Black History Month 2010: Heroes sung and unsung

Book Review: Two Must-read Biographies

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
by Carole Boyce Davies
Duke university Press, 2008

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
by Robin D.G. Kelley
The Free Press, 2009

Celebrations of Black History Month should not focus on the achievements of individuals or the status of personalities. Sometimes highlighting a speech by Dr. King or the wealth of Madam C. J. Walker or the discoveries of George Washington Carver every February replace a serious or comprehensive study of the whole contribution of the African American people to the culture and beauty of this country as well as to the general advance of democracy here over the past 230 years.

New biographies of two key 20th century African Americans, Claudia Jones and Thelonious Monk, however, put special focus on their individual genius, the social context of their lives and the personal details that make them more than stock characters in an historical drama. In the case of these books, studies of individual lives help tell a broader story.

Robin D. G. Kelley's biography of Thelonious Monk, published in 2009 after several years in the making, may prove to be the definitive work on this giant of jazz so much ignored by scholars. Its scope is deep and broad, elucidating the smallest details of Monk's life, background, development, politics, and creative genius. Both the use of Monk's private recordings and the interviews with family members, professional contemporaries, recording industry moguls, among others add sparkling details to the rigorous academic research that typifies Kelley's scholarly works, which include Freedom Dreams, Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!, Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970, Race Rebels and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.

Kelley rightly complicates ideas about individual genius usually attributed to major creative figures. The community in which Monk grew as a musician and intellect as well as the hard work that motivated his study of many forms of music are the catalysts in which his creative powers were concocted, Kelley shows. The book "is an intimate story of about the folks who shaped him," Kelley writes in his prelude. Of special note is Kelley's refusal to romanticize Monk's suffering from bipolar disorder, typically regarded as a stimulant for artistic activity, as well as his struggle with alcoholism, and identifies Monk's mental health as a major struggle for him and his family and the direct cause of the tragedy of his life.

Kelley also documents Monk's contributions to struggles for equality and freedom. Monk never explicitly identified with a party or a movement as such, but he did play at benefit concerts for Paul Robeson in the 1950s and for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the 1960s. For example, when CORE organized "jazz sit-ins" in support of the sit-ins at Greensboro, North Carolina, Monk was there. He lent his talents to support community centers and the Negro American Labor Council. Throughout the work, Kelley carefully contextualizes Monk's life in the political and social struggles of the day. Indeed, those struggles and his conscious participation in them lend some of the most important meanings to his music.

As the subtitle of the work suggests, Monk was an American original, an artist who might be canonized along side of "Bach and Beethoven" but who at heart "was essentially a rebel." Kelley sums up the man's life beautifully with these words: "He demanded originality in others and embodied it in everything he did – in his piano technique, in his dress, in his language, his humor, in the way he danced, in the way he loved his family and raised his children, and above all in his compositions."

Another American original was Claudia Jones. A product of the African diaspora via the Caribbean (Port of Spain, Trinidad), Jones was for her times one of a kind, concludes Carole Boyce Davies in her recent biography. What seems to shock Boyce Davies above all is that very little scholarship of Jones life or political philosophy has been published, considering the fact that Jones stands as quite possibly the most important Black Leftist woman political thinker in the 20th century in the US and British contexts. Perhaps it was those very qualities that for so long have aided her marginalization.

Above all, Boyce Davies should be commended for her special work in recovering the biographical details of Jones' life, which had been lost to the Cold War and the McCarthyite attempts to erase the life of this Black radical woman from our collective memory. Boyce Davies, author of such works as Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject and editor of the anthology Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, revives both Jones' activist spirit as well as her sharp political mind.

Of particular importance is the fact that Jones may have been the first woman of color in the US context to theorize the "triple oppression" of working-class women of color, producing a concept of the intersection of race, class and gender at least two decades before it became an essential component of feminist theory and the thinking of the working-class oriented women's movement. It was through Jones' efforts as a leader in the Young Communist League and the Communist Party USA that her analysis – developed within the collectivist approaches of the party – became essential components of the Party's strategy and thinking around the middle of the 20th century, especially with powerful essays published by this magazine titled "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women" (1949) and "For the Unity of Women in the Cause of Peace" (1951), for example.

In her journalism, as a contributing editor of the Party's Daily Worker and as a founder of the London-based West Indian Gazette, Jones called attention to African American women historical figures such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman who received little attention at the time in scholarly circles and the mainstream media. Jones helped build the peace movement in the early stages of the Cold War. Jones also led the way in developing analysis of US and British imperialism in the Caribbean.

Boyce Davies also details the political repression (along with the law enforcement incompetence) leveled against her in the depths of the McCarthyite period. After nearly a year of imprisonment in a federal prison that took a serious physical toll on her health, Jones was deported to Britain. But the story doesn't end there. Boyce Davies' account details her ongoing local and international activism.

One of the most wonderful parts of this book is its inclusion of dozens of images of document, newspapers, and photographs that really bring the story to life. Included are photos of Jones with prominent figures like Paul Robeson, Dr. King, Norman Manley, Cheddi Jagan and Jomo Kenyatta. Boyce Davies identifies Jones as a political and intellectual forerunner of giants like Angela Davis and Audre Lorde, but I think Jones' legacy belongs to all of us – those white and Black and Brown working-class men and women, straight and gay and transgender, young and old, urban and rural who fight for the unity and power of our class and communities, who worked in 2008 for the election of Barack Obama, who are fighting for jobs and economic recovery, are demanding the most expansive health care system possible, the restoration of the rights of working people, a permanent break from endless war and the salvation of our planet from the ravages of climate change.

Boyce Davies uses the fact that Jones was buried in London's Highgate Cemetery on the left side of Karl Marx as a kind of metaphor. By challenging the thinking of many of the Marxist-Leninists of her time who insisted on a narrow view of industrial class politics in favor of a broader politics of alliances beyond those boundaries, Jones sought a politics that addressed the special needs of the oppressed and the exploited. For Jones this was a moral and a strategic question; success in building the broadest alliances of democratic and class forces could ensure a successful, fundamental social change. For Boyce Davies it is this special development of Marxist theory that puts Jones to the left of Marx and makes her burial plot appropriate. Whether this is "leftism" or simply common sense, this reviewer can't say. But this is an important book that deserves careful study and a place on your shelf.

During this Black History Month, these two books on the lives of Thelonious Monk and Claudia Jones are must reads.