This chapter explores the relationship between dominant modes of masculinity and the position of African American men, as represented in the novels of several key writers of the period – James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes and Ann Petry. The chapter relates to Chapter 4, where I discussed ‘whiteness’ and the way in which it had been both a defining category of American citizenship but also a category subject to redefinition in twentieth-century America. While Jewish Americans had become categorised as ‘white’ by mid-century, African Americans remained beyond ‘whiteness’, while the legacy of slavery, the segregationist Jim Crow social and legal structures of the South and institutional racism in the North served to maintain their marginalisation and oppression. The artificial nature of this divide is highlighted by ‘passing’ and is made vividly by Margo Jefferson in her memoir Negroland. Her great uncle Lucious spent his life passing as white, but then ‘resumed his life as a Negro’: ‘We have friends who look as white as Uncle Lucious. But I had always known them as Negroes. […] Who and what are “we Negroes”, when so many of us could be white people? […] Suddenly the fact of racial slippage overwhelmed me’ (2016: 109–10).

The explanatory academic discourses that focused on the state of American society and culture in this period, and which I briefly surveyed in the Introduction, included the position of African Americans. Such analysis encompassed books by African American journalists and academics such as Roi Ottley, E. Franklin Frazier, Horace R. Cayton, St Clair Drake, John Hope Franklin and a variety of authors in the journal Phylon, published from 1940. The Second World War had a significant effect on the state of the debate for both practical and ideological reasons. In practice the United States government had to harness the skills and labour of the African American population in order to fight the war effectively. Segregation in the military and in the workforce strongly militated against this (see for example Franklin (1947) on the military, 559ff).