African American Anti-Semitism and Himes's Lonely Crusade

Abstract

racial conflict at a Los Angeles war industry plant, Lonely Crusade (1947), to be his most ambitious and substantial work.1 However, novel has attracted little notice since its reissue (1986), having long been unavailable after its initial publication.2 Were known as deserves, Lonely Crusade would still stir controversy. Himes maintained that Communist party-excoriated in Lonely Crusade-had effectively suppressed it.3 However, as he also acknowledged, Everyone hated it.... left hated it, right hated it, Jews hated it, blacks hated it (Quality of Hurt 100).4 According to Himes, black reviewers (such as James Baldwin) had been offended by his hero's discovery that the black man in America.. .needed consideration because he was so far behind (Williams 38). As Himes insisted, this argument for what he provocatively called special privileges long preceded demands for affirmative action (Williams 38-39). Lonely Crusade also anticipated controversy, occasioned nearly twenty years later by Moynihan Report (1965), about African American matriarchy (61). Additionally, Himes's hero, Lee Gordon, finds black workers resistant to integration and has to explain this to a baffled white liberal (138-40); such self-segregating tendencies (as in recent proposals for all-male African American high schools) still surprise liberals. But perhaps most controversial topic Himes pioneered in Lonely Crusade was black anti-Semitism. The conflict between Blacks and as Addison Gayle asserted in his history of African American novel, had been previously ignored by other black writers (225).5 In light of more recent black-Jewish conflict, Himes's treatment has proven to be very prescient. As Himes acknowledged, Lonely Crusade did offend Jews, such as Commentary reviewer Milton Klonsky, discussed below. Is novel anti-Semitic? I argue that is, but subject is highly compli-