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El Barrio / 101shortly after the Depression the Party’s contributions to Negro theater and historymade the CPUSA “a major force in American society promoting systematiccultural interchange between whites and blacks and encouraging whitesto recognize the black contribution to the nation’s cultural heritage.” 26 In additionto her portrait of Childress, Neel’s portraits of a lithe, elegant, but namelessballet dancer (Ballet Dancer, 1950, ƒg. 89) and the young communistwriters Hubert Satterfield and Harold Cruse (c. 1950, ƒg. 90) are presented aspensive dreamers, involved with the creative life rather than the world of activism.By 1961, however, Cruse had become disaffected from communism and inThe Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a text that anticipated much of the separatistlanguage of the Black Power movement, accused the CP of bad faith: “Inthe late 1940s and 1950s, the white political leftwing ran to Harlem in order toestablish a political hegemony over Negro art and artists—for the purposes ofdistorting and wielding both into programatic weapons.” 27 As a member of theCommittee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), he formed a dissident group inthe late forties called the Harlem Writers Club, which protested the CP’s“unity theme” (Black and White Unite and Fight) and its “enforced interracialism.”28 Nothing in Neel’s portrait suggests the outrage behind Cruse’sshrill call for separatism, for it was not until the early 1960s that the civil rightsmovement had entered its new phase. By then, not only had “Negroes” assumedfull leadership of the movement, but the concept of Black Power, substitutingblack nationalism for integration, had begun to be formulated in thewritings of Malcolm X and Stokeley Carmichael. 29This seminal cultural moment is recorded in Neel’s portraits of JamesFarmer (1964, ƒg. 91) and Abdul Rahman (1964, ƒg. 92). Farmer, a founder ofthe Congress of Racial Equality, was program director of the NAACP at thetime of this sitting. Dressed in a business suit, he personiƒes the integrationistcivil rights leader of the 1950s, who, for all the suppressed anger and the resolveindicated by his pose, seeks equality through the existing legal systemrather than revolution. Rahman, bemused by his new identity as a Black Muslim,complete with hat and military jacket, seems pleased that his masquerademay cause others to be “frightened by these resplendent and angry new blacks,by turns hard edged and remorseless or smoothly self-delighting, all rage andassertion in public but sometimes twinkling with affability, even self-irony inprivate.” 30 Neel was forthright about her own reaction. “He is a different Negro.I have studies of the Negro people, like those little girls, being overpowered.This man is not frightened. He is a nationalist, a black nationalist, even thoughthere’s a certain hysteria about him...” 31Neel’s portraits of blacks from the late 1950s and early 1960s are vivid indicatorsof social change, and of the important contribution of black writers and