Lawrence Jackson Talks About his New Book 'The Indignant Generation'

The Indignant Generation:
A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960
Lawrence P. Jackson
Princeton University Press

The Indignant Generation is the first narrative history of the neglected but essential period of African American literature between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Era. The years between these two indispensable epochs saw the communal rise of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and many other influential black writers. While these individuals have been duly celebrated, little attention has been paid to the political and artistic milieu in which they produced their greatest works. With this commanding study, Lawrence Jackson recalls the lost history of a crucial era.

Looking at the tumultuous decades surrounding World War II, Jackson restores the "indignant" quality to a generation of African American writers shaped by Jim Crow segregation, the Great Depression, the growth of American Communism, and an international wave of decolonization. He also reveals how artistic collectives in New York, Chicago, and Washington fostered a sense of destiny and belonging among diverse and disenchanted peoples. As Jackson shows through contemporary documents, the years that brought us Their Eyes Were Watching God, Native Son, and Invisible Man also saw the rise of African American literary criticism--by both black and white critics.

Fully exploring the cadre of key African American writers who triumphed in spite of segregation, The Indignant Generation paints a vivid portrait of American intellectual and artistic life in the mid-twentieth century.

Lawrence P. Jackson is professor of English and African American studies at Emory University. He is the author of Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius and a forthcoming biography of Chester Himes.

Endorsements:

"Lawrence Jackson's authoritatively detailed and lively Indignant Generation is an omnium gatherum of virtually everybody of color in the mid-20th century who tried to write the Great American Novel. This excellent study should become a literary and cultural history benchmark."--David Levering Lewis, New York University and author of When Harlem Was in Vogue

"The Indignant Generation is the most comprehensive portrait of the literary history in that glorious interregnum between the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and the Black Arts Movement of the sixties. Combining close reading with a keen sensitivity to cultural and political context, Jackson has brought this little studied period to life, and he has done so with compelling erudition. This book is a major contribution to literary scholarship. I learned quite a lot reading it, and enjoyed every minute doing so."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

"This is a magisterial book. Lawrence Jackson is a first-rate historian--I salute him!"--Cornel West, Princeton University

"The Indignant Generation is a thoroughly researched, highly informative, and remarkably important African American literary study about a neglected period of black creative writing. It fills some very important holes in black literary history, and all of us who work in literature are grateful that Jackson has taken on this task and done it so well."--Gerald Early, series editor of Best African American Fiction and Best African American Essays

"This is a landmark work in the history of African American studies and American intellectual history. Writing with verve, Jackson brings to life a large cast of characters and traces an ongoing conversation among the writers and critics of this period. This book is likely to become a model for a new generation of scholars, both for the breadth of its engagement and the depth of its archival research."--Werner Sollors, Harvard University

Barack Obama as Walter Lee Younger, Jr.

Special to NewBlackMan


Barack Obama as Walter Lee Younger, Jr.
by Duchess Harris

I never thought I’d be able to analyze a presidential election through the lens of the actor Sidney Poitier.

Over the course of the past year, commentary from prominent voices including Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, and New York Times columnist Frank Rich have compared Barack Obama with Sidney Poitier in the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Sidney Poitier’s screen characters are an apropos way of accessing Obama, but I think Johnson and Rich have the wrong movie.

This presidential election is more like A Raisin in the Sun.

A Raisin in the Sun is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959. The story is based upon her family's experiences growing up in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood, a neighborhood similar to the one that Michelle Robinson Obama grew up in.

The experiences in this play echo the lawsuit Hansberry v. Lee, to which the Hansberry family was a party when they fought to have their day in court because of a previous action about racially motivated restrictive covenants (Burke v. Kleiman). The Hansberrys won their right to be heard as a matter of due process of law in relation to the Fourteenth Amendment. The Hansberry case was not bound by the Burke decision, because the class of defendants in the respective cases had conflicting goals.

The plaintiff in the first action was Olive Ida Burke, who brought the suit on behalf of the property owner's association to enforce the racial restriction in 1934. Her husband, James Burke, was the person who sold the property to Carl Hansberry (Lorraine's father) when he changed his mind about the validity of the covenant.

Mr. Burke's decision may have been motivated by the changing demographics of the neighborhood, but it was also influenced by the Depression. The demand for houses was so low among White buyers that Mr. Hansberry may have been the only prospective purchaser available

Barrack Obama is like Lorraine Hansberry’s father, and the American people are like James Burke. After two stock market crashes, White Americans were willing to cast their vote for a Black man to move, not just into a White neighborhood, but into the White House.

In the 1961 film adaptation (the year Barack Obama was born), Sidney Poitier plays the protagonist, Walter Lee Younger. Similar to Obama’s “alternative blackness,” Poitier was born in Miami, Florida, of Bahamian parents. In addition to racial discrimination, he was also hampered even among people of color because of his thick Bahamian accent.

After his first audition, Poitier was told by the director to become a dishwasher. His effort to get rid of his accent resulted in a distinctive speech pattern that became one of his trademarks, along with his piercing gaze and magnetic smile.

When Poitier plays Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun, his character is more of a race man than Dr. John Wade Prentiss in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. When the residents of all-White Clybourne Park have learned of their new neighbors, they send an emissary to meet with the Youngers to explain the "rules." Mr. Lindner, the representative, carefully disguises his racist attitudes beneath neutral terms ("not rich and fancy people; just hardworking, honest people who don't really have much but those little homes and a dream of the kind of community they want to raise their children in").

These people are like some of the original Hillary supporters who are “hard-working White Americans.” Mr. Linder makes the Youngers a generous offer that Walter Lee refuses. Just like Barack Obama, he decides that his family has a right to a new life, and they will move to Clybourne Park.

Poitier, the Bahamain-American similar to Obama the Kenyan-American, convincingly speaks for the Black American men of the time. Even though Poitier isn’t the descendant of enslaved Africans, he redeems men whose ancestors have been in this country five generations and states that his Black family deserves to move into the White neighborhood because his daddy earned it “brick by brick.”

In real life, Sidney Poitier's most famous quote is, "If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. The journey has been incredible from its beginning." If that doesn’t explain the Obama presidency, I don’t know what does.

So, guess who’s coming to dinner now?

***

Duchess Harris, PhD, is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Macalester College. She is the author of the forthcoming Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton and co-editor with Bruce D. Baum of the forthcoming Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity. She is also a J.D. candidate at William Mitchell College of Law.

Queering Hansberry

from The Root

Lorraine Hansberry's Gay Politics
by Kai Wright

Why the 'Raisin in the Sun' playwright's homosexual ties have been straight-washed from black history.

The thing about history is that you don’t get answers to questions you don’t ask. Sally Hemings was a forgotten slave until Annette Gordon-Reed came along. Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War forward were said to play no meaningful role until black scholars ferreted out the facts. And Lorraine Hansberry had nothing to do with the lesbian liberation movement until 1976, when an editor revealed the playwright’s surprisingly radical correspondence on the subject.

Black gays and lesbians have been erased from our community’s history with surprising thoroughness. March on Washington planner Bayard Rustin labored away on behalf of the greater good for decades while having his own humanity shunted by fellow movement leaders. Duke Ellington’s genius writing partner Billy Strayhorn’s contributions have been profoundly obscured. And many of the artists who peopled the Harlem Renaissance have had their queer lives entirely straight-washed.

It’s a terribly consequential trend because it has left too many black people, straight and gay alike, to believe that sexual shame and silence is a long-standing norm in our community. The opposite is true, and Hansberry is a wonderful example.

Read the Full Essay HERE

Raisin Redux: A Hustle in the Sun

from NewsOne.com

A Hustle in the Sun
by Mark Anthony Neal

At a moment when Barack Obama is poised to make good on the promises to Black America that have long shriveled up, like that raisin in Langston Hughes “Harlem,” the ABC production missed an opportunity to make clear the political stakes that Hansberry wanted to address in the first place.

Ironically it was Sean Combs’s performance—from a limited actor, who can be described as adequate at best—that provides A Raisin in the Sun with any contemporary resonances. Combs is clearly no Sidney Poitier, but in fairness to Combs, Sidney Poitier wasn’t Sidney Poitier yet when he portrayed Walter Lee in the stage and Hollywood versions. What Combs did effectively was heighten the sense of hopelessness and even despair that animates Walter’s instincts as a hustler. And this is perhaps as it should be, since Combs, better than any of his generational peers—Misters Simmons and Carter included—embodies the hustling instinct of the so-called hip-hop generation.

Read the Full Essay