Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices andWorld War Il-era Civic Nationalism

Dan Shtffman is the authorof Rooting Multiculturalism:The Work of Louis Adamic{Farieigh Dickinson UP, 2003),His essays on Depression-era ethnic literature andcuiture have appeared insuch journals as MELUS,Mosaic, and Studies inAmerican Jewish Literature.He currentiy teaches Englishat Osaka InternationaiSchool,

Speaking at the Fourth American Writer's Conference in June1941, Richard Wright denounces the hypocrisy of America'sdefense of liberty in Europe. His speech, "What We Think ofTlieir War/' refers to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "FourFreedoms" as a "metaphysical obscenity" in light of the WarDepartment's policy of racial segregation: "How is it possible forany sincere or sane person to contend that the current war, WorldWar II, is a crusade for freedom, for the majesty of the humansoul, for a full life, in the face of official utterances [about segrega-tion in the armed forces] which categorically reject the very con-cept of freedom and democracy?" (Wright Papers).

As the war escalated, Wright tempered his harshest criticismsabout the nation's fight for democracy and along with theAmerican Communist Party dropped his anti-war position.Nevertheless, when 12 Million Black Voices was published inOctober 1941, Wright was still primarily concerned with what hesaw as the war's domestic front. Like the Pittsburgh Courier andother black newspapers that used the "Double-V" in a play on theubiquitous victory symbol (Roeder 47), Wright championed victo-ry both at home and abroad. He called for the defeat of fascism aswell as the end of discrimination, Jim Crow, and rapacious capi-talism.

12 Million Black Voices, a sweeping historical narrative ofAmerican black experience complemented by Farm SecurityAdministration photographs previously chosen by FSA editorEdwin Rosskam, is an act of protest against these social forces,one that expanded the work of reformers like Walter White andA, Philip Randolph. In September 1940, NAACP leader Whiteand Randolph, editor of the Socialist Messenger, met withPresident Roosevelt to push for the immediate desegregation ofthe armed forces. Although their demandbacked by the threatof a 100,000 strong black march on Washington was rejected,they did secure a compromise, an executive order in June 1941against discrimination in the defense industries (White 186-94).Wright's text indirectly places White and Randolph's battleagainst military segregation into the wider context of the histori-cal exclusion of blacks from full cultural citizenship in the UnitedStates. Wright's broader perspective on the war, however, did notextend as far as W. E. B. Du Bois's "wide angle vision," whichsaw "egalitarian potential" in Germany and Japan (Lewis 468).Nevertheless, Wright's position was less conciliatory than that ofRalph Bunche, who stated in 1940, "American Democracy is badenough. But in the mad world of today I love it, and I will fight topreserve it" (qtd. in Young 62). In essence, Wright continued tosee the war as a two-fronted fight, but for him the domestic battlewas always more urgent.

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12 Million Black Voices appeared at a time when the US was both was brim-ming with patriotism and trying to reconcile ethnic and class divisions. Populistworks such as Louis Adamic's From Many Lands (1940), and Tzvo-Way Passage(1941), the US Office of Education's radio program "Americans All. . . .Immigrants All" (1938-1939), the Atlantic magazine's We Americans (1939), andpatriotic immigrant affirmations like those found in / Am An American (1941)championed the contributions of ethnic Americans and, moreover, the nation'sunassailable democracy. These texts contributed to what would be a longprocess of re-rooting American historical identity from Plymouth Rock to EllisIsland, and they responded to the enormous presence and influence of immi-grants and their children. In spite of the severe quotas placed on immigration byttie Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, approximately two-thirds of residents of major USdties in the 1930s were either foreign bom or the children of the foreign bom.Furthermore, the rise of fascism in Europe provided a powerful impetus for thecelebration of American diversity. As historian Richard Weiss observes,"Ruthless [Nazi] repression of ethnic minorities resulted in a counter identifica-tion of democracy with minority encouragement and tolerance" (566). However,this defensive civic creed came into conflict with a persistent racialism. Althoughfirst- and second-generation immigrants were now generally considered to bepart of "white" America, the restrictive quotas that remained in place favorednorthern and western European nations whose emigrants were perceived by theUS as more readily assimilable. In other words, eugenicist arguments made dur-ing the 1910s and 1920s about the fundamental inferiority of non-Anglo orNordic stock and the dangers of racial contamination still held considerablesway.

The gathering of national support for the war effort was more immediatelychallenged by the fact that Asians were essentially wholly excluded from immi-gration to America and that black troops remained segregated from white ones.Efforts to include black experiences in the "Americans AH" campaigns, there-fore, tended to be awkward or superficialor both.^

The nation's civic nationalism attempted to affirm diversity, which includedpaying homage to the achievements of exceptional immigrants and the dedicat-ed labor and sacrifice of many others who were helping to build modemAmerica. This ideology acknowledged economic injustice and racial discrimina-tion and sought to ameliorate these problems by applying principles of faimessand conscience through various New Deal initiatives. At the same time, civicnationalism elided the reality that the immigrant-as-true-American waspremised on the exploitation of cheap foreign labor and on racial segregation.

This war-era social and historical context for 12 Million Black Voices has beenunder-appreciated; instead, critics tend to consider the work's emotional poweror sentimentality,^ examine Wright's narrative style,-^ or discuss the influence ofWright's communism.** My own approach to 12 Million Black Voices considersWright's political commitments but focuses on his critical relationship toAmerican pluralism. Wright's text revises the generic rags-to-riches immigrantsuccess story touted as quintessentially American.

War-era texts championing immigrants typically relied on enthusiastic cata-loguing of ethnic scientific and artistic contributions, or they were built on thepassionate testimonials of successful immigrants. 12 Million Black Voices insertsAfrican American experience into the midst of this seemingly inclusive coreAmerican identity. Wright declares, "We black folk, our history and our presentbeing, are a mirror of the manifold experiences of America. What we want, whatwe represent, what we endure is what America is. If we black folk perish,America will perish" (12 Million 146). The future of America, Wright boldly sug-gests, depends on the guiding consciousness of African Americans. Through a

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variety of rhetorical appeals, Wright's collective narrative challenges the War-eradiscourses proclaiming that individual immigrant success stories representAmerican promise; in those stories the sheer documentation of ethnic achieve-ments supposedly confirms the nation's pluralist credentials.

12 Million Black Voices was written before Wright's public break with theAmerican Communist Party, but, as is well known, he was frustrated with Partyin-fighting and manipulation almost from the very beginning of his membershipin 1934. This is not to say, however, that Wright ever became disillusioned withMarxist principles; to be sure, his admiration of Stalin seemed to survive theGerman-Soviet Pact. When Wright drafted 12 Million Black Voices, the AmericanCommunist Party had now shifted from its so-called Third Period to the PopularFront. Rather than emphasizing the creation ofat least symbolically a blackrepublic, the Popular Front encouraged support from all classes and from blackand white alliances, and it selected New Deal initiatives like the FSA. As BarbaraFoley comments, however, the Party's phases were by no means rigidly distinct;indeed, the Party had not surrendered its support for black nationalism in favorof all forms of black and white cooperation (170-212). Wright's connection to theParty, therefore, does not provide a clear explanation as to whether he is ulti-mately advocating racially-centered social action, transracial solidarity, or someother vision of social justice. While in 12 Million Black Voices Wright recognizesthe value of black and white cooperationfor example, the linked protestsagainst sharecropping practices and in support of the Scottsboro boysthe textas a whole focuses on how the distinctive consciousness and experiences ofAfrican Americans are shaped by their encounters with white America. Wrightis not so much advocating a particular path of social justice as he is attempting tocreate a broadened, interconnected historical awareness for both blacks andwhites.

Certainly, Wright was dismayed by certain dimensions of the Popular Front.For example, the Popular Front disbanded the John Reed Clubs that had helpedto awaken Wright's political passions. Bill Mullen calls attention to Wright's dis-like of Popular Front art. He points to his "disdain for the commonplace PopularFront strategy of remaking and reshaping 'white' Western artifacts to a black fit,a strategy that reached its peak in Orson Welles's spectacular HarlemShakespeare productions of the late 1930s." Mullen argues that this attitude"reveals [Wright's] commitment to a Third Period communism, the PopularFront was meant to displace" (26).

Despite his distaste for Popular Front aesthetics, Wright understood theforce of using language and motifs that appealed to a broad audience, an audi-ence familiar with and moved by the rhetoric of US promise. Wright did notsimply appropriate or manipulate this language to advance a preferred phase ofAmerican Marxism. Like most Americans, he had internalized the high promisesof freedom and opportunity expressed in the nation's founding documents, andwas captivated by them. Thus, Wright's distancing from the Popular Front as awhole can be overstated. Furthermore, 12 Million Black Voices reveals that theestablishment of a Black Belt had become exactly what African Americans didnot want: an alienated and exploited community. As Michael Denning writes,"A history of urban disinvestment, slum clearance in neighborhoods adjoiningwhite neighborhoods, and the construction of high-density public housing tocontain the black population, combined with the government subsidy of mort-gages and highways to build white suburbs, created a new Black Belt Nation,not the Black Belt of the cotton South, but an archipelago of cities across the con-tinent" (36). In essence, the new Black Belt had been constructed by whiteAmerican capitalism; any rooted understanding of black nationalism wouldneed to address this complex entanglement with whiteand now immigrant America.

RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES AND WORLD WAR II-ERA CIVIC NATIONALISM 445

Wright's repeated use of "We" in 12 Million Black Voices advances the deepand problematic interconnectedness between US exceptional ism and racial sub-jugation. Well-known Depression-era documentaries such as Erskine Caldwelland Margaret Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), Dorothea Langeand Paul Taylor's An American Exodus (1939), and James Agee and WalkerEvans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) tend to depict seemingly passiveand downtrodden victims of poverty, thereby underscoring the value of NewDeal relief efforts. Many of the photographs in such texts evoke the dignity of

12 Million Black Voices incorporates and inten'ogatesthe civic nationalism that regretted ill treatment of the

working poor but did not regard it as symptomaticof systemic problems within a racist economy.

individual impoverished Americans, while the accompanying commentarydirectly or indirectly describes how these individual lives are connected to widerpatterns of human displacement, alienation, and resilience. Wright's text, how-ever, forgoes considering individuals to emphasize more immediately howsocial and economic forces bind black workers and families as a whole. Bywidening the scope of his reportage and focusing on collective history, Wrightinfuses what Agee called "the cruel radiance of what is" (11) into the deliberate-ly optimistic and obfuscating American nationalism of World War II.

Wright's first-person plural perspective counterpoints the immigrant successstories and catalogues of ethnic contributions emerging in the late 1930s andearly 1940s, which were put forth as evidence of the nation's inclusiveness anddemocratic opportunity. His "We" implies "We the People," appealing toAmerica's democratic conscience, and it also implies class consciousness:Wright's "We" are black workers exploited by what he calls repeatedly the"Lords of the Land" in the South and the "Bosses of the Buildings" in the indus-trial North. 12 Million Black Voices, then, both incorporates and interrogates thecivic nationalism that viewed ill treatment of the working poor as deeply regret-table and in need of redressing but not as symptoms of systemic problems in aracist economy.

As Heruy Louis Gates, Jr., has argued more broadly of African American lit-erature, the text, " 'repeats,' as it were, in order to produce difference (10).Wright "signifies" appropriates, plays on, exposes the hypocrisy ofwar-eracivic nationalism. An early passage from 12 Million Black Voices indirectly cap-tures the tactical and performative qualities of Wright's text: "We stole wordsfrom the grudging lips of the Lords of the Lands, who did not want us to knowtoo many of them or their meaning. And we charged this meager horde of stolensounds with all the emotions and longings we had" (40). The "stolen sounds" ofWright's text include the Roosevelt era immigrant-as-the-true-American motifand the sentimental appeal to conscience and national unity. Rather than usingthese appeals as a way to justify a New Deal ethos and programs, Wrightdemands that America surrender paternalistic, denigrating, and exclusionarypractices toward African Americans. Notably, however, the notion of the immi-grant-as-true-American was in itself a dramaticand to many, an unsettling-revision of the Anglo-centered American founding myth. Part of the power of 12Million Black Voices is that it simultaneously advances the ongoing revision of theUS as a multiethnic nation while forcefully observing that this revision had notgone far enough.

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The rhetoric of war-era civic nationalism attempted to close the gap betweenold and new stock Americans to build a united front against fascism, to shore updivisions between those in full possession of cultural citizenship and those whohad endured various forms of exclusion. Whereas nativist writers in the 1910sand 1920s emphasized the social degeneracy of eastern and southern Europeans,in the late 1930s and early 1940s essentially all European immigrants wereincluded in the same narrative of inevitable forward progress. Italian and Slavicimmigrants, for example, were championed for their contributions to the build-ing of modem industrial America. For Wright, the Old immigrant/New immi-grant paradigm was irrelevant; what mattered instead was that AfricanAmericans remained largely cut off from the forward progress and sense of trueAmericanism increasingly associated with the foreign born and their children.Wright outlined a gap that needed to be closed; not a gap that separated olderstock Americans from the newer immigrants, but one that economically andpolitically separated blacks from whites. These divisions could not simply besmoothed over with patriotic rhetoric.

12 Million Black Voices traces African American experiences from slavery tosharecropping, and on to the Great Migration. The text has four major sections:"Our Strange Birth," "Inheritors of Slavery," "Death on the City Pavements,"and "Men in the Making." Wright begins with descriptions of harrowing slaveship conditions and the later deprivations of plantation life, and he discusseshow proponents of slavery rationalized it on religious grounds. Wright alsocharacterizes the development of a "genial despotism" in black-white relations,a degrading and specious benevolence. He presents African American churchesand music as sources of solace and release from such ongoing oppression, buthe also proclaims them inadequate responses to the entrenched political and cul-tural isolation experienced by this nation within a nation. The most forceful sec-tion of Wright's narrative characterizes the "transitional" areas of urban, indus-trial Chicago; Wright depicts deplorable living environments and abusiverestrictive covenants. He highlights the squalor of rent-inflated "kitchenettes,"conditions in which black infant mortality is twice the rate of whites and one toi-let often shared by 30 tenants (79).

Scholars have argued that Depression-era photo-documentaries, whileexposing harsh socioeconomic injustice, create a vague hopefulness in sympa-thetic middle-class readers for the poor, a hope that tacitly endorses New Dealsocial welfare programs.^ The photographs combined in 12 Million Black Voicesbelie facile optimism. They depict people experiencing a range of emotions fromecstatic to hopeful to impassive to anguished. David Bradley observes that "thefaces in the FSA photographs could easily have been [Wright's] face" (xviiii).While the comment is valid, Bradley misses the ways that text and photo con-struct social reality rather than merely reflect Wright's experience. Wrightemploys seen:\ingly sentimental appeals and aggressive, subversive rhetoric thatmatch the emotional and aesthetic range of the photographs. William Stottobserves an awkward, mismatched relationship between text and photos (232),but this disjunctive quality actually highlights the various registers throughwhich Wright advances the repressed history of African Americans. For exam-ple, Dorothea Lange's eloquent portraits of field workers dignify their subjectswithout romanticizing them, while Marion Post's photographs more deliberatelyemphasize the degradations of sharecropping (see Figs. 1 and 2). Several APwire photos bluntly reveal the horrors of lynching and police intimidation (seeFig. 3).^ In spite of the photographs' varying tenor, all of them are charged bythe intensified historical consciousness of Wright's surrounding text.Consequently, the reader cannot merely respond to these pictures in an emotion-ally circumscribed way, for example with complacent sympathy, paralyzing out-rage, or affirmations of human resiliency.

RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES AND WORLD WAR II-ERA CIVIC NATIONALISM 447

The collective focus of 12 Million Black Voices was a dramatic tum fromWright's starkly individualized portrait of Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940).While Bigger Thomas arguably embodies the social degradation experienced byAfrican Americans, Wright demanded that his audience engage with this fictionallifeto see him as a "living personality" ("How Bigger" 33) rather than to readBigger merely symptomatically. Indeed, u'hat matters deeply to Bigger as heawaits his execution for murder is that his lawyer, Max, is interested in thedetails of his short life, his dreams and aspirations. At the same time, Max'sfutile efforts to save the 20-year-old man from the electric chair require that heset aside Bigger as an individual. He declares during the trial that, to defendBigger, he must speak "in general terms" so that the judge will understand howBigger's violence has erupted from three centuries of US discrimination againstblacks (Native Son 328-29). Max's defense of Bigger demonstrates how his client'simpoverished life is the product of a nation that refused to see him as a humanbeing, that often refused to see him at all. The narrative approach that Wrightconstructs for Max is similar to the novelist's ow^ n narrative strategy in 12 MillionBlack Voices: By describing the alienation and hierarchies collectively encoun-tered by blacks, Wright challenges dismissive, condemning attitudes that hisaudience might have about individual African Americans with whom they havecome into contact. Furthermore, as he did in Native Son, Wright encourages allAmericans to resist responding to black degradation merely with symptom-treating social programs or by making speciously ethical distinctions between"good" blacks and "bad" blacks. Both of these responses tend to be based onlocalized, shortsighted impressions.

Not only does 12 Million Black Voices describe collective rather than individ-ual experiences, but it furthermore does not distinguish various groups withinthe larger black community. In his preface, Wright states that his focus deliber-ately excludes black leadership. He explains that the "talented tenth is omittedin an effort to simplify a depiction of a complex movement of a debased feudalfolk toward a twentieth-century urbanization" (xix). This disclaimer, however,does not attempt to justify the sweeping generalizations that Wright will make.He also states in the preface that he will "seize upon what is qualitative andabiding in Negro experience." He aspires "to place within full view the collec-tive humanity whose triumphs and defeats are shared by the majority" (xx).Instead of providing the dense detail of particular lives, Wright builds a collec-tive story underscored by his insistent use of "We."

In his study of FSA photo-documentaries, Nicolas Natanson takes Wright totask for passing over the individuated experiences of African Americans, theirprivate acts of protest and endurance. Natanson argues that Wright indulges hisliberal white readership in a complacent sympathy. He even goes so far as to callWright's use of "We" a "fundamental act of cultural suppression" that depictsthe "black millions as a monolithic mass" (247). In contrast to Natanson, RalphEllison views 12 Million Black Voices, not as a work of a cultural suppression, butas an empowering narrative. In a November 3,1941, letter to Wright, Ellisondeclares, "the book makes me feel a bitter pride; a pride which springs from therealization that after all the brutalization, starvation and suffering, we havebegun to embrace the experience and master it. And we shall make of it aweapon more subtle, more effective than a fighter plane!" (Wright Papers).Ellison understands how 12 Million Black Voices harnesses the rhetorical power ofcivic nationalism to form a pointed African American challenge to the dominant,adrenaline-charged war era patriotism, a patriotism that tended to overlook thevital domestic front against the ongoing oppression of blacks. Wright's bold gen-eralizations about African American history both parallel and critique thesweeping statements regarding ethnic contributions offered to buttress USdemocracy against fascism.

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t,^lp

To illustrate his broader history, Wright sometimes draws on stereotypes.For example, in the "Inheritors of Slavery" chapter of the text, he evokes theMammy: "Because of their enforced intimacy with the Lords of the Land, manyof our women were allowed to remain in the slave cabins to tend generations ofblack children. They enjoyed a status denied to us men . . . and through the yearsthey became symbols of motherhood, retaining in their withered bodies the bur-den of our folk wisdom, reigning as arbiters in our domestic affairs until we menwere freed and had moved to cities where cash-paying mobs enabled us tobecome the heads of our own families" (37). Wright suggests that Mammy's cel-ebrated maternal qualities were not timeless but linked tragically to her sexualvictimization, her "enforced intimacy" with masters. Moreover, Wright's sweep-ing historical statements imply that the slave-based capitalism that created theMammy also isolated black men from family life and left them feeling power-less, a condition that did not change significantly after abolition. Wright's sar-donic reference to the "cash-paying mobs" suggests that post-slavery capitalistAmerica continues to bind black men to narrow, stultifying roles.

Wright's verbal depiction of Mammy's motherhood and black men's eventu-al migration to US cities meets an effective counterpoint in Jack Delano's "RuralNegro family on their porch." This "family" photograph shows an older womansitting stiffly, with a detached expression, on the edge of a porch. Her hands arefolded on her lap. A young girl sits in a chair behind her; the girl's face isobscured by a dark shadow. Next to the girl stands an even younger boy, headturned to the side, looking down at the edge of the porch. The woman, girl, andboy seem dissociated from one another, almost as if they exist in separate pho-

Fig. 1.[topL)Dorothy Lange,"A Ihirteen-year-old sharecrop-per, Georgia(FSA)" from 12Mitlioti BlackVoices, 27.

Fig. 2. [bottom L]Marion Post,"Migrant work-ers in cabbagefield, Florida(FSA)" from 12Million BlackVoices. 82.

Fig. 3. [R]AP/Wide WorldPhotos,"Lynctiing,Georgia" from12 Million BlackVoices, 45.

RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES AND WORLD WAR II-ERA CIVIC NATIONALISM 449

tographs. The starkness and alienating effect of Delano's composition empha-sizes an absent presencean adult male presence that might reconnect and ani-mate these vacated individuals; the image thus establishes a relationshipbetween the Mammy's victimized social status and the ongoing exclusion ofblack men from US society. Text and photograph work together to complicateimages of the Mammy by pointing to the social conditions that created her (seeFig. 4).

In "Inheritors of Slavery" Wright complicates another idea familiarly associ-ated with "good" American blacks: humble and intense devotion to the Church.Wright offers a powerfully condensed description of how Christianity offersAfrican Americans spiritual expression that counters the dehumanization per-petuated by the Lords of the Lands and the Bosses of the Buildings. In fewerthan 500 words, Wright outlines Christian history from Eden to Apocalypse. AsWright implies, this story has two redemptive figures. The first and overt hero,of course, is Jesus who "assumes Man's corrupt and weak flesh and comes down andlives and suffers and dies upon a cross to show Man the way back up the broad highwayto peace..." (70-71). Wright's compressed narrative also provocatively suggestsLudfer as a figure "whose soul is athirst to feel thiyigsfor himself (69). Such self-consciousness is exactly what Wright positively claims the dhurch offers toAfrican Americans; "What we have dared not feel in the presence of the Lords ofthe Lands, we now feel in church" (68). Wright concludes by stating that in "thelast battle the Armageddon will be resumed and will endure until the end of Time and ofDeath" (72). Wright has juxtaposed the "broad highway to peace" offered by Jesuswith a pitched and enduring battle led by Lucifer. In this passage, he does notscoff at the inspiring, gently inclusive and redemptive message of Christianitybut implies that the broad African American identification with Christianity car-ries within it the menacing possibility of retributive justice.

While the story Wright tells inevitably blurs differences within the AfricanAmerican community and relies on broad historical generalizations, notably, 12Million Black Voices was published during a time when group identification haddistinctive significance and urgency. As Ellison observes in 1943, "despite thevery real class divisions during periods of crisisespecially during periods ofwarthese divisions are partially suspended by outside pressures, making for akind of group unity in which great potential political power becomes central-ized" (238). This potential powerthe repressed or misdirected creative energyof millions of African Americansneeds to be "seized upon" and channeled byboth black and white leaders; Wright's text may not directly include the talentedtenth but one of his implied audiences is black leaders, a group that Ellisondescribes as needing to "integrate themselves with the Negro masses" (239).

In 12 Million Black Voices, Wright's vision of social justice (rooted in a histori-cal, folk consciousness) extends the ideas presented in his "A Blueprint forNegro Writing," first published in 1937. Here, Wright states that black writersmust accept the "nationalist implications of their lives" (40), To make this hap-pen, Wright encourages writers to give voice to an "unwritten and unrecog-nized" Negro folklore. As his essay progresses, it becomes clear that Wright'sinterest in folklore is more than archeological. Black oral traditions and familialinteractions reveal a nation that exists largely outside of the boundaries ofAmerica's capitalist driven values. Wright's nationalism "carr[ies] the highestpitch of social consciousness . . . its ultimate aims are unrealizable within theframework of capitalist America, lit is] a nationalism whose reason for being liesin the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of the interdepen-dence of people in modem society" ("Blueprint" 47). To foster this nationalism,black writers must be intensely aware of "the foreshortened picture of thewhole, nourishing culture from which [blacks] were torn in Africa, and of the

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long complex (and for the most part, unconscious) struggle to regain in someform and under alien conditions of life a whole culture again" (47). Wrightasserts that socially progressive black writers, whatever their particular subjectmatter, should convey the total sweep of African American history to impress onreaders both the intense, disregarded humanity of blacks and the ways that thishumanity has been subjugated by a narrow and predatory capitalism. Moreover,according to Wright, African American history crystallizes the conflicts andtransformations that have marked the entire development of European andAmerican civilization. In 12 Million Black Voices, he states, "Brutal, bloody,crowded with suffering and abrupt transitions, the lives of us black folk repre-sent the most magical and meaningful picture of human experience in theWestem world. Hurled from our native African homes into the very center ofthe most highly industrialized civilization the world has ever known, we standtoday with a consciousness and history such as few people possess" (146). Putsimply, African American history can teach America about itself.

In 1941 this lesson had not yet been heard by most Americans. Wright's nar-rative suggests that, even though black and white histories have repeatedly con-verged, they have not really spoken to one another. One reason for this incom-municativeness is that the disparate values of the white and black communitiesare not yet fully compatible. Wright, for example, generalizes how black familiesare held together by love and voluntary association rather than by emphasis onproperty that unites the families of the Lords of the Lands. He writes, "A blackmother who stands in the sagging door of her gingerbread shack may weep asshe sees her children straying off into the unknown world, but no matter whatthey may do, no matter what happens to them, no matter what crimes they com-mit, no matter what the world may think of them, that mother welcomes themback with an irreducibly human feeling that stands above the claims of law orproperty. Our scale of values differs from that of the world from which we havebeen excluded; our shame is not its shame, and our love is not its love" {12Million 61). The meaning of compassion and acceptance has different boundariesfor blacks and whites, but Wright makes no outright claims about who possessesthe "right" values for the US. A photograph complementing this passage, ArthurRothstein's "Sharecropper family," which depicts 15 members of an impover-ished family lined across their dirt yard, underscores that Wright is not makingmoralistic assertions about the superior, unconditional love of black families.The men, women, teenagers, children, and toddlers look toward the camera withexpressions that reveal neither particular warmth nor contempt. What seemsmost salient about this family is their matter-of-fact, yet intense, presence, a real-ity that the photograph quietly demands we accept and address (see Fig. 5).

The under-acknowledged, inseparable presence of African Americans in UShistory could not be meaningfully addressed merely by including a supplemen-

Fig. 4, IL]Jack Delano,"Rural Negrofamily on theirporch, SouthCarolina (FSA)"from 12 MillionBlack Voices. 37.

Fig. 5. [R]Arthur Rothstein."Sharecropperfamily, Okla-homa (FSA)"from 12 MillionBlack Voices.61.

RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES AND WORLD WAR II-ERA CiVIC NATIONALISM 451

tal additional chapter to the American story. The "Americans All" rhetoric of thetime tended to overlook this reality and, instead, dwelled on the idea that EllisIsland was as essential to American identity as Plymouth Rock. In 72 MillionBlack Voices Wright interrogates this revised but still inadequate founding mythby suggesting America's multicultural complicity in the slave trade: "The lean,tall, blond men of England, Holland and Denmark, the dark, short, nervous menof France, Spain and Portugal, men whose blue and gray and brown eyes glintedwith the light of the future, denied our human personalities, tore us from ournative soil, weighted our legs with chains" (12). Without sarcasm, Wright high-lights the paradox that the same immigrants who sought political and socialfreedom engaged in the slave trade that completely denied freedom to others.He does not discredit the idea that these early immigrants were "flushed with anew and noble concept of life, of its inherent dignity and unlimited possibilities"(12); rather than debunking these exceptionalist myths, Wright exposes their limits.

Wright goes on to demonstrate how the culpability of the immigrant in theinhumane treatment of African Americans extended into the era of sharecrop-ping. He also describes the contemptuous response of his black voices: "If theLord of the Land for whom we are working happens to be a foreigner who cameto the United States to escape oppression in Europe and who has taken to thenative way of cheating us, we spit and mutter

Red, white and blue,Your daddy was a Jew

Your ma's a dirty dago,Now what the hell is you?... (43)

Ultimately, this strategy of turning ethnocentrism against the perpetratormay be ineffectual and narrowly defensive, but in the world Wright depicts,most African Americans do not have the means to focus their indignationtoward social reform. Indeed, the best they can hope for seems to be "genialdespotism." Wright describes, for example, that "[i]n exchange for our vote thegangster-politicians sometimes give us so many petty jobs that the white news-papers in certain northern cities contemptuously refer to their city hall as 'UncleTom's Cabin' " (121).

With only petty or patronizing forms of social and political power available,Wright argues, African Americans are drawn to far-flung sources of power. Inhis view, blacks seek to become protectively merged with the least kriown andfarthest removed race, saying with a collective snicker of self-depreciation:

White folks is evilAnd niggers is too

So glad I'm a ChinamanI don't know what to do. . . . (47)

In this section of 12 Million Black Voices, Wright suggests that US society debasesAfrican Americans beyond common sense. Blacks are more likely to assumefalse and ultimately weak identities than they are to affirm a "common union"(47) with poor whites and take direct action for social and economic justice. Atthe same time, Wright's war era narrative presents the possibility of blacks form-ing new and threatening alliances and, therefore, it is a veiled warning to whitereaders. As he writes, "Fear breeds in our heart until each poor white face beginsto look like the face of an enemy soldier" (46).

In Native Son Wright had already exposed ways that cultural and politicaloppression causes individuals to seek out dangerous and confused forms ofidentification. Bigger's experience of exclusion provokes in him such intensefrustration that he comes to view Japan's incursions into China, Mussolini's

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expanding power, and Hitler's extermination of Jews "as possible avenues ofescape" from his own thwarted existence (98). Bigger is unable to connect with awider America that, at its best, patronizes him with social charity. This lack ofnative nationalist identification contributes to Bigger's becoming intrigued bypower regardless of its moral or political legitimacy in the eyes of the whiteAmerican majority. Gary Gerstle explains how Japan's conquest of Western-con-trolled territories provided a lift for nonwhite minorities in the US, "for nowthey could dare to imagine a world in which all imperialist powers were senthome and rule based on racial subjugation would be banished from the earth"(193-94). This sentiment is directly evident in 12 Million Black Voicey, Wrightdescribes how some in the black community "feel the need of the protection of astrong nation so keenly that [they] admire the harsh and imperialistic policies ofJapan and ardently hope that the Japanese will assume the leadership of thedarker races" (143). Both the feelings of Wright's collective protagonist andBigger's confused attraction to militaristic regimes reflect how the denial of fullcultural citizenship to African Americans fuels recklessly powerful forms ofresistance.''

12 Million Black Voices implores the nation to confront its race-based capital-ism and its selective history or face the consequences. Wright contributes to arevisionist history by depicting the confluence of the two great American migra-tions. He brings them together to underscore that African American migrationhas become blocked, while Europeans continue to flow onwards towards the fullpromises of America. He, for example, describes how African Americans remaincaught in the grimy, dilapidated "transitional areas" of northern industrial cities,while immigrants progress to opportunities beyond manual labor: "For years wewatch the timid faces of poor white peasants Turks, Czechs, Croats, Finns, andGreekspass through this curtain of smoke and emerge with the sensitive fea-tures of modem men. But our faces do not change . . . years later, we pick up[the newspaper] . .. and see that some former neighbors of ours, a Mr. and Mrs.Klein or Murphy or Potaci or Pierre or Cromwell or Stepanovich and their chil-drenkids we once played with upon the slag piles are now living in the subur-ban areas, having swum upstream through the American waters of opportunityinto the professional classes" (102). Wright desires for the other major stream inUS history that of black migration to flow uninterrupted and to gain enoughpower to wash away the Lords of the Land and Bosses of the Buildings.

12 Million Black Voices suggests the need for radical action that goes wellbeyond New Deal reform efforts. At the same time, Wright does allow for thepossibility that the current political system has the potential to serve social jus-tice. For this to happen, the judiciary must defend constitutional principles andrise above deeply entrenched patterns of social exclusion. Wright observes waysthat courts presently defend residential segregation by "juggl[ing] words so thatthese restrictive covenants are always 'constitutional' and in defense of publicpolicy, thereby assuming the role of policemen" (113). His sharp critique allowsthe courts to honor more fundamental constitutional principles of equal protec-tion. To do so the judiciary must rise above public sentiment. Wright describes acomplicit relationship between the government and public "morality":"Newspapers, radio, Protestant and Catholic churches, Jewish synagogues,clubs, civic groups fraternities, sororities, leagues and universities bring theirmoral precepts to bolster their locking-in of hundreds of us black folks in single,constricted areas" (113). This passage of 12 Million Black Voices ends with anobservation that evokes the two-fronted battle for social justice that consumedWright as the war in Europe escalated: "Even in times of peace some of theneighborhoods in which we live look as though they had been subjected to anintensive and prolonged aerial bombardment" (114). The extended passage

RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BMCK VOICES AUD WORLD WAR II-ERA CIVIC NATIONALISM 453

reveals a dialectic often apparent in the text: an interplay between the hope forAmerica to achieve its founding promises and the threat of black retaliation.Wright takes each side of this dialectic quite seriously.

The very brief final chapter of Wright's text, "Men in the Making," weavesback and forth between appeals to civic nationalism and implications that thevictims of race-based capitalism are mobilizing for action. The second photo-graph in the chapter is 12 Million Black Voice's only image overtly depicting blackprotest. However, this photograph appears at first to be rather ineffectual. AnAPAVide World photo shows five women in front of the White House carryingpickets denouncing lynching (see Fig. 6). One of the pickets reads, "Down withDastardly Practices. Stop Lynching"; another states "Stop Lynching. Let RealDemocracy Prevail" (142). Although only four women are fully visible and haverather passive expressions, it is not clear from the picture where the line ofwomen stops or ends, quietly suggesting the possibility of a much more substan-tial protest. This point resonates with Wright's text on the same page, "We havetramped down a road three hundred years long" (142). Here, text and imageanticipate the final lines of the chapter that will proclaim that "men are moving"(147) with increasing strength and energy. Wright highlights the inexorable chal-lenge of black America to the nation's inclusive claims; more specifically, thephotograph protests Roosevelt's resistance to signing anti-lynching legislation."Men in the Making" is not merely prodding America's democratic conscience,however. The final chapter creates a gathering sense of men and women comingtogether to take action that goes beyond mere reform.

On one level, the final paragraphs of 12 Million Black Voices lack the criticaledge of the earlier sections. Some of Wright's closing comments evoke a willfuland somewhat implausible optimism; the text, in other words, seems to move tosafer territory. Wright asserts that similarities between blacks and whites aremore significant than their differences: "The common road of hope which wehave traveled has brought us into stronger kinship than any words, laws, orlegal claims" (145). And he comments reassuringly that the most qualitativelysignificant progress for blacks has been achieved through peaceful and in thecase of the Scottsboro trials, biracial protest. Wright's final lines, which evokethe rhetoric of forward progress, appear to capitulate to the vague idealism ofthe early war years, when the nation's attention was drawn more to broad pur-poses of the war rather than to specific strategic battles. He claims "the right toshare in the upward march of American life" (146). He observes, "We stand atthe crossroads. We watch each new procession. The hot wires carry urgentappeals. Print compels us. Voices are speaking. Men are moving! And we shallbe with them .. ." (147). Consider these lines in contrast to the conclusion of anearly draft of the text:

The deeds of men are making the tides roll over the world. We shall he marshaled intowar, hut even when we go to fight, we shall be watching, waiting . . . even when dying in"their" war, our eyes shall he riveted on what has propelled us thus far. Some of us willsurvive all the wars and shall retum to that vast land of cotton, the pale white sentry ofdeath, shall retum to that wilderness of huildings with their blocks of locked-in life, andwe shall make the wide fields of the South green again. We shall bring new life to the lor\gstraight streets of the city. (Wright Papers, "Men in the Making")

Wright provocatively suggests that African Americans who retum from the warwill become prisoners under guard, seeking escape from a "locked-in" life. Therevised manuscript, then, eliminates overt references to America's democraticfailings and instead emphasizes an urgent sense of forward movement andinclusiveness. The final photograph of 12 Million Black Voices, "Backyard of anAlley Dwelling," by FSA photographer Carl Mydans, complements the hopefulsentiments expressed in the published text (see Fig. 7). The photograph depicts a

454 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

young man standing in the doorway of a simple wooden residence. The youngman's eyes are raised upward and his expression appears to be the beginning ofa smile. Given Wright's verbal text, the reader is left wondering what this manhas to be happy about. While 22 Million Black Voices does include other pho-tographs of African Americans smiling and enjoying themselves, these imagesare connected to religion, music, and social relationships.^ This nascent smile,placed on the final page of the manuscript is detached, non-contextual, inexplic-able. Nevertheless, the young man's budding smile can be distinguished fromthe many other FSA photographs of the downtrodden, passive victims of pover-ty that the New Deal set out to help.

The conclusion of 12 Million Black Voices might be read as Wright having hitthe limit of acceptable criticism in a text designed to reach a wide audience. Orthe conclusion reads as surrendering to a willful war-era optimism about thefuture. The very lack of specificity in the language and in the young man's smilehas unsettling implications, however. Wright does not disclose what the "hotwires" and speaking voices in his final lines are urging blacks to do. It is as if theyoung man knows something that Wright's readers do not. This uncertaintygives the ending of 22 Million Black Voices a note of threat: if the democraticopportunity reflected in the "Americans All" rhetoric of progress is not extendedto African Americans, the nation's post-war identity will be increasingly cor-rupted and increasingly at risk.

This sense of threat was taken seriously by the FBI, who began investigatingwhether Wright could be charged with sedition.*^ Putting aside such alarmistreactions, even if we read the concluding section of Wright's text for its facevalue as an endorsement of the "common road of hope" shared by allAmericans, 12 Million Black Voices is no less challenging. Wright does not capitu-late to what John Higham has called the "rosy haze" (223) of American plural-ism of the era, nor is he merely giving communist principles a Popular Frontspin. This is not to say that Wright's particular vision always transcended ideo-logical influences; indeed, this essay has pointed out that Wright, while main-taining a strong connection to Marxist ideals, also interacts with the emergenceof US pluralism. He knows that the immigrant story as the founding narrative ofAmerican identity and democracy is blatantly hypocritical unless it accounts forslavery and black migration. At the same time, 12 Million Black Voices demon-strates that Wright is compelled by the rhetoric of American promise, even as herecognizes that this rhetoric can be deceptive and hypocritical.

When Wright stated in 1940 that "we live by an idealism that makes usbelieve that the Constitution is a good document of government, that the Bill of

Fig. 6. IL]AP/Wide WorldPhotos, "Dem-onstration,VWashington, DC"from 12 MillionBlack Voices,142.

Fig. 7. [R]Carl Mydans,"Back yard ofaliey dweiling,Washington, DC(FSA)" from 12Million BlackVoices. 147,

RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES AND WORLD WAR II-ERA CIVIC NATIONALISM 455

Rights is a good legal and human principle to safeguard our civil liberties, thatevery man and woman should have the opportunity to realize himself, to seekhis own individual fate and goals, his own peculiar and untranslatable destiny"{"How Bigger" 35-36), he affirmed American equal opportunity and self-deter-mination, even though his life and work exposed the limits and exclusions ofthis ideology. Wright's complex, conflicted engagement with mainstreamAmerican idealism forms part of the cosmopolitan fullness of identity that hesought throughout his career. This relationship to American ideals is sometimesdiscounted by critics who continue to measure Wright's perspective too exclu-sively by his relationship to the Communist Party however complex that rela-tionship may be understood. ^ ^ As Denning has argued, the broad impact of thePopular Front has not been adequately appreciated because of a prevailing criti-cal tendency to place the American Communist Party at the core of the struggleagainst exploitive capitalism and on behalf of the rights of the worker. Such ananalytical framework positions Party members at the core of the Popular Frontwith fellow travelers at the periphery, expressing sympathy with Party initia-tives, though with a somewhat diluted or guarded level of commitment to radi-cal social change. Denning helps us to consider the actual core of the PopularFront as a broad, implicit coalition of activists, anti-fascists, and second genera-tion immigrant laborers and artists who understood American life as rooted inthe sacrificing labor and inequities endured by workers. It is this revised notionof a Popular Front to which Wright belongs.

Despite Wright's distancing himself from specific Popular Front efforts, henevertheless understood the value of language and rhetorical appeals that couldbuild connections across groups in the fight for social justice. 12 Million BlackVoices both incorporates and questions the rhetoric of civic nationalism of thetime, which raised public consciousness of social inequality and racism butrefused to consider how the vaunted ideal of the immigrant-as-true-Americanwas built to a significant extent on the ongoing exclusion of African Americansfrom full opportunity and cultural citizenship. But it would be wrong to suggestthat the text merely exposes an unbridgeable gap between immigration andblack migration. Denning distills fundamental connections between these twocurrents in US history: "The symbolic structures of ethnicity and race were theproducts of slavery and migrant labor, segregated labor markets, legal codes ofexclusion and restriction, as well as the institutions of community culture andself defense" (239). As a text that indicts how the Lords of the Land and Bossesof the Buildings exploit a cheap and isolated labor market and as a text thatplays on the idea of the immigrant {or migrant)-as-tnie-American, seekingpromise and marching forward, 12 Million Black Voices shares common groundwith working class narratives of immigration and migration that also engagedthe rhetoric of American civic nationalism. An examination of this connectionlies beyond the scope of this essay, but I suggest that the broad power ofWright's text might be further appreciated by considering its relationship to eth-nic narratives of the era, including Henry Roth's Call it Sleep (1934), Pietro DiDonato's Christ in Concrete (1939), and Carlos Bulosan's America is itt the Heart(1943), narratives that both invoke class consciousness and navigate through thefog of American civic nationalism.

Notes 1, This contradiction between "civic nationalism" and "racial nationalism" is the focus of Gerstle'ssynthesis. Civic nationalism is based on founding American principles of life, liberty, and the pursuitof happiness. These ideals have been increasingly extended to white immigrants but less so toAfrican Americans and Asian Americans. Racial nationalism, which bases American identity on the

4 5 6 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

notion of a common blood, is built on the exclusion of non-whites. According to Gerstle, the uneasyrelationship between these two nationalisms is reflected, in war-era movies, which sometimesstretched the color line but essentially left it in place (210).

2. As Natanson asserts, the initial reviews of 12 Million Black Voices~m both the black and thewhite press-for the most part praised the text's power (249). However, as Woller observes, this initialwave of praise gave way to attacks that cited Wright's work for sentimental distortion (346-48).

3. See, for example, Woller, Moore, and Reilly.4. Nichoils, for example, describes 12 Million Black Voices as a "genealogy of proletarian con-

sciousness" (113-30).5. See, for example, Stott and Peeler.6. The lynching photograph depicts Lint Shaw (the reference to the photograph listed at the end of

Twelve Million Black Voices does not specify the victim), who was murdered shortly before appearingin courts to face assault charges. Commenting on a similar photograph of Shaw's body hanging froma tree, Apel writes, "The men showcase the tortured body of their victim as evidence of having upheldcivilized society" (42). Writing more broadly of lynching photographs, Goldsby observes that they Tig-ure the dead as signs of pure abjection who radiate no thought, no speech, no action, no will; who,through their appearance in the picture's field of vision, become invisible" (231), To an extent, Shawremains invisible in 12 Million Black Voices because he is never named, but at the same time.Wright's anti-lynching appropriation of the photograph critiques the social and economic forces thathave created a racially exclusive conception of "civilized society."

7. Rowley writes that in October 1942, a man sent a letter to the Secretary of War stating that pas-sages like the one mentioning the "darker races" could lead to "many forms of sabotage" and "resultin a general breakdown of morale" (275).

8. Furthemiore. the handful of photographs in which whites and blacks appear together depicts thestern faces of the sharecropper boss, governmental authority or lyncher,

9. For a discussion of the FBI's investigation of Wright, see Gayle.10. Examining Wright's political vision by its relationship to American Communism, however

nuanced our understanding of the Left may be, is still limiting. In an overview of scholarship onDepression-era radical literature, Wald notes that some critics have failed to recognize the complexi-ties of Party members' creative Influences, despite what he knows was the "the real weight.., of full-time Party literary-critical functionaries" (23), Schulman has made a similar point with specific refer-ence to Wright's artistic integrity and, moreover, Schulman challenges the critical tradition thatdefines Wright by either his embrace or rejection of the Party (137-80),

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