The past two decades have seen a flourishing of scholarship that seeks to recover and reinterpret the role of left radicalism in relation to mid-twentieth-century African American creative expression. Mary Helen Washington has been a central figure in this ongoing venture. Thus, it is particularly gratifying now to have available The Other Blacklist, in which Washington supplies a substantive extension, rethinking, and refinement of the field.The contributions of the book are at least fourfold. For one, Washington examines the role of radicalism in what all too often has been described as an era of political quiescence in U.S. arts and letters. Whereas trailblazing studies of radicalism in African American art and literature such as William Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (1999), Bill Mullen's Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946 (1999), and James Smethurst's The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930–1946 (1999) focused primarily on the 1930s and 1940s heyday of such enterprises, Washington trains her attention on the 1950s.Here, Washington documents the various ways in which writers Lloyd Brown, Alice Childress, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Julian Mayfield, and artist Charles White continued to craft left-influenced work amid contexts that made open affiliation with the U.S. Communist Party or allied organizations increasingly treacherous. By so doing, she makes evident the contested nature of African American literary politics even at the apex of U.S. cultural conservatism. Put simply, the period featured not only disaffection with Communist Party politics of the sort exemplified by the Brotherhood of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) but also novels openly sympathetic to communist politics such as Lloyd Brown's Iron City (1951) and Mayfield's The Grand Parade (1961). In this respect, Washington's treatment of creative artists in this period might be read as a companion text to works like Dayo Gore's Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (2011) and Erik McDuffie's Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (2011), which offer groundbreaking treatments of African American women's political activism during the Cold War.A second contribution of The Other Blacklist is to outline the range of factors that led many radicals to curtail or become more circumspect about their left affiliations by the second half of the 1950s. Toward this end, Washington follows the lead of William Maxwell's recent F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (2015) in mining the substantial documentation of left cultural figures in the files of the FBI—long available via the Freedom of Information Act, but relatively untapped to this point. These sources prove especially illuminating in Washington's chapters on Lloyd Brown and Frank London Brown (no relation), where reports on encounters with FBI agents illustrate the varied responses of left authors in an age of confrontation and harassment: Lloyd Brown responds with acerbic defiance to agent inquiries whereas Frank London Brown engages with FBI interlocutors more tactfully, but no less forcefully, in his adherence to a forthright critique of racial inequalities.In a related vein, in “1959: Spycraft and the Literary Left” (the book's one chapter not focused on an individual figure), Washington scrutinizes The American Negro Writer and His Roots, a conference (1959) and subsequent book publication of the same title that is based on the conference proceedings (1960)—both of which were produced with covert CIA sponsorship. Strikingly, even as African American intellectuals John Davis and Harold Cruse acted in partnership with the CIA in attempting to steer the conference in conservative directions, writers such as Childress, Lloyd Brown, Frank London Brown, Mayfield, and Hansberry all expressed openly leftist sentiments at the conference. The contributions of the latter figures were omitted from the ensuing book publication, edited by Davis, but Washington makes a game attempt to reconstruct the essence of Hansberry's spirited keynote address. Those readers acquainted with Hansberry only through A Raisin in the Sun (1959) will find their appreciation of the young author broadened. Given the well-chronicled compromises imposed on Langston Hughes in response to the rigors of House Un-American Activities Committee interrogation during this same period, the sheer resolve of Childress, both of the Browns, and of Hansberry—indeed, all of this book's principal players—in the face of such machinations is remarkable in its own right.One crucial transition at work during the 1950s and early 1960s was a shift of efforts by left African American writers and artists from projects framed explicitly in terms of class inequality to an alignment with the burgeoning civil rights movement. Washington is not the first scholar to note this redirection of energies, but her work furnishes valuable case studies suggestive of how and why figures such as White, Childress, and Frank London Brown effected such transitions. To be sure, race and class concerns were never separate for any of the figures in Washington's book, and, in some respects, redirecting one's efforts away from hounded Communist Party institutions and union activism and toward the energetic civil rights movement represented continuity: a means of addressing similar social justice concerns under a different banner. Such seems to have been the case with Frank London Brown's turn to concerns of housing inequality, both in his novel Trumbull Park (1959) and in his community organizing.To her credit, Washington notes not only continuity but also real change in left creative expression and political activism of the period. Moreover, The Other Blacklist suggests that, while the big picture shift from class-first to race-first frameworks was in part a response to political persecutions from the right, it also was shaped by artists and writers chafing against aesthetic constraints from the left. Delineating how left political networks both advanced and constrained the aesthetic experimentation of writers and artists on the left is a third signal contribution of Washington's work. For Charles White, in particular, Washington seems to propose that the cooling of direct ties to communist-affiliated networks during the 1950s had as much to do with stylistic differences as political ones. White returned from a trip to East Berlin and the Soviet Union in 1951 with renewed enthusiasm to pursue directly political work via a figurative aesthetic, even in the face of a U.S. art world that was widely embracing abstract expressionism and apolitical premises for the creation of fine arts.However, art criticism in communist circles took an increasingly didactic turn during the 1950s, so that even a committed left artist such as White found his work subjected to prescriptive assessments to a degree that he eventually found untenable. Hence, from the late 1950s until his passing in 1979, White was increasingly allied with group affiliations and exhibition themes tied to the civil rights movement and Black Arts Movement, rather than the U.S. Communist Party. Under these new auspices, White found conceptual space to continue to evolve his art in ways that were still politically engaged but more stylistically innovative. Likewise, Washington observes that, with the demise of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (a left organization in which White also was involved) and Paul Robeson's newspaper Freedom, Alice Childress joined the editorial staff of the publication Freedomways, a journal that united leftist politics and black nationalism. In a similar fashion, Childress continued to draw “from the Left's uncompromising critique of 1950s race liberalism as a powerful source of literary and cultural self-determination” (156) in works such as her play Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (1966), even as the author publically downplayed her connections to left institutions.A fourth significant contribution of The Other Blacklist is to blend discussion of creative figures clearly ensconced in the canon of African American creative expression, such as White, Brooks, and Hansberry, with less thoroughly studied authors such as Lloyd Brown, Frank London Brown, Childress, and Mayfield. Even with the book's most familiar figures, Washington manages to shed new light. While few would question the bona fides of Lloyd Brown, Charles White, or Alice Childress as political radicals, Washington's inclusion of Gwendolyn Brooks in a study of the African American Cultural Left might initially give some readers pause. Yet, as elsewhere in her study, Washington is careful to parse the nuances of Brooks's relationship with the left. Brooks never embraced communist politics in the manner of Lloyd Brown, White, or Mayfield, but she spent the early days of her career immersed in Chicago networks populated by the likes of left peers Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Willard Motley, and Ted Ward. This matters because all too many accounts of Brooks's career, including the poet's autobiographical Report from Part One (1972), oversimplify matters by depicting her career as transitioning abruptly from apolitical modernism to a profound engagement with the politics of the Black Arts Movement by way of a conversion experience at the Fisk University Second Black Writers' Conference in 1967. Through concise doses of close reading, Washington highlights the left impulses at play in Brooks's treatment of the intersecting issues of race, class, and gender in Maud Martha (1953) and The Bean Eaters (1960), well before 1967.The Other Blacklist is thoroughly interdisciplinary in methodology, drawing richly from the archives of the central figures' personal papers, FBI files, and interviews with those active on the left politically during the 1950s and early 1960s—all in ways that mesh nicely with Washington's selective close readings of literary texts by the focal authors and artworks by White. Further, Washington provides an admirable demonstration of academic writing that remains broadly accessible without sacrificing scholarly sophistication, attention to detail, or subtlety of argumentation. For all of these reasons, Washington's book should appeal broadly to readers with interests in African American studies, U.S. literature, art history, left politics and culture, and the Cold War. That Washington can speak so adeptly across these wide-ranging areas of interest is a credit to her exceptional breadth of knowledge and powers of synthesis.