Charles White's Walk Together, Charcoal, 1953-54 was used on the cover of Mary Helen Washington's The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, Columbia University Press, 2014. (On the flyleaf of The Other Blacklist, the work's title was written as Let's Walk Together).
The book concerned itself with recovering "the vital role of 1950s leftist politics in the works and lives of modern African American writers and artists. While most histories of McCarthyism focus on the devastation of the blacklist and the intersection of leftist politics and American culture, few include the activities of radical writers and artists from the Black Popular Front. Washington's work incorporates these black intellectuals back into our understanding of mid-twentieth-century African American literature and art and expands our understanding of the creative ferment energizing all of America during this period." This text, on the flyleaf of the book's jacket, continued, "Mary Helen Washington reads four representative writers—Lloyd Brown, Frank London Brown, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks—and surveys the work of the visual artist Charles White. She traces resonances of leftist ideas and activism in their artistic achievements and follows their balanced critique of the mainstream liberal and conservative political and literary spheres. Her study recounts the targeting of African American as well as white writers during the McCarthy era, reconstructs the events of the 1959 Black Writers' Conference in New York, and argues for the ongoing influence of the Black Popular Front decades after it folded. Defining the contours of a distinctly black modernism and its far-ranging radicalization of American politics and culture, Washington fundamentally reorients scholarship on African American and Cold War literature and life."
This was an important work of scholarship, that took its place alongside Andrew Hemingway's Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956, Yale University Press, 2002, both books chronicling and examining Charles White’s left-leaning impulses and his art work that reflected these impulses.