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THE HISTORY OF CAMP WO-CHI-CA  
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Nina Silber
August 6, 2024
History News Network
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_ The legacy of a radical summer camp in New Jersey tells a largely
overlooked story about left-wing politics and Black culture. _

Arriving at summer camp, by Peter Blanchard (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

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,”
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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
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“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.”
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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
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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
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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
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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.”_

_History News Network (HNN)
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founded in 2001 to help put current events into historical
perspective. Its original mandate, as articulated by founder Rick
Shenkman, was to create a space for historians to offer deeper context
for the stories flitting across American newspapers and TV
screens. Among HNN’s many duties, Shenkman explained, were: "To
expose politicians who misrepresent history. To point out bogus
analogies. To deflate beguiling myths. To remind Americans of the
irony of history. To put events in context. To remind us all of the
complexity of history."_

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