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Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson

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This search leads logically to an attempt to formulate the relation of African Americans to US institutions, for two distinct but related reasons. The first has to do with guiding principles of social action. If the protagonist can no longer be satisfied with either vanguardist or "spontaneist" Marxism, and has never seriously considered Ras's nationalism, an obvious alternative is some orientation toward long-term reform struggle, and one available framework for such struggle is US democratic ideology. The second consideration has to do with social agency. If the protagonist no longer believes in his own leadership status, in vanguard party organization, or in spontaneous self-organization of the Black proletarians, yet still opposes such middle-class African American leaders as Bledsoe, then he must be thrown back on conceptions of struggle that have traditional currency among African American common people. For both needs--a way of struggling on the basis of US ideals and of drawing on conceptions understood within the community--the contemporary contexts in the 1940s were the March On Washington movement and the "double V" conception during World War II.

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The March movement, as already seen, waged an independent mass civil rights campaign in wartime; "double V" expressed the same idea. This slogan, usually said to have been introduced by the Pittsburgh Courier in February 1942, referred to victory against fascism at home as well as abroad. Both crystallized an attitude popular among more militant African Americans--neither uncritically embracing the war effort, as urged by the Roosevelt administration and also the Communist Party, nor rejecting the war on pacifist or pro-Japanese grounds (each of which had some support) but supporting parallel struggles for war victory and for full, unconditional, and immediate civil rights in the US. These conceptions were a step away from the previous decade's alliance of African American leaders with Roosevelt and toward the start of an independent African American movement. (However, even more radical political trends were already present, notably the beginnings of nonviolent direct action organized by the pacifists of the Committee [later Congress] of Racial Equality in 1942.)

Incidental testimony to the power of the "double V" conception is found in the novel And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), by John Oliver Killens, an author whose aesthetics and politics differed sharply from Ellison s. (23) Set during World War II, Killens's tale chronicles the growth of Solly Saunders, an educated, upwardly mobile African American draftee, from conventional patriotism and racial assimilationism to hatred of war and racial-class fraternity with his African American army brothers. Despite this antimilitarist theme, Saunders's transformation comes through a clash between his initial point of view identifying Negro interests totally with war victory (similar to the CP's, though Killens does not say so) and the "double V" conception espoused by local NAACP activists. The "double V" functions as a recurring refrain in the first half of Killens's novel (53, 76-81, 92, 93, 94, 100, 102, 105, 139, 140, 154, 167, 203) and returns at its climax, a violently suppressed uprising by African American GI's in Australia against the army's segregationist regime (loosely based on historical fact). Standing over his comrades' bodies as one of his unit's few survivors, Saunders vows, "I promise you, my buddies, to never forget the way I feel this Monday morning. I will always hate war with all my heart and all my soul.... And I promise you a Double-V." And he seems to hear one of his fallen soulmates reply: "Where were you, Sergeant Solly? You should a been with us, cut buddy. We got our Double-V already" (482). Killens returns "double V" to its roots in 1940's African American radicalism, and reminds us that the phrase could be taken, not as an uneasy compromise with Roosevelt's war policy, but as a means of struggle and an alternative to conventional patriotism.

Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson

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