"Remembering When Indians Were Red": Bob Kaufman, the Popular Front, and the Black Arts Movement

Unlike other African-American contemporaries who participated in the New American Poetry groupings of the 1950s, such as Ted Joans and Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman seems not to have been much engaged with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. However, Kaufman's work in many respects was a crucial forerunner of the model of a popular avant-garde art rooted in African-American popular culture and connected to a radical anti-racist, anti-colonialist and internationalist sensibility that would be characteristic of much African-American nationalist art in the 1960s and 1970s. This model of what Werner Sollors has called a "populist modernism" is heavily associated with Amiri Baraka--with considerable justice since Baraka theorized it extensively in his prose writings (Sollors 8). Nonetheless, Kaufman actually pioneered this approach in his poetry simultaneously with or earlier than did Baraka or Joans--and, as Lorenzo Thomas points out in a clearer and more developed form (Thomas, "Communicating by Horns"293). In no small part, this is due to the fact that the notion of the popular avant-garde derives significantly from the Popular Front subculture from which Kaufman emerged and with which he continued to identify after its decline during the Cold War.

Reliable information about Kaufman's early life is hard to come by--largely due to Kaufman's self-mythologizing which, as we will see, has a crucial impact on how we read his work. ¹ What seems to be fairly certain is that Kaufman was born in New Orleans in 1925 to a "middle-class" Catholic African-American family. Though it seems possible that Kaufman's paternal grandfather was partly of Jewish descent, contrary to Kaufman's claims the family was not Jewish in terms either of Jewish law or social categories as they would have been recognized in New Orleans at the time. Rather Kaufman's family seems to have identified itself as African-American in a fairly straightforward manner--though it is worth remembering that racial identity was often defined a bit differently in New Orleans than in the rest of the South (or the North, for that matter).

At an early age (probably eighteen), Kaufman, like his older brother George, joined the merchant marine. During this period, Kaufman became an activist in the National Maritime Union (NMU), a union of merchant sailors famous at the time for its radical leadership and its racial egalitarianism--for example, its National Secretary at the time was Ferdinand Smith, a black Communist whose political sympathies were a matter of public record. In the late 1940s or early 1950s, Kaufman was (perhaps) one of approximately 2,000 sailors expelled by the union or "screened" from the merchant marine by the Federal government for their Communist associations. ² Kaufman is said to have engaged in a number of radical labor and political activities in New York and the South before ending up on the West Coast where he became an active and very visible part of the "Beat" and "San Francisco Renaissance" literary circles. ³

Kaufman spent most of the 1950s and 1960s in San Francisco with a sojourn in New York City. He was a crucial figure in the emerging Bay Area New American Poetry circles as a writer, an organizer (he was one of the catalysts for the important journal Beatitude), and a public figure of uncompromising resistance to aesthetic and political authority. His period in New York is frequently characterized as one of mental decline brought on by drugs, especially speed, arrest and brutal treatment by various authorities, including numerous forced bouts with shock therapy. However, there is evidence that even in New York, Kaufman continued to serve as a cultural catalyst, particularly among African-American artists. ⁴ Returning to San Francisco, Kaufman took a vow of silence, allegedly after John F. Kennedy's death, which he intended to last until the Vietnam War...