When Militancy Was in Vogue

I n the comical vignette published in the Pittsburgh Courier, “Simple’s Comment on Color: It’s a Gasser,” Langston Hughes debates with his most enduring fictional character, the humorous and wise Harlem everyman, Jesse B. Simple. Their jocular dispute questions the relationship between corporal Blackness and “Black thought.” Things move swiftly from the abstract to the personal when Simple states that because Hughes “is colleged” he has “Black skin but not a Black brain.” In response to this allegation Hughes cites author and emerging public figure Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones) as a counter example of a “college man” who exemplified “Black Nationalist” consciousness. In 1965, when the short piece was published, Baraka personified an intellectual artistic class that retained, even regulated, a folk-centered conception of Black authenticity; Baraka was seemingly a foolproof counter figure to Simple’s argument. Simple, who is no fool, however, responds to Hughes with a question that seemingly had little to do with the topics of education and nationalist ideology, “Didn’t I read in the papers where he married a white woman?” For Simple, all that needed to be known was that Baraka’s wife, Hettie Cohen, was white. In Simple’s estimation, despite appearing Black and gushing Black Nationalist rhetoric, Baraka was an example of one whose “Black head was filled up with white thoughts.” The accusation that Baraka was insufficiently Black would have seemed a ludicrous charge at that time; indeed, who was Blacker than Baraka? This paradox is Hughes’ point. The sardonic exchange between Hughes and his folksiest character is a clever act of signifying in which Hughes both affirms and questions the Black author’s relationship to whiteness. Hughes validates Baraka as the prime Black Nationalist pundit, through the retort to Simple that Baraka’s “private life was his own business” and his marriage not an appropriate topic for evaluating his political stance, while raising questions regarding the significance of Baraka’s ties to whiteness. Indeed, Baraka’s marriage to Hettie Cohen was not an issue for Hughes at all. However, his relationship with white audiences was. Simple’s provocative personal question acts as a sly gesture toward Hughes’ anxieties regarding Baraka’s broader relationship to whiteness and, more precisely, his concern regarding how white audiences received Baraka’s work. Expressed across several telling newspaper reviews and editorials in the middle part of the 1960s, Hughes, while praising Baraka as undoubtedly talented, is troubled that the young upstart benefited from, if not knowingly leveraged, a peculiar desire of white audiences to be rhetorically assaulted by Black dramaturgy. This essay will situate and explore Hughes’ unease and skepticism regarding what he called a “masochistic” pleasure white liberal audiences found in Baraka’s stages dramas during his transition from Beat to Black Nationalist (roughly between 1963 and 1965). Hughes critiques Baraka for playing the