Portside

As summer camp season draws to a close, millions of children across the country will be headed home, taking with them memories of exciting new experiences and fond recollections of friendships forged over the last few weeks.  For many of them, their camp time will have been transformative. In the 1930s and ’40s, my father, a poor Jewish kid from New York’s Lower East Side, had one of these life-changing experiences at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Built on land donated by a farming family hit hard by the Depression, the camp had a distinctive profile. For one, it defied the racial segregation of that era, bringing white and Black children together in an integrated setting. The camp also employed perhaps the most innovative cohort of Black artistic talent ever gathered at a summer camp. Over the course of Camp Wo-Chi-Ca’s two decades in operation, campers spent their days with preeminent artists of the Harlem Renaissance, including the illustrator and muralist Charles White, painter and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, modern dancer Pearl Primus, artist Ernest Crichlow, poet and artist Gwendolyn Bennett, and the painter Jacob Lawrence and his wife, the artist Gwendolyn Knight. Exploring how and why this impressive array of Black artists came together at a radical summer camp in northwest New Jersey illuminates a largely overlooked story about left-wing politics and Black culture in the first part of the 20th century. 

Although he first assumed Wo-Chi-Ca was an Indian designation, my father soon learned it was an acronym for Worker’s Children’s Camp. Organized by Communists and trade unionists, Wo-Chi-Ca was born in 1935, catering mostly — but not exclusively — to children in the New York area whose parents were Communists or members of left-wing unions. My father’s introduction to the camp came soon after his mother had joined the Communist Party.  Summers at Wo-Chi-Ca were broken down into five two-week sessions, with each session hosting about 200 campers. 

Wo-Chi-Ca flourished in a moment of rising influence for the U.S. Communist Party and the left more generally. This was the era of the “Popular Front,” a time when Communists moved beyond the closed introspection and sectarianism of an earlier period, built alliances with other left-wing and progressive groups, downplayed Russian communism in favor of American democracy, and gave full attention to alleviating the sufferings of laboring people during the Great Depression. Wo-Chi-Ca embodied the Popular Front spirit in the activities it offered to campers. Singalongs hosted by frequent camp visitor Paul Robeson introduced campers to the words of the quintessential Popular Front anthem, “Ballad for Americans”: “a man in white skin can never be free while his black brother is in slavery.” Elizabeth Catlett taught campers about the traditions of the native Lenape, and guided them in the carving of a totem pole to honor the earlier inhabitants of the camp land. In the summer of 1940, my father’s final year as a camper, the camp chorus, the nature group, the staff of the camp newspaper, and the drama group all organized themselves into “unions,” with each group sending representatives to the “Wo-Chi-Ca Council for Industrial Organization.” It was Wo-Chi-Cans’ way of celebrating the national Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which had recently undertaken a militant organizing campaign among steel, auto, electrical, and other industrial workers across the U.S. Fittingly, the CIO had been founded in 1935, the same year as Wo-Chi-Ca. Once in a while, campers dubbed their bunks “Lenin” or “the Soviet Union,” but they more often turned to Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman for the names of the cabins in which they lived. 

Although the camp was distinctive in many ways, Wo-Chi-Cans also spent a good part of their day doing what summer campers have always done. They staged drama and musical performances, participated in group hikes to nearby woods and hills, and helped build sets and paint murals for camp skits and plays. According to reports from the Daily Wo-Chi-Can, the camp newspaper, there were also lots and lots of softball games, a particular draw for my father. And despite the camp’s radical profile, there were movie star crushes: one girl hung a picture of Clark Gable above her bed.

Still, with the exception of a small handful of other left-wing camps, Wo-Chi-Ca stood apart on matters of race. By 1940, one out of five campers and 25% of the staff was Black. Campers and counselors remained ever attentive to racial discrimination. During one of my father’s summers, the camp softball team, following an away game at another camp, stopped at a local diner for drinks and snacks. When a Black player on the team was refused service, the team promptly staged a walk out. 

Wo-Chi-Ca did something else that many Communists, and communist supporters, did in the 1930s and ’40s: it provided a pillar of institutional support for Black artists and performers at a time of immense financial hardship for many of them. It was the kind of backing, one scholar has written, that Black artists and writers “could get nowhere else in white America.” Communists frequently collaborated with Black writers and artists in the New Deal arts programs, especially those sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, which began employing people to create art and public works in 1935. Many of the artists who later came to Wo-Chi-Ca — including Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, and Gwendolyn Bennett — had received commissions from, and worked together in, the WPA. 

Bennett was most likely the central figure in Wo-Chi-Ca’s recruitment of Black talent. Born in Giddings, Texas in 1902, she moved with her family to Washington, DC, in 1906 and then to Brooklyn. In New York, Bennett flourished as both a writer and artist, and became a critical figure in the early years of the Harlem Renaissance. Her early poems, as well as her graphic illustrations, appeared in both The Crisis and Opportunity. In 1924, the 21-year-old Bennett was invited to read her poetic tribute to novelist Jessie Fauset at a dinner party that some identify as a launching pad for the Harlem Renaissance. When the Great Depression hit, Bennett did what so many other Black artists of her era did: she enlisted in federal arts programs and embraced radical politics. Bennett helped found the Harlem Arts Guild, and in 1938, took the helm of the Harlem Community Arts Center, where she organized an exhibition that featured the paintings of the 21-year old Jacob Lawrence. Five years later they would reunite at Wo-Chi-Ca.  

In 1941, as the federal arts programs came increasingly under conservative scrutiny, Bennett was ousted from her position at the Harlem Community Arts Center, one of the early victims of the decade’s red scares. When it became difficult for her to find other government-funded work, Bennett turned to institutions where the Communist Party exercised influence, like the George Washington Carver School, an adult education center in Harlem, and Camp Wo-Chi-Ca. 

In 1940, Bennett married Richard Crosscup, a white educator who, like Bennett, was suspected by the FBI of Communist Party membership. Two years later, Crosscup became the director of Camp Wo-Chi-Ca and Bennett, too, joined the staff. Several of the men and women she knew from the Harlem arts community also came to work at Wo-Chi-Ca that year, as did my father, who had already put in four summers as a camper. Deeply affected by Bennett’s influence, he later gratefully recalled how she introduced many Wo-Chi-Cans to Black poets like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. Along with the other artistic luminaries on staff, such as Catlett, Charles White, and Pearl Primus, she instilled in my father a recognition of a powerful Black artistic tradition.

Robeson may have wielded the most influence of all: his musical gifts and emotional strength shaped the path my father took into the “folk revival” of the mid-20th century. “I’ll never forget,” my father recalled nearly 60 years later, “that deep, rich, resonant voice that seemed to shake the ground under us whenever he opened his mouth to speak, let alone sing.” For my father, and many in his Wo-Chi-Ca cohort, Robeson was a “role model.” When in 1951 my father went on to launch Sing Out! — the preeminent folk music magazine of the period — not only had his project earned Robeson’s support, he also carried with him a central Wo-Chi-Ca lesson: that American culture could never be fully understood or appreciated in isolation from the traditions shaped by African Americans in both slavery and freedom. 

Wo-Chi-Ca would not survive the 1950s. After years of harassment from the local Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups, the camp changed its name to Wyandot and moved to Kingston, New York. Beset by continued harassment and structural problems, it ceased to function by 1954. 

Before going to Wo-Chi-Ca, my father had been a self-described “kid on the block,” so accepting of the racist culture of his youth that he once sent his girlfriend a Valentine emblazoned with a racist cartoon. Wo-Chi-Ca taught him not only about African American poetry, music, and dance; it also opened his eyes, through his relationships with others, to Black humanity, dignity, and leadership. In 1944, my father’s penultimate year at camp, dance teacher Pearl Primus reflected on the importance of children forming connections free from bigotry and hate. “We must help our children grow up with this affection strengthened. That is why I will dance for camp Wo-Chi-Ca.” 

Nina Silber is the Jon Westling Professor of History at Boston University. The author of several books on the U.S. Civil War and its legacy, her work has also been featured in the Washington Post; Cognoscenti; Time; the Boston Herald; and the Civil War Monitor. She is currently working on a book about her family and the mid-20th century “folk revival.”

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