August 13, 2019 • 29 mins
“I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.” – Richard Wright, from “Black Boy.”
Richard Wright’s writing was controversial. His work was both praised as improving race relations and criticized as perpetuating dangerous stereotypes of Black people in the United States. James Baldwin took issue with Wright’s novel “Native Son” and protest fiction’s reductionist approach to race relations and Black humanity. Wright’s work ignited conversations about race and about the treatment and perspective of Black Americans. But the role of this literary protest in bettering Black lives and futures was disputable.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Identity is such a tough topic to have conversations around.
It's such a nebulous concept, and every person can align
with a bunch of different identity groupings. Within any identity group,
individual people will have their own perspectives and experiences. It's
(00:21):
almost as if lives are intricate and require us to
think deeply about ourselves and others. It's no wonder that
when identity comes up in relation to social and political issues,
chaos often ensues confronting the ways we think about and
address identity is no one size fits all process, and
(00:45):
if you're an outsider in any way and conscious of
its effects, you're often tasked with defending your humanity and
disrupting orthodoxes. But answers don't come without questioning. I'm Eve
(01:08):
stef Coote and This is Unpopular, a podcast about people
in history who didn't let the threat of persecution keep
them from speaking truth to power. In the early and
mid nineteen hundreds, the relationship between the FBI and black
activists and artists was and still is fraught with tension
(01:28):
and animosity that moved in both directions. The United States
Federal Bureau of Investigation targeted many black Americans for their
work and political involvement. Take writer Claude Mackay, who wrote
the sonnet If We Must Die, among many other poems, stories,
and books. The FBI's file on him was a hundred
(01:50):
and ninety three pages long, and it called him a
notorious Negro revolutionary coin tel pro Or The FBI's Counter
intellig program used psychological warfare, informants, and illegal surveillance to
go after civil rights activists, communists, and other organizers and
movement leaders. It killed members of the Black Panther Party
(02:14):
and raids. Put simply, the FEDS went to great lengths
to sew division and political organizations, encourage presentment of black
leaders and groups, and make sure people that they considered
subversives were brought down in any way possible. FBI Director
j Edgar Hoover even directed the FBI's attention to black
(02:36):
owned extremist bookstores, as he labeled them. It's a move
that hearkens back to the restrictions placed on enslaved people's
literacy in the attempt to limit insurrection and challenges of
authority and status quo. One of the people the FBI
(02:58):
employed it's correct tactics on was Richard Nathaniel Right. Richard
was born in nineteen o eight in Roxy, Mississippi. His
mother was a teacher and his father was a sharecropper.
Richard had a younger brother named Leon Allen Wright. As
the family attempted to make ends meet, they moved from
(03:19):
Roxy to Natchez, Mississippi, to Memphis, Tennessee, but Richard's father
left the family by nineteen fourteen, and Richard, his mom,
and his brother moved a lot in the following years
as Richard's mother took low paying jobs to take care
of the family. His father's absence took a toll on him,
(03:40):
and Richard remained estranged from him into adulthood. When Richard
was young, he and his brother spent time at an orphanage,
and his mom had a paralytic stroke, so neighbors and
family helped take care of the Rights as they moved
from place to place. A major moment in Richard's life
(04:03):
happened when he was about nine years old, living with
his aunt and uncle in Elaine, Arkansas. Richard grew to
love his uncle Silas, but that relationship was cut short
when Silas was murdered by a gang of white men.
Richard's family and his aunt soon fled the city and
headed for West Helena, Arkansas. For a while, the family
(04:29):
also lived with Richard's grandparents in Jackson, Mississippi. His grandma
and aunt Addie, who lived there too, were devout Seventh
Day at Venice, and were strict about what Richard could
read and write. He rejected having evangelical teachings pressed upon him.
Despite the strict religious rules of the household, Richard read
(04:50):
pulp magazines, newspapers, and stories. It was hard for Richard
to manage his schooling because the family moved so much
and because of his mom's disability, but he published his
first short story, The Voodoo of Hell's half Acre, in
a black newspaper called The Southern Register in nineteen four,
and he graduated from Smith Robertson Junior High School in
(05:13):
nineteen Richard started attending Lanier High School that fall, but
he was only there for a few weeks before he
dropped out to begin working. He left Mississippi once again
and went to Memphis, where he worked for the Merry
Optical Company and discovered a love for the writings of H. L.
(05:34):
Mencon Fyodor Dostoyevski, Saint Clair, Louis Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser.
Richard's literary interest was being fed in Memphis. He identified
with Mencon's view of the South as hell and the
writing planted in Richard a seed of social protest. But
Memphis itself, Jim Crow, was stifling. He hopped on a
(05:57):
train to Chicago near the end of eight His family,
who had joined him in Memphis, followed him to Chicago.
To Chicago was not the South, but it was no
(06:18):
magical city, devoid of segregation, discrimination, and racism. He took
a series of jobs and went through a period of
unemployment during the depression. But all the while Richard was
still writing, still reading, and still studying writers, and he
was developing an interest in communism. In nineteen thirty two,
(06:42):
when he was working at a post office where a
bunch of radical intellectuals were employed, he began going to
meetings of the Chicago John Reid Club, which was mainly white.
John Read Clubs were an arm of the Communist Party
u S, a geared towards Marxist artists and intellectual Richard
joined the Communist Party in nineteen thirty three, and he
(07:04):
began publishing essays and poems in left wing journals. He
was even elected executive secretary of the Chicago John Read Club.
This is what he later said in an essay about
how he felt when reading communist magazines. After attending his
first club meeting, the revolutionary words leaped from the page
(07:24):
and struck me with tremendous force. It was not the
economics of communism, nor the great power of trade unions,
nor the excitement of underground politics that claimed me. My
attention was caught by the similarity of the experiences of
workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered
but kindred people's into a hole. It seemed to me
(07:47):
that here, at last, in the realm of revolutionary expression,
Negro experience could find a home of functioning value and roll.
Around this time he wrote his first novel, Law Today,
but it was not published until after his death. The
John Reid Clubs disbanded in nineteen thirty four, but Richard
(08:09):
continued in his literary pursuits. He went to the American
Writers Congress in New York in nineteen thirty five. That
same year, he began preparing guidebooks for the Federal Writers Project,
A New Deal Relief program for unemployed writers. In nineteen
thirty six, he was transferred to the Negro Theater unit
of the Federal Theater Project and his writing career was flourishing.
(08:34):
He joined the South Side Writers Group and wrote two
plays based on his unfinished novel. He wrote the short
story Big Boy Leaves Home, which was published in the
Anthology of the New Caravan and received critical acclaim. He
worked as a journalist for New Masses of Marxist magazine,
but Richard was becoming disenchanted with the Communist Party. He
(08:56):
questioned Stalinist policies and recruiting and organizing for the party
was interfering with his literary work. Plus other Chicago communists
constantly questioned his loyalty. In ninety seven, he decided to
move to New York City. After the break, Wright publishes
his magnum opus. In a counter terrorism report the FBI
(09:29):
put out in the agency referenced a group of people
they called Black identity extremists. The report said that quote,
it is very likely black identity extremists perceptions of police
brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated retaliatory
(09:50):
lethal violence against law enforcement, and will very likely serve
as justification for such violence. It noted that the violence
committed by these extremists, or b I E S as
it called them, peaked in the nineteen sixties and seventies,
and that this violence was rare in the past twenty years,
but the six targeted attacks against police that it listed
(10:13):
since those could be indicative of a resurgence of targeted
violence in what they called the b I E Movement.
Throughout the report, the FBI took care to emphasize how
these extremists premeditated attacks were motivated by the perceptions of
an unjust criminal justice system, perceptions of unjust treatment of
(10:37):
African Americans in the perceived unchallenged the legitimate actions of
law enforcement. Here's US Representative Karen Bass expressing her concerns
about the report to former U s Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
So you should know that a lot of active surround
(11:00):
the country are very concerned that we're getting ready to
repeat a very sad chapter of our history where people
who are rightfully protesting what they consider to be an
injustice in their community, which is their relationship with police officers,
are now being targeted and labeled as extremists and are
(11:21):
going through periods of surveillance and harassment. She goes on
to ask him what the Department of Justice is going
to do to protect the rights of average citizens who
want to protest the actions of police officers. He says,
this department will not unlawfully target people, but too many
(11:44):
Black identity extremists. Labeling and targeting represented a spiritual successor
of co intel pro the grouping is fictitious. The cases
the FBI identified in relation to Black identity extremism had
no link to a unified movement. The label does, however,
(12:04):
provide a concise terminology to help spread fear a moniker,
not unlike the one given to serial killers for the
purposes of sensationalizing and mythologizing. The specter of a black
uprising looms closer when black identity extremists exist. In July
twenty nineteen, it was reported that the FBI ditched the
(12:27):
term black identity extremists and was opting to place several
categories it once used under the umbrella of racially motivated
violent extremism instead, but the point had been proven. It
was not about organized and targeted violence against the state.
Any challenge of the racial status quo was a threat
(12:49):
to an order to precious to let go of without
a fight. So Richard left Chicago the place that represented
his departure from a South and his journey deeper into
radical thought and social justice. But Chicago was not the
refuge he had worked it up to be. It had
(13:10):
also been a place where he lived in the boundary
between black space and white space. He rubbed shoulders with
white people in his Communist Party circles, but was still
confined by the limitations that white society imposed on him.
Years later, after he moved out of the United States,
but returned to Chicago briefly, he wrote an essay titled
(13:31):
The Shame of Chicago for the magazine Evenue. In the essay,
he described the ugliness of Chicago and says it never
became the promised land, the loaned for Mecca that he
envisioned when he left the South. In New York, Richard
helped start the magazine New Challenge. He also became the
(13:54):
Harlem editor of The Daily Worker and co editor of
Left Front, and to New York is where he had
his first book published. He submitted some of his stories
to a magazine contest that was open to Federal Writers
Project Authors, and he won first prize. The publishing house
Harper and Brothers then published four of his novellas as
(14:17):
the book Uncle Tom's Children in nineteen thirty eight. Uncle
Tom's Children confronted the horrors of Southern racism and black
people's resistance against it. But it was the book Native Son,
which he finished in nineteen forty with the help of
a Guggenheim fellowship, that really put right on the map.
(14:37):
Native Son follows Bigger Thomas, a twenty year old black
man living in poverty in Chicago's South Side. Bigger responds
to the weight of racism, oppression, and poverty with anger, fear,
and violence. Through that lens, he rapes a woman and
murders her and another woman. In the end, Bigger is
(14:58):
sentenced to death. The book was a bestseller. Black and
White folks Alike praised right for its brutal realism, for
its emotional residence, and for its unparalleled portrayal of the
reality of the effects of racism on its targets and
its perpetrators. The implication was that Bigger was not just
(15:20):
an animalistic criminal acting out of primitive instinct. He was
a Native Son shaped by an environment that encouraged isolation, hatred, resentment,
and violence in black people. That was a viewpoint that
could tug at the heartstrings of white people who were
prone to sympathy and understanding. The book dramatized the injustice
(15:42):
and bleakness that plagued black life under the thumb of racism,
and it emphasized the need for social change. The n
double a CP awarded Right the spin guard Metal for
the book. Native Son even went on to become a
play and a movie. But Richard's breakout hit was not
immune to negative criticism, especially from black people. Bigger's troubled
(16:06):
life and tragic end was predestined. He was one dimensional
and poorly developed, with no roots in real truth. Critics
also said the story grossly supported perceptions of black people
as simple, brutish, and doomed to tragedy because they were
poor and black. In nineteen forty nine, James Baldwin, who
(16:26):
was friends with Fright, wrote the essay Everybody's Protest Novel.
In it, he said, quote Bigger's tragedy is not that
he is cold, or black or hungry, not even that
he is American black, but that he has accepted a
theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility
(16:46):
of his being subhuman and feels constrained therefore to battle
for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him
at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life.
We need not battle for it. We need only to
do what it's infinitely more difficult that is accepted. We're
(17:13):
going to pause on the controversy and take a quick
break when we return. Right breaks with the Communist Party,
but still earns a spot on the FBI's watch list.
(17:34):
Wright had married a Russian Jewish ballerina, Dimo Rose Meadman,
in ninety nine, but they got a divorce in nineteen forty.
The next year, he married Ellen Poplar, a white woman
who was a member of the Communist Party. They stayed
together until he died, and had two daughters together, born
in nineteen forty two and nineteen forty nine. Nineteen forty
(17:58):
one was also the year that he published twelve Million
Black Voices, a folk History of the Negro in the
United States, a book about black life from slavery to
sharecropping to the Great Migration. Right also wrote the manuscript
for American Hunger, which wasn't published in its entirety until
after his death. Part of the second section, about his
(18:20):
involvement in and later rejection of the Communist Party, was
published in the Atlantic Monthly in nineteen forty four. By
this point Wright had grown completely disenchanted with the Party
and split with it. The party had turned pro war
and it did not challenge segregation. He also distanced himself
from Marxism, which had contributed to his perspective in his writing.
(18:44):
The first section of the manuscript was published as the
memoir Black Boy, A Record of Childhood and Youth in
nineteen He made this dark statement in Black Boy, I
used to maul over the strange absence of real kindness
and negroes. How unstable was our tenderness, How lacking in
(19:05):
genuine passion we were, How void of great hope, how
timid our joy, how bear our traditions, How hollow our memories?
How lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind
man to man, And how shallow was even our despair.
(19:26):
He was also busy with endeavors beyond writing. Fright gave
a bunch of lectures, traveled helped James Baldwin get a
grant and served on the American Council of Race Relations,
but he would soon make another major life changing move.
In nineteen he traveled to France, where he gave interviews,
(19:47):
met with publishers, and linked up with French intellectuals and
existentialists like Hertrude Stein, Jean Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Richard and his wife Ellen also traveled to other European countries,
and Richard even helped other American, African and European intellectuals
(20:10):
launched the Pan African magazine Presence Africane. The family returned
to New York in January of nineteen forty seven, but
the racism and anti radicalism was no longer tolerable, especially
now that he had spent time in France, the looks
he god for being in an interracial marriage, the discrimination
(20:32):
he still faced for being black. He wrote the essay
titled I Choose Exile, which was denied for publication in Ebony,
but in it he wrote that there is more freedom
in one square block of Paris than there is in
an entire United States of America. He and the family
(20:54):
moved to Paris in nineteen forty seven, where he remained
until his death in nineteen sixty. There he continued to
write essays and books, including The Outsider, Savage Holiday, The
Color Curtain, and The Long Dream, and he published a
collection of his lectures that he gave in Europe titled
(21:15):
White Man Listening. After traveling to the Gold Coast or
present day Ghana, he published the book Black Power, A
Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, in which
he espoused condescending views about so called African culture and
tribal customs, and implied the superiority of Western traditions and industrialization.
(21:41):
Right attended the Bandon Conference in Indonesia as a representative
for the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and he took part
in planning the first Congress of Negro Artists and Writers
in Paris. His work was so troubling to US authorities
that the FBI kept him under surveillance, targeting his passport
(22:02):
and keeping him on the Security Index of Major Threats
to the US. He was blacklisted in Hollywood, and he
was having trouble publishing his work in the US, but
he wrote and used his voice to champion social progress
until the end. He died in Paris in nineteen sixty
of a heart attack. Wright's work has been read worldwide,
(22:28):
translated into many different languages. His writing indoors, and it
has been credited with positively affecting race relations in the
United States, and it continues to be contentious in the
years after Wright's death. Many people have argued that his
depiction of black life in Native Son and much of
his writing reinforced negative stereotypes and distorted reality so much
(22:52):
as to be harmful, and Zora Neil Harston said that
his depiction of the South was unrealistic, writes words were
more than vehicles to entice white readers into thinking and
caring about the plight of black people. He influenced writers
who came after him, and he worked to immortalize the
(23:13):
truths of living well black that were often ignored in
literary traditions in favor of caricature, idealism, or moderation. In nineties,
Alas Poor Richard James Baldwin wrote and Uncle Tom's Children
and Native Son and above all and Black Boy, I
found expressed for the first time in my life, the sorrow,
(23:38):
the rage, and the murderous bitterness which was eating up
my life. Richard gave his lecture the Situation of the
Black Artist and Intellectual in the United States just weeks
before his death, when he was ill and under financial strife.
He said that black American artists lived in a nightmares
(23:58):
jungle and were repressed when they tried to speak out
against the racial status quo. He had previously been involved
with the American Society of African Culture a c I,
a funded organization, and he had given US officials who
were eager to curb communism information about Ghanaian politician Quam
(24:22):
and Cruma, But in this speech he took a sharp turn,
denouncing the US for spying on and trying to silence expatriates,
and claiming that most revolutionary movements in the West were
started by a gen provocateur to organize the discontented so
that the government can keep an eye on them. Some
(24:42):
people have suggested that Right was murdered. Right once wrote
that a person who doesn't have a theory about the meaning, structure,
and direction of modern society is a lost victim in
a world he cannot understand or control. The Black experience
(25:03):
is not monolithic, and neither are the ways black people
choose to pursue liberation right chose to try to get
people to acknowledge the cruelty and dehumanization that were the
products of race and class inequality. The criticism of his
work and questioning of its efficacy in bettering the lives
of black people was warranted, but the fluctuations in his philosophies, politics,
(25:29):
and feelings throughout his life chart the path of a
man trying to attain self actualization and trying not to
become a lost victim. His writing was purposeful and the
stakes were high. Mississippi Senator Theodora Bilbo, a white supremacist,
segregationists and Ku Klux Klan member, said the book was
(25:53):
a damnable lie whose purpose was to plant seeds of
hate against white people. He said at the book was
quote the dirtiest, filthiest, lousiest, most obscene piece of writing
that I have ever seen in print. I would hate
to have a son, our daughter of mine permitted to
read it. It is so filthy and so dirty, but
(26:15):
it comes from a Negro, and you cannot expect any
better from a person of his type. He said this
on the floor of the Senate in nine It's in
the congressional record. He was sure the book would bread
trouble in black folks if we were distributed widely, and
he wasn't alone in this thinking. Black Boy was challenged
(26:38):
or banned in many US public schools for inciting racial
hatred or portraying race relations as strained in hostile decades
after Bilbo s viewed his rage. So was the book agitational?
Did it dig up something unsettling in the white American
psyche that society could potentially sift through? I think? So?
(27:03):
That doesn't mean it fueled a revolution that turned race
relations in the US on its head. Right wrote about
how social conditioning and systems helped construct black identities and
built characters of black people of the South that many
would say lacked nuance. Black suffering was on display in
(27:24):
his work in front of a worldwide audience, and Right's
fiction waded into uncomfortable territory, like the sexual violence against
women that's in Native Son. But Right's views did not
represent those of all Black Americans, despite the notions of
critics who believed him to be the most eloquent spokesman
(27:45):
for the American negro in this generation. As one New
York Times obituary put it, Native Son definitely breathes differently
now than it did in the context of nineteen forty America.
Yet rights insistence on exposing the destruction of racism and exploitation,
(28:07):
and his use of literary naturalism if imperfect, remain relevant.
He responded to the moment in which he lived with
an intentional call for understanding and progress. Isn't awakening even
possible without discomfort? Yeah, our producer is Andrew Howard, Holly
(29:05):
Fry and Christopher Hasiotis are our executive producers. So we've
reached the end of season one of Unpopular, who will
be going on a short break. We'll be back in October,
but in the meantime you can be on the lookout
for a bonus content over the break, So keep your
eyes peeled on the feed and keep sharing the show,
(29:27):
keep sending us your thoughts and ideas and warm praises,
and we'll see you again soon
Identity is such a tough topic to have conversations around.
It's such a nebulous concept, and every person can align
with a bunch of different identity groupings. Within any identity group,
individual people will have their own perspectives and experiences. It's
(00:21):
almost as if lives are intricate and require us to
think deeply about ourselves and others. It's no wonder that
when identity comes up in relation to social and political issues,
chaos often ensues confronting the ways we think about and
address identity is no one size fits all process, and
(00:45):
if you're an outsider in any way and conscious of
its effects, you're often tasked with defending your humanity and
disrupting orthodoxes. But answers don't come without questioning. I'm Eve
(01:08):
stef Coote and This is Unpopular, a podcast about people
in history who didn't let the threat of persecution keep
them from speaking truth to power. In the early and
mid nineteen hundreds, the relationship between the FBI and black
activists and artists was and still is fraught with tension
(01:28):
and animosity that moved in both directions. The United States
Federal Bureau of Investigation targeted many black Americans for their
work and political involvement. Take writer Claude Mackay, who wrote
the sonnet If We Must Die, among many other poems, stories,
and books. The FBI's file on him was a hundred
(01:50):
and ninety three pages long, and it called him a
notorious Negro revolutionary coin tel pro Or The FBI's Counter
intellig program used psychological warfare, informants, and illegal surveillance to
go after civil rights activists, communists, and other organizers and
movement leaders. It killed members of the Black Panther Party
(02:14):
and raids. Put simply, the FEDS went to great lengths
to sew division and political organizations, encourage presentment of black
leaders and groups, and make sure people that they considered
subversives were brought down in any way possible. FBI Director
j Edgar Hoover even directed the FBI's attention to black
(02:36):
owned extremist bookstores, as he labeled them. It's a move
that hearkens back to the restrictions placed on enslaved people's
literacy in the attempt to limit insurrection and challenges of
authority and status quo. One of the people the FBI
(02:58):
employed it's correct tactics on was Richard Nathaniel Right. Richard
was born in nineteen o eight in Roxy, Mississippi. His
mother was a teacher and his father was a sharecropper.
Richard had a younger brother named Leon Allen Wright. As
the family attempted to make ends meet, they moved from
(03:19):
Roxy to Natchez, Mississippi, to Memphis, Tennessee, but Richard's father
left the family by nineteen fourteen, and Richard, his mom,
and his brother moved a lot in the following years
as Richard's mother took low paying jobs to take care
of the family. His father's absence took a toll on him,
(03:40):
and Richard remained estranged from him into adulthood. When Richard
was young, he and his brother spent time at an orphanage,
and his mom had a paralytic stroke, so neighbors and
family helped take care of the Rights as they moved
from place to place. A major moment in Richard's life
(04:03):
happened when he was about nine years old, living with
his aunt and uncle in Elaine, Arkansas. Richard grew to
love his uncle Silas, but that relationship was cut short
when Silas was murdered by a gang of white men.
Richard's family and his aunt soon fled the city and
headed for West Helena, Arkansas. For a while, the family
(04:29):
also lived with Richard's grandparents in Jackson, Mississippi. His grandma
and aunt Addie, who lived there too, were devout Seventh
Day at Venice, and were strict about what Richard could
read and write. He rejected having evangelical teachings pressed upon him.
Despite the strict religious rules of the household, Richard read
(04:50):
pulp magazines, newspapers, and stories. It was hard for Richard
to manage his schooling because the family moved so much
and because of his mom's disability, but he published his
first short story, The Voodoo of Hell's half Acre, in
a black newspaper called The Southern Register in nineteen four,
and he graduated from Smith Robertson Junior High School in
(05:13):
nineteen Richard started attending Lanier High School that fall, but
he was only there for a few weeks before he
dropped out to begin working. He left Mississippi once again
and went to Memphis, where he worked for the Merry
Optical Company and discovered a love for the writings of H. L.
(05:34):
Mencon Fyodor Dostoyevski, Saint Clair, Louis Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser.
Richard's literary interest was being fed in Memphis. He identified
with Mencon's view of the South as hell and the
writing planted in Richard a seed of social protest. But
Memphis itself, Jim Crow, was stifling. He hopped on a
(05:57):
train to Chicago near the end of eight His family,
who had joined him in Memphis, followed him to Chicago.
To Chicago was not the South, but it was no
(06:18):
magical city, devoid of segregation, discrimination, and racism. He took
a series of jobs and went through a period of
unemployment during the depression. But all the while Richard was
still writing, still reading, and still studying writers, and he
was developing an interest in communism. In nineteen thirty two,
(06:42):
when he was working at a post office where a
bunch of radical intellectuals were employed, he began going to
meetings of the Chicago John Reid Club, which was mainly white.
John Read Clubs were an arm of the Communist Party
u S, a geared towards Marxist artists and intellectual Richard
joined the Communist Party in nineteen thirty three, and he
(07:04):
began publishing essays and poems in left wing journals. He
was even elected executive secretary of the Chicago John Read Club.
This is what he later said in an essay about
how he felt when reading communist magazines. After attending his
first club meeting, the revolutionary words leaped from the page
(07:24):
and struck me with tremendous force. It was not the
economics of communism, nor the great power of trade unions,
nor the excitement of underground politics that claimed me. My
attention was caught by the similarity of the experiences of
workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered
but kindred people's into a hole. It seemed to me
(07:47):
that here, at last, in the realm of revolutionary expression,
Negro experience could find a home of functioning value and roll.
Around this time he wrote his first novel, Law Today,
but it was not published until after his death. The
John Reid Clubs disbanded in nineteen thirty four, but Richard
(08:09):
continued in his literary pursuits. He went to the American
Writers Congress in New York in nineteen thirty five. That
same year, he began preparing guidebooks for the Federal Writers Project,
A New Deal Relief program for unemployed writers. In nineteen
thirty six, he was transferred to the Negro Theater unit
of the Federal Theater Project and his writing career was flourishing.
(08:34):
He joined the South Side Writers Group and wrote two
plays based on his unfinished novel. He wrote the short
story Big Boy Leaves Home, which was published in the
Anthology of the New Caravan and received critical acclaim. He
worked as a journalist for New Masses of Marxist magazine,
but Richard was becoming disenchanted with the Communist Party. He
(08:56):
questioned Stalinist policies and recruiting and organizing for the party
was interfering with his literary work. Plus other Chicago communists
constantly questioned his loyalty. In ninety seven, he decided to
move to New York City. After the break, Wright publishes
his magnum opus. In a counter terrorism report the FBI
(09:29):
put out in the agency referenced a group of people
they called Black identity extremists. The report said that quote,
it is very likely black identity extremists perceptions of police
brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated retaliatory
(09:50):
lethal violence against law enforcement, and will very likely serve
as justification for such violence. It noted that the violence
committed by these extremists, or b I E S as
it called them, peaked in the nineteen sixties and seventies,
and that this violence was rare in the past twenty years,
but the six targeted attacks against police that it listed
(10:13):
since those could be indicative of a resurgence of targeted
violence in what they called the b I E Movement.
Throughout the report, the FBI took care to emphasize how
these extremists premeditated attacks were motivated by the perceptions of
an unjust criminal justice system, perceptions of unjust treatment of
(10:37):
African Americans in the perceived unchallenged the legitimate actions of
law enforcement. Here's US Representative Karen Bass expressing her concerns
about the report to former U s Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
So you should know that a lot of active surround
(11:00):
the country are very concerned that we're getting ready to
repeat a very sad chapter of our history where people
who are rightfully protesting what they consider to be an
injustice in their community, which is their relationship with police officers,
are now being targeted and labeled as extremists and are
(11:21):
going through periods of surveillance and harassment. She goes on
to ask him what the Department of Justice is going
to do to protect the rights of average citizens who
want to protest the actions of police officers. He says,
this department will not unlawfully target people, but too many
(11:44):
Black identity extremists. Labeling and targeting represented a spiritual successor
of co intel pro the grouping is fictitious. The cases
the FBI identified in relation to Black identity extremism had
no link to a unified movement. The label does, however,
(12:04):
provide a concise terminology to help spread fear a moniker,
not unlike the one given to serial killers for the
purposes of sensationalizing and mythologizing. The specter of a black
uprising looms closer when black identity extremists exist. In July
twenty nineteen, it was reported that the FBI ditched the
(12:27):
term black identity extremists and was opting to place several
categories it once used under the umbrella of racially motivated
violent extremism instead, but the point had been proven. It
was not about organized and targeted violence against the state.
Any challenge of the racial status quo was a threat
(12:49):
to an order to precious to let go of without
a fight. So Richard left Chicago the place that represented
his departure from a South and his journey deeper into
radical thought and social justice. But Chicago was not the
refuge he had worked it up to be. It had
(13:10):
also been a place where he lived in the boundary
between black space and white space. He rubbed shoulders with
white people in his Communist Party circles, but was still
confined by the limitations that white society imposed on him.
Years later, after he moved out of the United States,
but returned to Chicago briefly, he wrote an essay titled
(13:31):
The Shame of Chicago for the magazine Evenue. In the essay,
he described the ugliness of Chicago and says it never
became the promised land, the loaned for Mecca that he
envisioned when he left the South. In New York, Richard
helped start the magazine New Challenge. He also became the
(13:54):
Harlem editor of The Daily Worker and co editor of
Left Front, and to New York is where he had
his first book published. He submitted some of his stories
to a magazine contest that was open to Federal Writers
Project Authors, and he won first prize. The publishing house
Harper and Brothers then published four of his novellas as
(14:17):
the book Uncle Tom's Children in nineteen thirty eight. Uncle
Tom's Children confronted the horrors of Southern racism and black
people's resistance against it. But it was the book Native Son,
which he finished in nineteen forty with the help of
a Guggenheim fellowship, that really put right on the map.
(14:37):
Native Son follows Bigger Thomas, a twenty year old black
man living in poverty in Chicago's South Side. Bigger responds
to the weight of racism, oppression, and poverty with anger, fear,
and violence. Through that lens, he rapes a woman and
murders her and another woman. In the end, Bigger is
(14:58):
sentenced to death. The book was a bestseller. Black and
White folks Alike praised right for its brutal realism, for
its emotional residence, and for its unparalleled portrayal of the
reality of the effects of racism on its targets and
its perpetrators. The implication was that Bigger was not just
(15:20):
an animalistic criminal acting out of primitive instinct. He was
a Native Son shaped by an environment that encouraged isolation, hatred, resentment,
and violence in black people. That was a viewpoint that
could tug at the heartstrings of white people who were
prone to sympathy and understanding. The book dramatized the injustice
(15:42):
and bleakness that plagued black life under the thumb of racism,
and it emphasized the need for social change. The n
double a CP awarded Right the spin guard Metal for
the book. Native Son even went on to become a
play and a movie. But Richard's breakout hit was not
immune to negative criticism, especially from black people. Bigger's troubled
(16:06):
life and tragic end was predestined. He was one dimensional
and poorly developed, with no roots in real truth. Critics
also said the story grossly supported perceptions of black people
as simple, brutish, and doomed to tragedy because they were
poor and black. In nineteen forty nine, James Baldwin, who
(16:26):
was friends with Fright, wrote the essay Everybody's Protest Novel.
In it, he said, quote Bigger's tragedy is not that
he is cold, or black or hungry, not even that
he is American black, but that he has accepted a
theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility
(16:46):
of his being subhuman and feels constrained therefore to battle
for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him
at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life.
We need not battle for it. We need only to
do what it's infinitely more difficult that is accepted. We're
(17:13):
going to pause on the controversy and take a quick
break when we return. Right breaks with the Communist Party,
but still earns a spot on the FBI's watch list.
(17:34):
Wright had married a Russian Jewish ballerina, Dimo Rose Meadman,
in ninety nine, but they got a divorce in nineteen forty.
The next year, he married Ellen Poplar, a white woman
who was a member of the Communist Party. They stayed
together until he died, and had two daughters together, born
in nineteen forty two and nineteen forty nine. Nineteen forty
(17:58):
one was also the year that he published twelve Million
Black Voices, a folk History of the Negro in the
United States, a book about black life from slavery to
sharecropping to the Great Migration. Right also wrote the manuscript
for American Hunger, which wasn't published in its entirety until
after his death. Part of the second section, about his
(18:20):
involvement in and later rejection of the Communist Party, was
published in the Atlantic Monthly in nineteen forty four. By
this point Wright had grown completely disenchanted with the Party
and split with it. The party had turned pro war
and it did not challenge segregation. He also distanced himself
from Marxism, which had contributed to his perspective in his writing.
(18:44):
The first section of the manuscript was published as the
memoir Black Boy, A Record of Childhood and Youth in
nineteen He made this dark statement in Black Boy, I
used to maul over the strange absence of real kindness
and negroes. How unstable was our tenderness, How lacking in
(19:05):
genuine passion we were, How void of great hope, how
timid our joy, how bear our traditions, How hollow our memories?
How lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind
man to man, And how shallow was even our despair.
(19:26):
He was also busy with endeavors beyond writing. Fright gave
a bunch of lectures, traveled helped James Baldwin get a
grant and served on the American Council of Race Relations,
but he would soon make another major life changing move.
In nineteen he traveled to France, where he gave interviews,
(19:47):
met with publishers, and linked up with French intellectuals and
existentialists like Hertrude Stein, Jean Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Richard and his wife Ellen also traveled to other European countries,
and Richard even helped other American, African and European intellectuals
(20:10):
launched the Pan African magazine Presence Africane. The family returned
to New York in January of nineteen forty seven, but
the racism and anti radicalism was no longer tolerable, especially
now that he had spent time in France, the looks
he god for being in an interracial marriage, the discrimination
(20:32):
he still faced for being black. He wrote the essay
titled I Choose Exile, which was denied for publication in Ebony,
but in it he wrote that there is more freedom
in one square block of Paris than there is in
an entire United States of America. He and the family
(20:54):
moved to Paris in nineteen forty seven, where he remained
until his death in nineteen sixty. There he continued to
write essays and books, including The Outsider, Savage Holiday, The
Color Curtain, and The Long Dream, and he published a
collection of his lectures that he gave in Europe titled
(21:15):
White Man Listening. After traveling to the Gold Coast or
present day Ghana, he published the book Black Power, A
Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, in which
he espoused condescending views about so called African culture and
tribal customs, and implied the superiority of Western traditions and industrialization.
(21:41):
Right attended the Bandon Conference in Indonesia as a representative
for the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and he took part
in planning the first Congress of Negro Artists and Writers
in Paris. His work was so troubling to US authorities
that the FBI kept him under surveillance, targeting his passport
(22:02):
and keeping him on the Security Index of Major Threats
to the US. He was blacklisted in Hollywood, and he
was having trouble publishing his work in the US, but
he wrote and used his voice to champion social progress
until the end. He died in Paris in nineteen sixty
of a heart attack. Wright's work has been read worldwide,
(22:28):
translated into many different languages. His writing indoors, and it
has been credited with positively affecting race relations in the
United States, and it continues to be contentious in the
years after Wright's death. Many people have argued that his
depiction of black life in Native Son and much of
his writing reinforced negative stereotypes and distorted reality so much
(22:52):
as to be harmful, and Zora Neil Harston said that
his depiction of the South was unrealistic, writes words were
more than vehicles to entice white readers into thinking and
caring about the plight of black people. He influenced writers
who came after him, and he worked to immortalize the
(23:13):
truths of living well black that were often ignored in
literary traditions in favor of caricature, idealism, or moderation. In nineties,
Alas Poor Richard James Baldwin wrote and Uncle Tom's Children
and Native Son and above all and Black Boy, I
found expressed for the first time in my life, the sorrow,
(23:38):
the rage, and the murderous bitterness which was eating up
my life. Richard gave his lecture the Situation of the
Black Artist and Intellectual in the United States just weeks
before his death, when he was ill and under financial strife.
He said that black American artists lived in a nightmares
(23:58):
jungle and were repressed when they tried to speak out
against the racial status quo. He had previously been involved
with the American Society of African Culture a c I,
a funded organization, and he had given US officials who
were eager to curb communism information about Ghanaian politician Quam
(24:22):
and Cruma, But in this speech he took a sharp turn,
denouncing the US for spying on and trying to silence expatriates,
and claiming that most revolutionary movements in the West were
started by a gen provocateur to organize the discontented so
that the government can keep an eye on them. Some
(24:42):
people have suggested that Right was murdered. Right once wrote
that a person who doesn't have a theory about the meaning, structure,
and direction of modern society is a lost victim in
a world he cannot understand or control. The Black experience
(25:03):
is not monolithic, and neither are the ways black people
choose to pursue liberation right chose to try to get
people to acknowledge the cruelty and dehumanization that were the
products of race and class inequality. The criticism of his
work and questioning of its efficacy in bettering the lives
of black people was warranted, but the fluctuations in his philosophies, politics,
(25:29):
and feelings throughout his life chart the path of a
man trying to attain self actualization and trying not to
become a lost victim. His writing was purposeful and the
stakes were high. Mississippi Senator Theodora Bilbo, a white supremacist,
segregationists and Ku Klux Klan member, said the book was
(25:53):
a damnable lie whose purpose was to plant seeds of
hate against white people. He said at the book was
quote the dirtiest, filthiest, lousiest, most obscene piece of writing
that I have ever seen in print. I would hate
to have a son, our daughter of mine permitted to
read it. It is so filthy and so dirty, but
(26:15):
it comes from a Negro, and you cannot expect any
better from a person of his type. He said this
on the floor of the Senate in nine It's in
the congressional record. He was sure the book would bread
trouble in black folks if we were distributed widely, and
he wasn't alone in this thinking. Black Boy was challenged
(26:38):
or banned in many US public schools for inciting racial
hatred or portraying race relations as strained in hostile decades
after Bilbo s viewed his rage. So was the book agitational?
Did it dig up something unsettling in the white American
psyche that society could potentially sift through? I think? So?
(27:03):
That doesn't mean it fueled a revolution that turned race
relations in the US on its head. Right wrote about
how social conditioning and systems helped construct black identities and
built characters of black people of the South that many
would say lacked nuance. Black suffering was on display in
(27:24):
his work in front of a worldwide audience, and Right's
fiction waded into uncomfortable territory, like the sexual violence against
women that's in Native Son. But Right's views did not
represent those of all Black Americans, despite the notions of
critics who believed him to be the most eloquent spokesman
(27:45):
for the American negro in this generation. As one New
York Times obituary put it, Native Son definitely breathes differently
now than it did in the context of nineteen forty America.
Yet rights insistence on exposing the destruction of racism and exploitation,
(28:07):
and his use of literary naturalism if imperfect, remain relevant.
He responded to the moment in which he lived with
an intentional call for understanding and progress. Isn't awakening even
possible without discomfort? Yeah, our producer is Andrew Howard, Holly
(29:05):
Fry and Christopher Hasiotis are our executive producers. So we've
reached the end of season one of Unpopular, who will
be going on a short break. We'll be back in October,
but in the meantime you can be on the lookout
for a bonus content over the break, So keep your
eyes peeled on the feed and keep sharing the show,
(29:27):
keep sending us your thoughts and ideas and warm praises,
and we'll see you again soon
Unpopular News
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Yves Jeffcoat
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