Jesse Jackson’s Call Me Charley: Protesting Segregated Recreation in Cold War America

Jesse Jackson began work on his first novel, Call Me Charley (1945), when Harper and Row editor Ursula Nordstrom said to him, “What I’m looking for is the story of a black boy growing up. Can you do it?” (Lanier 336). Invited to enter a publishing world dominated by white editors and writers, Jacksonjoined the ranks of the first African American authors to write about black childhood for both black and white audiences,¹ and is rightly mentioned in histories of African American children’s literature as a breakthrough writer. Barbara Lowe, for instance, concludes her entry in The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature with, “Jackson’s novels and biographies paved the way for more explicit writing about race relations in children’s and young adult literature and gave African American writers an audience that had, in large measure, previously been denied them.” Rudine Sims Bishop specifically refers to Call Me Charley as a “pioneering book” in what she terms “social conscience” literature (Shadow 17), and notes that with this text, Jackson “introduced the African American children’s novel of racial conflict” (Free 60).

Despite his foundational status, however, few critics have investigated Jesse Jackson’s work at length. Those who have argue that his early novels, especially Call Me Charley, emphasize interracial friendship as the means to overcoming racism (Lowe; Schmidt 78).² Certainly friendship is the apparent focus of the text: Tom, a white boy who lives in an affluent suburb, befriends Charley, a black boy whose parents keep house for and chauffer the suburb’s resident doctor. Their relationship places the text firmly within the tradition of “race-liberal writing” as it manifested in 1940s children’s texts depicting African American children (Capshaw 6).Jodi Melamed argues that racial liberalism “promoted the idea of a racially inclusive US national culture as the key to achieving America’s manifest destiny and proof of American exceptionalism and universality” after World War II (58). Casting “racism as a problem of white attitude or prejudice” (61), the “official, state-recognized anti-racism” (x) of the early Cold War found a conduit in literature that could “enabl[e] changes in white attitudes that were presumed to have a leveling effect on racial disparity” (54). Melamed exposes how the race novel’s focus on sympathy and friendship privileged “regulative concepts and discourses that produced and circumscribed acceptable [i.e., Cold War sanctioned] discourse on race” (71)—discourse that often marginalized or erased the role of economic and political systems in racial discrimination.³

Focusing on the “trickster” potential of such texts, however, Katharine Capshaw argues that despite “the narrowing of radical potential for critique in race-liberal articulations, subtle undercurrents of dissatisfaction and of civil rights demands still course through texts written by black authors and offered to black and white audiences” (7). And indeed, Jackson himself has acknowledged the significance of such undercurrents in his work. In a series of interviews with Ruby Lanier in 1977, he characterized his novel as a conscious and deliberate site of racial advancement: with Call Me Charley, “it was my aim to single out one black boy, to have him fight for at least the respect of being called Charles Moss. Charley had a game plan and the game plan began with recognize me as an individual and then we will go on from there and I’ll try to get into the boys’ club and try to win admission to the swimming pool and try to get a part in the school play” (Lanier 333). Of the racism Charley encounters as he attempts to do so, Jackson said, “We know these things exist. We know that black children have such experiences. We just do not write about them. We just do not talk about them. It was part of the invisible nature of the black at that time” (334).⁴Jackson’s mission, then, involved making visible and giving voice to that which had been hidden and silenced.

Shifting critical attention to Call Me Charley away from the novel’s alignment with...