In this well-researched and clearly written book, Brian Dolinar extends the chronology of revisionist histories of the left, such as those by Barbara Foley and Michael Denning, to re-examine political trajectories in the lives and works of Langston Hughes, Chester Himes and the cartoonist and artist Ollie Harrington, to show a radicalism that extends well after the 1930s and into the civil rights and black arts era in subsequent decades. The Black Cultural Front revises and revisits the impact of Marxist activism on these artists and their works, both during and after the height of its influence in the 1930s. Dolinar shows that unlike accepted Cold War-infused narratives of retreat from left-wing beliefs (usually epitomized by their contemporaries Richard Wright's and Ralph Ellison's rejection of their former communist and cultural front activism), these artists did not succumb to anticommunist political disillusion or retrenchment, but continued to pursue (or, in the case of Harrington, intensify) radical ideas, even in the face of intense investigation and persecution by the House Committee for Un-American Activities (HUAC).

Dolinar's first chapter sets the context for a black “cultural front” as it emerged out of the cultural wing of communist activism in Harlem, developing into the National Negro Congress (NNC), which formed in 1936. Involvement in key trials concerning racial prejudice (notably the trials and imprisonment of the Scottsboro Nine and Angelo Herndon in the early 1930s) politicized and radicalized African American artists and created intersecting interests between communist activists and civil rights campaigns. Interracial arts policies promoted by communists, in particular the national network of John Reed clubs, gave many workers of all races the opportunity to write and paint for the first time, including Wright and Ellison. Activism stemming from this and later formations – such as the Southern Negro Youth Congress, the Committee for Democratic Culture, various freedom rallies and events and the Negro Labor Victory Committee in World War II – politically energized the work of numerous black artists, not least of all Langston Hughes, a celebrated poet, writer and dramatist since the 1920s.

Dolinar rejects official narratives that show Hughes moving away from his engagement with the left in the postwar period to show that “in the face of the growing red scare, Hughes remained defiant” (109). Private transcripts from his HUAC testimony, only released in 2003, show a contentious Hughes that puts his official “cooperative” witness statements into question. Dolinar thereby rereads Hughes's Chicago Defender columns and Jesse B. Semple stories (published up until the Watts riots of 1966) as evidence of a “masked” and more subtle, but no less radical, political critique of capitalist racism.

Chapter 3 examines the involvement of crime noir writer Chester Himes in the radical social struggles of the 1930s and 1940s that influenced his work into the 1960s, despite publicly falling out with the Communist Party following their criticism of his work. By contrast, the chapter on Ollie Harrington, creator of the popular and now forgotten “Bootsie” cartoon series, shows an artist whose political activism and communist beliefs intensified and increased over the 1940s and 1950s as he campaigned ever more vociferously in civil rights critiques of racism and US imperialism stemming from postwar disillusion. It is a shame there are no images in this chapter to put on show the work of this overlooked black artist. In the 1950s, Himes's and Harrington's lives intersected with other expatriate black artists and writers in Paris, who were also seeking refuge from Cold War persecution. Regarding the premature death of fellow writer Richard Wright in 1960 as suspicious, a detail which subtly reframes Wright's own recantment of the left, Harrington fled to East Germany, where he continued to criticize America from behind the Iron Curtain.

While focussing in biographical detail on these particular artists, Dolinar reminds us of the way that many black cultural workers, such as Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles White remained intensely committed to the communist left even in the face of immense persecution for their beliefs. Dolinar shows both the power of the black cultural front to create politically inspired works of art and its enduring legacy. His book indicates that there were many different paths followed as the American left disintegrated which, despite appearances, did not involve abandoning radical commentary even if it meant distancing oneself (both geographically and symbolically) from a hostile and fearful racist America. As Dolinar concludes, these artists continued their work and, in so doing, managed to keep a flame burning for anticapitalist, anti-imperialist and antiracist expressions and art that served to ignite and inspire a new generation of works by black artists and writers to the present day.