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“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:

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 presented by the Chicago School. Either way there is no question that Wright’s growing radicalism derived from his own experience, and it developed through a perceptive reading of the bases of oppression in American society.19

Richard Wright and the Chicago Communist Party

At the very same moment he encountered the Chicago School’s science of modern society, Wright immersed himself in the world of radical politics as a member of the Chicago Communist Party. Wright later claimed to have felt no attraction to the Communist Party initially, but his work in the cultural wing of the revolutionary workers’ struggle in the early 1930s brought him into direct contact with the party, and he soon joined. He later suggested that when he joined his friend Abe Aaron at the John Reed Club in Chicago in the summer of 1933, he was simply seeking a place to come and discuss his own writing and the process of literary creation itself. The John Reed Club was an organization devoted to incorporating writers and visual artists into the larger project of proletarian cultural creation that was part of the Communist Party’s program during the late 1920s into the 1930s. In the John Reed Club and in the Communist Party, Wright found his first sustained friendships with white people, men and women who took his mind and his writing seriously. The party became the primary avenue for Wright’s contact with the broader world of politics and culture, a world beyond the South Side ghetto.20

It is easy to see why Wright would be attracted to a political party that was explicitly challenging white supremacy and seeking rights for “the Negro.” In the 1930s, the Communist Party appealed to “the black masses” to join it in revolutionary struggle. “Here at last in the realm of revolutionary expression,” declared Wright, “was where Negro experience could find a home, a functioning value and role.”21 The party linked the black struggle for freedom with the aims of the proletarian revolution. Though the Communists’ association with the black civil rights struggle had begun years earlier, the worldwide economic and social crisis of the Great Depression gave new weight to the need for a vision of society that dissolved the old order built on racial and class differences and oppression. According to one contemporary of Wright, the Communists worked harder than any other political party in America to challenge white supremacy. The Communists “pushed Blacks into Party work…they nominated Negroes for political office, dramatized the Black man’s problem, risked social ostracism and even physical violence in behalf of Black people. No political party since the Abolitionists challenged American racial hypocrisy so zealously.”22

Wright claimed, however, that the Communist Party had failed to articulate its vision and program in ways that could appeal more widely to black Americans, especially those who had migrated from the South into cities like Chicago. When Wright’s mother came upon him reading The Masses and Anvil, she looked at the images of bulging-eyed workers clothed in ragged overalls, holding red banners and “waving clubs, stones, and pitchforks,” and asked him, “What do Communists think people are?” If the message was not clear to his mother, then the Communists were indeed going to have real trouble attracting the black masses.

Wright envisioned a unique role for himself in the party as a conduit between the Communists and the masses of common black people like his mother: “I would address my words to two groups: I would tell Communists how common people felt, and I would tell common people of the self-sacrifice of Communists who strove for unity among them.” He decided that his contribution to the translation of Communist ideology and black experience would be to write a series of life histories of black Communists, men who had taken the leap and joined with the revolutionary workers of the world.23

Wright encountered his first major conflict within the Communist Party when he set out on his new project. As a member of the party, he was assigned to a unit on the South Side of Chicago, the “Black Belt.” A unit was the basic mode of organization for the party, and a unit leader directed each member into activities promoting the policies and programs ordered by the Communist International in its seat in Moscow. Wright’s goal of being a writer contrasted with the vision of most of the black Communists he encountered in the South Side unit. They held intellectuals in suspicion of being class traitors or, even worse, Trotskyite apostates. Wright was questioned about the books he read and the ideas he held. Some of his comrades suggested he was a “smuggler of reaction,” because he read bourgeois books. One fellow black Communist flatly informed him, “Intellectuals don’t fit well into the party, Wright.” He was stunned. How, he asked, could a man who swept streets for a living be branded an intellectual? Wright had come up against a deep-seated mistrust of people who asked too many questions, not to mention men who wrote “bourgeois” novels.24 While the party may have supported the idea of creating proletarian literature, officials in the Chicago Communist Party questioned his aims as a writer and asserted that it might be impossible to reconcile the desire to be a creative writer with the duties of community organizing and political agitation.25

Wright remained determined, though, to write the life histories of several black Communists. By capturing their stories he would be able to explain African American experiences of becoming modern men—through migration and urbanization—and describe the process by which “the Negro” became a self-conscious participant in the revolutionary proletarian struggle. The life histories were to form a series of biographical sketches titled “Heroes, Red and Black.” There was, according to one Wright biographer, “ample precedent for this literary genre in proletarian literature, but Wright also had a personal reason for choosing this mode of expression”: it was a way to reflect his own experience of emergent self-consciousness without writing explicitly about himself.26

The first story he wished to tell was that of a man he later called Ross, whom Wright saw as a representative type: “Distrustful but aggressive, he was a bundle of the weaknesses and virtues of a man struggling blindly between two societies, of a man living on the margin of a culture.”27 Ross was in fact a man named David Poindexter, whom Wright had met in 1934. At the time, Poindexter was on trial for “incitement to riot.” Wright was fascinated by Poindexter, a gifted storyteller, who often recounted his experiences of being a stevedore on the Mississippi River and the many tricks he had used to outsmart southern white men.

Wright viewed Poindexter not as just one man on the move, but as a sociological type, a representative of a vast social and historical process. For Wright, Poindexter embodied Robert Park’s theory of the marginal man. Marginal men represented social hybrids who lived in constant negotiation of the culture of the tribe and that of the new environment in which they found themselves. Wright wanted to tell the story of the marginal man in the figure of Poindexter: “I felt that if I could get his story I would make known some of the difficulties inherent in the adjustment of a folk people to an urban environment; I would make his life more intelligible to others than it was to himself. I would reclaim his disordered days and cast them into a form that people could grasp, see, understand, and accept.” “Heroes, Red and Black” represented Wright’s earliest attempt to study human personality and behavior systematically, and it laid the foundation for Wright’s later use of life histories and character studies for his writing.28

Unfortunately for Wright, the party viewed his life history project with suspicion. Perhaps he picked the wrong life story; not only was Poin-dexter under indictment for incitement to riot, but he was also in trouble with the Central Committee of the Chicago Communist Party. According to Wright, Harry Haywood, member of the Communist International Committee and newly installed South Side unit leader, let him know that Poindexter had gone down an incorrect path, veered from the party line, and flirted with nationalism. Wright simply wanted to tell Poindexter’s story because of his “typicality” as a black migrant whose marginality had planted the seeds of a radical, rapidly modernized consciousness—a consciousness materialized through revolutionary political action.

If Wright’s depiction of this scenario is to be believed, then it is doubtful whether the party unit on the Black Belt would have supported his aim to write these short biographies of any of Chicago’s black Communists. Wright’s comrades were invariably suspicious and distrustful of his intellectualism and his aspiration to become a writer. By 1936, Wright was at odds with the Communist Party. At the time of his conflicts within the party, Wright was being forced to choose between his writing and organizing a committee within the black community against the high cost of living (something Wright claimed to know nothing about). When Wright pleaded to Haywood that he was in the middle of writing a novel, while working full time to support his family, the South Side unit leader replied, “The party can’t wait…. You’ll find time to write.” “But I work during the day,” Wright pleaded to no avail.

Wright found “relief from these shadowy political bouts” in one of his jobs secured through his social worker Mary Wirth’s help. At the South Side Boys’ Club, Wright supervised recreation for boys and young men. His relief must have come in listening to these black young men, watching and recording their behavior, not for science but for his own writing. “I kept pencil and paper in my pocket to jot down their word-rhythms and reactions.” Wright later explained that it was his time working at the Boys’ Club that enabled him to sit down at his typewriter and begin to draft Native Son.29

The South Side Boys’ Club was founded in 1925 by utility tycoon Samuel Insull and a group of like-minded men in order to do something for the “underprivileged boys who were a constant source of trouble” along the eastern border of the Black Belt. Wright clearly was aware that two of the backers of the South Side Boys’ Club also headed the Chicago Real Estate Board, a group responsible for implementing restrictive covenants to keep white neighborhoods in the city white and thus maintain the settlement of African Americans only within the Black Belt. Located closer to the heart of “the colored district,” the club aimed to “instruct ‘colored boys’ in ‘citizenship and respect for the law’” and “to create in the minds of young boys right attitudes and sounder thinking on the various problems they will face at a later time.”30

Wright was ambivalent about his role in an institution designed to redirect the energies of “misbegotten delinquents in training.” While happy to have a job in the midst of the Depression, he had serious doubts about what good he was doing and what an institution like the Boys’ Club could do to address the real, human needs of the floating, dislocated boys who came to the club. Wright described the boys as “a wild and homeless lot, culturally lost, spiritually disinherited, candidates for the clinics, morgues, prisons, reformatories, and electric chair of the state’s death house.”31

Wright saw in these boys the embodiment of a figure he had been consciously trying to imagine and put into words: Bigger Thomas, the young black man who would become the protagonist of Native Son, the book that propelled Wright to literary stardom. At the Boys’ Club he would “work hard with these Biggers, and when it would come time for me to go home I’d say to myself, under my breath so that no one could hear: ‘Go to it, boys! Prove to the bastards that gave you these games that life is stronger than ping-pong…. Show them that full-blooded life is harder and hotter than they suspect, even though that life is draped in a black skin which at heart they despise.” Wright took a perverse sort of comfort in how the Boys’ Club youths could not be contained by “ping pong tables” and the like. Their energies, desires, and frustrations couldn’t simply be neutralized by a place to come for several hours to “blow off steam.”32 (These boys would also be those whom the Lafargue Clinic might reach and provide alternative modes of navigating and maybe even changing the ghetto.)

In a memorable scene at the end of Native Son the mother and father of Mary Dalton come to visit Bigger Thomas in jail in order to persuade him to reveal who else had a hand in murdering their beloved daughter. Bigger refuses to speak with the Daltons, but his lawyer, Boris Max, uses the occasion to impress upon Mr. Dalton the nature of Bigger’s case. In response to Mrs. Dalton’s claim to have tried to help Bigger and send him to school, Max explains that “those things don’t touch the fundamental problem involved here. This boy comes from an oppressed people. Even if he’s done wrong, we must take that into consideration.” Mr. Dalton says that no matter what this young black man has done to his family, “I want you to know that my heart is not bitter…. What this boy has done will not influence my relations with the Negro people. Why, only today I sent a dozen ping-pong tables to the South Side Boys’ Club.” In response, Bigger’s lawyer exclaims, “My God, man! Will ping-pong keep men from murdering? Can’t you see? Even after losing your daughter, you’re going to keep going in the same direction?…This boy and millions like him want a meaningful life, not ping-pong.”33

Wright’s experiences at the Boys’ Club led him to question the purpose and utility of recreational and social agencies for African Americans. He later mused that “only a revolution could solve [the] problem” of the emotional and social dislocation of black boys like those of the South Side Boys’ Club.34 Despite their falling far short of a societal revolution he believed necessary, by the mid-1940s Wright would lend his name and energy to institutions devoted to the emotional and mental health of just this same type of boy. His experience at the South Side Boys’ Club enabled him to discern what truly helped boys in need and what was merely a diversion.

On May Day 1937, Richard Wright was physically tossed from the ranks of the Communist Party’s public parade through the streets of Chicago. Wright had naively expected to participate as normal in May Day festivities. But he had been branded an enemy of the party for his associations with Poindexter and for his unwillingness to give up writing fiction. Wrestling briefly with the idea of going back to the parade and forcing himself back into the ranks, he returned home instead. But soon he stepped back outside, determined to visit friends, anyone he could talk to about the exclusion and desperation he felt.

Just weeks later, Wright placed first in all Chicago for the postal exam, but turned down a permanent job at the Post Office. Instead he decided to move to New York City. He was going to become a full-time writer.36

Richard Wright in New York

Despite his trials with the Chicago Communists, Wright made his way in New York through his connection to the Communist Party. As he settled in New York, Wright became an active member of the Harlem branch of the party, which had been established the year before. The Harlem branch was headed by Benjamin Davis, a black Harvard Law School graduate who had made his name defending Angelo Herndon, a black Communist sentenced to a chain gang for leading a peaceful protest in Georgia. Wright became Harlem editor for the Daily Worker, the national newspaper of the Communist Party. Over the course of his first year, he wrote hundreds of articles. Initially enjoying his work within the party, as well as his writing and editing duties, Wright soon felt constrained by having to “toe the Party line.” He hated having to write propaganda and began referring to the Daily Worker as “Stalin’s newspaper.” According to one Wright biographer, “By December [1937] Wright was restless. He was a prisoner of the Party; he was living in Harlem, yet another black ghetto; and he was wasting more time on drudgery and earning less than he had at any time in the last two and a half years.” In a letter to Ralph Ellison, another aspiring writer who had become his closest friend in New York, Wright declared, “It was not for this that I came to NYC. I’m working from 9 a.m. to 9 and 10 p.m. and it’s a hard, hard grind. Can’t do any work, haven’t the time. I am thinking definitely in terms of leaving here, but I don’t know when. I seem to be turning my life into newspaper copy from day to day; and when I look into the future it looks no better. I don’t want to go back to Chicago, but where else is there?”37

In 1938, Wright decided to stay in New York because he began to achieve much of what he set out to do when he left Chicago. Early in the year he joined the Federal Writers’ Project, writing the “Harlem” chapter of New York Panorama, an encyclopedic work on the history and culture of each major section of the city. Wright then entered the mind of the American reading public that year through winning Story magazine’s national writing competition, one of the most prestigious awards a young writer could achieve. Not only did Wright win the cash prize of $500, but his collection of short stories was published by Harper & Brothers under the title Uncle Tom’s Children. On the strength of this work, Wright was able to secure a Guggenheim fellowship, which paid $2,500, a sum greater than the yearly salary he would have earned at the Chicago Post Office.

During this time, Wright was completing a new novel about one of those boys who had frequented the South Side Boys’ Club.38 He wished to use one character to portray the full texture of these black boys’ lives, the conditions they lived under and the anger and fear that governed their own perceptions of the wider world. Most importantly, Wright wanted to tell the story of how one young black man becomes so conditioned by the fear white society has instilled in him that in a moment of crisis he can only respond out of fear.

Bigger Thomas and the Sources of Literary Creation

In Native Son Wright told the story of Bigger Thomas and changed the way millions of white Americans saw the black men in their midst. Bigger is a young product of urbanization, resulting from the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the cities of the North. An aimless, poor, petty criminal, he takes a job as a chauffeur for one of the wealthiest families in Chicago, the Dalton family. One night Bigger must guide his boss’s drunken daughter, Mary, to her bedroom. When Mary’s blind mother appears in the bedroom, Bigger becomes so fearful of being caught in the white girl’s bedroom that he accidentally smothers Mary to death to stifle her possible screams. To dispose of Mary’s body, Bigger cuts her to pieces and burns her up in the Daltons’ furnace. On the lam, Bigger later kills his black girlfriend Bessie Mears, deliberately, because he fears she will turn on him. Fear had created Bigger, and fear was the emotion that governed Bigger’s actions under trying conditions. Wright’s portrait of Bigger and the environment that created him through marginalizing and stultifying him challenged whites to see their culpability, their own participation in the violence of antiblack racism and capitalist exploitation.

On March 12, 1940, less than two weeks after Native Son was published, Richard Wright gave a lecture at Columbia University titled “How Bigger Was Born.” Wright’s lecture was both an explanation and defense of his novel and its main character. Wright aimed, as well, to prepare readers for a new type of figure in American literature: a young black man who was simultaneously enmeshed in American civilization while being closed out from any true identification or participation in the institutional and cultural life of that society. Wright posed the question of how a young black man who knows nothing but oppression makes sense of American ideals of liberty, justice, and industry. Bigger, Wright explained, was the literary manifestation of the modern black individual, who, bereft of the cultural armament of his forebears, thrashes about in the hard, cold city, bumping against all the codes and mores erected to keep the unruly in place.

Bigger Thomas and Native Son represented revolts against the constricted ambit allowed for modern black humanity. In his lecture, Wright gestured toward something often denied in the average American Negro of the day—psychological complexity. Wright explained that he “felt bound to account for and render” the substratum of Bigger’s thoughts and behavior, “a level as elusive to discuss as it was to grasp in writing.” “I had to deal with Bigger’s dreams, his fleeting, momentary sensations, his yearning visions, his deep emotional responses…. I had to fall back upon my own feelings as a guide,” said Wright, “for Bigger did not offer in his life any articulate verbal explanations.”39

In the years immediately following Native Son, Wright further embraced psychoanalysis and other psychological sciences as guides to understanding his own thinking and for plumbing the “inner landscapes” of his fictional characters. Dr. Fredric Wertham, who in the years since the Clinton Brewer murder case through which they forged their initial collaboration had become one of Wright’s most valued mentors and friends, shared with Wright the belief that psychoanalysis and literature were naturally aligned. By exploring the unconscious—that reservoir of primal fears, hopes, and desires animating human behavior—artists, analysts, and critics could gain access to a significant determining source of creativity. Moreover, the unconscious was where the mind directed its repressed energies, memories, and experiences, which in rare circumstances could be sublimated into great art.

Thus, soon after Wright and Wertham became close friends in the early 1940s, Wertham proposed an experiment, a psychoanalytic exploration of the unconscious sources of some of the most important themes and scenes in Native Son. Wertham wished to demonstrate that “unconscious material enters definitely into a work of art and can be recovered by analytic study.”40 Referring to “How Bigger Was Born,” Wertham explained that Wright’s “conscious account” of the creation of the novel and its main character, while “sincere,” was partly an “unconscious rationalization.”41

Published in a 1944 article titled “An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son,” Wertham’s reading of Bigger Thomas’s murder of Mary Dalton (while her blind mother was in the room) was the result of Wright’s assent to undergo psychoanalysis. Wertham began with the basic question: “Had the author [Wright] any knowledge or remembrance of a situation where a boy like Bigger worked in a white household, where there was a tense emotional atmosphere between the dramatis personae?” In his teens, Wright had been a handyman in the home of a white family known for being liberal toward Negroes, relative to other whites in Mississippi in the 1920s. Through a stream of associations, Wertham was able to conjure from Wright a memory of being fifteen years old and walking in on the adult daughter of his white employer while she was undressing. Mirroring Bigger Thomas in the home of the Daltons, Wright was consumed with shame and fear over his transgressive proximity to this young white woman. But unlike Bigger, who of course kills Mary Dalton, Wright had repressed his emotions and his memory.42 And unlike Bigger, Wertham contended, Wright’s experiences unconsciously fed his creativity. Further, Wright was also able to draw an association between the name Dalton and something he had learned while working in a medical lab: Daltonism is a form of blindness—a technical term for color blindness. This experiment offered further evidence to both Wertham and Wright that psychoanalysis—and psychotherapy in general—could yield insights into the unconscious motivations that guide one’s personality and actions, especially in areas of creativity. More specifically, psychoanalysis could offer Wright a map for freeing those repressed bits of his past so that they might serve as a basis for literary creation.43

Despite Wertham’s argument that psychoanalysis revealed more about the novel than the author’s rational explanation, Wright was not fully convinced. Reflecting on the experiment with Wertham, he noted in his journal that “what was uncovered was vital and interesting but sadly incomplete.” The unconscious was indeed essential to literary creation. But, for Wright, psychoanalytic theory was not dynamic enough to account for “why a man wants to create anyhow.” Wertham had shown how certain repressed experiences in Wright’s past found their way into Native Son, but, Wright noted, “he did not tell how I had come to use them,” which to Wright was the key question, akin to the issue of how unconscious thoughts and impulses are translated into action, or in this case literary representation. Wright concluded that “there’s a lot here which psycho-analysts do not know. Psychoanalysis is still a science in its enfancy [sic].”44

Wertham’s experiment with Wright exemplified, though, the growing currency of psychoanalysis as it permeated many areas of American culture.45 Their collaboration and friendship indicated, as well, the increasing collaboration of black and white progressive intellectuals in which aesthetic, political, and scientific concerns bled together, blended, and often created unexpected conduits, circuits, and avenues for the creation of art, ideas, and ultimately institutions. In the case of Wright and Wertham, they shared a peculiar and paradoxical mix of prominence and marginality, which created the conditions of possibility for them not only to experiment with the borders of science and art by applying psychoanalysis to the creation of a living writer, but soon to experiment with institution building.

“Towards the Conquest of Ourselves”

Wright remained a member of the Communist Party even after he had become the most famous black American writer in the world through the notoriety of Native Son, but that would change soon. Wright’s increasing attention to the world-historical conflicts of the Second World War, and a deeply personal exploration of the meaning of black experiences within the war era’s tumult, led him in new political and intellectual directions in the early 1940s. In the winter of 1942, Richard and his wife Ellen left the Communist Party, convinced it no longer spoke to the concerns of African Americans. The Communist Party’s Popular Front policy of unconditional support of the Roosevelt administration’s battle against fascism had placed Wright in the untenable position of having to remain silent on racist state policies. Because the United States was now an ally of Soviet Russia, the Communist Party USA tamped down its crusade for black civil rights during the war and required all party members to avoid criticizing America’s adherence to Jim Crow policies. When the party refused to support calls to end discrimination in the military industries and to desegregate the U.S. armed forces, the Wrights simply stopped participating in all party activity.46

Wright’s break with the party was not public, though, and it did not become so until Wright published “I Tried to Be a Communist” in two installments of the Atlantic Monthly in 1944. Wright later reflected privately on the meaning of his departure from the party:

Several friends close to Wright at the time suggested that he did indeed feel alone in his radicalism—alone on the left fighting for black rights while also fighting to find new ways of expressing the meaning of African American experience.48 There is no question that despite his prominence as a public spokesman, Wright experienced a particular marginalization, in many ways the result of that very prominence. Privately, Wright once cried out to himself, “Oh, God, how lonely I am with this burden of consciousness!”49 This could be read in universalistic terms—as a cry of human existence. Yet Wright’s self-described “apartness” also provided him with the space to examine the meaning of American life, especially along the color line. As emotionally painful as his departure from the Communist Party was, Wright continued searching for answers about what it meant to be black in America, what it meant to be modern, and what was the best way to struggle against oppression.

In the early 1940s, Wright repeatedly declared fear to be the fundamental emotion guiding black personality and behavior. And he sought to tap into the meaning of that fear as a source of insight and creativity. Wright contended that “none of us want to believe that fear—a fear that lies so deep within us that we are unaware of it—is the most dominate [sic] emotion of the Negro in America.” He continued, “But what if we are afraid and know it and know what caused it, could we not contain it and convert it into useful knowledge? But we are afraid and we do not want to tell ourselves that we are afraid; it wounds if we do; so we hug it, thinking that we have killed it. But it still lives, creeping out in a disguise that is called Negro laughter.” Wright called upon his fellow African Americans to face the fear of exploring the psychological and emotional effects of racist oppression. He called this process “the Conquest of Ourselves.”50

Wright presented the challenge of self-conquest as a new and most important front in “the Negro’s struggle for freedom.” By delving into the “dark byways of the Negro heart,” both blacks and whites would be able to face the deep, inner meaning of black oppression. In an unpublished lecture written during the Second World War, he defined this conquest as a form of “supreme self-consciousness” about who black Americans were and why they reacted as they did to the conditions of their environment. He declared, “I maintain that we need a hardness of heart and mind toward ourselves, in our efforts to look at ourselves; perhaps after all, we may find there, over and above the shameful fear, other emotions which, in the light of world conditions, will redeem the initial shame.”

Black Americans’ psychological introspection could serve themselves and be a guide to the subjugated peoples of the world. “By comparing our reactions with the reactions of other submerged groups,” Wright explained, “we can see that our reactions are but a part of a common pattern of living in the world today. If we can do this, our shame vanishes; we assume a responsible, human attitude toward what we are and, in turn, we get a glimpse of what is likely to happen to the rest of the world…. Ultimately, we shall discover we are merely human, despite all our strangeness.” Wright claimed that he was trying to get his fellow Negroes to see that the struggle for rights and freedom should begin with knowing who they are and “knowing our needs in their deepest sense.”51

Through “the Conquest of Ourselves,” Wright sought to shake up his audience, to have them think of black identity and black liberation in radically expansive terms. Wright’s views here were emblematic of his quest for a new framework for approaching America’s race problem in the 1940s. He was fashioning a language for both blacks and whites to look deep within for the fundamental reasons why they feared and hated not only each other, but themselves. Wright was not alone in this quest.

Toward a “Psychological Approach to Race Relations”

Between 1941 and 1946, there was no man closer to Richard Wright than Horace R. Cayton Jr., coauthor of Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945). Wright produced some of his most gratifying writing in collaboration or conversation with Cayton, namely 12 Million Black Voices and Black Boy / American Hunger. Cayton sought to join with Wright in shepherding a new black intellectual movement in which psychological knowledge would inform and guide the exploration of modern American culture and lead to new modes of creativity in Negro literature. “You could lead this thing, Dick,” Cayton wrote. “I don’t mean a formal movement or anything like that, but you could nurture it, encourage it.”52 Cayton and Wright also planned a magazine to be named “American Pages” that would “psychoanalyze” the white reading public, as well as an anthology of black scholarship on the race problem to be titled “The Negro Speaks.” However, neither project ever materialized. The two men may have met years before in Louis Wirth’s office at the University of Chicago, but it was not until 1940 that they actually came to be close friends and collaborators.53

Wright’s attraction to Cayton as a friend derived from Cayton’s honesty about how racism had affected him personally. Wright once noted to himself: “I like Horace because he’s scared and admits it, as I do.” Their relationship was characterized by an intense interest in the theoretical insights of psychoanalysis for the Negro, as well as practical aims for aiding “the Negro” in managing the damaging effects of racism on his personality.54 “About the whole problem of psychoanalysis,” Cayton wrote to Wright, “I would like to talk to you at length. Especially would I like to discuss the question of what constitutes the rock bottom of the Negro’s existence & personality structure—his earlier psychological conditioning in the family or his reaction to his subjugation. My notion is that they are curiously blended—one reinforcing the other to produce the most devastating results. However, I would have to talk to you about this at length. It is not in the literature and we could make a real contribution if we could express it.”55

Both Wright and Cayton were in the process of articulating a view of America’s race problem that emphasized the psychological, particularly psychoanalytic, aspects of race relations. Neither of the two men, however, disputed the social, systemic nature of race relations—instead they shared the view that a deep “substructural” understanding of what motivates behavior at the level of race and racial difference could contribute to the vast body of knowledge on “the Negro problem.”

In April 1943, Wright took a trip with Cayton that would change both men’s lives and careers. Charles Johnson, the eminent Chicago-trained sociologist and chairman of Fisk University’s Social Sciences Department, had been trying to get Wright to visit the campus in Nashville. After declining Johnson’s requests for two years, Wright accepted Cayton’s request to accompany him to Fisk to present a lecture. Prior to the Fisk visit, he met Cayton in Chicago, where Cayton arranged for Wright to give a lecture at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis on the utility of psychoanalysis for understanding fear and hate in the American Negro. At the institute, Wright met Dr. Helen V. McLean, who had recently begun analyzing Cayton. Through her association with Cayton, who introduced her to Charles Johnson and his Race Relations Institute, McLean would emerge as a prominent advocate for the inclusion of psychoanalysis in discussions of American race relations. Wright’s lecture at the Institute for Psychoanalysis inspired him to look into his own past to explain why he and other blacks reacted as they did to the anxiety engendered by white racism.56

When Wright got to Fisk, he did something no other black man had done prior to his visit: he told a southern interracial audience the truth about the deep emotional pain inflicted on black people by whites in the Jim Crow South and how blacks, unable to retaliate, unleashed physical and psychological violence on one another. Wright told these truths through direct reference to his own experiences and thoughts of growing up in Mississippi and Memphis. This talk sowed the seeds of his desire to draft a full-scale autobiography, later published as Black Boy. And as soon as he returned to New York, Wright began writing in earnest; in seven months he completed the manuscript that told the story of his life up to his departure from Chicago in 1937.57

The version of Black Boy first published in 1945 was an unflinching portrait of Wright’s experiences growing up in extreme poverty in Mississippi. Revealing the psychological costs of growing up black in the Deep South, Black Boy depicted Wright’s story of surviving the bleak and oppressive smothering of life under Jim Crow and within a vicious family of black men and women broken by white supremacy and self-loathing. Portraying Wright’s youth from his childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, and Helena, Arkansas, to his adolescence in Memphis, Tennessee, from where he left for Chicago at the age of eighteen, Black Boy emphasized the harm a racist society does to its most vulnerable members. It told of young Richard’s survival and his finding refuge in the magic of words, of reading and writing. It charted his attempts to find a viable identity apart from the one imposed on him by white racism, and it depicted his own struggle for a form of existential, if not social, freedom. Most controversial of the book’s themes was that black people themselves were the most ardent agents of the wounds and hurt of this violent society; that within black families and black institutions such as the church and school, the fear and anger of black adults was recycled and unleashed upon black children.58

Wright’s insights into the motivating forces of fear and hate in both the formal and intimate relations between whites and blacks had a direct influence on Cayton’s experience of psychoanalysis, as well as the career of Cayton’s analyst Helen McLean. Wright’s autobiographical and explicitly psychoanalytic arguments about the conditioning sources of “Negro personality” formed the basis of several articles and conference papers written separately by Cayton and McLean. Wright’s views also influenced McLean’s treatment of Cayton. Cayton revealed that

Cayton used the occasion of reviewing Black Boy to enunciate a new psychoanalytically based theory of black identity. He argued that

To support his argument, Cayton cited none other than Dr. McLean. McLean herself was citing Richard Wright when she wrote, “Fear is probably the predominating feeling of any persecuted minority toward the strong dominating group. In the winter of 1943, Richard Wright…gave us at the Institute for Psychoanalysis a tragically beautiful analysis of how this fear, with its concomitant reactive hostility, affects the entire life of the Negro.”61

Through this circuit of citation, Cayton concluded that the admission of fear provided the foundation for an honest examination of the effects of oppression on black Americans. One concern for Cayton was that Jim Crow’s effects reached far beyond the Mississippi plantations of Wright’s youth. Cayton soon argued that the movement of African Americans north and west during the Second World War had changed “the Negro problem” from a sectional to a national problem. Even more, “the Negro problem” had become in recent years part of the worldwide issue of “color and democracy” and the global war against fascism. These trends meant that the problems of Jim Crow oppression had traveled as “the Negro problem” traveled “because the Negro’s position in the social structure of the South molds the type of personalities which migrate to the North. Further, the attitude of the dominant group in the North [whites] is influenced by the history of the nation, and the past and present attitude of white southerners.”62

For Cayton, a social scientist, the problem of race hate, as he termed it, begged for a psychological analysis that went to its root causes and addressed its effects. And while initially using the language of morality, following Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s pronouncement of the race problem as a moral dilemma in the white man, Cayton soon drew on the deep, psychological bases for race thinking and race relations. Building on his arguments in his review of Black Boy, Cayton made his strongest case for “a psychological approach to race relations” in a 1946 article bearing that title. “Without under-evaluating the necessity to know and be familiar with the system of race relations and its objective manifestations in our culture, I believe that it is time to devote some of our attention to the deeper, more elusive and irrational elements which make the perpetration of these phenomena possible and make it so difficult even for men of good will to effect a change.”63

In “A Psychological Approach to Race Relations,” Cayton supplemented his analysis of the fundamental problem of fear in Negroes with a reading of the white Americans’ “guilt-hate-fear complex.” He contended that “the white man suffers then from an oppressor’s psychosis—the fear that there will be retribution from those he has humiliated and tortured.”64 Cayton sought a deeper understanding of the motives and forces in both races that proved to be obstacles to any substantive advances in relations between individuals or groups of different races. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Cayton argued that conscious rationalizations for why whites attempted to dehumanize blacks—“the Negro is a primitive, dangerous person who must be kept in subordination. Negroes do not have the same high sensibilities as do whites and do not mind exploitation and rejection. Negroes are passive children of nature and are incapable of participating in and enjoying the higher aspects of general American culture”—were, in reality, screens, shrouds for the unconscious guilt, hate, and fear residing in the deep substructures of the white psyche.

Cayton wrote to Wright often during the time he was formulating his new vision for race relations. And he sought reassurances and support from Wright that this was the correct direction for his research on the race problem, as well as his career as a race relations expert. Cayton was buoyed by the revelations coming out of his psychoanalysis with McLean and hoped his new insights would prove to be a real contribution to knowledge and action in the field of race relations. Moreover, Cayton hoped to establish a common thread between his own analysis of the race problem and the revelatory insights of Wright’s Black Boy.65

Some critics praised the writing in Black Boy but doubted whether Wright’s unique story held psychological or even political implications for the rest of black America held in the yoke of Jim Crow. In his review of Black Boy, published in 1945, Fredric Wertham chided critics of the autobiography for complaining that it was not a typical story. He explained that as a “psychiatrist who has especially studied the lives of Negroes from the point of view of psychotherapy, I must record the opposite opinion. While this is the story of an individual, it is at the same time a highly typical story.” Writing for a medical audience, Wertham argued that this climate of fear and cycle of hurt had clinical significance for his colleagues.

Wertham was on the verge of a sociogenic argument for explaining mental disorders in black Americans, which meant the source of mental illness might be located in the social order rather than the individual’s psyche or his inherited constitution.66

Concluding the review, Wertham wrote, “It would seem to me as a psychiatrist that most of the literary critics, much as they have praised the book, have missed a salient point. Perhaps it is a point of which the author himself is unaware. This is not a book about racial intolerance. It is a book about American civilization, about modern civilization in general. The material of this book approximates the experience of too many people all over the world.” As specific as the book’s story was, specific to Wright and to the generalized black experience of Jim Crow oppression, Wertham’s insight was that there was a struggle going on in the modern world being played out in the individual lives of billions of people. That struggle was for the will to survive in a hostile world.

In actuality, Wright was very much aware of the universality of his story. On the radio show The Author Meets the Critics, Wright explained that “one of the things that makes me write is that I realize that I’m a very average Negro…. Maybe that’s what makes me extraordinary.” His self-awareness that his own experience represented something universal in modern black experiences of American civilization was indeed that which made him exceptional. Or rather it was his capacity to communicate the meaning of these experiences that distinguished him. Wright’s claims about the broader significance of his own story were founded on a wide-ranging argument that black Americans’ experiences of modernity were concentrated, exaggerated versions of all peoples’ lives within the modern world, most especially the oppressed. Wright saw “the Negro’s” experience of modernity as symbolic and representative of everyone’s human struggle for survival and humanity in a machine age. Wright explained that “Negro life in the U.S.A. dramatically symbolizes the struggle of a people whose forefathers lived in a warm, simple culture and who are now trying to live the new way of life that dominates our time: machine-civilization and all the consequences flowing from it. It must be understood that when I talk of American Negroes, I am talking about everybody.”67 Wright was then committed to what we may call a radical universalist humanism while being committed to exploring the uniqueness of “the consequences flowing from” black American encounters with modernity—white supremacy and capitalist exploitation being the most significant components of this encounter. Wright consistently argued that his task and, by extension, that of all black intellectuals was to expose and publicize the truth of black experiences of living in America. Moreover, the meaning of this experience was his quarry.

At the center of Wright’s overall vocation was a practical commitment to providing African Americans with the institutional means for making sense of their experience. While Wright had been at odds with the central institutions of black American life, its schools, churches, and families, because they had meted out much of the constraints upon his own personal development—and they offered, in Wright’s eyes, a restricted vision of what a human being could become—Wright was most critical of the exclusion of black Americans from the institutional life of American society. It was not that he deemed black institutions inferior to white; it was that the whole nature of African Americans’ relationship to the anchors of society, the sites in which the individual develops an image of himself and the world in which he lives, was distorted by racism. For Wright, segregation was fundamentally violent, blacks were to be contained, limited in their movement and presence in institutions both public and private. New types of institutions were needed to counteract the violence of segregation.

Race Relations, Philanthropy, and the Children of Harlem

By the mid-1940s, Wright was no longer a formal member of any political party or antiracist organization. He was, however, part of a loosely knit group of white and black intellectuals, physicians, and activists on the left who were committed to fighting fascism abroad, while also confronting racial and class oppression in the United States. Alongside his black colleagues who had coalesced around “The Negro Speaks” project, Wright found friendship, intellectual stimulation, and a shared commitment to activism with such figures as Fredric Wertham, filmmakers Willard Maas and Marie Menken, and music producer John Hammond. In 1944, Wright established a friendship with Dorothy Norman, a wealthy Jewish intellectual, who wrote a weekly column for the New York Post and published the journal Twice a Year. Like Wright, Norman was a noncommunist progressive who was committed to exploring the deeper bases of race relations, while also engaging in practical projects to address the needs of black New Yorkers. Norman often entertained international political and intellectual figures while they visited New York. It was at her home that Wright met the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus.68

In the 1940s, Wright and his fellow progressives became increasingly concerned over the breakout of racial hostilities. They were not alone in worrying about the specter of racial violence. Race riots had erupted in such cities as Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York, crucial sites mobilized for the war effort. Tensions between blacks migrating for jobs created by the war and the already-settled whites in cities across the United States became palpable for many Americans. The possibility of race war in the United States was on the minds of many Americans at this moment.69

As early as 1941, Anna Kross, a court magistrate in Harlem, urged “the leading citizens of the white and Negro community” to form the City-Wide Citizens’ Committee on Harlem to address the escalating tensions. The aim of the Citizens’ Committee was “to relieve the suffering and the tensions, to fulfill the promise of equality of opportunity and true democracy for the Negro people; to try to make up for the neglects and mistakes of the past in the relations between Negro and white communities; and to contribute toward a morale based upon a real stake for the Negro people in the democracy and in the victory of the United Nations.” Dorothy Norman was on the board of directors of the Citizens’ Committee, along with prominent New York City clergymen, activists, politicians, judges, and physicians, including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr. of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and the Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop of St. Philip’s Episcopal; A. Philip Randolph; Robert F. Wagner Jr., who later became mayor of New York; Judges Hubert Delaney and Justine Wise Polier of the City’s Domestic Relations Court; and the psychiatrist Dr. Viola W. Bernard of Columbia University Medical School. Several of these figures would soon play prominent parts in the story of the Lafargue Clinic. Wright was not a member, but through his acquaintance with a number of people on the Citizens’ Committee he became a part of the larger push to help the community of Harlem.70

One of the main contributions of the Citizens’ Committee was its call for measures to provide delinquent and neglected black boys with more caring and therapeutic institutions. In New York City during the late 1930s and early 1940s the New York Children’s Court and city social agencies tended to blur the lines between neglected black children and those who were deemed delinquent. In many cases, judges designated black children who needed foster care as delinquent because there was no place apart from correctional institutions to send them.71 During this period most foster care facilities and group homes for dependent and neglected children were run by private agencies, mostly by churches. Despite funding from the city and state, these private agencies maintained strict control over their provision of services, thus enabling them to exclude Negro children from their foster care and child guidance facilities. An exception was Catholic Charities, which closed its institution for dependent Negro boys in the fall of 1940 and integrated black children in its already existing institutional and foster-care system. But Protestant agencies, to which the vast majority of black children would have been referred, refused to accept black children within their established facilities and foster-care programs. Members of the Subcommittee on Crime and Delinquency of the Citizens’ Committee on Harlem soon coalesced around a project that would ensure that black boys had a caring place to go if declared delinquent by the New York City Domestic Relations Court.72

Several members of the Citizens’ Committee on Harlem came together in 1942 to save the Wiltwyck School for Boys. Wright would soon join them to champion the work of the school. Founded in 1937 by the Protestant Episcopal Mission Society and located ninety miles north of Manhattan in Esopus, New York, the Wiltwyck School provided physical and psychological care for black boys eight to twelve years old, but by 1942 it stood at the brink of closure. A nonsectarian interracial committee was formed to see if it was not possible to find the funds to keep the school running. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was among the noteworthy roster of Wiltwyck’s board of governors. An august list of social reformers and activists joined her: politicians, ministers, jurists, doctors, and psychiatrists. One of the board members was Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop of the St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, future home of the Lafargue Clinic. What really enabled Wiltwyck to stay open was not the prominence of its board, though, but the funding it received from donors such as Marshall Field III, the department store heir and newspaper magnate, and Marion Ascoli, the daughter of Julius Rosenwald, founder of Sears, Roebuck.

When asked to help publicize the work done at Wiltwyck, Wright immediately signed on, but not without reservations. The whole framework of philanthropy and race troubled him. He noted in his journal, “I am convinced that Wiltwyck is a damn good cause for it is trying to rehabilitate broken boys, emotionally damaged boys who need a chance.” Nonetheless, he had misgivings about the efficacy of such a small institution. “I could not but keep thinking that the school can take care of but a few of the many who need attention, and that it would not in the long run solve anything.” Wright was also skeptical of some of the women on the board of directors. After attending a cocktail party at the home of Mrs. Trude W. Lash, secretary of the Wiltwyck board, Wright described in his journal feeling puzzled by rich white people who gave their time and money to aid underprivileged black people. “Really, now, why,” he asked:

Wright’s cynicism about these philanthropic white women was matched by his skepticism of white men like Marshall Field III and Edwin Embree of the Rosenwald Fund. After a meeting at Field’s Manhattan apartment on January 12, 1945, Wright declared to himself,

Wright was the most prominent black writer of the day and a vocal spokesman for African American rights, so there was no way that he would refrain from working with the race relations experts and liberal philanthropists.75 But he was also determined to change the terms of the field of race relations.

Wright placed emotional and psychological health at the center of race relations discourse. He identified “emotional deprivation” as a problem just as grave as the material and social deprivation that came from segregation in ghettos like Harlem. In 1945, he drafted a long article titled “The Children of Harlem,” about the conditions of life that had produced the boys sent to the Wiltwyck School. Eventually condensed into a shorter article published as “Juvenile Delinquency in Harlem” for Dorothy Norman’s Twice a Year, the essay exemplified his emphasis on the psychological consequences of racism, as well as his interest in institutions devoted to countering those consequences.

According to Wright, black juvenile delinquents were most often the children of recent migrants to the city. He claimed that more often than not, these boys came from families whose roots were in the South and whose family structure reflected the disorganization and disruption of urban poverty resulting from New York City’s version of Jim Crow. He wrote, “One can say that these boys are neglected, that they are delinquents, that they are problems; but the real name for their ailment is that they are emotionally deprived, that they have had no chance to reach out and attach their feelings to those things in our world that we deem right and necessary…they have had to carry their burdens of fear and anxiety each day and each hour.” Wright wanted to show how black migrants’ daily struggle to survive in the city directed their energies away from their children’s emotional needs and how this neglect contributed to juvenile delinquency.76

In his essay, Wright made dramatic claims about the larger significance of the lives of boys like those of the Wiltwyck School. “When the American environment touches the Negro boy,” argued Wright,

Wright claimed that if “we can save these boys, we can save America. For what is wrong with these boys, what is lacking in them, is, in varying degrees, wrong and lacking in our whole culture.” It was a claim that echoed his contention in “Towards the Conquest of Ourselves” that blacks were “exaggerated Americans,” a notion also held by Fredric Wertham and fellow black writers like Ralph Ellison and Horace Cayton.77

Much of Wright’s writing in this period was geared toward addressing the conditions in cities that created the boys who ended up in Wiltwyck. But his broader aim remained illuminating “the naked experience of Negro life.” In his journal in the winter of 1945, Wright meditated on the importance of this project: “When the feeling and fact of being a Negro is accepted fully into the consciousness of a Negro there’s something universal about it and something that lifts it above being a Negro in America. Oh, will I ever have the strength and courage to tell what I feel and think; and do I know it well enough to tell it?”78

Over the course of ten years, Richard Wright assimilated a vast body of scientific knowledge regarding modern society and the psychological roots of human behavior. He used this knowledge for a form of radical introspection that culminated in Black Boy (American Hunger). Beginning in the early 1940s, Wright asked black and white Americans to engage in the same type of introspection, to look deep within themselves to understand the fundamental sources of their thoughts, feelings, and behavior on matters of race. This introspection, he believed, would provide a new footing for race relations in America. Wright’s new vision for race relations found expression in both his writing and in new institutions devoted to helping black New Yorkers explore and counter the effects of living in a hostile, racist society. It is in the context of Wright’s unflinching confrontation with the policies and practices of white supremacy in American society and his call for introspection among whites and blacks that we can understand the significance of his involvement with projects like the Wiltwyck School and soon the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic.