Richardson, Beulah

RICHARDSON, BEULAH (1926-2000). Known under her screen name Beah Richards, Beulah Richardson was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1926. She attended college at Dillard University in New Orleans and graduated in 1948. Eager to pursue an acting career, she moved to California where she met Louise Thompson Patterson and her husband, William Patterson, both prominent American Communists. In 1951 she moved to New York City where she became ensconced in Black radical and artistic circles that included the Pattersons, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones.

In May 1951, Willie McGee, a veteran falsely accused of raping a white woman was executed in Mississippi. His case and execution galvanized an international movement and inspired Richardson to write the poem “A Black Woman Speaks . . . of White Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of Peace.” The poem, reprinted as a pamphlet by the American Women for Peace, made Richardson a well-known artist among American leftists. It also helped inspire the creation of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a Black woman’s group that organized against war and racism. Richardson, along with her friend Louise Thompson Patterson, Charlotta Bass, and other prominent Black women leftists organized in the Sojourners to challenge legal lynchings like McGee’s and to call attention to the atrocities of Cold War policy, particularly in the Korean war.

In 1951, Richardson wrote the performance poem “Genocide” in support of the Civil Rights Congress “We Charge Genocide” petition to the United Nations, written under the direction of William Patterson. Both the poem and the petition accused the United States of genocide against Black Americans through purposeful policy and willful indifference. The poem included three parts starting with African slavery and ending with the challenge of white supremacist violence. It powerfully challenged white America to consider the moral failing of raising murderers cloaked behind white supremacy. Richardson used her art to push white American to consider what benefits it gained from white supremacy, while also advocating for unity against capitalist exploitation. The poem was performed at the We Charge Genocide American unveiling. The petition was quickly denounced as communist by the United States, and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice disbanded by 1952. The pressures of anticommunist campaigns and legal action took its toll on activists and organizations.

Richardson would emerge from the anticommunist campaigns relatively unscathed and enjoy a successful acting career. Using the stage name Beah Richards, she landed jobs in movies and television, though Black actors continued to face discrimination in hiring, particularly in the emerging television industry. She would go on to recurring roles in Sandford and Sons, The Cosby Show and ER and star in the film adaptation of Beloved. When she died in 2000, she was celebrated as an Emmy winning, Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated actress, while her political activism was largely forgotten.

Gore, Dayo. “A Black Woman Speaks: Beah Richards Life of Protest and Poetry,” Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald. Edited by Howard Brick, Robbie Lieberman, and Paula Rabinowitz, 67-81, Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing Services, 2015.

Gore, Dayo. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

McDuffie, Erick. Sojourning for Truth and Justice: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Beah: A Black Woman Speaks (2003). A Documentary directed by LisaGay Hamilton.