Although a great many who got their news from conservative-based journalistic media might be shocked to learn this fact, it is irrefutable and inescapable: the Black Lives Matter movement is not an example of black radical imagination. When Black Lives Matters protesters take to the street to peacefully protest after another weekly show of unnecessarily zealous force on the part of law enforcement offices against African American men and women, it is merely a demonstration of the least radical form of good old-fashioned American dissent.
In reality, the Black Lives Matters protests which defined the summer of 2020 were less radical than the Boston Tea Party. That this is true endows the modern Tea Party formed in directly response to the election of President Barack Obama with the kind of profound irony not often seen in modern times. The disconnect between conservative fear of absolutely mainstream forms of a dissent and protest as something so radical it threatens the very fabric of American society as well as their actual lives stems from a lack of education. And that lack of education is revealed page after page in the book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. This is a text which serves to open up an entire “secret history” of America that, in reality of course, is only a secret because it has been systemically suppressed by the academic structure of the country. Every person who ever made it through high school in American knows the name Ernest Hemingway, but precious few ever have ever heard of a black man named Charles Chesnutt whose writing makes Hemingway look like a sixth season replacement writer on a really badly written successful sitcom. And here’s the kicker: Chesnutt is not even a subject in Freedom Dreams. This is the secret history of radicalism in American society and the overlooked Chesnutt does not belong there.
What is there? Well, there’s Claudia Jones. Familiar with the Hollywood Ten? The collection of Hollywood writers and directors who jailed for refusing to name names before HUAC on their communist witch hunting exercise in violating Constitutional rights? Dalton Trumbo was among them and a movie made about his experience starred Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston. Trumbo was probably not really a communist at all, but Claudia Jones was an editor with the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the American Communist Party, who rose through the ranks to become the editor of its offshoot, the Weekly Review. She, too, was jailed, spending four years in prison after being arrested under one of the most specious piece of legislation ever passed by Congress: the Smith Act. After serving her prison sentence, the Trinidad-born Jones was then deported. Aside from the fact that Jones was a staunch radical member of the Communist Party and Trumbo merely a non-radical fellow traveler at best, the primary difference between them is physical and we're not taliking gender: Jones was black, Trumbo was white.
The history of the mingling of black society and the communist movement in America is long, vast, intricate and stars a number of very famous celebrities. It is a fascinating tale of the Black Radical Imagination at work in a big way under a big tent recognized by everyone. And yet, when one thinks of the Red Scare, the Communist Witch Hunt, and even the Cold War itself, for that matter, how often do images of participants with darkly pigmented spring to mind?
That empty space in your recollection is one that this book was designed to fill and it does it brilliantly and with the capacity to offer information that is new to a reader on almost every page. The role of black society in the brief rise of radical communist thought to almost co-equal status with democratic free enterprise in the 1930’s is hardly a story that has been left to the margins of the history books and yet it is almost unknown. It is also the arguably the most well-known example of the Black Radical Imagination covered in the book. Therefore, one can likely imagine the effect of reading the rest of the volume and exploring all the other fascinating nooks and crannies of history denied illumination within the American academic system.
