The Soviet Anthology of “Negro Poetry”

Years before he worked alongside Thurgood Marshall on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the attorney Loren Miller spent the summer of 1932 in Moscow helping edit a Soviet anthology of “Negro poetry.” Miller had arrived that June with a group of twenty-two African Americans (including his good friend Langston Hughes) to shoot a Soviet agitprop film about racial tensions and labor disputes in the American South. When the project fell through, Miller and many of his compatriots stayed in Moscow to pursue creative opportunities that would have been largely foreclosed to black artists in the United States: the aspiring actor Wayland Rudd found work with the avant-garde theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold; the painter Mildred Jones apprenticed with the Soviet artist and graphic designer