The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones by Amiri Baraka

Author:Amiri Baraka [Baraka, Amiri]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781556522314
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books
Published: 1984-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Seven

The Black Arts Politics, Search for a New Life

The Cuban trip was a turning point in my life. Langston, Jimmy Baldwin, and John Killens were supposed to go, but didn’t. I was in a group that included Sarah Wright, the novelist, and her husband. Ed Clark, the painter, whom I knew. Harold Cruse, the writer, whom I also knew. (I’d met Harold in my MacDougal Street days, often in the Caf, Figaro at Bleecker and McDougal. He lived then in a furnished room on West 23rd or West 14th and was always complaining about how Broadway producers were turning down musicals he was writing.) Julian Mayfield and his wife, Ana Codero, a doctor, born in Puerto Rico. Also with our party was a man I didn’t know until then, Robert Williams. It was Williams who had organized the most militant NAACP chapter in the States, a chapter composed of black workers and returning veterans, in Monroe, North Carolina. They’d had “wade-ins” to integrate the pool in Monroe, and Rob had summoned black militant attorney Conrad Lynn down to North Carolina to defend a ten-year-old boy who had been locked up for kissing an eight-year-old white girl. Rob had also organized a self-defense group in Monroe and when he made the statement in 1959, after a white rapist of a black woman had been freed by an all-white jury, that blacks should “meet violence with violence,” he was summarily ditched by Uncle Roy and the NAACP. Later, Rob led a group of armed blacks to surround a group of menacing Klansmen, disarm them, take off their hoods, and send them scurrying back into their rat holes.

He was wearing a big straw hat like a campesino (Cuban farmer) when I met him, with a wispy tip of beard. He was a big man, maybe six feet three inches and about 240 pounds, imposing, strong-looking. One never doubted that, aroused, Rob could be a mean mf.

Traveling with us, as well, were John Henrik Clarke, the historian, plus some other people — a black model, two strange-looking sisters who were members, along with Gibson, of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and a journalist from a Philadelphia newspaper. (For a detailed account of this trip, see “Cuba Libre,” an essay in Home: Social Essays.)

But we went to Cuba (this was 1959), after a false start courtesy of the U.S. government, and we stayed a couple days in Havana talking to various people, meeting various Cuban and Latin intellectuals and officials. I met the great Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, who asked me straight out where was Langston and did I think that Langston had gotten more conservative. I smiled, but I did not know then that Langston had testified, under duress, before HUAC, denouncing some of his own earlier work, to keep great patriots like the filthy cracker bastard James Eastland off his ass.

I met Pablo Armando Fernández, the poet, and people at La Casa de Cuba, an arts center. We also visited various ministries and got lectured to about what Cuba was trying to do.

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