distorts.59 That very same
group of writers who apparently “went a-begging to white America … dressed in knee-pants of
servility” that Wright describes contained “staid intellectuals, rugged labor leaders, tough-
minded preachers and conservative pan-Africanists.” In other words, as Wilson Moses suggests,
[T]here were two groups of New Negroes associated with the Renaissance of the 1920s:
the “old” New Negroes, [such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Carter G. Woodson, William H.
Ferris, and John E. Bruce], and the “new” New Negroes,
including … Claude McKay …,
Countee Cullen …, and Langston Hughes. The
latter group celebrated the fast, jazzy life-
style associated with the Harlem myth.60
With an understanding of earlier Black nationalist theorizing, Wright would probably have
realized that his, at times brilliant, characterizations of “folk” culture was only a gradual step
away from earlier dismissals and exoticizations of the “folk” – possessors of some social
organization and peculiar group sentiments (i.e., “nationalism”), but, ultimately, backwards, in
some eyes.
Conclusion
The key issues raised by Michael Dawson and Rob Bush regarding Black Marxism and
cultural work during the 1930s – Dawson suggests that Black Marxism was “hurt by
subservience to … ideological dependence on foreign models”61 and Bush highlights the CP’s
“inability to attract … more nationalist-oriented intellectuals”62 – capture the contours of the
arguments that I have tried to make in this essay. Rather than provide a celebration of Hughes
and an indictment of Wright, I have attempted to demonstrate that a comparison of their theories
and cultural work yields useful results for students of Black Marxism and Black intellectual
history.
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