Black Power

Richard Wright

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062018373
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Threeextraordinary and impassioned nonfiction worksby Richard Wright, one of America's premier literary giants of the twentieth century, together inone volume, withan introduction by Cornel West.

"The time is ripe to return to [Wright's] vision and voice in the face of our contemporary catastrophes and hearken to his relentless commitment to freedom and justice for all." — Cornel West (from the Introduction)

Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos is Richard Wright's chronicle of his trip to Africa's Gold Coast before it became the free nation of Ghana. It speaks eloquently of empowerment and possibility, freedom and hope, and resonates loudly to this day.

The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference is a vital piece arguing for the removal of the color barrier and remains one of the key commentaries on the question of race in the modern era. "Truth-telling will perhaps always be unpopular and suspect, but in The Color Curtain... Wright did not hesitate to tell the truth as he saw it" (Amritjit Singh, Ohio University).

White Man, Listen! is a stirring assortment of Wright's essays on race, politics, and other social concerns close to his heart. It remains a work that "deserves to be read with utmost seriousness, for the attitude it expresses has an intrinsic importance in our times" ( New York Times ).

Black Power

A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos

INTRODUCTION: APROPOS PREPOSSESSIONS

In today’s intellectual climate—a climate charged with ideological currents in the service, paid or voluntary, of some nation, party, movement, or interest—it behooves a writer reporting in nonfictional terms on vital material to lay before the reader his working frame of reference, his assumptions and preoccupations. If the present writer were less serious or responsible, he would not be concerned about this, but since he knows that he is dealing with material out of which our destiny will partly be shaped, he is anxious to place himself in a position where the reader will have no doubts as to what he is up to.

During my lifetime I’ve witnessed a radical change engulf more than half of human society; some nations have disappeared and new ones have risen to take their places; some social classes have vanished and others have come into being…. These changes were not unexpected on my part; indeed, I labored to help bring them about. My belonging to a minority group whose gross deprivations pitched my existence on a plane of all but sheer criminality made these changes welcome to me. From 1932 to 1944 I was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America and, as such, I held consciously in my hands Marxist Communism as an instrumentality to effect such political and social changes.

Today I am no longer a member of that party or a subscriber to its aims. Let it be said that my relinquishing of membership in that party was not dictated by outside pressure or interests; it was caused by my conviction that Marxist Communism, though it was changing the world, was changing that world in a manner that granted me even less freedom than I had possessed before. Perhaps, in time, I could have brought myself to accept this Communist suppression of freedom on a temporary basis, but when historic events disclosed that international Communism was mainly an instrument of Russian foreign policy, I publicly and responsibly dropped its instrumentality and disassociated myself from it.

Yet, as an American Negro whose life is governed by racial codes written into law, I state clearly that my abandonment of Communism does not automatically place me in a position of endorsing and supporting all the policies, political and economic, of the non-Communist world. Indeed, it was the inhuman nature of many of those policies, racial and otherwise, that led me to take up the instrumentality of Communism in the first place….

Hence, the problem of freedom is still with me. The Communist instrumentality which I once held in my hands has built up a slave empire of 800,000,000 people; and the Western world, of which I am an uneasy member, has not materially altered many of its attitudes toward the aspirations of hundreds of millions of minority peoples caught by chance, time, and culture within its wide sway of power.

In this dilemma of a divided world one elementary fact stands out undeniably: the victories of the Communist instrumentalities were largely won by skilled Communist appeals to the Western sense of justice, by Communist exploitation of the thwarted traditional hopes of Western man. In fact, it can be definitely stated that Communist strength is predicated upon Western stupidity, moral obtuseness, foolish racial jealousies—of the abandonment by the West of its own ideals and pretensions…. (“Capitalistic contradictions,” the Communists call it.)

If Western man has irrevocably decided that his record of dealing with the colored part of mankind is just and beyond criticism, that his way of life is perfect, that he has a godlike right to determine and time the development of mankind according to his own convenience, that his mere presence in this world is a blessing to the less fortunate, that he will make no meaningful concessions to the sense of justice and freedom which he himself helped to instill in men’s hearts—if this is the stance of Western man, then the last and strongest weapon of the West has been voluntarily surrendered to the Communists, the most solid moral ground of the last two thousand years has been gratuitously vacated, and the chances of a Communist global victory thereby immeasurably enhanced.

The aim of this book is to pose this problem anew in an area of the world where the issue has not yet been decided, an area that is proving a decisive example for an entire continent. The Western world has one last opportunity in Africa to determine if its ideals can be generously shared, if it dares to act upon its deepest convictions. China has gone the desperate way of totalitarianism; India teeters on the brink; and now has come Africa’s turn to test the ideals that the West has preached but failed to practice….

Let me be honest; I’m not too hopeful. The Western world does not even yet quite know how hard and inhuman its face looks to those who live outside of its confines. One of the aims of this book is to show you that face in its characteristic historical expression, to show you that face in terms that maybe you can understand and recognize. I don’t know. It may well already be too late. If you can feel that the person who presents these perhaps unwelcome facts to you does so with the desire of making you aware of your moral stance, of making you realize how others see and judge you, then you might read these lines with care.

In presenting this picture of a part of Africa, I openly use, to a limited degree, Marxist analysis of historic events to explain what has happened in this world for the past five hundred years or more. If anyone should object to my employment of Marxist methods to make meaningful the ebb and flow of commodities, human and otherwise, in the modern state, to make comprehensible the alignment of social classes in modern society, I have but to say that I’ll willingly accept any other method of interpreting the facts; but I insist that any other method must not exclude the facts!

But my utilization of Marxist instrumentalities of thought does not necessarily commit me to programs or policies popularly associated with Marxist philosophy. The measures which I recommend at the end of this book do not derive from any programmatic theories of any political party. They are derived from my concern about human freedom, from what I know of the world, from what I saw and felt in Africa, and the concrete situation of the Convention People’s Party of the Gold Coast.

This book seeks to provide Western readers with some insight into what is going to happen in Africa, so that, when it does happen, they will be able to understand it, so that they will not entertain the kind of illusions that held forth about China; my point is that if Africa today is in turmoil, it is not merely the omniscient hand of Moscow that is fomenting all the trouble; but that, given the harsh background of Africa and the numbing impact of the West that it has suffered, what is happening was bound to happen. Frankly, this current mania of ascribing all the world’s unrest to Russian Communists simply credits the Russians with more intelligence than they actually possess.

The issue of who is to blame in a colonial nation that is determinedly actuated by Western ideals to throw off the yoke of foreign rule is a tricky one. The popular assumption is that colonial people are happy and that only evil foreign agents are stirring up strife, but the facts of life in the Gold Coast do not bear out such tortured contentions. Indeed, the greatest incentive to the growth of Communism in Africa today would be the attempt on the part of the West to throttle the rise of African nations; such an attempt at crushing African aspirations would drive the Africans straight down the road that China is so bloodily traveling…. That road began with Mau Mau.

The historical material in this book is drawn exclusively from bourgeois sources, if that is of any comfort to anybody. The interpretations of facts, their coloring and presentation, are my own, and, for whatever it is worth, I take full responsibility for them. And I think that time will bear me out.

This volume is a first-person, subjective narrative on the life and conditions of the Colony and Ashanti areas of the Gold Coast, an area comprising perhaps the most highly socially evolved native life of present-day Africa. The choice of selecting the Gold Coast for such an intensive study was my own and the judgments rendered are not comparative. I felt that it was time for someone to subject a slice of African life to close scrutiny in terms of concepts that one would use in observing life anywhere. Thus, some conclusions arrived at in these pages might well startle or dismay those who like to dote on “primitive” people….

Africa challenges the West in a way that the West has not been challenged before. The West can meanly lose Africa, or the West can nobly save Africa; but whatever happens, make no mistake: THE WEST IS BEING JUDGED BY THE EVENTS THAT TRANSPIRE IN AFRICA!

RICHARD WRIGHT—PARIS: MAY, 1954

PART I

Approaching Africa

Only in one particular did the freedom accorded in the slave trade differ from the freedom accorded in other trades—the commodity involved was man.

ERIC WILLIAMS’ CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY

One

The table had been cleared and the coffee was being poured. The Easter Sunday luncheon was almost over and we were stirring the sugar in our cups. It was so quiet that the footfalls from the tranquil Paris street below echoed upward. It was one of those moments when, for no reason, a spell of silence hangs in the air. I sipped my coffee and stared at the gray walls of the University of Paris that loomed beyond the window.

One of my guests, Dorothy, the wife of George Padmore, the West Indian author and journalist, turned to me and asked:

“Now that your desk is clear, why don’t you go to Africa?”

The idea was so remote to my mind and mood that I gaped at her a moment before answering.

“Africa?” I echoed.

“Yes. The Gold Coast,” she said stoutly.

“But that’s four thousand miles away!” I protested.

“There are planes and ships,” she said.

My eyes ranged unseeingly about the room. I felt cornered, uneasy. I glanced at my wife.

“Why not?” she said.

A moment ago I had been collected, composed; now I was on the defensive, feeling poised on the verge of the unknown.

“Africa!” I repeated the word to myself, then paused as something strange and disturbing stirred slowly in the depths of me. I am African! I’m of African descent…. Yet I’d never seen Africa; I’d never really known any Africans; I’d hardly ever thought of Africa….

“Kwame Nkrumah, the Prime Minister, is going to table his motion for self-government in July,” Dorothy said.

“It would be a great experience for you,” my wife said.

I heard them, but my mind and feelings were racing along another and hidden track. Africa! Being of African descent, would I be able to feel and know something about Africa on the basis of a common “racial” heritage? Africa was a vast continent full of “my people.”…Or had three hundred years imposed a psychological distance between me and the “racial stock” from which I had sprung? Perhaps some Englishman, Scotsman, Frenchman, Swede, or Dutchman had chained my great-great-great-great-grandfather in the hold of a slave ship; and perhaps that remote grandfather had been sold on an auction block in New Orleans, Richmond, or Atlanta…. My emotions seemed to be touching a dark and dank wall…. But, am I African? Had some of my ancestors sold their relatives to white men? What would my feelings be when I looked into the black face of an African, feeling that maybe his great-great-great-grandfather had sold my great-great-great-grandfather into slavery? Was there something in Africa that my feelings could latch onto to make all of this dark past clear and meaningful? Would the Africans regard me as a lost brother who had returned?

“Do you think that the Gold Coast will be self-governing soon?” I asked. I genuinely wanted to know about the political situation in the Gold Coast, yet another and far more important question was trying to shape itself in me. According to popular notions of “race,” there ought to be something of “me” down there in Africa. Some vestige, some heritage, some vague but definite ancestral reality that would serve as a key to unlock the hearts and feelings of the Africans whom I’d meet…. But I could not feel anything African about myself, and I wondered, “What does being African mean…?”

“…and they are fighting for self-government,” Dorothy was explaining. “It would be wonderful if you could be there when the first black Prime Minister in history asks the British for the freedom of his people.”

“Yes,” I said. “How long does it take to get there?”

“One day by plane and twelve days by ship,” Dorothy said.

Was Africa “primitive”? But what did being “primitive” mean? I’d read books on “primitive” people, but, while reading them, their contents had always seemed somehow remote. Now a strange reality, in some way akin to me, was pressing close, and I was dismayed to discover that I didn’t know how to react to it.

“Just what level of development have the people there reached?” I asked Dorothy.

“You must ask George about that,” she said. “He’s been there…. But you’ll find their development mixed. You’ll find Christians and pagans…”

“I want to see the pagans,” I said impulsively.

“Why?” my wife asked.

“I know what a Christian African would have to say, but I don’t know what paganism is—”

“It’s all there,” Dorothy said emphatically. “And if you’re going to attend the session of the Legislative Assembly in which the Prime Minister will make his bid for freedom, you’d...