dier, Solly Saunders, in the segregated military.
Killens traces Saunders’s route from basic training
in Georgia to battlefields throughout the South
Pacific. The novel is also notable in recording
a three-day race riot among American soldiers
in Sydney, Australia. Killens’s third novel, ’Sippi
(1967), begins with the Supreme Court 1954 deci-
sion in Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw seg-
regation in education. The central character, Jesse
Chaney, a jubilant black sharecropper, is enamored
with this landmark decision. Wanting to enact his
own end to segregation, Chaney confronts his
employer, Charles Wakefield, a rich, white Mis-
sissippi plantation owner and so-called “friend of
the Negro,” wishing to address him as Charles, in
place of the prescribed “Mister Charlie.” Rather
than an embracing response of equality, Wakefield
calls Chaney “nigger,” directly informing Chaney
that the Court’s decision is irrelevant, as far as he
is concerned. Thus, ’Sippi is a realistic exploration
of the struggle to change the traditional class rela-
tionships of a South steeped in the social hierarchy
that retained the legacy of slavery.
Killens’s fourth novel, The Cotillion, or One
Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971), which is set in
the North, explores and critiques intraracial is-
sues and satirizes the black middle class and class
division within the black community. The Cotil-
lion follows the efforts of the young and beautiful
Yoruba of Harlem to bring her 1960s Black Power
sensibilities to her black middle-class family. The
novel reaches an eventful and humorous climax
when Yoruba and friends arrive at her debutante
ball wearing a militant afro and African Dashiki
instead of the coiffure and formal style of the old
South. Killens wrote two screenplays, Odds against
Tomorrow (1959) and Slaves (1969), the latter of
which was also published as a novel.
Killens contributed to the debate over black aes-
thetics, publishing major essays in such journals as
The Black Scholar, Negro Digest, and BLACK WORLD
on this central movement. He published a collec-
tion of essays, Black Man’s Burden (1965), and an
exploration of the working class in Black Labor and
the Black Liberation Movement (1970). His essay
“The Black Writer vis-à-vis His Country” appeared
in ADDISON GAYLE, Jr.’s The Black Aesthetic (1971),
and “Rappin’ with Myself ” appeared in Amistad
2: Writings On Black History And Culture (1971);
In the latter essay he interviews himself on topics
concerning black leaders Paul Robeson, MARTIN
LUTHER KING, JR., and MALCOLM X. He also wrote
two biographical novels: Great Gittin’ Up Mornin’:
The Story of Denmark Vesey (1972), based on The
Trial Record of Denmark Vesey (1970), which he ed-
ited, and the posthumously published Great Black
Russian: A Novel on the Life and Times of Alexan-
der Pushkin, African American Life (1989). Many
scholars consider Pushkin “the father of Russian
literature”; however, Killens argued that Pushkin’s
African ancestry should also be viewed as central
to his identity. Killens also wrote a book for young
adults, A Man Ain’t Nothin’ but a Man: The Ad-
ventures of John Henry (1975). Killens worked with
Jerry Ward to compile Black Southern Voices: An
Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, and
Critical Essays (1992). This collection featured 56
famous and less-known southern African-Ameri-
can authors. His last novel, The Minister Primarily,
remains unpublished.
Killens, who served as vice president of the
Black Academy of Arts and Letters from the
1977 foundation of the Junior Black Academy of
Arts and Letters, received Pulitzer Prize nomina-
tions for Youngblood (1954), And Then We Heard
(1964), and The Cotillion (1971). However, during
the years his works were nominated, prizes for the
novel were not awarded. Killens shares this dis-
tinction with Richard Wright, whose NATIVE SON
(1940) was nominated in a year (1941) when no
award for the novel was given.
Although firmly entrenched in the school of so-
cial realism, Killens’s work has not been included
in contemporary canonical anthologies. Killens’s
exclusion partially stemmed from his political af-
filiation and embrace of leftist politics. But criti-
cism also came from blacks who did not take
kindly to his criticism of Ellison’s INVISIBLE MAN
(1952). In a review printed in Freedom, a journal
edited by Paul Robeson, Killens derided Ellison’s
novel for promoting stereotypes, the “Uncle Toms,
pimps, sex perverts [and] guilt ridden traitors,” re-
garding it as a mainstream publisher’s dream of a
black novel.Killens, John Oliver 301