Mayfield moved to New York in 1948, originally to study at
New York University, but instead began a career in theatre. He developed the role of Absalom Kumalo for the
Kurt Weil musical
Lost in the Stars during 1949–50, before producing his own play
Fire in 1951 and directing
Ossie Davis's
Alice in Wonder in 1952. Along with Ossie Davis and
Ruby Dee,
Alice Childress,
Rosa Guy,
Audre Lorde,
John O. Killens,
Sarah E. Wright,
William Branch,
Sidney Poitier, and
Loften Mitchell, Mayfield became an important figure in the 'Black Cultural Left'. This group was associated with the African-American singer and political activist
Paul Robeson and was composed of actors, writers and artists who believed that art was a key component of the struggle for civil rights. During this period, Mayfield spent summers at
Camp Unity, a left-wing interracial summer camp for adults in
Wingdale, New York. There, he wrote and produced his one-act play
417, which he later adapted into his first novel,
The Hit. Mayfield drove a taxi cab at night while writing during the day. He also attended the
Jefferson School of Social Science on Sixth Avenue. In 1954, Mayfield met and married Puerto Rican doctor and activist,
Ana Livia Cordero. Later that year, the couple relocated to
San Juan, Puerto Rico. There, Mayfield wrote for the
Puerto Rican World Journal, an English newspaper on the island. He also worked at the island's only English radio station. Additionally, he began adapting his one-act play,
417 to novel form. Renamed
The Hit, the novel was published in 1957 and was followed by
The Long Night in 1958 and
The Grand Parade in 1961. In 1955, Mayfield became a target of
FBI surveillance due to his association with members of the
Communist Party in New York, including
Paul Robeson and
Louis Burnham, and his role in the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA). His FBI file reported that: "Mayfield, a free-lance writer, has been described as being a Communist Party (CP) sympathizer and to have been a CP member possibly as late as 1955. He has been connected in the past with other organizations which have been designated pursuant to Executive Order 10450." Surveillance on Mayfield continued until the late 1970s. Returning to the United States in 1959, Mayfield was inspired by the success of the
Cuban Revolution. Visiting
Cuba at the invitation of
Fidel Castro in July 1960, he accompanied Cordero, LeRoi Jones (later known as
Amiri Baraka), Sarah E. Wright and
Robert F. Williams to
Oriente, where they celebrated the anniversary of the attack on the
Moncada Barracks and the birth of the
Movimiento 26 de Julio. After returning from Cuba, Mayfield began raising money for food and weapons for Williams and ferrying them to
Monroe, NC. In August 1961, after a series of attacks by white terrorists, a tense standoff developed between Williams' self-defense group and white citizens of Monroe. On August 27, Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Stegall from nearby
Marshville, NC drove down the dead end street to the house which Williams and others were guarding. Remembering the Stegalls from an earlier
white supremacist demonstration, and convinced they had come to his street to prepare for a later attack, Williams held the couple at gunpoint and brought them to his house. They were held and released a few hours later. The FBI, which had previously refused to take action against the violence perpetuated by white citizens of Monroe, charged Williams with kidnapping and named Mayfield and fellow activist
Mae Mallory as material witnesses. Late that night, Williams, his wife Mabel, Mayfield, and Mallory left Monroe in Mayfield's car and made their way to
Canada. Robert and Mabel Williams fled to Cuba while Mayfield traveled to London to meet his wife. The couple then flew to Ghana, where Cordero had a taken a job with the government of President
Kwame Nkrumah. During Mayfield's time in Ghana, he was employed by the Ministry of Information and wrote for Ghanaian newspapers including the
Ghanaian Times, the
Evening News, and
The Spark. He founded the
African Review, a bimonthly journal that featured articles by African-descended intellectuals including
Bessie Head,
Preston King, and
Neville Dawes, analyzing the economic and social issues facing decolonizing Africa. He also helped to establish the international branch of
Malcolm X's Organization of Afro-American Unity. Mayfield lived in worked in Ghana until January 1966 before relocating to
Ibiza, Spain, just prior to the
1966 Ghanaian coup d'état. Mayfield returned to the United States in May 1967 and took a job teaching at
Cornell University. At the invitation of film director
Jules Dassin, he began rewriting the script for
The Betrayal, which would later be made into the film
Uptight (1968). The movie, which was shot on location in
Cleveland, was a financial failure, but it presaged the explosion of Black films in the late 1960s and early 1970s known as
Blaxploitation. In November 1971, Mayfield relocated to
Guyana at the invitation of the artist
Tom Feelings who had recently relocated as a planning officer in the Guyanese Ministry of Education. There, he worked for the government of
Forbes Burnham in that leader's attempt to modernize his recently independent nation. Burnham, who had previously been a staunch ally of the United States in the 1960s, proclaimed his support for other Caribbean revolutionary movements in the early 1970s. His first marriage having ended in divorce, Mayfield married
Joan Cambridge, a Guyanese writer and colleague in the Ministry of Information and Culture, in 1973. As internal politics became more heated, the nation's economic fortunes suffered and Mayfield left the country in 1975. ==Work as a teacher and university professor==