But civil rights lawyers, and the African American parents they represented, were also emboldened after World War II. And it was their energy and uncompromising demands that shifted the landscape. By 1951, African American students were making their own demands. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns led her classmates at Moton High School in a walkout and boycott of their segregated school. Her action prodded Marshall and the LDF lawyers to file Davis v. Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the four Brown cases.
Back in Hearne, by the time African American parents began organizing to challenge the dilapidated “new” high school for their children, Marshall already had his hands full with cases, all of which would become landmarks in their own right. This may be in part why the Hearne case is not widely known. It was one of a cadre of small, unsuccessful cases extending back to Marshall’s late 1930s schoolteacher-pay-equality cases in Maryland and Virginia. But these cases played a powerful role in shaping the thinking of LDF lawyers about what was possible in their litigation challenging Jim Crow. And it powerfully demonstrated the civil rights challenge confronting the United States in those early postwar years. As Thurgood Marshall wrote in his 1948 letter to the editors of The Dallas Morning News, “I think that before this country takes up the position that I must demand complete equality of right of citizens of all other countries throughout the world, we must first demonstrate our good faith by showing that in this country our Negro Americans are recognized as full citizens with complete equality.”
1954–1959
BLACK ARTS
Imani Perry
On May 17, 1954, the axis of American history shifted when the unanimous Supreme Court opinion in Brown v. Board of Education declared that separate was in fact not equal, and that legally mandated segregation was unconstitutional. It was front-page news around the world, and the opinion was printed in full in American papers.
Desegregation would prove an arduous process, marked by violence and unapologetic resistance in many corners of white America. Nevertheless, the Brown decision had immediate significance because it indicated that finally, after decades of aversion and refusal, the Supreme Court would be on the side of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision concluded a hard-fought multidecade legal strategy by the NAACP. The victory fueled the coming two decades of African American protest and organizing and America’s second Reconstruction.
Brown fueled not only Black activists but also Black artists who explored social conditions and the human imagination necessary to transform them. In prior years, many Black artists had been chastened and chastised by McCarthyism. Black artists were among those blacklisted for holding leftist politics or simply for being outspoken against American racism. Organizations were fractured and shuttered, and careers were destroyed. Black art communities were subject to surveillance, closed doors, and punitive measures.
And so in 1954, Black artists and writers found themselves at something of a crossroads. McCarthyism was waning. Brown was a beginning, and the FBI surveillance of Black activists under the COINTELPRO program had not yet begun. Possibility, however fraught, was refreshed. And these artists claimed new space.
In November 1955, James Baldwin followed two novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, with a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son. The book fairly crackled with his refusal to apologize for who he was and where he came from. The essays were both autobiographical and critical. His pen was unflinching.
In the first section, Baldwin took his predecessors to task. He subjected Harriet Beecher Stowe, Richard Wright, and the filmmakers who made Carmen Jones to withering critiques for their too-narrow depictions of Black life, thought, and feeling. Baldwin sought to claim the expansiveness he saw in Black history and culture. In the second section of the book, he depicted the conditions of Black life, North and South, including Jim Crow in Princeton, New Jersey. Baldwin placed himself as a global figure, in France and Switzerland. Unfamiliar ground gave him a sense of solidarity with other oppressed peoples and nuanced his and his readers’ understanding of race and racism as a global problem.
This drive to expand the terrain of Black humanity in the public sphere was evident in the work of other artists. Elizabeth Catlett, already recognized as an exceptional visual artist who worked largely in prints, began to sculpt in the 1950s. A graduate of Howard University and the child of a Tuskegee professor, Catlett had settled in Mexico to escape the tentacles of McCarthyism. She had been scrutinized and harassed more than most in retaliation against her leftist politics. And she did not break. She sculpted smooth, sensual, and solemn pieces, and her fully rounded Black subjects—both of historic significance and of the folk—grew under her hands. Her landmark 1957 print Sharecropper is the image of a Black woman—serious and dignified—beneath a hat shielding her from the sun. Niña depicts a Mexican girl in profile, with the brown skin of an Indigenous child and her hair in plaits. In both prints, along with many other works, Catlett wove together key elements of her artistic imagination—a fight against economic exploitation, sexism, and racism—with unseen yet quintessentially American faces.
Black American artists of the 1950s found common ground and purpose with Black artists abroad. In 1958 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, considered one of the most important and widely read novels in the English language. Published two years before Nigerian independence, the novel tells a story of the infiltration and domination of the West at the dawn of colonialism. Achebe’s protagonist, Okonkwo, a man with a clear history and place in his Ibo community, confronts the world-destroying forces of the colonial order and the missionaries who served as the moral justification for British incursion. The anticolonial novel had a global impact. It also brought Achebe into contact with Baldwin and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry.
Baldwin’s younger but similarly genius friend, a protector and a thinking partner, Lorraine Hansberry transformed American theater in March 1959. Her play A Raisin in the Sun was the first written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. It was a runaway success, and that year Hansberry won the Drama Critics Circle Award. The play tells the story of a Chicago South Side family living in a squalid kitchenette apartment whose patriarch has died, leaving them with a $10,000 insurance check. The question of what to do with the check is the primary plot device.
Around it, Hansberry crafts a masterful ensemble of characters who dream in the face of a deeply racist society. The title of the play comes from Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem,” also colloquially known by its introductory question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” Each character lives with that prospect. Walter Lee Younger longs for wealth and status of the sort he sees in the lives of the white men he drives around. His wife, Ruth, is a domestic worker who is contemplating an abortion and is desperate for a home of her own. Beneatha, Walter’s younger sister, aspires to be a doctor and is also exploring her identity and the idea of freedom in part by means of a West African suitor, a student in the independence movement. And the elder Lena, Walter and Beneatha’s mother, betrays every Mammy stereotype with the force of her moral guidance and her reminder that freedom is the purpose of life.