Abstract: In the summer of 1949, Langston Hughes’s long-running column for The Chicago Defender featured vignettes about “Old Ghost.” Animated by the spirits of abused and murdered Black Americans, this supernatural character confronts American institutions from the Ku Klux Klan to the Presidency. Identifying the Old Ghost series for the first time as a discrete work, this essay argues that its exclusive publication in The Chicago Defender indicates how the newspaper’s editorial pages countered Cold War liberalism’s antipathy toward Left radicalism. The fantastic implication of the series is that a postwar liberalism supplemented by radicalism rather than anticommunism would have entailed reckoning with a history of anti-Black racism that awaits amendment still.
James Zeigler (Thu,) studied this question.