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

Speaker 1: The following is a lecture by Martin Kilson recorded at the Third Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture on July 29th, 1971. Mr. Kilson speaks on Richard Wright's African Phase. Number one. Darwin Turner: Martin Kilson is a Professor of Government at Harvard University. He brings from Cambridge an outstanding professional reputation. In addition to energy, youth, and the passionate commitment to his field. He received his Bachelor's degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and his Master's and Doctorate from Harvard. In coming from Lincoln, he emerges from a Black school traditionally strong in his area if one also includes law in addition to government. Lincoln, I'd like to think now is the alma mater of Thurgood Marshall, Robert Carter, Franklin Williams, and it is here at Lincoln that Professor John Davis, the brother of Allison Davis, taught government so successfully for many years. I don't think I ever asked Martin Kilson. Martin Kilson: Right. He taught me government. Darwin Turner: Well, that's good. Professor Kilson is the author of Political change in a West African state and a co-editor or co-author of two other works, Apropos of Africa: Sentiments of American Negro Leaders Toward Africa, 1800s to the 1950s, and Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience. The list suggests a shift and Professor Kilson's professional interests from the examination of political phenomenon in Africa to the analysis of political and sociological problems somewhat closer to home. We use today, his knowledge of West Africa, a major preoccupation as we know of Richard Wright during his years of residence in France. I'm pleased to present professor Kilson, whose lecture has the title, Richard Wright's African Faith. Martin Kilson: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have somewhat revised the title of these lectures too, which I shall do in two parts because I was asked to do them in two parts. I've called it Richard Wright's African Orientation. Quite what the significance of the changes, I'm not sure, but somehow, somebody told me I should call it that. Now I shall talk in these lectures most generally about Wright's African Orientation in two phases. Maybe that's the reason for the change. I shall talk about what I have called here in my lecture notes, my manuscript, an early period or early phase namely of his African Orientation, namely 1927 to 1947, and I shall talk about a second phase, presumably I think a more mature phase of Richard Wright's African Orientation, 1947 to his death in my second lecture. Martin Kilson: So the topic, as far as what I shall say formally here today is Richard Wright's African Orientation: the early phase, 1927 to 1947. Now before doing that, let me make some disclaimers. I'm a political sociologist who spent these days, most of my research time researching in the political sociology of the ghetto, the urban Black ghetto, although in the last two months, I'm trying to finish writing a book that I researched in Africa on the sociology of grassroots politics in Ghana in 1964 to '66, and I've written six chapters already in the last two months so I guess I'll get it done by September 1st after five, six years of gestation, but all this is to say that I am not a student of comparative literature or any related subject. Martin Kilson: I agreed to do this for professors [David] and Corrigan because one, I was asked and I have an awful problem when I like people ask me to do things to say no, and two, because I nurse a certain kind of ambition of trying to break the boundaries of one's formal training and the study of the knowledge of man towards some more Renaissance pattern of knowledge and inclusion, if you will. There's a combination therefore being asked by people whom I like and respect and of this silly ambition because that's really what it is in today's world of highly specialized knowledge towards some Renaissance inclusion of one's, the knowledge that one accumulates before one dies that I've decided to come and do this lecture on a figure who is not a political figure, but who is strictly an intellectual or most prominently, an intellectual and artistic figure, Richard Wright's African Orientation. Martin Kilson: Now, in what I shall say, I'm really involved in trying to suggest a method of analysis, though last night I had a most animated and probably sometimes heated, but at least animated discussion with our chairman and Professor [Willesden] on this issue or what one does both in the social sciences and humanities with regard to how you accumulate and conquer different areas of knowledge, I believe probably simply because I'm a social scientist that no knowledge is possible, is available can be conquered short of mediation through methods. So I do have a method of analysis which ought to become clear that I employ trying to talk about a figure in the world of art and intellectual humanistic procedures, Richard Wright. Martin Kilson: First of all, I should like to suggest there are mainly these two periods of Wright's African Orientation. One, as I've said, is this early phase, '27 to '47. The other is this more mature phase, which I should talk about in more detail tomorrow, '47 to his death in 1960. The periods in Wright's African Orientation are distinguished by several characteristics, the 1927 to '47 period, which is the phase in which Wright produced his major work of fiction. Wright displayed very little explicit interest in things African. At no point, it seems to me, and I, as a novice might be quite wrong, but at no point, it seems to me in this era, this first phase did Wright as an artist and intellectual who was Negro, that is who was of African descent ever asked himself Countee Cullen's cryptic and profound query, what is Africa to me? Martin Kilson: In view of the fact that Wright emerged as an intellectual precisely in the period when race consciousness was central, indeed crucial to the mainstream of American Negro art and literature, it is surprising to say the least that Wright's variant of Blackness had little room for Africa, and mind you, it wasn't a situation of Wright not having leads or incentives from other Negro intellectuals. Indeed quite the contrary. An important constituent of the Black intelligentsia, particularly it's literati in the 1920s to the 1940s, the early phase of Wright's African Orientation, had evolved what might be called an Afric-centered Blackness. They were drawing upon African sources for larger artistic inspirations across the gamut of artistic formulation, music, painting, verse, dance, sculpture, fiction, and the rest. Martin Kilson: Some of the artists involved in this process were more over known to Richard Wright. For example, Paul Robeson, Claude McKay, Cullen, Katherine Dunham, Priemus among others. What then explains the apparent immunity Richard Wright experienced in regard to Afric-centered Blackness, to what I call Afric-centered Blackness in the 1920s to the 1940s? I'm sorry. I finally wrote these notes after I'd had dinner and an argument with people last night. I had thought about it for several weeks, but there's some things I should have edited. I didn't do quite well editing. Part of the answer to this question is a matter, of course, of definition and interpretation. If what one means by Afric-centered Blackness is 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 thirties to the forties in this first phase of his African Orientation was oblivious of African inspirations. Martin Kilson: But if one also means by Afric-centered Blackness the display, and this is a minimal definition as it were of Afric-centered Blackness as opposed to the maximal definition of Afric-centered Blackness, which I just gave you, if one means Afric-centered Blackness on the other hand as a secondary meaning, the display of a type of Black racial awareness that embraces all Blacks, wherever they are. That is what used to be called when I was a boy, in fact 30 years ago, a pan Negro or in "race man outlook," then if one would allow this definition or interpretation of this concept that I've introduced, Afric-centered Blackness, then I think Richard Wright falls within a definition of Afric-centered Blackness. Martin Kilson: First, let's look at Wright in terms of the first definition of Afric-centered Blackness and then in terms of the secondary or tertiary definition I've offered. In terms of the first definition, it is to be noted I think that even Richard Wright's book, 12 million Black Folks, Black Voices published in 1941 by Viking in New York City is only a 10th, in fact, as far as I know, as a novice to confront the folk essence of the Afro-American experience was devoid of evidence of an Afric-centered Blackness in terms of my first definition, but why should this be so? His first effort to deal explicitly with the folk essence of the Black experience in a book, in fact, which was subtitle a folk history of the Negro in the United States done, of course, with a joint author, a photographer, Rokam, I think. Rosskam. Rosskam. R-O-S-S-K-M-U-N. Martin Kilson: There was a joint author in little parentheses, if I remember. It says with collaboration of somebody. I found it 15 years ago in an old bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, my third year in graduate school for sale. It's a big flat portfolio book with a cover that's black and red, if I remember, red writing on it. 12 Million Black Voices, but why should this be in the book whose very subtitle is, as I said, a folk history of the Negro in the United States? Part of the explanation of this absence of Afric-centered Blackness in my first definition of the term in Wright's work, including that aspect of his work that dealt with the folk essence of the Negro lies, I suggest, in part in Richard Wright's education. Martin Kilson: If you consider those intellectual, those Negro intellectuals in the 1920s through the 1940s, whose works did exhibit an explicit Afric-centered Blackness as I have defined it in my first definition, they were almost without exception, intellectuals of middle-class and indeed in a high proportion of cases, a one calculation, one statistical calculation, 51% of the cases upper middle-class background. That is two or three generation from the middle classes, Black middle classes who had attended college and indeed often graduate school as well. Some of the artists whose work was stamped explicitly by Afric-centered Blackness in this era, 1920s and 1940s, also attended Negro colleges as I myself did. Martin Kilson: For example, Langston Hughes, as I guess was already said, attended Lincoln University. The point is that in nearly all cases, these articulators are the first explicit Afric-centered Blackness and Black art in the United States were college educated and middle-class and in 51% of the cases, according to bone, upper middle-class Blacks. Richard Wright on the other hand had a different origin. Wright was of stable working class background. Stable is a very important qualitative modifying term here, and of course, not college educated. Wright in fact, if you want me to do a footnote, which is not uninteresting to this matter, a footnote, Wright in fact, I say here in footnote two, seems to have harbored no small antipathy toward Negro colleges, which educated, of course, in this era, almost 99% of the Black bourgeoisie. Martin Kilson: We can deduce this, I think, from the rather bitter description of two Negro colleges, in fact of three, located not too far from Wright's home in Jackson, Mississippi, he gave to his biographer Constance Webb. There were no high schools for Negroes, he told Constance Webb. If a student wishes to continue his education, he had to attend the one Negro Catholic school or one of the Negro colleges, Jackson or Campbell and another, Tougaloo, somewhat distant, but not that distant from his home. Established after the civil war by Northern whites, like 99% of Black colleges, had an all white faculty and only those considered in "big niggers" sent their children there. Money alone indeed was not sufficient. At the time, there existed a blue vein, he says in "society" in Jackson, and if skin tone was not mixed sufficiently with white so that blue veins showed in the wrists, a Negro was excluded from these Negroes institution of higher education. Martin Kilson: That's just a footnote to elaborate another dimension of this very core, important variable in this production of this extraordinary intellectual figure in the twenties and forties. He was not college educated. This fact, I think explains part of the problem I've posed. It happened that highly ethnocentric and ethno-exclusive forms of Nationalism, whether it be expressed in literature and art or in politics, is initially middle-class or bourgeois in origin. As Lenin once quipped, scratch a nationalist and underneath is a budding bourgeois. For a variety of reasons, which I can go into here and you have to read some books I've written in the political modernization of African Nationalism, but for a variety of reasons, which I can enter here, the middle classes, the bourgeoisie have been prone throughout the industrial era to articulate their particular type of social and political power needs and highly ethnic centered. Martin Kilson: And therefore, what social scientists came to call at the end of the 19th century nationalistic terms. In doing so, they, as it were, resuscitate the past. They, through both bizarre and ingenious atavistic means call upon the service of the old, the fossilized artifacts of days gone by to breathe life into the new. The goal of course, if you accept the Marxist-Leninist analysis of cultural Nationalism which I accept, is to facilitate a redefinition of social and political power in the present more in favor of this emergent bourgeoisie. This of course, as I've just said, is a variation, my variation of the classical Marxist-Leninist analysis of the nature of cultural Nationalism, and I think it is valid analysis of the nature of cultural Nationalism and one that can be employed in our particular circumstance. Martin Kilson: Certainly, this conception of cultural Nationalism helps us to understand the powerful thrust toward an Afric-centered Blackness that characterized the race conscious artistic and literary tendencies among middle class Negro intellectuals in the 1920s through the 1940s. Richard Wright, I suggest, fell outside of this Afric-centered Blackness orientation precisely because he was not of bourgeois origin. In fact, even if Wright had been of petty bourgeois or lower middle class origin, he might well have fallen somewhere upon this Afric-centered Blackness in his work in the 1920s to the 1940s, the first phase of Richard Wright's African Orientation, for after all, one terribly important strand in the Afric-centered nationalist tendencies among Negroes in these years was represented by the universal Negro improvement association, commonly called the Garvey Movement. Martin Kilson: The Garvey Movement was an affair of the Black lower middle classes, especially the West Indian elements among the Black petty bourgeoisie, but also the American Negro counterpart made up of shoe makers, grocery store owners, money lenders, barbers, bar owners, poolroom operators, hairdressers, and the like, the petty bourgeoisie commonly called the lower middle classes in American sociological terminology. Petty bourgeoisie is a European Marxist socialist conception of the same thing, but alas, Richard Wright was not from this section of the middle classes either, thus lacking middle-class background of any sort, of some sort, Richard Wright fell outside of those particular type of social relationships among Negroes in the years between the two World Wars that were conducive of what I call an Afric-centered Blackness outlook. Martin Kilson: It is noteworthy by the way, if you want me to read another footnote, I may as well read it because it's here. I'm getting paid for it anyhow. Footnote four, it's noteworthy that Wright's mother, who was of course stable working class, stable working class domestic servant. You often call her a cook or the cook, entertain middle-class type aspirations and indeed tried from the vantage point, the brave fledging vantage point of stable working class to communicate some of these middle-class type aspirations to Richard directly and in other times, indirectly through her style of disciplining him. Richard, so he tells his biographer and also an intimate friend, Constance Webb, rejected his mother's effort to rear him in a way separate from what his mother called other children, a term frequent on her tongue. Martin Kilson: Son, she once remarked to Richard Wright, they are your color, but they aren't your kind, stable working class Blacks of course know this. I have experienced this as have stable working class whites. What is really important in this matter is that Wright's mother did not live long enough to apply systematically these middle-class aspirations, however fledgingly, to his adolescent and teenage years, maybe fortunately for Wright. I'll leave that to your observation. Of course, what Afric-centered Blackness represented intellect surely was simply a more developed or sophisticated conception of race consciousness than a mere anti-white instinctual or gut feeling. That is what Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Alain Locke and sundry other extraordinarily sophisticated and well-educated upper middle-class and middle-class Blacks were about between 1915 and the 1940s, a more sophisticated conception of race country dismissed than a mere anti-white instinctual or gut feeling. Martin Kilson: Anyone seeking to utilize a conception of race consciousness as an intellectual weapon and by extension therefore, a political weapon simply required some way of intellectually reinforcing this sort of native, racial, or ethnic consciousness. Doing this by resorting to one's cultural roots or historical heritage is common for bourgeois nationalists intellectuals throughout the industrial era. Wright however, was not a bourgeois intellectual in any meaningful sense of that term, thus he had to search elsewhere to render his particular gut sense of race consciousness more sophisticated and articulate. Where, that is where should he turn? He turned, of course, to the Marxist and communist movement, borrowing from it a variety of concepts and formulations, which helped render more sophisticated, his more primeval form of race consciousness, his gut instinctual form of race consciousness. Martin Kilson: Marxism, in a word, became Wright's equivalent of a sophisticated Africa-centered Blackness, and throughout his post 1930 intellectual development, Richard Wright used Marxism, I suggest, to communicate to the world, the larger world of power, a special sense of what made the problem of Negroes something larger than merely an American problem, which very much was in the same style of other Negro artists like Dunham, Robinson and others who use Afric-centered Blackness to do the same thing. Indeed, it is of some interest that during Richard Wright's early days in Chicago, he by spending many hours checking the street and in Washington Park, often encountered speakers who supported the Garvey Movement or some other variant of lower middle class Black Nationalism. Martin Kilson: But when, as it happened, these speakers approached Wright for membership in the Garvey Movement as they did, Wright, according to his biographer and to Wright himself, tried to explain, I'm quoting, "tried to explain that he was trying to be a writer letting down his own reserve, admitting them to personal territory because he had not the heart to say to them they would never succeed." Yet alas, the same Richard Wright trekking through the same Washington Park where he rejected an African focused Black nationalist overture to membership told his biographer that "his favorite group in Washington Park was called 'the bugs club,' which was a sensitive group of white Bohemian intellectuals, and it was through this time, mediated interestingly enough by white female intellectuals that Richard Wright acquired Marxist associations and outlook." Martin Kilson: Nonetheless, there was, I am still willing to argue, in Richard Wright's gut reaction toward the Garveyites speakers in Washington Park, an element which makes it possible to apply to Richard Wright at least my second definition of Afric-centered Blackness. Wright told his biographer that though he could not join a back to Africa Black nationalist organization like the Garvey Movement, "he loved," says Webb, "their passionate rejection of America." In Wright's rather supercilious, but sensitive own words, I quote, "they, the Garveyites sensed with that directness of which only the simple," and this is the supercilious element, "only the simple are capable, that they had no chance to live a full human life in America. Their lives were not cluttered with ideas," which is another supercilious statement which intellectuals are in the nature of making. Martin Kilson: It's a hazard, perhaps. Their lives were not cluttered with ideas in which they could only half believe. They could not create illusions, which of course, intellectuals do all the time, which made them think they were living when they were not. Their daily lives were too nakedly harsh to permit of camouflage. "I understood their emotions," says Wright to his biographer, "for I partly shared them." It is, I suggest, precisely in Wright's capacity to share those special, unique cultural and historical emotions that fired the back to Africa nationalists Garveyites that one locates the key to why Richard Wright fits my second definition of Afric-centered Blackness. Wright possessed, like Edward Blyden and others a century before him, what I should call a certain native identification with the special complex of historical, cultural, and psychological forces out of which the Negro American masses came. Martin Kilson: Africa was of course, part of this complex of forces, though Wright, as I have argued, never had the social class or bourgeois stimulus, which would lead him to fathom the African component more fully. It was precisely Wright's profoundly native connection, so to speak, with the complex of historical and psychological forces that created over centuries, 12 Million Black Voices, to quote Wright, to quib Wright, which ordained Africa, however tangentially, a subtle place in Richard Wright's conception of being Black in America. In this sense then, Wright possessed what might be called a natural pan Black awareness. He was in short a good race man. I should note in concluding this first lecture, that serious artistic articulation of Richard Wright's natural pan Black awareness, his natural race man outlook is apparent in his works during the period 1927 to 1947. Martin Kilson: But interestingly enough, when he makes one of his few specific references to Africa in works of this early period, which he does, for example, in his first novel, Lawd Today, written presumably according to his biographer, between '35 and '37, but not published until after his death in '63, Richard Wright is cryptic about the value of the African connection to Afro-Americans. The reference, I think, supports the particular dialectics of Wright's African Orientation in the first phase I have analyzed for you. Jake Jackson, the main thing figure in Lawd Today, and friends watching a back to Africa parade. "You know what I don't like about them folks," ask Jake. "What?" "They want us to go back to Africa. I don't like that neither. They sure nuts on that point, and if we went back to Africa, what would we do?" "You'll have to ask them that." "They nuts as hell," said Jake with an impatient wave of the hand.