TY - JOUR TI - Banquo's ghost DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3X928JT PY - 2014 AB - This study examines the place of the Russian Revolution in postwar black intellectual circles. It argues that interpretations of the revolution by New Negro writers such as James Weldon Johnson, A. Philip Randolph, and Cyril Briggs shaped their political and intellectual trajectories through the postwar years. Though each emerged with a quite different political orientation than the others, the engagement with Russia was central in the ideological evolution of them all. By demonstrating the revolution's role in shaping the political trajectories of New Negro activists, this study offers a new foundation for the study of the debates over the direction of black struggle between figures like Johnson, Randolph, and those associated with the Communist Party that occurred during the Depression and later. More generally, the careers of Johnson, Randolph, and Briggs illustrate the necessity for a return to intellectual history in New Negro studies. While the kinds of cultural and social histories that have been written in recent years have advanced our understanding of the postwar moment in important ways, the neglect of attention to the explicit political and theoretical commitments of New Negro writers and activists, along with the intellectual background of those commitments and the ways they shaped the movement's ideological evolution, has obscured the moment's intellectual heterogeneity. Although Johnson, Randolph, and Briggs all ended up in positions quite opposed to each other, in the postwar moment their ideas were much more fluid, as Briggs, the hardened black nationalist, flirted with Wilsonianism and Johnson, the NAACP liberal, spoke of impossibility of democracy in a country governed by millionaires. Only through careful reconstruction of their explicit political positions can the ideological transformations these figures would undergo be explained. By situating these New Negro writers in their intellectual moment, and tracing how their thought with respect to the revolution changed over time, this study demonstrates that interpretations of the revolution helped shape the political evolution of New Negro thought KW - American Studies KW - Harlem Renaissance--Russian influences LA - eng ER -