Under the Strain of Color

Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry

Gabriel N. Mendes

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781501755316
• eBook ISBN: 9781501701382
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

In Under the Strain of Color, Gabriel N. Mendes recaptures the history of Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a New York City institution that embodied new ways of thinking about mental health, race, and the substance of citizenship.

The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, the writer Richard Wright, and the clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic emerged in the context of a widespread American concern with the mental health of its citizens. Mendes shows the clinic to have been simultaneously a scientific and political gambit, challenging both a racist mental health care system and supposedly color-blind psychiatrists who failed to consider the consequences of oppression in their assessment and treatment of African American patients. Employing the methods of oral history, archival research, textual analysis, and critical race philosophy, Under the Strain of Color contributes to a growing body of scholarship that highlights the interlocking relationships among biomedicine, institutional racism, structural violence, and community health activism.

1

“This Burden of Consciousness”

Richard Wright and the Psychology of Race Relations, 1927–1947

With the publication of Native Son in March 1940 and its wide circulation through the Book-of-the-Month Club, Richard Wright became the most widely known black writer in the United States.1 But in his everyday life and in his relations with the central institutions of American society he remained just another Jim Crowed black man. It did not help that he was also a member of the Communist Party USA. With the onset of World War II, Wright’s complicated status as a black man and a Communist and yet an American citizen placed him in a peculiar position in relation to state and nation. At every turn, he faced unyielding challenges to his political and personal status and identity—almost all of which played out in public.

On January 15, 1944, the Selective Service Local Draft Board 178 in Brooklyn, New York, rejected Wright for service in the armed forces. Initially classified 1A in July 1942, thus ripe for being drafted into the Jim Crow army, by October he was granted 3A status, a designation for men who were married with children. Knowing that he still might be called to serve, Wright applied for a commission in the Office of War Information “to work in public relations or on the staff of an army newspaper.” He was denied the post. Nevertheless he received another draft notice in January 1944, to which he replied with a long, emphatic letter of protest against serving in a segregated military. Within days the Brooklyn draft board reclassified Wright as 4F, unfit for service. The reason for rejection was “psychoneurosis, severe, psychiatric rejection; referred to Local Board for further psychiatric and social investigation.” A report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation stated, “It appeared from the Subject’s contacts with his Local Board that his interest in the problem of the Negro has become almost an obsession and it was said that he apparently overlooks the fact that his own rise to success refutes many of his own statements regarding the impossibility of the Negro’s improving his personal position.”2

It is perhaps strange now to consider how an agent of the U.S. state could conceive of Wright’s efforts to combat antiblack racism in terms of mental disorder. It requires imagining a juncture in U.S. history in which psychological discourses individuated human thought and action to such a degree that the category of the political was erased. In this moment one’s refusal to comply with the systematic oppression of black Americans could only register as an individual’s inability to recognize the rewards of living in a purportedly liberal society and his failure to reconcile and adjust himself to his place in the social order. To consider this reign of the psychological is to imagine the restricted ambit for expressions of dissent and desire for change governing discourse on the position of “the Negro” in American society in the mid-1940s.

The irony of this moment was that Richard Wright and a number of his fellow antiracist writers, intellectuals, and activists framed their struggles against various forms of oppression in psychological terms as well. In the 1940s, Wright was particularly determined to reveal the psychic dimensions of black-white race relations as a way of highlighting the mutability of human thought and behavior.3 He sought to denaturalize race relations by introducing the contingent dimension of the psyche. He believed that racism and its effects were not determined by nature, not fixed in the minds and bodies of different American people(s), but rather the result of socially created divisions that came to be expressed in psychic manifestations of fear and hatred. Yet the difference between Wright’s vision of the psychological and the hegemonic uses of the psychological as expressed in the state’s devaluing of the political was that Wright harnessed the psychological to the work of radical social and political change.

Psychology, both as science and everyday discourse, may have been the frame in which various state and civil society agencies, actors, and institutions determined the intelligibility or legitimacy, normality or pathology of U.S. citizen-subjects’ utterances and behavior. But there were individuals and groups who emerged in the 1940s speaking the language of psychology with distinctly different aims, aims that might even be called counter-hegemonic.4

This chapter traces Richard Wright’s intellectual and geographical migrations from Chicago, sociology, and communism to New York, psychoanalysis, and a broad-ranging nondenominational radicalism. He did not simply jettison one set of intellectual and political frames of thinking for another as he moved through these different spheres; the Chicago-based frames structuring his early social, political, and aesthetic thought would remain relevant and instructive for the whole of his life.5 But, in New York during the 1940s, Wright came to foreground the psychological dimension of racial oppression in his writing and public statements. The psychic effects of black Americans’ encounters with modern forms of oppression, he argued, had been ignored by both whites and blacks for far too long. “I’m convinced,” Wright noted in his 1945 diary, “that the next great area of discovery in the Negro will be the dark, landscape of his own mind, what living in white America has done to him. Boy, what that search will reveal! There’s enough there to find to use in transforming the basis of human life on earth.”6

Chicago: The City and the School

Richard Wright had lived in cities before—Jackson, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee—but nothing in his previous experience prepared him for the scale of modern industrial, urban anonymity and social anomie of Chicago in the late 1920s.7 In the opening sentences of American Hunger, the second part of his autobiography originally combined with Black Boy (1945), Wright recalled that “my first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies. Chicago seemed an unreal city whose mythical houses were built of slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of gray smoke, houses whose foundations were sinking slowly into the dank prairie…. The din of the city entered my consciousness, entered to remain for years to come. The year was 1927.”8

At the time he came to Chicago, soon to be twenty, Wright possessed, in his words, “a vague yearning to write.” He knew that in order to write he needed a more systematic understanding of his environment and the personalities of the people around him. “Something was missing in my imaginative efforts: my flights of imagination were too subjective, too lacking in reference to social action,” he later recalled. “I hungered for a grasp of the framework of contemporary living, for a knowledge of the forms of life about me, for eyes to see the bony structure of personality, for theories to light up the shadows of conduct.”9 In the early 1930s, as the Great Depression descended over the United States, Wright discovered a map for his attempts to understand his world and the people in it through his encounter with the research and faculty from the University of Chicago’s Department of Sociology.

The Chicago School of sociology fashioned a paradigm for urban sociology that focused on explaining the metropolis through methods gleaned from the natural sciences.10 Founded in 1892 by Albion W. Small, the Chicago sociology department became in the first half of the twentieth century the most prominent center for research into the nature of cities and the groups and individuals they encompassed. Led by Robert E. Park, who had come to the University of Chicago in 1913 after serving as a ghostwriter and public relations agent for Booker T. Washington, the Department of Sociology developed a scientific approach to the study of how cities came into being, how they were structured, and how different social groups interacted. The Chicago School also sought to explain the impact of cities on the personalities of modern men and women. Park charged his students with approaching sociology with “the same objectivity and detachment with which the zoologist dissects a potato bug.”11 There was in the city an ecology, a natural relationship between its people and institutions, which could be studied in the way a system of plants and animals was studied. Park explained, “There are forces at work within the limits of the urban community…which tend to bring about an orderly and typical grouping of its population and institutions. The science which seeks to isolate these factors and to describe the typical constellations of persons and institutions which the co-operation of these forces produce is what we call human…ecology.”12

Through a set of coincidences that almost seem scripted, Wright soon came into personal contact with the Chicago School of sociology. Mary Wirth, the social worker assigned to Wright’s family by the Cook County Welfare Department when his family sought relief during the Depression, was married to Professor Louis Wirth, one of the most prolific members of the Chicago School. And Wright had recently attended a lecture by Professor Wirth given at a symposium organized by a writers’ group he had just joined. One day in 1934, Wright walked into Wirth’s office at the University of Chicago and was greeted by Horace Cayton Jr., a graduate student in sociology at the time. Cayton, coauthor of Black Metropolis (1945), the classic study of black Chicago, recalled the meeting:

One day there came a tapping on the door of [Wirth’s] office. I opened the door and there was a short brown-skinned Negro, and I said, “Hello. What do you want?” He looked like an undergraduate, so I was perhaps condescending in a polite fashion, and, of course, he was also colored. He said, “My name is Richard Wright. Mrs. Mary Wirth made an appointment for me to see Dr. Wirth.” That made me a little more respectful. I told him to come in. “Mrs. Wirth said her husband might help me. I want to be a writer.”13

By the time he had come to Wirth’s office, Wright had already begun reading in the social sciences. But his venture into the halls of the University of Chicago brought him into direct contact with the era’s most formidable science of modern society.

The Chicago School’s research into the nature of human personality in an urban context not only influenced Wright’s understanding of black experiences of migration and city life, but also shaped the form in which he would express the meaning of those experiences. He found in Chicago School sociology both a paradigm for understanding the process of modernization through urbanization and a valuable narrative model in ethnographic life histories. In W. I. Thomas and Florian Zianecki’s The Polish Peasant (1917), one of the first comprehensive studies in U.S. urban sociology, the authors demonstrated the scientific utility of the life histories of Polish immigrants to Chicago. At the time the primary method of social investigation was the broad social survey, but Thomas and Zianecki emphasized that the life history was a valid piece of evidence from which to draw generalizations about the impact of migration and urbanization on the lives of a previously rural people.14

Wright wanted to convey the meaning of African Americans’ experiences of the transition from small, rural community to vast, urban society. In broad social terms, black migrants’ experiences of mass migration from rural to city life paralleled those of other racial and ethnic groups. Yet Wright was interested in the particular implications of blacks’ migration and urbanization. He began to write of the personalities of black men and women who had succumbed to the pressures of city life: “My reading in sociology had enabled me to discern many strange types of Negro characters, to identify many modes of Negro behavior; and what moved me above all was the frequency of mental illness, that tragic toll that the urban environment exacted of the black peasant.”15 What was initially a personal concern with the relation between migration and urbanization and their effects on black personality proved, in retrospect, to be the seed of Wright’s interest in establishing a clinic in the capital of black America: Harlem, New York.

For Wright, black life in the city was characterized by a tension-filled proximity to the most vaunted aspects of modern Western civilization—industry, commerce, skyscrapers, and most of all a sense of possibility. This proximity inspired the same impulses for acquisition and status shared by whites in American society. But denied the opportunity to act on these impulses, blacks on the whole were forced into a relationship to the rest of society characterized by Wright as “teasing torture.”16 This experience of modern society warped how black people related to one another and to themselves. Wright thus sought to use his writing to change how African Americans saw themselves, to show them that there were broad social and historical reasons for why they lived in poverty and disfranchisement, to show them that their personalities were negatively conditioned under the regime of white supremacy, that they were not born weak or fearful or angry, but made so by American society.

Wright saw “the Negro” as both a universal and exaggerated version of all oppressed groups in American society. (He would later discover that this sentiment was shared by his friend and Lafargue Clinic cofounder Dr. Fredric Wertham.) As he would later note regarding 12 Million Black Voices (1941), his study of black migration: “I want to show in foreshortened form that the development of Negro life in America parallels the development of all people everywhere.”17 For Wright the plight of “the Negro” was bound up with the plight of all oppressed people, and the fight for black liberation could mesh with the struggle of others for radical change. Wright explained, “I felt certain that the Negro could never solve his problem until the deeper problem of American civilization had been faced and solved. And because the Negro was the most cast out of all the outcast people in America, I felt no other group in America could tackle this problem of what our American lives meant so well as the Negro could.”18 Perhaps the Depression brought these insights to full consciousness in Wright, and maybe they were present since he began to put the history of “the Negro” in the broader social context ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “This Burden of Consciousness”
• 2. “Intangible Difficulties”
• 3. “Between the Sewer and the Church”
• 4. Children and the Violence of Racism
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index