Celebration and Struggle: On the Life and Work of Alice Childress

I was born into a country where people with uteruses had the right to choose if, when, and how they would carry a fetus to full term. I don’t live in that country anymore.

I grew up in a world where “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “equity” weren’t slurs but benchmark goals for many institutions—goals most institutions nearly always failed to meaningfully meet, but they were goals nonetheless. As a black woman from a working-class family, such governmental expectations meant I was the first woman in my family to attend college. I know personally how inclusion and access can change lives.

I worry for the poor, people with uteruses, the undocumented, LGBTQI folks, and a variety of other people who find themselves on the wrong side of history and governmental care at this moment.

But I make a living reading and talking with people about books, so I often turn to literature for guidance and models of how to navigate this strange world. Specifically, I turn to books by African American writers who lived and wrote during a different era marked by state repression and limited access to choice and freedom: racial segregation. I am not arguing that we are returning to a moment of racial segregation as a nation; neither would I argue that we ever fully shed ourselves of racial segregation. Instead, I want to say that black writers, especially black women writers, who wrote under and against segregation and the lived experience of being a second-class citizen in the country where they were born, have always served as models for me. These models seem all the more vital as we try to navigate the world today with dignity and a desire for some measure of satisfaction.

 Childress is a threat because she chose to do monstrous work that centered on freedom of thought and choice for women and black people.

For instance, as we observe the rise of state surveillance merging with social media to impose life-altering punishments for “likes” and “retweets,” I’ve been reflecting a lot on what it means to work for health, hope, and dignity under scrutiny alongside Alice Childress’s writings.

Many people are not familiar with Alice Childress. She was a Black actress, playwright, and novelist whose career lasted over four decades in the mid-20th century. During the middle of her career, Childress wrote extensively about Black women and work in a book called Like One of the Family (1956). This collection of vignettes features a domestic worker named Mildred Johnson talking with her best friend, Marge, about the news of the day. They discuss topics such as fair wages for domestic workers, labor conditions, good and bad bosses, African decolonization, love, and the violence they face while vacationing as Black people in the United States. Childress’s Mildred Johnson is a voice of a Black woman navigating rights and life, meant to speak to readers interested in leftist issues and politics.

Probably the most interesting thing about Childress, however, is that she has an FBI file. What you discover when you read her file, which opens in 1951, is that she was very active in leftist politics in New York City during the 1950s. In fact, the vignettes that compose Like One of the Family were first published in 1951 as a column in Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper. By the time Childress was writing for Freedom, Paul Robeson was already an actor, athlete, and scholar blackballed by the U.S. government for his political views and Communist Party affiliations. When Childress wrote for Freedom, we have to understand that she was writing as a form of political dissent against racism, sexism, and classism in a national atmosphere consumed by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist “witch hunt.”

In other words, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI saw Childress as an enemy of the state because she wrote plays and short stories that depicted the lives of Black women both at work and leisure. Additionally, Childress and her friends believed in the liberation of oppressed people both worldwide and in the United States. These factors combined to make her work, as an activist and artist, a threat to the state.

In my research and writing, I explore what I call the “monstrous work” of Black women. Monstrous work is work that refuses to trade Black comportment for temporary inclusion into any institution that prefers to keep Black people separate and devalued. Monstrous work emphasizes Black life and dignity. Childress is a threat because she chose to do monstrous work that centered on freedom of thought and choice for women and black people.

In our own time, the complex relationship between Black women and work has received more attention due to widespread layoffs in the federal workforce in recent months. Since Black women make up 12% of federal employees, they have faced the highest proportion of layoffs and dismissals caused by federal budget cuts. These labor realities demonstrate how fragile job security can be in a system that lacks regulation and undermines efforts toward equity and fairness.

But the idea of job security and dignity for black women has always been tenuous. In her exploration of the topic, Childress considers the importance of laborers to our daily lives. She reminds us in a vignette titled “Hands” that “You can take any article and trace it back like that and you’ll see the power and beauty of laboring hands.” The beauty of finding dignity in labor and laboring, however, must be made secure through labor unionization, according to Mildred. Childress is a product of her leftist times, but at the core, and what I find most useful, is the sense that we workers deserve some level of security in the work that we do.

American support for labor unions has held between 67% to 71% over the last five years, the highest such support has been since the 1950s when Childress wrote in favor of labor unions. Yet, calls for job security, especially for Black women’s labor, are often met with condemnation. We are helplessly watching some of the most stable and secure work in the United States shrink. This is significant because federal employment was a reliable entryway to the American middle class for many during the 20th century. This shift should not go without comment and organizing for change.

In addition to organizing, Childress appears through the FBI’s eyes to be deeply invested in celebration. That, too, is worth remembering.

Black literature has many examples of the severe consequences of limited labor options and lost job security. One notable example is the resilient writer Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston was one of the most famous women writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. Many Americans might encounter her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), through the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read. Now well-known, she spent the last decades of her life living in poverty in her hometown of Eatonville, FL. She died in a county welfare home in Florida and was buried in an unmarked grave until writer Alice Walker found her resting place and provided her with a stone.

Before this, Hurston worked as a writer, an anthropologist and folklorist, for the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA during the Depression, a librarian, a domestic servant, and held various other jobs. She worked a lot. What I always think about when I consider Zora Neale Hurston’s literary career and her death is how she, like many Black women in the United States, had so little security. Talent and fame can never fully shield someone from racism and sexism in the workforce. But since her death, it’s come to light that Hurston, though she died in poverty, died beloved by her community. Those two things are not mutually exclusive: to be wealthless and to be loved.

It feels difficult to hold onto hope and possibility in the face of alarming governmental failure, financial loss, and institutional erasure. Yet, all around us, we have models of people who were working to build capacity for radical satisfaction. The key is remembering this fact and committing to organizing for health and dignity.

In 1958, the FBI closed Alice Childress’s file because they had no specific evidence to support that she was a member of the Communist Party. What strikes me, however, is that one of the last events that the FBI notes Childress participating in is a birthday party for Paul Robeson. I find this important because, in addition to organizing, Childress appears through the FBI’s eyes to be deeply invested in celebration. That, too, is worth remembering.

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Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation by Eve Dunbar is available from University of Minnesota Press.