A Black Arts Poetry Machine

Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets

David Grundy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350061989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

A vital hub of poetry readings, performance, publications and radical politics in 1960s New York, the Umbra Workshop was a cornerstone of the African American avant-garde. Bringing together new archival research and detailed close readings of poetry, A Black Arts Poetry Machine is a groundbreaking study of this important but neglected group of poets. David Grundy explores the work of such poets as Amiri Baraka, Lorenzo Thomas and Calvin Hernton and how their innovative poetic forms engaged with radical political responses to state violence and urban insurrection. Through this examination, the book highlights the continuing relevance of the work of the Umbra Workshop today and is essential reading for anyone interested in 20th-century American poetry.

1

‘A Tale of Two Cities’: Umbra, Internationalism and the Death of Lumumba

‘This is the time!’ On Guard for Freedom protest the UN

On 17 January 1961, Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo, was murdered while in the custody of troops loyal to anti-Communist, Belgian- and CIA-supported Katanganese secessionists. On 15 February 1961, the day after the official announcement of Lumumba’s murder, a group of around sixty African-American activists loudly interrupted Adlai Stevenson’s inaugural speech as US representative at the UN building in New York in protest at Lumumba’s death. Meanwhile, four hundred other activists picketed the building from the outside. Among these groups were Baraka and many future members of Umbra, participating both as part of On Guard and Baraka’s own Organization of Young Men. Chaos ensued with the police and UN security guards violently moving in on the protestors, and a number of the activists, including Baraka and On Guard’s leader and future Umbra member, Calvin Hicks, were arrested. The New York Times characterized the protest as ‘the most violent demonstration inside the United Nations headquarters in the world organization’s history’; for the first time, the UN’s outside gates were locked while a meeting was underway, and the building was closed to the public for the next two days to prevent further disruption (‘Riot in Gallery’, 1; Philip Benjamin, 18). In Hicks’s words, ‘we tore the place up’ (Tinson, 18). As Baraka later recalled: ‘I found myself marching outside the UN in demonstrations, while others, mostly blacks, took off their shoes and threw them down in the gallery as the gallery guards were called in to toss the demonstrating blacks out. Sisters were bashing the guards in the head with their shoes and throwing the shoes down in the gallery’ (Autobiography, 181).¹

The event emerged from and served to foster new links between a disparate group of New York–based intellectuals, activists and artists, proving crucial for the emergence of Umbra and for Baraka’s own increasing political commitment. It was on these picket lines that Baraka met Askia Touré, later both a member of Umbra and an important participant in BART/S and the BAM. The protest also caused highly visible disruption to a building of globally significant symbolic and administrative value, unavoidably registering a militant, internationalist African-American activist presence which linked anti-colonial politics to the more militant wings of the domestic Civil Rights Movement.

In contrast to the brief narratives of this event given by Jerry Gafio Watts and Komozi Woodard in their books on Baraka, my account stresses its emergence from an organizational climate to which Umbra would soon provide an aesthetic parallel. Instead, I build on the work of James Smethurst and Cheryl Higashida, which emphasizes the vital tradition of black internationalism – particularly on the part of female activists – in the protest (Smethurst 2005, 118–19; Higashida, 54–5). Moving beyond characterizations of On Guard as a confused and prefigurative stage in the development of Baraka’s own singular political career – fostered in large part by the account of Harold Cruse, himself a member – a closer examination of the Lumumba protest alters our histories of New York’s black radical climate at the time. Following a more detailed history of On Guard and the UN protest, I will examine poems emerging from this event by Ishmael Reed and Lorenzo Thomas, published in the first two issues of Umbra, and by Askia Touré, in Liberator. This analysis enables us to see Umbra in a tradition of black internationalism on which the poets reflect both critically and in solidarity.

Though tracing the exact trajectories of the group’s formation is complicated by gaps in the archival record, it appears that On Guard was in large part the initiative of Calvin Hicks and Sarah E. Wright. Hicks, a journalist and writer whose mother had been a member of the CPUSA, had worked for Time magazine, undertaken independent research work in the South following the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956, and, following his move to New York in 1957, worked on a weekly local newspaper in Harlem alongside Tom Dent (Flynn; Dent 2018, 50, 441). He was also executive director of the Monroe Defense Committee in support of Robert F. Williams, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, with whom Baraka had visited Cuba in 1960. Wright, who had visited Cuba in the same delegation as Baraka, had published poetry in the Daily Worker and other left-wing periodicals beginning in the late 1940s and joined the Harlem Writers Guild in 1957, alongside Maya Angelou, John Henrik Clarke and others. Galvanized by a demonstration outside the Hotel Theresa in Harlem during Fidel Castro’s visit in September 1960, Wright and Hicks began to plan a newspaper devoted to what Wright called ‘the anti-colonial struggle, abroad and at home’ (Wright, 594). In January 1961, Wright wrote to African National Congress (ANC) Deputy President Oliver Tambo and to the London office of the National Democratic Party of Southern Rhodesia outlining the plans for the newspaper, characterizing it as ‘a new periodical by which we hope to inform our people of the struggle for liberation going on not only in our own country, but in Africa as well’ (quoted in Wood, 162). The same month, another letter credited to the organizing committee (and handwritten by Wright) announces a fundraiser that February at which ‘our very own beloved’ Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln would perform and describes On Guard as ‘a new kind of newspaper – a fighting newspaper – which we hope will help do the job our other organizations and newspapers won’t do’ (quoted in Wood, 163).

The group’s undated constitution (likely written the same month) proclaims their intention to ‘act as an educational and action organization’ (On Guard, n.p.). On Guard oppose the pacts made by the US government with ‘undemocratic, racist, dictatorial governments all over the world’ and place their struggle ‘in the tradition of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Soujourner Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Patrice Lumumba, Sekou Toure, Kwame Nkrumah, Antoine Gizenga, Jomo Kenyatta, Juan Almedia [and] Robert Williams’. Listing among a series of victims, Emmett Till, the Scottsboro Boys, the unknown victims of lynching, and Thomas Russ, Amiri Baraka’s grandfather, they proclaim their ‘ultimate goal’ as ‘self-determination and independence’. A supplementary ‘Declaration of Grievances’ anticipates arguments for reparations that would come to increasing prominence through organizations such as the Republic of New Afrika and through the efforts of former CPUSA and future RAM member Queen Mother Moore, who formed a Reparations Committee of Descendants of U.S. Slaves, Inc., in 1962, demanding 500 trillion dollars to be spread over the next four generations (Kelley, 119). Thus, the fifth grievance states: ‘Actual slavery existed for 400 years and Black Men have never received reparation for the free labour that helped build this country.’ Though it is primarily a political document, the constitution also emphasizes the importance of art, arguing that ‘1/10th of the total population of the United States are Negroes. No American art or cultural contribution can be divorced from the influence of the Black American.’ As such, it indicates the involvement of members who defined themselves equally as writers and activists and suggests the aesthetic direction from which Hicks, Wright and other members of the group emerged and which would pave the way for the emergence of Umbra.

While On Guard’s constitution is fairly broad in its concerns, from the start, the Congo was a clear focus. Cuba and the Congo are given as examples of ‘the legitimate resurgence of nationalism and free-thinking’, and Lumumba appears in the roll call of names in whose tradition ‘we intend to carry on our struggle’. A galvanizing figure for black internationalism throughout the 1960s – he is part of the pantheon of heroes and martyrs in Baraka’s ‘The Revolutionary Theatre’ and was frequently mentioned by the Black Panther Party for Self-defense (BPP) and other activist groups – Lumumba was head of the independent Congolese Trade Union and founder of the Congolese National Movement Party. Elected by an overwhelming majority in the first elections held in the newly independent Congo in 1960, his displacement in an anti-Communist coup and subsequent murder became a locus for internationalist activism. Many black radicals believed that Eisenhower had ordered his murder, and pro-Lumumba protests served as a means to unite struggles against racism in the United States with struggles against imperialism across the globe (Reed 2000B, 105–6; Peery, 200). Even before Lumumba’s death, the situation in the Congo had become a key issue for the nascent activities of On Guard. The first of the group’s two newsletters appeared in early February 1961, very soon before the official announcement of Lumumba’s death on February 13, and contained an article, ‘What Means Independence in the Congo’, which opened with an eerily prophetic warning that, ‘with the rapid change continually taking place in the Congo, it will be no surprise if within a very few weeks Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba will be returned to power or be dead’ (‘What Means Independence’, 1).

When Lumumba’s death was finally announced, nearly a month after it had occurred, it set off an outraged reaction: there was widespread fury at the refusal by both the United States and the UN to support Lumumba after he had appealed to them and speculation as to CIA involvement in his death. On February 15, demonstrations took place worldwide and across America in Washington, DC, Chicago, San Francisco and Houston. In New York, activists associated with On Guard, the Harlem Writers’ Guild and other organizations – including Hicks, Sarah E. Wright, Daniel Watts and Robert F. Williams – planned to cause maximum public disruption at the UN building in New York. The aforementioned interruption to Adlai Stevenson’s speech was decisive and bold. Wearing black armbands and veils which had been prepared at the home of singer and activist Abbey Lincoln, the activists who interrupted the speech included members of the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage (Lincoln, Wright, Maya Angelou and Rosa Guy), Daniel Watts’s Liberation Committee for Africa, Baraka’s Organization of Young Men, On Guard, and the Harlem Writers’ Guild. Rosa Guy, a member of the Harlem Writers’ Guild and an important participant in On Guard’s early organizational activity (though she was never an official part of the organization) stood up when Stevenson defended US foreign policy with regard to the Congo as a means of avoiding ‘the jungles of internecine warfare and internal rivalry’, and disorder began when guards rushed for her. Guy recalls: ‘I began injecting myself. You’d think I was one of the delegates. We began to yell “This is the time! This is the time!”’ (Wood, 165, 173). As the Times report noted, this intervention turned the tables: the UN representatives were turned ‘from actors to audience’ as African-American activists took centre stage (‘Riot in Gallery’, 1). Having been expected to ‘wait’, to watch, to be the audience, the protestors now intervened in a highly public arena, ensuring that their images appeared in the media and in front of a cast of world leaders.

As with the wide variety of artists, intellectuals and political activists who had met with Fidel Castro at the Hotel Theresa the previous year, the UN protest involved a disparate group of protestors from differing political backgrounds. James Lawson, president of the United African Nationalist Movement (UANM), stated that at least fifteen organizations had taken part in the demonstration. When the event was reported in the mainstream media, it was predictably stigmatized as a ‘riot’; uncertainty as to who had organized and coordinated the protest, and rumours spread by representatives of the US government, set off panicked invocations of the twin fears of Communism and Black Nationalism. One such response in the New York Times played on fears of international Communism, citing rumours spread by unnamed US officials that ‘Communist agitators had stirred up pro-Lumumba demonstrations around the world’ (‘Riot in Gallery’, 1). This rumour spread even more wildly by the California-based Lodi News-Sentinel, whose February 15th edition denounced the protest as a ‘Communist inspired […] riot’ by ‘screaming demonstrators’, placing a photograph of Calvin Hicks’s arrest under the banner headline ‘Mobs Rampage Around World in Lumumba Protest’ (‘Mobs Rampage’, 1). Though some protesters, such as Daniel Watts, editor of Liberator and founder of the Liberation Committee for Africa, identified as nationalists and explicitly not as Communists, the members of On Guard possessed a definite leftist orientation (‘U.N. Rioting Laid to Pro-Africans’, 11). Calvin Hicks would later argue, using Cedric Robinson’s term, that ‘the understanding, or the lack of understanding, of On Guard, coming from the Lower East Side, was a kind of Black Marxism’ (Wood, 181). Likewise, Umbra member Rashidah Ismaili characterizes On Guard as ‘working-class oriented, […] cultural workers, and […] leftwing politically’ (Wood, 169).

Such left-wing sympathies invited a predictably paranoid media response – even if On Guard’s orientation tended more towards the non-aligned politics identified with Castro, Lumumba and the ‘Bandung World’ than to the Soviet Union. These reactions had uncomfortable echoes of the 1919 Red Summer in which the spectre of black bolshevism was used to justify large-scale campaigns of terror conducted against black neighbourhoods, and African-American commentators were quick to point out the links between the situation in the Congo and the conditions they faced in the United States. In the New York Times Magazine, the month after the protest, James Baldwin sarcastically demolished media arguments which stigmatized left-oriented self-organization by African-Americans as part of a Communist plot.

According, then, to what I take to be the prevailing view, these rioters were merely a handful of irresponsible, Kremlin-corrupted provocateurs. I find this view amazing. It is a view which even a minimal effort at observation would immediately contradict. (Baldwin, 103)

Linking conditions in Harlem to the anger felt by the protestors at events in the Congo, he argued that the protest represented African-Americans’ refusal to ‘wait’ or ‘adjust themselves to the cruel racial pressures of life in the United States […] The American Negro can no longer, nor will he ever again, be controlled by white America’s image of him. This fact has everything to do with the rise of Africa in world affairs’ (103). As Baldwin’s comments suggest, On Guard’s solidarity with Africa was not tokenist Afrocentrism – a charge frequently levelled at the Black Power and Black Arts Movements – but a conscious and active response to the realities of geopolitics, imperialism and domestic racism. The connections between African-American demonstrators expressing their solidarity with anti-colonial struggles were more than merely symbolic. Rosa Guy, due to her fluency in French, had played a key role in establishing connections in New York for the Congolese delegation to the UN, who spoke little English, and received news of Lumumba’s death before it was officially announced through contacts in the Congolese diplomatic corps (Angelou 198...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Amiri Baraka, the Umbra Workshop and the Writing of Literary History
• 1. ‘A Tale of Two Cities’: Umbra, Internationalism and the Death of Lumumba
• 2. ‘Poems That Kill’: Amiri Baraka’s Magic Words
• 3. ‘Space of a Nation’: David Henderson Writes the City
• 4. Language, Violence and ‘the Collective Mind’: Calvin C. Hernton
• 5. ‘Home Is Never Where You Were Born’: Calvin Hernton’s ‘Medicine Man’
• 6. ‘Return to English Turn’: Tom Dent
• 7. Memory and Myth in Lorenzo Thomas’s ‘The Bathers’
• Conclusion: ‘If Our Heads Are Harder’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint