Julian Mayfield

Julian Hudson Mayfield was born on June 6, 1928, in Greer, South Carolina, and relocated with his family to Washington, D.C. at the age of five. He attended Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, where he determined that writing would be his vocation. Following graduation, Mayfield enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1946 and was stationed in Hawaii before receiving an honorable discharge. He subsequently enrolled briefly at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

In 1948, Mayfield moved to New York City, initially intending to study at New York University, but pivoted instead toward a career in theatre. His Broadway work came in 1949, when he developed the role of Absalom Kumalo in the Kurt Weill musical Lost in the Stars, a production that ran into 1950. He continued building his theatrical career by producing his own play, Fire, in 1951, and directing Ossie Davis's Alice in Wonder in 1952. During this period, Mayfield became associated with a circle of Black artists and intellectuals that included Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, John O. Killens, Sarah E. Wright, William Branch, Sidney Poitier, and Loften Mitchell — a group connected to singer and activist Paul Robeson that viewed art as integral to the civil rights struggle. Mayfield also spent summers at Camp Unity, a left-wing interracial adult camp in Wingdale, New York, where he wrote and produced the one-act play 417, which he later adapted into his debut novel.

To support himself as a writer, Mayfield drove a taxi cab at night and attended the Jefferson School of Social Science on Sixth Avenue during the day. In 1954, he married Puerto Rican doctor and activist Ana Livia Cordero, and the couple subsequently moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico. There, Mayfield wrote for the Puerto Rican World Journal and worked at the island's only English-language radio station. His one-act play 417 was expanded into novel form during this period; published under the title The Hit in 1957, it was followed by The Long Night in 1958 and The Grand Parade in 1961. Beginning in 1955, Mayfield became a subject of FBI surveillance owing to his associations with Paul Robeson, Louis Burnham, and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, as well as his reported connections to the Communist Party. That surveillance continued until the late 1970s.

Mayfield returned to the United States in 1959, energized by the Cuban Revolution. In July 1960, at the invitation of Fidel Castro, he traveled to Oriente, Cuba, alongside Cordero, LeRoi Jones, Sarah E. Wright, and Robert F. Williams to mark the anniversary of the Moncada Barracks attack and the founding of the Movimiento 26 de Julio. He subsequently assisted Williams by raising funds for food and weapons and transporting them to Monroe, North Carolina. Following a violent standoff in Monroe in August 1961, the FBI named Mayfield a material witness in a kidnapping charge against Williams. That night, Mayfield, Williams, Williams's wife Mabel, and activist Mae Mallory departed Monroe in Mayfield's car, eventually crossing into Canada. Williams and his wife continued to Cuba, while Mayfield traveled to London and then flew with Cordero to Ghana, where she had accepted a position with the government of President Kwame Nkrumah.

During his years in Ghana, Mayfield worked for the Ministry of Information and contributed to several Ghanaian publications, including the Ghanaian Times, the Evening News, and The Spark. He founded the African Review, a bimonthly journal featuring work by African-descended intellectuals such as Bessie Head, Preston King, and Neville Dawes, focused on the economic and social challenges of decolonizing Africa. He also helped establish the international branch of Malcolm X's Organization of Afro-American Unity. Mayfield remained in Ghana until January 1966, departing for Ibiza, Spain, shortly before the Ghanaian coup d'état of that year.

Returning to the United States in May 1967, Mayfield joined the faculty at Cornell University. At the invitation of director Jules Dassin, he rewrote the screenplay for what became the film Uptight, released in 1968 and shot on location in Cleveland. In November 1971, he moved to Guyana at the invitation of artist Tom Feelings, working for the government of Forbes Burnham in that country's Ministry of Information and Culture. Mayfield married Guyanese writer Joan Cambridge in 1973, following the end of his first marriage. He left Guyana in 1975 as the country's economic and political conditions deteriorated.

Mayfield received a Fulbright Fellowship and taught in West Germany and Turkey in 1976. From 1975 to 1978, he served as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and spent his final six years as writer-in-residence at Howard University. His published novels include The Hit (1957), The Long Night (1958), and The Grand Parade (1961), and his film appearances include Virgin Island (1958) and Uptight (1968). Julian Mayfield died of cardiac arrest at Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, Maryland, on October 20, 1984, at the age of 56.