Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Allies of a Different Sort \\ 225
34. See Jay Williams, Stage Left (New York, 1974), 114-17. In the next few years
Stevedore was performed by Black companies in the Federal Theater. Originally produced
by the Theatre Union (one of whose central figures, Albert Maitz, would
become a member of the "Hollywood Ten" blacklistees), the play dealt with a Black
dock worker falsely charged with raping a white woman because he was organizing a
stevedore's union and because he was forcefully antiracist. In the climactic scene,
white workers rush to join a Black neighborhood group in defending him against a
racist mob. On at least one occasion, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson rushed up from the
audience to join the action! The Theater Union was among the first to pay Black
actors scale, and to seat African Americans in any audience seat. Stevedore played 22
weeks, and met with approving reviews. Four years earlier, a production of Green
Pastures had won raves and a Pulitzer Prize by reviving the Uncle Remus view of
Black life in the old South, notably paying its Black cast subscale and playing in seg-
regated theaters.
35. Unfortunately but predictably, Gordon's memoir, Live At the Village Vanguard
(New York, 1980), carefully understates the Left's role as performers and patrons, noting
only as musicians those noted communists and leftists, like Woody Guthrie and
Josh White, who took a part in the early days. On the Cafe Society, see John
Hammond, with Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record (New York, 1977),
206-10.
36. Buhle, Marxism in the U.S.A., 289.
37. See the description of this film in Robert Sklar, City Boys (Princeton, 1992),
183-89. Abraham Polonsky, returning from the Blacklist, sought to make a series of
films starring Harry Belafonte on civil rights-related themes. Only one, Odds Against
Tomorrow (1959), was completed, but because it lost money he could not see his plan
through to completion. Others blacklisted, notably Martin Ritt (Sounder), made supportive
anti-racist films during the 1960s—70s. None had the bite of Body and Soul.
The degree of cooperation achieved between left-wing Blacks and Jews does not,
of course, resolve the many ambiguities of the relationship. Harold Cruse argued
forcefully that the Communist Party had given a latitude to Jewish nationalism,
including an autonomous Jewish press, never allowed to Blacks, and that the Popular
Front aesthetic (as in the case of Lorraine Hansberry) had been carefully crafted to
meet white audience approval. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New
York, 1967), 267—301. Cruse missed the decisive point not in ideology so much as in
political and cultural support: even the Yiddish newspaper Morgn Freiheit had vastly
more readers than the Harlem edition of the Daily Worker, and at some points (the
early 1920s and later 1950s) more readers than the Worker itself. Black left-wing theater
and Freedomways magazine survived, however, in no small part because of Jewish
support.