"[A] mission accomplished . . . Smith has put together a richly detailed and . . . persuasive narrative . . . Becoming Something . . . makes possible much more discussion and reflection on a life that still has lessons to teach us."
--Clyde Taylor, The Washington Post Review of Books
"Arguably one of the greatest black actors of his time . . . Lee's story is as tragic as those he portrayed on stage . . . Smith wondrously brings to life a man whose impact on American theater and culture was far too great to be allowed to lapse into obscurity."
--Carol Haggas, Booklist
"Smith . . . makes a convincing case in this groundbreaking biography, providing a thought-provoking example of the tragic impact of a nation's and an art form's paranoia."
--Carol J. Binkowski, Library Journal
"Smith paints an attractive portrait of a man who loved a good time, always offered a helping hand to his friends, and continued to support the causes he believed in even after he know what the consequences would be . . . A valuable . . . attempt to restore a heroic figure to his rightful place in American cultural and political history."
--Kirkus
"Smith deftly depicts New York's theater scene, showing how Lee became one of the first African-Americans to gain acceptance in white theater, and thoroughly documents Lee's outspoken support for civil rights." --Publishers Weekly
"Mona Z. Smith has used her considerable gifts as a dramatist and storyteller to illuminate the astonishing odyssey of Canada Lee, a man who challenged racism in every quarter, here and abroad, for thirty years, and usually prevailed. Here at last is a full length portrait of this forgotten hero." --Daniel Mark Epstein, author of Lincoln and Whitman and Nat King Cole
"A biography of Canada Lee has been long overdue. The story of his dramatic rise and fall is as important as it is moving, and Mona Z. Smith tells it with theatrical flair. This is a first-rate book." --Hazel Rowley, author of Richard Wright: The Life and Times
Excerpt from Becoming Something: The Story of Canada Lee by Mona Z. Smith. Copyright © 2004 by Mona Z. Smith. Published in August, 2004 by Faber and Faber, a division or Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
PREFACE
How does a man die? Darkness comes, breath ends, the heart ceases to beat.
How does a man's honor die? His glory, his fame, his good name? Honor dies by a man's own hand, or by the hand of another—by rumor and ruin, attack and abuse.
Sometimes, when a man's honor dies, his story dies with it, destroyed, erased, deleted.
This is the story of a talented and ambitious black man, a musician turned athlete turned artist turned activist, a patriot who fought tirelessly for the rights of his people and for all people who did not enjoy the full privileges of American democracy, a man viciously dishonored and virtually deleted from this nation's history. This is the story of Canada Lee, an unsung hero, a voice of dissent silenced by the McCarthy-era blacklist.
In his classic book on the show business blacklist, A Journal of the Plague Years, Stefan Kanfer writes, "Overlooked by almost every theatrical or film historian, unmentioned by such retentive and bitter victims as Alvah Bessie and Dalton Trumbo, Lee is the Othello of the blacklist, at once its most afflicted and ignored victim."
Ironically, Canada's story was also a relatively minor episode in Kanfer's book. When recounted at all, the tragic tale of this actor and activist is usually treated as little more than a footnote in the history of the Cold War and the anti-Communist crusade dubbed "McCarthyism" after its most notorious knight, Senator Joseph McCarthy. Most often, the only reason Lee is mentioned is to acknowledge him as one of a handful of people whose deaths are attributed to persecution by the blacklist—a complex machine of journalists, Hollywood executives, congressmen, businessmen, and government agencies that destroyed the careers of the famous and the not so famous.
Bibliographies list hundreds of articles, books, plays, and films written during the past five decades about the Red Scare and anti-Communism, about McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), as well as the blacklist and its most famous victims, a group of screenwriters and film directors known as the Hollywood Ten. Interest in the subject spiked in the early 1990s when the Cold War ended and information long buried in archives in Moscow, Washington, and elsewhere came to light. A new generation has become fascinated with those chilling decades of Soviet and American animosity, nuclear anxiety and espionage, Red Scare propaganda and the anti-Communist movement, including the blacklist.
Why, then, has Canada Lee's story not been told?
Certainly, he was not blacklisted in the usual manner. He was never called before HUAC and asked the infamous question: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" He wasn't sent to jail like the Hollywood Ten for refusing to answer that question. His name was never named by one of HUAC's glamorous movie-star witnesses. He was not cited in the notorious Red Channels, the "bible of the blacklist" that demolished the careers of so many entertainers. Instead, Lee was blacklisted as a result of one of the most peculiar episodes in the history of the Cold War, the now largely forgotten espionage trial of Judith Coplon.
Perhaps this is the reason.
Or perhaps it is because Canada Lee was black. Little has been written about the entertainers, teachers, labor leaders, artists, and activists of color who were blacklisted. Perhaps Lee's story hasn't been told because African Americans are generally under-represented in our history books; perhaps those who do chronicle black history view the blacklist as a relatively minor misdemeanor compared to nearly four hundred years of criminal human rights abuses in this country. In any event, of all the blacklisted African Americans, we know the most about Paul Robeson, the internationally renowned singer and activist. A colleague and friend to Canada Lee, Robeson was also vilified as a Communist, his passport confiscated, his career sabotaged. Though he lived the last fifteen years of his life in virtual obscurity, Robeson's contributions to the arts and his struggle for civil rights have been reclaimed and celebrated, thanks in part to the indefatigable efforts of his only child, Paul Robeson, Jr. But Robeson's case is the exception.
Of the many stories that deserve to be told, I chose Canada Lee's because it was, in the beginning, a fascinating puzzle, a mystery to be solved.
While studying for a master's degree in theater, I wanted to write a play about the intersection of jazz and politics at the end of World War II. Leafing through a library book about McCarthyism, I came across a single-line footnote that attributed Canada Lee's death to the blacklist. Intrigued, I unearthed a few entries in reference books describing him as one of the greatest black actors of his time and mentioning some of his most noted roles. That was the extent of the information readily available. How could a man of such talent be erased from history with hardly a trace?
Surely, there was more to this.
Several years of research squeezed around day jobs, family, and other matters turned up more mentions in more books, including Kanfer's study of the blacklist and Victor S. Navasky's Naming Names. A slim but intriguing folder in the theater research collection of the New York Library of the Performing Arts tossed more crumbs my way. Celebrity profiles described in greater detail Canada's chameleon transformations from violinist to jockey to boxer to actor. Yellowed clippings showed he had worked in the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre during the Depression before achieving Broadway stardom in Orson Welles's adaptation of Native Son. Movie reviews showed that Lee had landed significant roles in several films, including Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat. A newspaper photo of Canada helping to organize a rally against Jim Crow in the theater was the first tangible evidence of his political activism. Though tantalizing, Lee's story was still far from complete.
Then came a real breakthrough, followed by crushing disappointment. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem had acquired seven boxes of materials on Canada. After years of turning up bits and scraps, I thought I had hit the jackpot, only to discover that the materials were off-limits to researchers. Archivists said Lee's papers were fragile, and his files hadn't yet been sorted or microfilmed. However, an attorney who had overseen the transfer of these materials to the Schomburg said the donor was Lee's widow, who was still alive. Write a letter describing your project, the attorney suggested, and I'll forward it to her. Soon after, Frances Lee Pearson telephoned with an invitation to visit her in Atlanta. Meeting this woman was a revelation; now in her eighties and legally blind, Frances is an absolute dynamo. Determined to preserve Lee's story, she created a database about his life, copying his files into a computer with special equipment rigged for her by family and friends. When I told her how much I wanted to put Lee's story on the stage, Frances opened her late husband's files and shared her most treasured memories, bringing the richness of Canada's story to life at long last—his rise to stardom, his fight for civil rights, his persecution under the blacklist, his failing health, those final moments before he slipped away from her forever.
In one from or another, I have been writing his story ever since.
"All my life, I've been on the verge of being something," Canada Lee once said. He almost became a concert v
