Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Allies of a Different Sort \\ 211
minded, who were closely connected to the Communist Party." And one of his
greatest heroes was none other than Paul Robeson, whom Gillespie described as a
"forerunner of Martin Luther King": "I'll always remember Paul Robeson as a
politically committed artist. A few enlightened musicians recognized the importance
of Paul Robeson, amongst them Teddy Wilson, Frankie Newton, and Pete
Seeger—all of them very outspoken politically." At another level, Yiddish choral
appearances with Paul Robeson reminded audiences of a deep folkish basis for
sentiment. 39
All this came to a shocking conclusion, as McCarthyism began and a series of
calamities associated with suburbanization, inner city decay, drug epidemics, and
gang violence literally swept several generations of interracial (and anti-racist,
Jewish community) activists off the streets. The collapsing Communist Party
added to its own troubles, alienating Jews by defending Stalin's depredations
while attracting little African American admiration by the "trials" and expulsions
of aged Jewish activists charged with taking vacations in racially segregated
Florida. Furthermore, as the Jewish role in the Communist Party became more
public and more pronounced, so did Black nationalist sentiment. During the
1950s, a growing number of Black Communists quit the Party, charging that it
was "dominated" by Jews whose interest in African Americans was less than genuine.
Although organizations like the Civil Rights Congress successfully rallied
the faithful to protest new waves of Southern lynchings and arrests, by and large,
a legally hamstrung Left spent its time defending itself and living through the
large-scale disillusionment of its members, Black and Jewish alike. 40
The Jewish Left retained a surprising vitality on Black-Jewish issues not
because of Party leadership but because of the experience and dedication of mostly
former Communists. On the political front, former Communists played key
roles from the top of the Civil Rights movement to the local grass-roots organizer.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s top advisor, for example, was ex-Communist
Stanley Levison. Southern African American leaders were often trained in leftwing
organizations or schools, and Jews and Blacks in Northern metropolitan
centers jointly protested segregated public facilities and racial discrimination in
housing policy. On selected campuses in the 1950s, the Labor Youth League,
overwhelmingly Jewish, often led such fights and, especially after the revelations
about Stalin, turned their full attention toward civil rights support groups for the
Southern movement. 41
The Left arguably had still more success on the cultural front. There, for
instance, eager Jewish audiences had been created for Harry Belafonte (who first
made some of his appearances at Popular Front functions in the later 1940s, and
became a standard figure in Jewish summer entertainment), Lorraine Hansberry
(whose play, Raisin in the Sun, might be considered a final Popular Front aesthetic
triumph, and which served as the model for the 1970s television series, Good
Times), and notable progressives Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. One might also
include the late Arnold Perl, the credited co-author of the screenplay that became