(Posted to FB by Jairus Banaji)
Langston Hughes (1901–1967). Where solidarity begins. When hauled up for
interrogation by Roy Cohn (McCarthy’s chief counsel), one of the several
bits of testimony Hughes offered was an appeal to his childhood in Kansas.
“They did not let me go to the school [in Topeka]. There were no Negro
children there. My mother had to take days off from her work, had to
appeal to her employer, had to go to the school board and finally after
the school year had been open for some time she got me into the school.
I had been there only a few days when the teacher made unpleasant and
derogatory remarks about Negroes and specifically seemingly pointed at
myself. Some of my schoolmates stoned me on the way home from school.
One of my schoolmates (and there were no other Negro children in the
school), a little white boy, protected me, and I have never in all my
writing career or speech career as far as I know said anything to create
a division among humans, or between whites and Negroes, because I have
never forgotten this kid standing up for me against these other
first-graders who were throwing stones at me. I have always felt from
that time on . . . that there are white people in America who can be
your friend, and will be your friend, and who do not believe in the kind
of things that almost every Negro who has lived in our country has
experienced.”
(From Vera M. Kutzinski, The Worlds of Langston Hughes (2012), pp.213-14)
The quote is from the transcripts of his secret testimony to one of the
executive sessions that held closed interrogations prior to the public
hearings of the McCarthy Committee (the ‘Senate subcommittee on internal
security’, not to be confused with the HUAC). The session was held on
Tuesday March 24, 1953 in McCarthy’s office. The written records of the
closed sessions were only released in 2003.
If Hughes appeared as a “compliant” witness in the public hearings, he
was anything but in the secret sessions where he was both deft and
combative in handling questions about his radical past. But he also
realized that “the story he was telling about being black, about being a
writer in the USA, and about the difference between art and political
propaganda was not one that the committee could and would credit”
(p.218). His declarations of loyalty to America proved ineffective,
Kutzinski argues. They ordered him to “cease what they took as evasive
maneuvering”. “Hughes’s failure…puts into evidence a sentiment that
James Baldwin would express in 1963: ‘It is perhaps because I am an
American Negro that I have always felt white Americans, many if not most
of them, are experts in delusion—they usually speak as though I were not
in the room. *I*, here, does not refer so much to the man called Baldwin
as it does to the reality which produced me, a reality with which I
live, and from which most Americans spend all their time in flight’”
(p.215). (Cited from Baldwin, “Envoi,” in A Quarter Century of
Un-Americana, ed. Charlotte Pomerantz (New York, 1963), p. 127)
In the end, of course, it was the senator from Wisconsin who won.
“Hughes was very sensitive—perhaps overly so—about being called
‘left-wing’ even seven years after his encounter with McCarthy” (p.219).
As for McCarthy, “He knew nothing about history, literature, music, art,
or science. And he had no desire to learn. ‘As far as I know,’ said Van
Susteren, ‘Joe looked at only one book in his life. That was Mein
Kampf.’” (p.198, citing David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The
World of Joe McCarthy (2005)).
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