Martin Kilson lecture, "Richard Wright's African Phase I part two," at the University of Iowa, July 29, 1971

Darwin Turner: [inaudible] to put now, and I am sure that there are many that come as a consequence of Mr. Kilson's address. Mr. Gibson. Mr. Gibson: I'd like to ask Professor Kilson why he dated the first period 1927. Martin Kilson: '27? Oh '27 is when he decides to leave after having got his, in effect, high school diploma, within 18 months of it, and to realize, what, according to his biographer, was an urge that is articulated as early as 1921, the urge to leave Mississippi behind forever and to go a city. And I suspect given the kind of communication that works, that you have in any Great Migration movement, which was going on since 1910, Chicago, or some other city becomes central, symbolic of that desire to move. And so he realizes that desire in 1927 and moves to one of the great urban, metropolitan ghettos of Chicago. Martin Kilson: '47 is a very important cut-off point because Wright realizes, in 1947, a new set of relationships, intellectual relationships, that make available to him, for the first time, Afric-centered Blackness near to my first definition of it, as against the second definition of it. And that's why I use '47 as cut-off point. I shall talk about that next time. I'll talk about it now if you want, but they said to do two lectures so... Speaker 4: We've been discussing here that Wright really wasn't as lower class as his other biography [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: He's stable working class, that's not lower class at all. Speaker 4: Or even that working class. Martin Kilson: Oh yes he's stable working class. All the stuff I know, not only that biographer, there's other stuff. Wright's stable working class with middle class aspirations. Speaker 4: Well? Martin Kilson: Well I don't know, I only know what I read. I don't know the man. Speaker 4: I mean, where would you... Martin Kilson: I mean I didn't live... Speaker 4: There was the fact that his mother also did teach school every so often. Martin Kilson: Yeah, but that was a church school. She was church, cause they were working class, well that's what I'm talking... He was raised by, his mother died, he was really raised in this important. [crosstalk] Darwin Turner: She was very ill and she in a sense disappeared. Martin Kilson: Yeah well indeed Constance Webb makes, gives the impression she's dead. Darwin Turner: That's not right. [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: Right, well that's a correction. But he's raised in this crucial adolescent phase by again, what I can only describe as a stable working class and highly middle-class aspirations. In all the descriptions about the kids around walking past the school. You should use Jackson State and you should use Campbell, you should play with. And he tried to, but Wright has a certain aversion to the special, I think, advantages that the middle class and upper-middle class backs had. A real special aversion which was again, probably a gut thing. I think Wright is a gut artist, quite frankly, and not a cerebral artist, but that's another question. Speaker 4: Perhaps you could say what you mean by stable working class. Martin Kilson: Well I don't... A sociologist means by stable working class, people who have predictable employment, and therefore predictable income. And with that special, so it could be all kinds of, it could be many things. It could be a taxicab driver, he's stable working class. He's likely to be working in the depression, when many other people are working. Stable, reasonably well-paid domestic servants. I come from a town of such people, in fact. My little town of Amra, Pennsylvania. 3500 people. Which is what it was in 1940, when I was a boy. Up from 1.5% were Black, was overwhelmingly, apart from a small middle class, was overwhelmingly stable working class. If you come to my town today, or even it you came to it 1940, you would think in fact, that looking at the homes, the yards, the roses, the hedges, that it was middle class. It was middle class, in terms of aspiration, and a high proportion of their kids have become professionals. Much more high proportion than you would find in the typical large-scale ghetto: a more pathological urban Black situation. Martin Kilson: But all I'm saying is that's what stable working class is. You see, from stable occupations as well as stable income, as sociologists look at it, come many things: a capacity, for example, to get credit, a mortgage, to be able to buy a house, et cetera. All kinds of things come. The early elements among the working class that got access to credit buying from the big stores, like Ward's or Sears Roebuck's of course were the stable elements in the working class. So stable working class is a precondition for middle class aspirations becoming available to an offspring outside of the middle class proper. And of course, the sons and daughters of the stable working class always, in the next generation, if they got any ambition at all, moving somewhere within the middle class. Martin Kilson: One major, initial middle class occupation for offspring of the stable working class, of course school teachers. And all the marvelous studies we have of why school teaching is so bad, because there are girls who are first generation out of the stable working class. Why they're so bad in terms of the intellectual equipment that they bring to the task. They don't get much solid intellectual equipment out of the stable working class background, but a lot of ambition to alter the life circumstance more favorably from that of the parent. Martin Kilson: So in that sense, stable working class is very important. But there's no evidence that Wright is anything, I don't know any evidence that he's anything more than that. Speaker 4: [crosstalk] Placement of Wright's family within the context of Black community Mississippi, that made [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: Well the stable working class, you see, is a very important advantage. I mean, census data, if you look at census data historically, if you take a city that was studied heavily by Warner, Lloyd Warner and others in the Northeast, Newburyport, which is classically called Yankee City, it was re-done by Stephan Thernstrom. Martin Kilson: Do you know the book Poverty and Progress? It's a really, very important book, which was in graduate school with me. It was his dissertation. It's a very important book, got him a job at University of California, that's no small operation. And then what he showed, is that stable working class was even more significant, you see, as a status above what Warner called the lower class, than Warner himself saw! He went back to the mortgage records, which had been kept in Newbury. It's a fascinating book. Martin Kilson: These were the guys, although they lived sometimes juxtaposed to really lower class Irishmen who drank half their goddamn weekly income and kicked their wives around... I lived once in an Irish work town that's why I know what goes on. And so forth and so on. The fact is described in Warner and other books on the East Coast cities. Although they lived close to them, the effective interactions were different. And what provided those effective interactions, which ultimately communicated new lifestyle through offspring, was the stable working class condition. I mean that's the effect what Thernstrom shows in his book. That's why he calls it Poverty and Progress. Martin Kilson: So all I'm saying is that I don't know what Allison Davis said, he's older than I am, he might have, he probably knew the man. I mean, I only, I just turned 40. Darwin Turner: One factor that... Martin Kilson: Davis must be in his 70s. Darwin Turner: Not quite, not quite. Martin Kilson: Pretty damn near to it. Darwin Turner: [crosstalk] The one fact of it, I know you're very familiar with his work but you might consider in connection with your definition of Wright's class there, is the caste barrier. Which seems to me to give a Martin Kilson: The color barrier. Darwin Turner: The color barrier. Martin Kilson: Within the Black subgroup. Darwin Turner: No, no I'm thinking of the caste barrier separating whites from Blacks. Which means, which gives to the stable middle class, as you've accurately defined it, a significance, a greater flexibility perhaps, than it would normally have. Martin Kilson: Right, good point. Good point. Darwin Turner: This is deep south we're talking about. Martin Kilson: Good point, good point. Because you know even where I come from, stable working class Blacks had more, within the Black subsystem in my home town, had more prestige and more expectations were made of them than their stable working class white counterparts. Martin Kilson: I mean for example, my home town, another stable working class were gardeners and chauffeurs and people who, what do you call the guys who are at the railway station? There were three of them in my, they went into, I live 25 miles from Philadelphia, they got on a, what do you call them? Speaker 5: Porters. Martin Kilson: Porters! Porters. That's another stable working class occupation, by the way. Very stable. Through depressions, through all kinds of Darwin Turner: It's what the caste barrier did to [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: Yeah caste. Caste barrier is very important. Yeah, very good. That's a good formulation. [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: All I'm saying it that it's still, it's not wrong to call it stable working class even though it's a basis for communicating middle class aspirations. And Wright was reinforced by those, Constance shows that, a number of other people who talk about his biography show that he was reinforced by Mama's expectations of something better always telling him "Leave those other kids alone." I know that cause my Mama taught me that too. And she had less fear than he did that I would perpetuate a third generation middle class situation for myself, because I had other things to build on; an educated father and so forth and so on. Speaker 6: But you have another problem though. If you give this kind of emphasis to the stable working class, there are at least three questions that arise in this immediate setting and one of them is the remark that Allison Davis made regarding Wright's mother's family. Which, apparently in Davis' judgment, would not be classified even as stable working class. Speaker 6: The second question has to do with the question of the number of Wright's contemporaries who are bourgeois, who were surprised at Black Boy, because they say "This is not the Richard Wright I knew." Speaker 6: The third problem then, becomes you're necessitated now to delineate to some extent, not quite so extensively, the meaning of bourgeois. Martin Kilson: Right, well I would say, I mean, strictly as a sociologist or political scientist, bourgeois is a measurable category, the indices of which are the years of post-secondary school education, et cetera, income, so forth so on, and the different levels of being bourgeois from a solid middle class, upper-middle class, to ultimately a Rockefeller, the upper class or what the proper, what the French properly called the haute bourgeoisie - the higher, and therefore by extension more powerful element. Martin Kilson: But, in my notion of bourgeois, and I've always used a notion that goes beyond the more measurable indices of that social rank, I employ the important variable that I think must one employ and which from the great American sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, at the turn of the century, the variable of lifestyle. Martin Kilson: Lifestyle is very important. I would say now of course lifestyle means many things but from what I know about Wright, through reading others who knew him more intimately than I do, I would say that although he, as I do, I prefer to live in a house rat-free than in one that has rats, and so on. You get my point, I prefer to have beef than to have pig tail, or whatever food the lower class or working class might eat. Although he preferred, either he preferred, as Lanine did or as Marx and Engels did, they preferred a structure of sustenance, let me call it, that is different from the structure of sustenance, I can't think of anything else, that is available to groups outside of the bourgeoisie. Martin Kilson: Yet, they were in no other sense apart from this identity of structures of sustenance, bourgeois. As far as I know, Wright was not bourgeois in any other sense. He wore jacket as I do. I wear a tie most of the time. I don't wear dashikis even though I'm as Black [inaudible] Black and before most of them who got on the bandwagon in the last three years ever heard of Blackness. But I don't know, style I think is the only way I can talk about it. Martin Kilson: His style was anti-bourgeois. His style and his political implications were socialist and at one point communist and if he had economic power or political power over economics in Washington, he would do something differently with it than if, I don't know, McNamara had economic political power over economic choices by the American power. You get my point. What I mean by, even though he and McNamara would share the same kinds of tastes for, I don't know, oxford cut suits or Brooks Brothers cut suits or the same Italian imported leather, which I gather is very nice on your feet, I can't afford that, I not that bourgeois. My shoes don't cost me much more than 14 or 15 bucks, that's not too much. But I gather Italian imported soft leather is up to 70, 80, 90 bucks. He might have those of tastes, but beyond that I would say his style and therefore his self-projection was not bourgeois. Darwin Turner: Now if we accept the point, just to pursue this a minute, and very quickly, it seems to me that Wright found the identification with the working class style artistically desirable. It was something that he has to create. Martin Kilson: Right, right. That's an interesting formulation. That might be an interesting psychological point for psychological insight into Wright, which is not uncommon for other bourgeois radical, if you want to call them, intellectuals who are of working class backgrounds. Martin Kilson: Yeah I mean like Odettes that's an interesting point. Speaker 6: What I'm trying to get at though is, it goes back to the initial question regarding stable working class and bourgeois, it seems to me you need to make this distinction more sharply because in Wright's case at any rate, his lifestyle at one point of course is dictated by his life circumstances. But this has very little to do with his preferences, what he would like to have. And it seems to me that if you make this the kind of distinction which you have made, then you have to tell us something else about Wright's concern for books, and Martin Kilson: Well we get a good view of where he gets those from [crosstalk] He doesn't get those from the family circle and that's another way of saying he's not middle class in any strict sense of the word. I mean at least from Webb, he gets those all extraneous, external, exogenous to the family. He gets them from a guy who's trying to produce a little, in effect, the first newspaper, in effect, the first Black newspaper in Jackson. He gets them from a man who becomes a little insurance man. And so and so on, he gets them from different kinds of people who inspire. Of course his school situation is important. And this is a measure I think of even his mother's effort to communicate middle class up educationally, upwardly mobile aspirations to him. It's clear, at least from what Web says that Wright makes more use of his school situation than most did, than what I even did. Martin Kilson: And it's clear I think, at least I think Webb is not a good book, she's not, she doesn't know anything, she has no biographic concept, it's a crazy book. I mean, as a biographer but, surely we get some idea of Wright the personality working out through what I guess psychologists would call his own achievement psychological orientation through whatever agencies were available to them. He exploited them more than most of us usually do. And I suspect that that probably reinforces my position, that what he had as a family situation was not in any meaningful sense middle class, but stable working class with a lot of upwardly mobile aspirations being communicated to him, given what I have described as being natural to the stable working class. Speaker 7: I think tenuously connected with this, the drift of the conversation, the question about caste. And I'm curious of all the number of references that show all the references to West Indians in [inaudible] fiction [inaudible] and I'm wondering if there's a chicken or the egg question is Garvey responsible for the epithets, monkey chaser and so on [inaudible] or indeed does Garvey come sort of under a cloud and do we have here anything an explanation, the West Indian [inaudible] in what Wright doesn't take [inaudible] Martin Kilson: Well, I don't think in Wright's case, you see I would still say something in the kind of way of going about, the dissecting the sources and nature of Wright's African orientation and I've tried to suggest kinds of questions one asks and the kinds of deductions one makes from the data available for elucidating those questions, will tell you more about his aversion, which is really what it is. It's a profound intellectual aversion. Although, an instinctual kinship. It's an intellectual aversion to the Garvey movement, is more near to the mark than I think any of the West Indian. And other people involved in this era, who the West Indian element is a really profound reason why they never really got close to these kinds of tendencies. Martin Kilson: But that would not be true for Wright, after all there were no West Indians in Jackson. I mean Wright is already relatively mature or at the point of becoming a mature man by the time he gets to Chicago. Not merely in Chicago, we have a good study in fact, of West Indian immigrants, a classic study by Ira Augustine Reid, called Negro Immigrants, it's a classic, it was his dissertation, one of the great American sociologists of the Urban Negro and also the American Negro Sociologist. Now, dead. It's published 1937, Columbia University Press. New York is really the West Indian haven, to my surprise in fact he shows 1920's census West Indians are almost a fifth of the New York Negro population. To my surprise, it's quite extraordinary. Martin Kilson: That explains of course Garvey, we have no good sociological study of the Garvey movement yet, but we should get it. It's somewhere in the making. Darwin Turner: [crosstalk] Harlem renaissance as well. [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: That's an interesting one. I'm not sure about that. I mean there are two West Indian figures of note in the renaissance, but the renaissance still had its thrust and structure before they appeared. I'm thinking of Cullen and McKay. Martin Kilson: [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: I don't think the West Indian connection. Now McKay. Speaker 7: What would be the attitude of Wright's mother's church, the Seventh-Day Adventist church, to an Afrique orientation, an Afrique Martin Kilson: Well no, because I just don't know. All I know is that that happens to be an interest of mine for a long time. The different kinds of American influences on the African continent. Seventh-Day Adventists were early in the missionary movement. In the white American African missionary movement, the Adventists were very important. Darwin Turner: A strong missionary church, that's right. Martin Kilson: A strong missionary church, having a real, what British sociologist social historian, Eric Hobsbawm, would call primitive rebellious impact upon modernization. Wherever you find Seventh-Day Adventists the data looks like you'll find a high tendency toward what they called separatist churches. Africans sort of culture center separatists churches breaking away from established European missions that created them 40, 30, 50 years ago. The Adventists is a kind of rebellious fundamentalism, theologically speaking. Martin Kilson: [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: Oh well Seventh-Day, that's typical of all middle class church. They weren't [inaudible] middle class of course, there's no doubt about that. Martin Kilson: [crosstalk] Speaker 8: I'm not certain that I got all three of your definitions [inaudible] remind me again. Martin Kilson: Afric-centered. What is that? Of Afric-centered Blackness? Well you can probably define it any way you want. What did I say? Martin Kilson: I'll find it for you in a minute. Yes, I said the problem is a problem to some extent of definition. If one means by Afric-centered Blackness, the use of specifically African-related or African-derived, and that's not a simply fanciful distinction. Martin Kilson: If one means by African-centered Blackness, the use of specifically African-related or African-derived materials, motifs, symbols, allusions, et cetera, in one's work of art, then, to my knowledge, Richard Wright's work in the 30's and the 40's was oblivious of African inspiration and therefore not Afric-centered Blackness in that particular definition. Martin Kilson: Then I gave a second definition. But, if one means by Afric-centered Blackness, the display of a type.. I don't how any way to put it but, I think I'm talking about something that did exist and does still exist... of a type of Black racial awareness that embraces all Blacks, wherever they are, what used to be called when I was a boy, the pan-Negro or "race man" outlook, then I think Richard Wright falls within at least this definition of Afric-centered Blackness. Martin Kilson: [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: I refer to the second one as a secondary or tertiary explanation because there is another level of explanation within that. But I was talking to myself I guess. Martin Kilson: [crosstalk] Speaker 8: Is your analysis of the Garvey movement as [inaudible] is it based on [inaudible] Martin Kilson: Oh yeah, oh there's a study. The typical petit bourgeois movement. Oh yeah, there's a study of it. There's a very good, the only good thing and the only study we have, although Vincent Thompson is coming out with a study, he's a social historian, works on these things, who's Black actually. But the only good study we've had up until whenever Thompson's thing's coming out, I think from Oxford, is the study by a white historian still at Wisconsin as far as I know, named Edmond Cronin, which was originally his dissertation and published by University of Wisconsin Press 1955, called Black Moses, subtitle The Story of the Garvey Movement. And that's the only good thing in it. It's a typical piece of narrative history lacking method and the theoretical conception of what the hell the historian's dealing with, it's mindless, you see. I'm not saying anything bad by it, it's invaluable, yet it's mindless in this larger sense of the kinds of deductions you can make from all these narratives, all these accounts of events from point A to point Z. Speaker 4: Yeah, I just wanted to go back to something that Dr. Lee was saying and that is, I think, that actually trying to account for Wright's lack, if you call it that, over the first definition of Afric-centered Blackness, and his education, his self-education, the kind of self-education that he himself made for himself, it was very important. And if you want to say that's the way [inaudible] yes Martin Kilson: Sure pursue that, that would be nice to pursue sure. [crosstalk] Speaker 4: The kind of authors [crosstalk] read and was using as models and teaching himself how to write [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: That's a nice pursuit. That would be a dimension of my class analysis. Speaker 4: Yeah. But they were also primarily white authors, and I think this is probably [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: That would not be the variable. I mean, for example, the special forms of Afric-centered Blackness that emerged among Africans themselves as well as the French West African intellectuals in the 30s who were close to French West Africans and often are considered French West African, like Aimé Césaire for example, or Léon Dalmas, or René Maran and others, they too formulated an Afric-centered Blackness out of the close readings of white authors. You see, that is not a variable. You see, ideas and intellectual inspirations are neutral. I mean hell, a Greek can take something from a Roman and vice versa on ad infinitum and generate his own particular... so that's neutral. Martin Kilson: I wouldn't say that would be variable. After all, I mean Sterling Brown and others, Hughes and others got most of their sense of the structure of modern fiction in the literary world out of white authors. That would not be a variable. Today, there's a tendency among the more mindless and almost intellectually demented, if you will, Black militants to talk this nonsense. But that's all utter nonsense. I don't think anyone that takes anything actually seriously, can ever deduce a defense for this kind of thing. There's not defense for it. There's no evidence anywhere in the world. Speaker 10: I'm wondering, you didn't mention anything about Wright's, let's say, philosophical and intellectual connection with Africa through the understanding of the development of the slavery process itself. For example, in Native Son, Max in his broad, sweeping condemnation of Western culture, links bigger through the preceding steps back to a native culture in Africa [crosstalk] and so forth. I'm wondering, does this qualify in your mind as a sort of Afric-centered darkness, Blackness, of the first type? Because it's here that Wright sees that somewhere back along the line, he was part of that. Martin Kilson: It's all backdrop, it's very different in Wright as it is in. You might, I simply try to throw out a certain set of hypotheses in a way of trying to elucidate the validity of those hypotheses for understanding Wright's African orientation. So I've not said anything, I've never done anything like this before quite, except for writing short stories, some of which got published in out-of-the-way little journals but they're not worth anything. Martin Kilson: But all I'm saying is that I wouldn't argue, you see, I wouldn't fight on anything at all that literally that I've said. My purpose is really to try and suggest how you analyze a problem. But I would say that again, that's why that never stuck in my mind. It's a backdrop. It's very different from what's involved with many of these other people who are working with these materials. It's very different from the influence of the Afric-centeredness on someone like August the Savage. Martin Kilson: It's a very different thing. You see something ultimately as she comes under this influence and actually is a case of a bourgeois girl who actually joins the lower-middle class Garvey movement, by the way. The influence is more intrinsic, that's the term I'm looking for. It's as if it's a backdrop he's putting up. We all put backdrops to something where that's more central in our concern, and that's what I would say. His effort to connect bigger to something larger than his American present existence is backdrop. Martin Kilson: I might be wrong. One might find, if one pursued, that your hypothesis, you could re-read passages. That's really what analysis is all about, introducing a new hypothesis, re-read, and find something that no one else saw. You might write a PhD thesis on it you might be able to find it, do it. I wouldn't want to discourage you. All I'm saying is that when I, I completely forgot about that. I would say it's backdrop, what you're. Speaker 6: What would you say about his dealing with mostly [inaudible] Black voices, to which you referred several times. He makes some effort, it seems to me, to suggest Boston's building the law of the land and the Black peasantry in which he seeks to suggest that there is a distinctive and unique quality in the life of the peasant which may... would you put that under your first definition of Afric-centered Blackness, or your second one? Martin Kilson: No that's strictly under the second. And of course that's a strictly Marxist book. Any Marxist could have done that book. I would say any Marxist intellectual [crosstalk] Well, yeah similar books were done at the same time, even earlier. I mean, that is basically a Marxist. That is the point where Wright already found a mediating set of concepts and formulations to communicate to the larger world his particular, or my second-level understanding of how he related to an Afric-centered Blackness. His more instinctual, primeval gut conception of the horror of being Black in American society. I don't know, I mean, that's how I read when I first laid my hands on the book now 15 years ago. Twelve Million Black Folks: a Folk History of the United States. That's how I saw it. And I would have thought that, well I don't know. I don't know. Speaker 6: I don't think any Marxist could have written it. Darwin Turner: No one denies, I think Carlton, the essentially Marxist orientation of the book. What you are talking about, it seems to me is something special and very germane... and that is the particular association of Black people with the soil. And the kinds of ideas that have been associated with that, because the fact of the matter is that earlier in the 20s, the association was made of the soil in Tumor and other intellectuals of that time with Africa. So that extension is, as you have indicated, is entirely a middle class phenomenon. But it's interesting that here, Wright in coming to it, largely, it seems to be through the class ideals which are framed by Marxism. Darwin Turner: Would, accept, some other ideas and some other associations partly because he is Black. [crosstalk] Speaker 6: That's why I said not any Marxist could have written it. Darwin Turner: And so I would say that only a semantics thing. That is seems to me that we, it's very interesting how these two things do work together here. Yes, go ahead. Speaker 11: Yes I was wondering, what notable literary works written after the closing of the renaissance would fulfill your first definition of Afric-centered Blackness? That is writing by, literary works by Black artists? Martin Kilson: Well it's a complete shift. You're right. I mean, the renaissance had it. I have in my briefcase the, I suspect the first major, literary critical focused social history of the renaissance. The galley proofs of it, because this guy is a very good friend of mine named Nathan Huggins. It's Oxford University Press that's bringing it out. And what he shows is that other variables enter the conceptual and intellectual formulation of being Black as an artist and as an intellectual in America. World War II was really the watershed. And you haven't got back to it until of course the last ten years, at least not the last five years of the current patterns. Darwin Turner: Is this the history of the conception of Blackness that hasn't been written? Martin Kilson: It's the history of the Harlem renaissance social, it's a literary critical focus, social history, which is a very bold thing for a social historian to do of the Harlem renaissance. That's what it's called, it's called The Harlem Renaissance, subtitle, a Social History and it's going to be out any day now, cause I've had this for — [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: Nathan Huggins. H-U-G-G-I-N-S. He's a Harvard-trained historian. We were in school together and he's now at Columbia. No, I mean that's, well we're back at it again of course. We're back at it again. But it's a very different phenomemon now. I haven't quite figured out even how to characterize the current Afric-centered Blackness. It's something that neither Tumor or McKay or Richard Wright would have prophesized. Martin Kilson: One, it's more political. You make more immediate political deductions from the intellectual, artistic, literary formulations today, than you would have done in 1918, 1919, 1920 and so forth and so on. Two, it's now more contrived, you see, because of what's happened in the intervening two and a half generations in Africa itself. Have you been to Africa? Well I go about every other year. Although this mean in the last thirteen years of being a social scientist are, but I've spent about five years of my life out there. And it's just the opposite. Martin Kilson: I'll give you an example. Modernization has occurred in all of its bizarre and distorted and twisted forms that we have it. Almost in certain sense an exaggerated form. Whereas, for example, they would advertise I guess today in Ebony, the afro wigs. You know what are advertised in newspapers, in magazines in the African Coast? Has anybody, no one has been ever? Straightener, straightened hair wigs, and so forth on ad infinitum. It's an extraordinary thing but you see if you're coming into a sense of Afric-centered Blackness today, you never saw Africa and yet Africa is somehow the source of all these formulations, you're somehow fifty years, or almost thirty, forty years behind. Martin Kilson: That's the extraordinary, extraordinary transformation. You see, no African elite runs around talking about separatism from honkeys. That has no meaning. How you going to get capital? How are you going to get the engineers to develop the railroads? How you going to get your students? And so on and so on, you get my point. These transformations have let a certain kind of profound fabricated, or contrived component to the Afric-centered Blackness that is indeed more pervasive today among all intellectual types, whether they have formal education or not, than ever, no one, anyone would have conceived in the 20s and 30s and 40s. Speaker 11: [crosstalk] in '27 and '47, Wright is writing at a time that falls between the impetus that the writer would get from the Harlem renaissance and another writer would get from [inaudible] too. And I was wondering what emphasis there would be upon Afric-centered Blackness during that in-between period of the renaissance and [inaudible] where Wright's writings do fall, in this '27 to roughly '47 period. Martin Kilson: Well [crosstalk] Well really by '47 he has sort of shot his load, if that's the expression, as far I know. I haven't read all Wright. But I would say, you see again whatever ties there were in the late 40s and early 50s on his part, they would all be essentially sort of staging ties. I mean a group of my teachers at Lincoln, two very important ones, who had definitely can, by that time, that is I'm thinking of '56, '57, '58 that's done. Aubrey Davis, the brother, younger brother, an extraordinary American political scientist who heads political science for a long time now. [inaudible] at CCNY and Horace Mann Bond, one if the great American sociologists of education, who was head of my university. My alma mater, between '53 and '57. They went to, they became part of an effort of the more sort of cosmopolitan and sort of race-minded elements of the Black bourgeoisie in the late '50s to forge ties with this emergent African bourgeoisie. That's a fair description of what happened. Martin Kilson: I was actually in grad school, I was a part of it. There were three young guys who were drawn into it. We were sort of errand boys and they got money, of course as usual in this post-war business from honkeys. Whiteys paid for it, they went to Paris. There's a picture in fact, of Horace Mann Bond, John Aubrey Davis and another now-deceased American Negro philosopher. [crosstalk] No his name was Fontaine. Cook was not in that picture. Its in the [crosstalk] Cook was there too, right. But Fontaine is the only other one in that picture with Wright in the Constance Webb book. Martin Kilson: Does anyone have the Webb book? You'll see a picture of Wright in '56 at the first gathering of this effort on the part of the... the French Africans agreed. [inaudible] had some contact with these people. Cook was one, with whom French [inaudible] had an earlier contact in the 40s and he agreed, they agreed, and they created a thing called the American Society of African Culture, which became the official American organ, branch in the Western hemisphere, the official Western Hemispheric branch, based in New York City, of the International Society of African Culture, which has been shaped by French West Africans in the late 40s. And in the late 40s in fact, Wright had met and had some ties with Alioune Diop, who helped shape the International Society and his journal Présence Africaine, came out about, first issue '47 or '48. Martin Kilson: But that's very different. You see, that's all been shot to hell with the new Afric-centered Blackness as an actual extension of the new political Black militancy. So that's all been shot to hell. Probably you never even heard of the AMSAC, they used to call it, the American Society of African Culture. I was a founding member. I was just a little old graduate student. But I was an errand boy for these two teachers of mine and one [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: That's right, he told me to join and it's one of those things. He helped me to get a grant once. It's one of those things, we all do that. We're all apprentices or whatever. I didn't mind it. In fact, I picked up some cues. I learned something from it. Darwin Turner: Wouldn't you say that group, who looked at the question again at what survived in that in-between period, would be in constant movement in Chicago and in New York. The kind of things that Malcolm X's father, for example, who was a Garvey-ite and remained one until he was killed. I found that I remembered them from Chicago through the years [crosstalk] and Martin Kilson: They survived, [crosstalk] they survived. But they were all stable working class, lower middle class propositions, sure they survive. Darwin Turner: And Wright would know of them. Wright would have, partly because of the kind of thing he did for the government research, because he was hired by the WPA. He would have access, obviously to [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: Oh yes, sure. But I don't get the connection to what he did with it intellectually or artistically. Darwin Turner: I would say the shape that it takes in law today and the other references to it, it seems to me you're essentially right, it would be kind of basic rejection of any kind of a larger commitment, but he knew [crosstalk] Tom? Tom: I suspect that you're probably, I think you're right, I get to the same conclusion. Wright's probable attitude towards the [crosstalk] You didn't present yourself as a sociologist in that [inaudible] case. But there is a kind of problem in the reading, in your reading of that passage about nationalism, it seems to me, because it seems to me that we're supposed to, in many ways, think the opposite of whatever Jake thinks. So Jake, for example, talks about Marxism and the reader is supposed to see his limitations because his attitude toward Marxism is [inaudible] Darwin Turner: and this other material is presented similarly Martin Kilson: Maybe, maybe. It's a kind of symbolic put-on. Tom: Well, there's the irony there, Wright seeming different [crosstalk][inaudible] Speaker 15: Yes I'm wondering [inaudible] if Wright's [inaudible] with the [inaudible] Garvey-ites in the direction of the more culturally [inaudible] or Afric-centered persons [inaudible] had something to do with the [inaudible] political economic aspects of that [inaudible] Martin Kilson: That's a very good point. If you're saying, and I would agree with this, if you're saying that as a result of Wright's baptismal, as it were, in the Marxist worldview, as against other worldview, Wright had one thing that is not very well-represented among any of the Afric-centered renaissance people. He had an extraordinary sense of pragmatism. Political pragmatism. In other words, Wright could say "I agree with all the symbolic elements, emotional substructure, of all the Afric-centeredness thing you're doing, but it won't solve your problem. Only some way of getting, of re-defining, and getting the skills and tools with which to redefine the structures of power, of force, of command, that dominate modern urban life, can you ever solve." And his model of doing that was a socialist, Marxist, communist model. Martin Kilson: But if you're saying that, yes. I would agree that that's an important distinguishing feature of Wright, relative to these other people. If that's what you're saying. Speaker 15: Then how do you explain [inaudible] because you basically have two poles. You two poles, you have the communist in the political as well as the economic. And you that and you also emphasize [crosstalk] Martin Kilson: Well that's gut, and he says [crosstalk] Speaker 15: [inaudible] I think in some ways, Wright's anti-bourgeois feeling might have gone towards Americans and it might have gone to the international- Martin Kilson: Wright was an elitist. Most Marxists are elitists. I'm sort of a Marxist. And I'm sort of an elitist. But I don't want to have to apologize for it. But that's to say that you prize highly those attributes of man that are more a function of discipline [inaudible] you probably know the attributes. A minimal definition of what you mean. I don't mean in any negative sense. Wright did definitely that. And although I don't get much evidence that he communicates to his biographer, this constituent of his reaction to these lower middle class Garvey-ite people. Martin Kilson: Another his biographer talks about is guy who developed both in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York boycott movements among sort of skilled working class, lower middle class to get that jobs. His name was, he wore a turban and boots, what was his name? There's a good account on him in Claude McKay's book on... well here's another one of these nationalist leaders. Martin Kilson: Wright somehow intellectually could not identify with the, I would argue. And he was as much an elitist as Jean Tumor or Langston Hughes or someone else, from a different perspective on the same set of problems and issues. But I would say basically, Wright's a pragmatist. I think even he leaves the communist party out of pragmatic instincts. I will talk about some of this, there's a curious mixture of elitism and pragmatism in Wright as he, in the late 40s and 50s as he gets close to Africa for the first time. He had never been to Africa. He never had any contact with African students, unlike Langston Hughes and McKay and others. I will talk about that my next time. Martin Kilson: The second phase is interesting. It's a dialectical outgrowth of the first, I think. Speaker 6: Let me just, I think I'd like to have you pursue this a little further along by raising a question with you now as a political scientist regarding Wright as an outsider, marginal man, who if we look at him from the perspective of any one of these rather demanding and compelling groups, he is not likely to fit into any one of them at all. So that he is going to almost always have to be a pragmatist. Could you speak to that? Martin Kilson: Well I don't know, that's why I'm interested in Wright. I'm a marginal man, but I won't talk about myself. I really am. I got analyzed and I was convinced after getting analyzed about nine years ago. Darwin Turner: That's an expensive discovery! Martin Kilson: Well yeah, I could afford it but, yes, Wright is definitely a marginal man. Has someone written on Wright? I don't know the criticism on Wright. Has someone written on Wright about, there must have been someone, must have been. Speaker 6: The outsider is a term that he uses and Martin Kilson: Yeah but he is a marginal man. Really, an extraordinary. See I love marginal creatures but that's another thing. And I hate people who are like everything else that's going, I don't hate them, they don't interest me. Let's put it that way. My parents are like everything else that goes, and so are my kin and I don't hate them, they don't interest me. No, Wright's a marginal man if you're asking me to disagree, he definitely is. He's a great marginal figure. Speaker 6: What is the function of his marginality in terms of these questions [crosstalk] in terms of Garvey-ism, in terms of communism, in terms of all of these other things? Martin Kilson: Right, I would say that that kind of special ego that is at the center of marginal personalities will never allow a movement. That is to say, a systematic, perpetual structuring of principles, immerse them and inundate them because at the end of the day they go up against the wall, I mean as my psychiatrist told me [inaudible] you got to go against the wall. Literally I wouldn't be here today, I'd be... Martin Kilson: I mean yes I would agree fully that this is another component if you went at Wright from the psychological dynamics, the psychodynamics of the man. Wright, absolutely, would fall central into a marginal analysis of the man, his thoughts, his works, both his intellectual political choices, et cetera. And all the vacillations and variations on those. Oh I would agree fully. That's a first class point. Absolutely first class. Again, I was mainly talking, I was trying to put the man in the only context that I have some control over which is political sociological context and so didn't really deal with that issue. But that would elaborate a lot, I'm sure as much as a political sociological effort to talk about Wright's African orientation, I'm sure that would elaborate a lot about it. Someone should do it. I'm sure you'd get a whole bloody book out of it. Darwin Turner: We have reached the end of the margin. That is the time margin, that is. But I thank very much, Professor Pilson for his most animated [inaudible]