Wealth inequality has grown generally within American society, but it is widest among African Americans. An analysis by the People’s Policy Project found that the black upper class controlled 1,328 times the wealth of the black poor, compared to a racial wealth gap of 15.7 between the black and white median. It is not surprising, under these conditions of astronomical wealth concentration, that there was a significant shift in the votes of African Americans for Donald Trump in 2020 from 2016.
Kendi and the money-obsessed artists and journalists he has identified as part of the “Black Renaissance”—whose political touchstones are the war criminals and corporate raiders in the Democratic Party—have nothing in common with the democratic and egalitarian strivings of the best elements of the Harlem Renaissance. That artistic and cultural movement was profoundly influenced by the 1917 Russian Revolution led by the Bolsheviks, the workers state they built in the Soviet Union and the political activity of Communist and socialist thinkers in the United States.
The Harlem Renaissance was racially and culturally mixed, involving white and black, American, Caribbean and French influence. The artists, writers, poets and political activists were a mix of Garveyite black nationalists, Communists and socialists. Above all they sought to use their art to break down racial barriers and stereotypes and fight against the racism of Jim Crow segregation and the terror of lynching. Many joined the Communist Party or affiliated organizations inspired by the example of the October Revolution, only to become disillusioned and driven away from revolutionary politics by the bitter experience of Stalinism and the anti-Communist witch hunts.
The list of enduring black artists, writers and journalists from this period is long: Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Nella Larsen, Lorraine Hansberry, Hubert Harrison, Scott Joplin, W.E.B. Dubois, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, Shirley Verrett, Paul Robeson, William Grant Still, Duke Ellington, Marian Anderson, James Weldon Johnson, Lena Horne, Sidney Poitier, Cab Calloway, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker, Sidney Bechet, Chandler Owen, A. Phillip Randolph and on and on and on. Who among the current crop of racialist celebrities hailed by Kendi and Time compares to any of these figures?
Wright, the author of Native Son (1940), began attending meetings of the John Reed Club, a Communist Party-sponsored literary group, in 1934 and married Communist Party organizer Ellen Poplar in 1941. He explained later in life: “The revolutionary words leaped from the page and struck me with tremendous force. My attention was caught by the similarity of the experiences of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred peoples into a whole. It seemed to me that here at last, in the realm of revolutionary expression, Negro experience could find a home, a functioning value and role.”
Hughes, poet and playwright, was also involved in the John Reed Club and was active in other Communist Party sponsored initiatives, including the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. He explained under the needling of Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953, “My feeling, sir, is that I have believed in the entire philosophies of the left at one period in my life, including socialism, communism, Trotskyism.”
McKay, co-executive editor of The Liberator alongside socialist Max Eastman, traveled to the Soviet Union, attending the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922. He declared in 1919: “Every Negro who lays claim to leadership should make a study of Bolshevism and explain its meaning to the coloured masses. It is the greatest and most scientific idea afloat in the world today.”
While many figures in the Harlem Renaissance eventually moved to the right, along with the intelligentsia generally in the postwar period, socialist ideas and consciousness of the class struggle left a mark in their best works. Their understanding of the reality that there was, is and could be a class struggle, in which the working class, led by a politically conscious revolutionary leadership, united across racial, linguistic and national lines, can free itself from the bonds of capitalism and take control of society for itself is completely devoid from the works of those identified as the leading lights of the “Black Renaissance” today.
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