Any emerging novelist would be thrilled to receive the critical reception that John Oliver Killens did for Youngblood when the book appeared in the spring of 1954. Although a few southern reviewers predictably balked at the damning portrait of white supremacy, and his hometown newspaper, the Macon Telegraph, ignored the book, positive and effusive praise prevailed nationally. Taylor Glenn, a transplanted Maconite who wrote for the Bridgeport (Connecticut) Sunday Post, announced, “The story of Crossroads and its people, the genteel, the middle class, the peckerwoods, and the Negroes, is the most exciting adventure, the most pulsating excursion, I’ve had in...

Another boy? She sat robustly pregnant, past the eighth month and round enough of belly, carrying high enough to deliver another son, or so the old folks would say. Her oldest son, Charles Jr., born February 4, 1914, paused restlessly at her knee, poised to burst in a matter of days into a new calendar year and then, a few weeks later, into the “Terrible Twos.” She hoped the toddler would continue to strive and be okay, Lord willing, though his earthly father did not put much stock in divine grace. For Charles Sr., the key lay in his proper...

Ballard Normal School ranked as one of the most important educational institutions in Georgia for African Americans.¹ An outgrowth of the Lincoln Schools founded in Macon by the Western Freedmen’s Aid Commission and the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865, Ballard served as the educational springboard for generations of African American students and became the principal source of trained African American teachers for central Georgia. The accomplishments of its alumni, beginning with early graduates such as Lucy Craft Laney and William Scarborough, were probably unmatched by those of graduates of any African American high school in the South. Laney, a member of...

Macon residents accorded significant stature to the Killens brothers, imagining them—and anyone who held a government position in Washington—to be working “in the White House” helping Franklin Roosevelt run the country.¹ Friends also associated the Killenses with a citified flamboyance expected to be on display during visits home. John Killens became a bit of a clotheshorse; his trousers and suits were usually full cut, even baggy, in the style of the day. He usually appeared in public clean-shaven, kept his rapidly thinning hair trimmed short, and was fond of hats. He generally sought an understated elegance. Neither he...

More than one million African American soldiers served in World War II. Many of them expressed optimism that their loyalty in combating the fascism and imperialism of the Axis powers would signal the demise of institutional racism in the United States. But neither the geopolitical picture nor the domestic outlook would ever be so simple. African American involvement in the titanic global conflict, while indisputably a catalyst for certain changes in national social, economic, and political arrangements, could not be leveraged into an immediate and wholesale revision of the American racial order. That the American military itself was a Jim...

Sergeant John Oliver Killens was released from the military on December 3, 1945, exactly forty-one months after his induction. He was one month away from his thirtieth birthday. He came home to reunite with his wife and meet his son, who was almost two years old. Although he had been away from Grace much longer than they had been together, the two were definitely still in love. Killens created a stir, however, when he announced soon after coming home that he had changed his career plans. Rather than working as a lawyer, he wanted to become a professional writer, work...

The Wallace campaign failed. Despite the throng of fifty thousand people who attended a September 10 rally at Yankee Stadium sponsored by the American Labor Party—the party in which John and Grace Killens were registered voters—election results proved disheartening for the Left.¹

No one expected a Wallace victory, but the Progressive Party candidate drew barely a million votes and was shut out in the Electoral College. Moreover, he did not even finish third in the popular vote. Strom Thurmond, the arch-segregationist and secessionist senator from South Carolina, out polled him.

Killens expressed disappointment about the outcome but denied...

As John Oliver Killens was completing his academic year at Columbia, anticommunist Cold War fervor approached high tide. Not since the Palmer raids, when thousands of noncitizen immigrants were detained and deported in 1919 and 1920, had law enforcement officials so vigorously squelched opposing voices.¹ The Soviet Union was unalterably construed as the enemy, military intervention in Korea was judged necessary, and those who manifested a perceived lack of patriotism were subject to overzealous prosecution.

Killens witnessed firsthand the political hardships endured by his main triumvirate of mentors, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alphaeus Hunton. Robeson and...

As 1951 drew to a close, thirty-five-year-old John Oliver Killens often sat at his cluttered desk working into the wee hours of the morning on the way to producing a 994-page draft of what would become Youngblood. He said his characters kept telling him, “You’ve got to get us down on paper before we vanish and are no more.”¹ In shaping his novel, Killens continued to draw heavily on his childhood memories, particularly his sense of place and family. Although the story is mostly set in the fictional town of Crossroads, Georgia (a reference to the “crossroads” episode of Killens’s...

Of the scenes and characters in Youngblood, reviewers responded most often to the revamped Jubilee, which had been inspired by Doxey Wilkerson; the whipping scene, which had impressed Dorothy Brewster at Columbia University and Elizabeth Pollock at New York University; and the book-long development of Laurie Lee. Granville Hicks titled his review “Laurie Grows Up.” Another critic commented that Laurie stood out as “one of God’s noble women” and added, “The poetry-like way in which Killens tells her story sets her apart as one of the most finely-etched women characters in modern American fiction.”¹ Harriet Jaffe reported for the Pacific...

His health restored—he also quit smoking after his surgery—John Oliver Killens grappled once more with the contradiction of his artistic lifetime: How could he remain isolated to write but also promotionally and politically engaged? He could simply turn inward and back to his drafts, especially the war material, which was still a novel in waiting, and to other literary ventures to help support himself and his family. He could also look for the action outside, as he had done in varying degrees in Atlanta, in Washington, in the military, and in New York. As the summer of 1955...

On February 27, 1958, Thomas Jones wrote a letter to get the Soviets to pay. The Russian edition of Youngblood was being prepared for publication, and Jones informed Professor Mary Becker in Leningrad, who had requested a biographical sketch of Killens, that the author had not been consulted about translation, publication, or payment of royalties. The attorney inquired about the identity of the publisher, the size of the print run, and the format. Jones sent the same core message to the cultural attaché at the Soviet embassy in Washington, adding that he believed that the Soviet Union honored the “rights...

John Oliver Killens returned home to a request from Langston Hughes on behalf of the Afro-American Committee for Gifts of Art and Literature to Ghana. The ambassador from Ghana welcomed donations, vowing to facilitate shipment, exhibition, and eventual cataloging for scholarly use. Killens was instructed to submit material directly to Hughes’s home and responded eagerly, having entered, as Sarah Wright commented, a marked Ethiopia-shall-stretch-forth-her-hand phase.¹

Shortly thereafter, Maya Angelou breezed in from California. Killens had met the six-foot-tall nightclub singer with questionable pitch while he was in Los Angeles. His children spent time with her son, Guy, who was about...

Back in the United States, John Oliver Killens agreed to a contract with the Educational Communications Corporation that would net him four thousand dollars. The only major sticking point between the parties was that Killens wanted no part of working in Los Angeles. He planned to stay in New York and complete the screenplay during the first eight or nine weeks of 1962, after the scripts on West Africa were done. However, that project became imperiled, largely because of the inexperience and ineptitude of External Development Services. Company officials unrealistically expected Killens, who returned to the States during the second...

Shortly after the release of And Then We Heard the Thunder, Lee Nichols, a Defense Department official, arranged a meeting with John Oliver Killens at a lounge in midtown Manhattan. Over rounds of gin, Nichols lavished praise on the author, informing him that even attorney general Robert Kennedy had enjoyed the book. Nichols next asked about the writer’s opinion of the army in 1963. Killens had given the matter little thought but could not imagine that the racial climate had changed substantially over the preceding twenty years. Nonetheless, he was invited to tour several military facilities and perhaps publicize any...

Public signs of a friendship between John Oliver Killens and Malcolm X existed well before the latter’s break with the Nation of Islam in the wake of his chickens-coming-home-to-roost commentary following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. On October 11, 1963, while visiting Berkeley, Malcolm was asked about Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent direct action approach; he replied, “I’ll let Jimmy Baldwin and John Killens and Lou Lomax, the writers, answer that,” before quoting them.¹ It therefore stood to reason that Killens would become involved in Malcolm’s efforts to fashion a better political role. As the chief spokesman for...

At the request of Fisk University president Stephen J. Wright, Arna Bontemps contacted John Oliver Killens to gauge his interest in spending a semester on campus as author in residence. Bontemps had known Killens for several years, and the two men “had a long session over literary matters” in the spring of 1962.¹ Bontemps suggested compensation would be in the neighborhood of $8,000, a princely sum to Killens, who scrambled to make a living. He had signed a contract to teach a second semester at the New School for $1,000, but an offer from Nashville at those higher numbers proved...

The 1966 conference at Fisk centered on “The Image of the Negro in American Literature.” Panelists highlighted conceptions about black consciousness, black affirmation, and politically useful art—some of John Oliver Killens’s core values—and matched the prevailing mind-set of the attendees. Esteemed critic Saunders Redding, who had participated in the 1959 American Society of African Culture conference, served as the keynote speaker and charged some African American writers with developing an inappropriate line of characters, “making heroes out of heels.” He specifically accused John A. Williams (Night Song), Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go), Rosa Guy (Bird...

John Oliver Killens’s plans for a 1967 literary conference at Fisk paralleled the efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc). In the fall of 1966, George Ware, the group’s campus coordinator, arrived in Nashville to reestablish a strong presence for the organization. Killens’s conference on “The Black Writer and Human Rights” was set for April, while Ware arranged for a Black Power conference, featuring Stokely Carmichael, to take place in March.

Fisk officials permitted the literary gathering to proceed despite the displeasure of conservative faculty. But the university banned Ware’s conference, which ultimately was held in April at the...

“We marched along the streets of Atlanta to bid a final farewell to one of the most beautiful sons of Africa who ever walked upon this earth.” John Oliver Killens’s most poignant memory regarding the death of Martin Luther King Jr. intersected in his mind with a clear sense of anger. Recalling the ceremonies at Morehouse College, he wrote, “I remember a feeling of deep resentment at the hypocrisy that permeated the atmosphere. There were men and women of government, of the corporate world, who either by commission or omission helped create the atmosphere that in turn created the scenario...

During the spring 1970 semester, John Oliver Killens shuttled back and forth between New York and Hartford, where he was teaching a course on “The Dynamics of Afro-American Culture,” the same course he taught at Columbia University. Although the calendar had been flipped past the 1960s, his semester at Trinity College began with 1960s-style drama. Black students decided to bar white students from the course. The Trinity Coalition of Blacks later issued a statement expressing its sympathy to white students who were excluded: “White students can and should understand that the suppressed Black desire for a meaningful course could not...

John Oliver Killens’s return in the fall of 1971 was part of Howard University’s effort to create a major presence relative to contemporary African American culture. Not only was Killens employed as a writer in residence, working across the boundaries of the English department and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities with black culture seminars and writing workshops, but Haki Madhubuti was hired as well. Three days each week, Killens immersed himself in campus activities before driving back to New York in his brand-new Pontiac Le Mans to teach the writing workshop he maintained at Columbia University. He began...

Of all the Howard University conferences held between 1974 and 1978, the one held November 8–10, 1974, remains the most significant.¹ By the beginning of the 1970s, the ranks of African Americans still optimistic about social and political revolution had thinned. Much crucial black leadership had been eliminated—Far Left exemplars such as the Black Panthers, nationalist visionaries such as Malcolm X, and mainstream direct actionists such as Martin Luther King Jr. Their departures bred a belief that the oppressive establishment would always prevail. To demonstrate that black was beautiful could be done rather quickly, but more difficult was...

On January 14, 1977, his sixty-first birthday, John Oliver Killens championed Alexander Pushkin on Howard University’s radio station, whur, beginning a lengthy string of Pushkin-related appearances. He lectured at the New Muse Community Museum of Brooklyn and at New York University on “The Resurrection of Alexander Pushkin.” Then he reprised the performance at Howard University. He visited the Federal City College Mount Vernon Campus on March 23. In early April, he went to Tufts University to address several literature classes on the Afro-American novel and to speak with the Russian Club about Pushkin. On May 1, he appeared on Gil...

Harlem’s Studio Museum buzzed with hundreds of guests who attended the autograph party sponsored by the eastern regional branch of the Ballard Normal Hudson Alumni and Friends on October 24, 1982. The crowd, with six foot, five inch Gil Noble towering above most of it, circulated throughout the gallery as the writer they had come to fete remained seated and signed copies of the University of Georgia Press edition of Youngblood with some spin on the basic inscription “For Freedom.” Killens did not miss the irony of the fact that a place where he could not have attended school in...

After the euphoria generated by the National Black Writers Conference subsided, John Oliver Killens invited several members of the planning committee to his home to brainstorm about a March 1988 sequel. He seemed relaxed yet energetic, at one point taking his guests on a tour of his home during which he lingered momentarily before the large print of Paul Robeson on display in the basement. Killens commented about how much Maya Angelou liked the poster. He also showed off a new novel that he was reading, Ishmael Reed’s Reckless Eyeballing. He thought that Reed was a great writer but felt...