Notes

Introduction

1. Time, July 28, 1941.

2. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1973), 236.

3. “Murder Is Admitted by Negro Musician,” New York Times, December 3, 1941, 52.

4. Frederic Wertham, Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941). At some point in the mid-1940s Wertham dropped the second e from the spelling of his first name.

5. David Park, “The Couch and the Clinic: The Cultural Authority of Popular Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (January 2004): 109–33.

6. James E. Reibman, “The Life of Dr. Fredric Wertham,” in The Fredric Wertham Collection: Gift of His Wife Hesketh (Cambridge, MA: Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, 1990), 11–22. Ella Winter was married to the writer Lincoln Steffens, with whom she joined the League of American Writers, “an affiliate of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers,” in 1935; see Constance Webb, Richard Wright: A Biography (New York; G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968), 134. Wright describes his involvement with the League of American Writers in a memorable section of Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Perennial Classics, Harper Collins, 1998), 346–50.

7. Richard Wright to Frederic Wertham, October 24, 1941. Quoted in Richard Wright: Books and Writers, ed. Michel Fabre (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 171.

8. Fredric Wertham to Richard Wright, November 9, 1941, box 108, folder 1677, Richard Wright Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection MSS 3, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (hereafter cited as Wright Papers).

9. “Mental hygiene” was both a generic term and a specific movement to institute preventive mental health care throughout the United States. In the first half of the twentieth century, many people used “mental hygiene” simply as substitute for saying “psychiatry.” See Gerald N. Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 1875–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

10. Reibman, “Life of Dr. Fredric Wertham,” 12; Sidney M. Katz, “Jim Crow Is Barred from Wertham’s Clinic,” Magazine Digest, September 1946, and Therese Pol, “Psychiatry in Harlem,” Protestant, June–July 1947, 28–30, reprint in “Publicity,” box 3, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (hereafter cited as Lafargue Clinic Records). Clarence Darrow’s relationship with African American clients is discussed in Kevin Boyle’s excellent history of the Ossian Sweet case in Detroit, The Arc of Justice.

11. Jacques Cattell, ed., American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory (Lancaster, PA: Science Press, 1944), 1908.

12. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson documents the pre–World War II complexity of American whiteness by exploring how scientists and everyday people developed systems of racialized differentiation among varieties of white populations that are now referred to as ethnicities or nationalities. See Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

13. Lorraine Maynard (in collaboration with Laurence Miscall), Bellevue (New York: Julian Messner, 1940), 61, 139–40, italics in original; see also Cheryl Lynn Greenberg “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 86–91; and see also Dennis Doyle, “‘Racial Differences Have to Be Considered’: Lauretta Bender, Bellevue Hospital, and the African American Psyche, 1936–52,” History of Psychiatry 21, no. 2 (2010): 206–23.

14. “Harlem Pioneers with Mental Clinic,” Headlines and Pictures, July 1946, reprint in “Publicity,” box 3, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records.

15. In 1949, the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal Parties formed in New York City and drafted Brown to defeat the Communist city councilman Benjamin J. Davis Jr. The repeal of proportional representation in 1947 enabled Davis’s defeat. According to a New York Times editorial, “The ‘bullet’ voting of PR was an ideal weapon of the Communists in putting Mr. Davis into office and keeping him there.” See New York Times, July 22, 1949, 38; November 9, 1949, 26.

16. Katz, “Jim Crow Is Barred,” no pagination; Richard Wright, “Psychiatry Comes to Harlem,” Free World, September 1946, reprint, p. 3, box 3, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records.

17. Ralph G. Martin, “Doctor’s Dream in Harlem,” New Republic, June 3, 1946, 799. At the time the clinic opened African Americans were only 6.5 percent of New York City’s population; in 1940 there were 458,000 blacks out of a total population of 7,455,000, and in 1950 they were 748,000 out of a total 7,892,000. Yet in the early 1940s black people were five times as likely to be in jail and were one-third of the city’s prison population. Black youth were reported to be 53 percent of all juvenile delinquency cases in Manhattan. See Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972), chap. 6.

18. Bishop was not completely alone at the time among Harlem pastors who sought rapprochement between the ministry and psychiatry. In his autobiography the Reverend James H. Robinson wrote: “I dreamed of a minister and a psychiatrist working together in an experiment in spiritual psychiatry. It would be no trick at all if two such persons of equal stature and mutual confidence and respect for one another’s respective fields could be found who would deal with people both as moral and physical beings.” James H. Robinson, Road without Turning: The Story of Rev. James H. Robinson; An Autobiography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1950), 253. Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 300–336; Shelton H. Bishop, “A History of St. Philip’s Church,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 1946, 298; “Biggest Episcopal Church: Harlem’s St. Philip’s Tops in U.S. Membership,” Ebony, November 1952, 58–66.

19. Lafargue Clinic pamphlet, box 2, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records.

20. Florence Hesketh Wertham to Richard Wright, no date, approximately late 1946, box 108, folder 1677, Wright Papers.

21. The “Lafargue Clinic Statistics” report dated March 6, 1956, explains that for records of correspondence between the clinic and city, state, and private funding agencies, “all data in Dr. Wertham’s file Official Papers.” Box 1, folder 9, Lafargue Clinic Records. Just several blocks away in the very same month, Kenneth and Mamie Clark opened the famed Northside Center for Child Development, where their doll tests with black children were used as evidence in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. See Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (New York: Routledge, 2000) and chapters 3 and 4 for a discussion of the Clarks and the Northside Center in relation to the Lafargue Clinic’s history.

22. Lafargue clinic pamphlet, box 2, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/preface.htm. For recent exploration of Lafargue’s thought see Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 103–9.

23. For a broad, interdisciplinary exploration of psychiatric representations of African American madness and black mental illness as a mark of distinctly racial proclivities toward irrationality and psychopathology see Sander Gilman’s “On the Nexus of Blackness and Madness,” in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 131–49. See also Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power; Matthew Gambino, “‘These Strangers within Our Gates’: Race, Psychiatry, and Mental Illness among Black Americans at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., 1900–1940,” History of Psychiatry 19, no. 4 (2008): 387–408; Jonathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009); Martin Summers, “‘Suitable Care of the African When Afflicted with Insanity’: Race, Madness, and Social Order in Comparative Perspective,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84, no. 1 (2010).

24. See Jay Garcia, Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the Race Question in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), and Jonathan C. Hagel, “In Search of the ‘Racist White Psyche’: Racism and the Psychology of Prejudice in American Social Thought, 1930–1960” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2012) and my discussion below of the literature of race and the human sciences in postwar American society. In his book Madness Is Civilization: When the Diagnosis Was Social, 1948–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Michael Staub shows that in the three decades following World War II, psychiatry developed a turn toward “environmental” factors in mental life and toward “social analyses of individual problems,” reflecting “beliefs that analyzing interpersonal relations and environmental conditions offered an exciting key for the curing of individual psychological difficulties,” 4. See also Martin Halliwell, Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945–1970 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), and Trysh Travis and Timothy Aubry, eds., Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

25. See Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey, The Mark of Oppression: A Psychosocial Study of the American Negro (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1951). Albert Murray’s writing has been an invaluable guide for thinking about social scientific explorations of black personality. See his self-admittedly polemical The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy (New York: Vintage, 1983), published originally in 1970. Ruth Feldstein’s Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) is particularly helpful for considering the gendered dimensions of the mid-twentieth-century pathologizing of African Americans in the human sciences. See also Anna Creadick, Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), and Deborah Weinstein, The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

26. Historian James T. Patterson writes that “roughly a million blacks (along with even more whites) moved from the South during the 1940s. Another 1.5 million Negroes left the South in the 1950s.” Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 19.

27. See Robert Gregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression: Philadelphia’s African Methodists and Southern Migrants, 1890–1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).

28. See David Park, “Putting the World on the Couch: Cultural Authority as a Dimension of Mid-20th Century Popular Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2001).

29. See Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Historian Dennis Doyle convincingly shows, though, that some psychiatrists and social scientists continued to entertain bio-racial explanations for supposed differences in white and black behavior and culture; see Doyle, “‘Racial Differences.’”

30. See Walter Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 272–93, and Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 174–207.

31. The phrase “psychological reworking of race” comes from Jay Garcia’s “Psychology Comes to Harlem: Race, Intellectuals, and Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century U.S.” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2003). See also Anne C. Rose, “Putting the South on the Psychological Map: The Impact of Region and Race on the Human Sciences during the 1930s,” Journal of Southern History 71, no. 2 (May 2005): 321–35; Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal; Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 40–61; Herman, Romance of American Psychology; Scott, Contempt and Pity; Leah Gordon, “The Question of Prejudice: Social Science, Education, and the Struggle to Define ‘the Race Problem’ in Mid-Century America, 1935–1965” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008); Hagel, “In Search of the ‘Racist White Psyche.’” The most prominent exponent of the theory of frustration and aggression in race relations was social psychologist John Dollard; see his “Hostility and Fear in Social Life,” Social Forces 17, no. 1 (October 1938): 15–26; see also Hortense Powdermaker, “The Channeling of Negro Aggression by the Cultural Process,” in Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture, ed. Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 473–84.

32. See the U.S. Army Medical Department, Neuropsychiatry in World War II, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966–73); Roy R. Grinker and John P. Siegel, War Neuroses (Philadelphia: Blakiston Co., 1945); Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 5–23; and Nathan G. Hale Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 187–210; Herman, Romance of American Psychology, esp. chaps. 2–4.

33. Karl A. Menninger, A Psychiatrist’s World: The Selected Papers of Karl Menninger (New York: Viking, 1959), 526–28, quoted in Gerald Grob, From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 7.

34. See Guy B. Johnson, “The Stereotype of the American Negro,” in Characteristics of the American Negro, ed. Otto Klineberg (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944), 4–22. For an excellent historical study of black encounters with psychiatry in the World War II U.S. armed forces see Ellen Dwyer, “Psychiatry and Race during World War II,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61, no. 2 (2006): 117–43.

35. Kay Cremin, “Brown Breakdown: Negro Mental Patients Increase as Race Hate Takes Its Toll,” Negro Digest, March 1947, 51. See also E. Franklin Frazier, “Mental Deficiency and Insanity,” in his textbook The Negro in the United States (New York: Macmillan Co., 1949); Park, “Couch and the Clinic,” 109–33.

36. Grob, From Asylum to Community; Gerald Grob, The Mad among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill (New York: Free Press, 1994).

37. Robert Bendiner, “Psychiatry for the Needy,” Tomorrow, May 1946, 24.

38. See Steven F. Lawson, ed., To Secure These Rights: The Report of Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights (1947; Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2004).

39. Kenneth Spencer, “Sans Funds, LaFarge [sic] Clinic Lives,” The People’s Voice, July 13, 1946, reprint in “Publicity,” box 3, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records.

40. While there are several chapter and article-length examinations of the Lafargue Clinic that provide a wealth of insight into what distinguished it on the intellectual and social landscape of mid-twentieth-century psychiatry and racial knowledge, Under the Strain of Color offers a comprehensive exposition of the story and significance of Lafargue. It does so by using both widely known published and unpublished sources and heretofore untapped archival material to position the clinic in a set of distinct yet convergent discursive, institutional, and geographical contexts that reveal histories of African American migration and urbanization, dramatic developments in psychiatric science and practice in both Western Europe and the United States, as well as interracial networks of collaboration among the noncommunist radical Left in postwar America. Shelly Eversley, “The Lunatic’s Fancy and the Work of Art,” American Literary History 13, no. 3 (2001): 445–68; David Marriot, “The Derived Life of Fiction: Race, Childhood, and Culture,” in Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Dennis Doyle, “‘A Fine New Child’: The Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic and Harlem’s African American Communities, 1946–1958,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 64, no. 2 (2009); Dennis A. Doyle, “‘Where the Need Is Greatest’: Social Psychiatry and Race-Blind Universalism in Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic, 1946–1958,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 746–74; Badia Sahar Ahad, “‘A Genuine Cooperation’: Richard Wright’s and Ralph Ellison’s Psychoanalytic Conversations,” in Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); J. Bradford Campbell, “The Schizophrenic Solution: Dialectics of Neurosis and Anti-Psychiatric Animus in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” Novel: A Forum for Fiction 43, no. 3 (2010): 443–65; and Catherine Stewart, “‘Crazy for This Democracy’: Postwar Psychoanalysis, African American Blues Narratives, and the Lafargue Clinic,” American Quarterly 65, no. 2 (June 2013): 371–95, which is an extraordinarily capacious and well-crafted synthesis of both literary studies and institutional history that makes creative use of the Lafargue patient files to situate the clinic’s work within a compelling cultural frame, namely African American blues narratives.

41. Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Gambino, “‘These Strangers within Our Gates’”; Samuel K. Roberts, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Metzl, Protest Psychosis; and Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Jenna Lloyd, Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

42. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). In addition to the works referenced in this paragraph, historian Andrea Friedman uses Marshall’s “social citizenship” to analyze Wertham’s efforts “to redefine national security for those left behind by democracy.” See Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). Unfortunately, I encountered Friedman’s book too late in the production of this book for me to engage her insights in any sustained, substantive manner.

43. Nelson, Body and Soul, 9–11.

44. John Stanfield, Philanthropy and Jim Crow in American Social Science (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal; Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); James B. McKee, Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure of a Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Herman, Romance of American Psychology; Ben Keppel, The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Scott, Contempt and Pity; Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White; John Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case against Segregation (New York: NYU Press, 2001); Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Rose, “Putting the South on the Psychological Map”; Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Garcia, Psychology Comes to Harlem.

45. Scott, Contempt and Pity, xix. Alongside Scott’s, the works most critical of the reifying normativity and constricting, neutralizing liberalism of postwar human sciences are Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White; Ferguson, Aberrations in Black; and Melamed, Represent and Destroy.

46. Richard Wright, “Urban Misery in an American City: Juvenile Delinquency in Harlem,” Twice a Year 14–15 (Fall 1946–Winter 1947): 339–46, and Wright’s 1945 private journal, box 117, folder 1860, Wright Papers. Just as insightful is Garcia’s contention that scholars today who seek to locate traditions of black radicalism need to pay more attention to the ways in which black writers and activists in the twentieth century articulated together analyses and critiques of political economy, psychology inquiry, and cultural commentary; Garcia, Psychology Comes to Harlem, 12–18.

47. Fredric Wertham, “What Is Social Psychiatry?,” lecture read at the Brooklyn State Hospital Psychiatric Forum on December 5, 1946, 16–17, box 85, folder 8, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as Wertham Papers).

48. Bart Beaty’s Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005) is a vital exception within the historiography.

1. “This Burden of Consciousness”

1. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1973), 179. For more on the significance of inclusion in the Book-of-the-Month Club see Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

2. FBI File No. 100-41674, “Richard Nathaniel Wright,” July 8, 1944, 2–3, http://vault.fbi.gov/Richard%20Nathaniel%20Wright. See also Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 245–46, and Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001), 285–86.

3. See also Jay Garcia, Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the Race Question in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

4. See Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); John Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case against Segregation (New York: NYU Press, 2001); Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Garcia, Psychology Comes to Harlem.

5. See James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).

6. Wright Journal, January 6, 1945, box 117, folder 1860, Richard Wright Papers.

7. At the time the population was approximately three million people, of which around three hundred thousand were African American. The Black Belt, that strip of land on which blacks were forced to settle, “was seven miles in length and one and one-half miles of width.” See St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, vol. 1, rev. and enlarged ed. (1945; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 8.

8. Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth, restored text established by the Library of America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 261.

9. Ibid., 284.

10. See Fred H. Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1977), and Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

11. James F. Short, ed., The Social Fabric of the Metropolis: Contributions of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), xix.

12. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (1925; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 2.

13. “Reflections on Richard Wright: A Symposium on an Exiled Native Son,” in Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 196–97. Cayton would confess in his 1965 autobiography, Long Old Road, that Wright had to remind him they had met previously and that Wright described their meeting in the way Cayton claimed to remember at the Berkeley symposium; see Cayton, Long Old Road (New York: Trident Press, 1965), 247–48. See also Rowley, Richard Wright, 81–82.

14. Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 46. See also Cappetti, Writing Chicago.

15. Wright was drawing on the concepts of German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies as distilled through the Chicago School. See Louis Wirth, “The Sociology of Ferdinand Tonnies,” American Journal of Sociology 32, no. 3 (November 1926), and Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (July 1938): 3, 20–21; Wright, Black Boy, 284.

16. Quoted in Campbell, Middle Passages, 275.

17. Book-of-the-Month Bulletin, February 1942, quoted in Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 572, n.41.

18. Wright, Black Boy, 297–98.

19. See Cedric Robinson, “The Emergent Marxism of Richard Wright’s Ideology,” Race and Class 19, no. 3 (1978): 221–37.

20. See “How Bigger Was Born,” in Richard Wright, Native Son, restored ed. by Library of America (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 443. The story of Wright’s experiences within the Chicago Communist Party is well-known and remains a subject of discussion and debate. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), and William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

21. Wright, Black Boy, 318.

22. Daniel Aaron, “Richard Wright and the Communist Party,” in Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives, ed. David Ray and Robert M. Farnsworth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 41–42; see also St. Clair Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 734–37; and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–63.

23. Wright, Black Boy, 319–20; Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 105.

24. See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 287–305.

25. Wright, Black Boy, 333, 352–58; Rowley, Richard Wright, 88–101.

26. Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 105.

27. Wright, Black Boy, 332; for more on Poindexter see Addison Gayle, Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press / Doubleday, 1980), 73–78.

28. Robert Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” American Journal of Sociology 33, no. 6 (1928): 881; Wright, Black Boy, 332.

29. Wright, Black Boy, 341; Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” in Native Son, 453–54.

30. “The Negro Boy Problem and the South Side Boy’s [sic] Club Foundation,” n.d., n.p., Chicago Historical Society, quoted in Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

31. Wright, Black Boy, 341.

32. Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” in Native Son, 454.

33. Wright, Native Son, 294.

34. Wright Journal, February 5, 1945, box 117, folder 1860, Wright Papers.

35. Wright, Black Boy, 382. This passage does not appear in the 1944 essay “I Tried to Be a Communist,” a long excerpt from American Hunger, the second part of Wright’s autobiography. See Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Bantam Books, 1950), 103–46. See “Note on the Text,” in Wright, Black Boy, 409–10.

36. Rowley, Richard Wright, 123; Margaret Walker, “Richard Wright,” in Ray and Farns-worth, Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives, 57.

37. Rowley, Richard Wright, 128–29; Wright to Ellison, November 2, 1937, quoted ibid., 129.

38. When asked by his lawyer Max whether the South Side Boys’ Club kept him out of trouble, Bigger replies, “Kept me out of trouble? Naw; that’s where we planned most of our jobs”: Wright, Native Son, 355.

39. Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” in Native Son, 450, 452.

40. Fredric Wertham, “An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son,” Journal of Clinical Psychopathology and Psychotherapy 6 (July 1944): 111–15.

41. Frederic Wertham, introduction to The World Within: Fiction Illuminating the Neuroses of Our Time, ed. Mary Louis Aswell (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1947), xxi.

42. Wertham, “Unconscious Determinant,” 111–15.

43. For a detailed study of the intersections of literature, psychoanalysis, and race within the Wright/Wertham relationship, which uses “An Unconscious Determinant” as a prism, see David Marriot, “The Derived Life of Fiction,” in his Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 69–105, and Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

44. Richard Wright Journal, January 25, 1945, box 117, folder 1860, Wright Papers.

45. See Herman, Romance of American Psychology; Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004); Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); David Park, “The Couch and the Clinic: The Cultural Authority of Popular Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (January 2004): 109–33.

46. Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 228–29.

47. Quoted ibid., 230–31.

48. Ray and Farnsworth, Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives.

49. Richard Wright Journal, January 20–21, 1945, box 117, folder 1860, Wright Papers.

50. Wright, “Towards the Conquest of Ourselves,” n.d., n.p., box 6, folder 148, Wright Papers.

51. Ibid.

52. Cayton to Wright, October 22, 1944, box 95, folder 1254, Wright Papers.

53. Rowley, Richard Wright, 298–300.

54. Wright’s interest in the utility of psychological readings of the race problem applied to all people, but his emphasis was decidedly on the psychic health of black boys and men. The literature on the masculinist character of Wright’s thought and fiction is voluminous. A good starting point is Paul Gilroy’s discussion of this issue in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 173–86.

55. Cayton to Wright, April 2, 1945, box 95, folder 1254, Wright Papers.

56. See Cayton, Long Old Road, 249; Rowley, Richard Wright, 277–78; Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 249–52; and Scott, Contempt and Pity, 100–102, 231. There is no extant copy of the lecture Wright delivered at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.

57. Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 249.

58. See Ralph Ellison’s treatment of this topic in his classic review of Black Boy titled “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Quality Paper Back Book Club, 1994), 77–94.

59. Cayton, Long Old Road, 260.

60. Horace Cayton, “Frightened Children of Frightened Parents,” Twice a Year 12–13 (Spring–Summer and Fall–Winter 1945): 262–65.

61. Ibid., 266.

62. Horace Cayton, “A Psychological Approach to Race Relations,” Reed College Bulletin 25 (November 1946): 8.

63. Ibid., 6.

64. Earlier in the essay, Cayton applied the term “oppression psychosis” to the Negro. He was borrowing the concept from Herbert A. Miller’s Races, Nations and Classes: The Psychology of Domination and Freedom (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1924). It is worth noting that Cayton never made reference, in either his letters to Wright or the essays discussed here, to the published research of John Dollard, Hortense Powdermaker, or Allison Davis, each of whom made use of psychoanalysis to explain the psychic dimension of whites’ oppression of blacks and its impact on the personalities of both blacks and whites in the Jim Crow South. See Anne C. Rose, “Putting the South on the Psychological Map: The Impact of Region and Race on the Human Sciences during the 1930s,” Journal of Southern History 71, no. 2 (May 2005): 321–56.

65. Cayton, Long Old Road; Cayton to Wright, April 2, 1945, box 95, folder 1254, Wright Papers.

66. On the distinction among sociogeny, ontogeny, and phylogeny to which I refer see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; New York: Grove Press, 1967). Also see Wertham’s unpublished lecture “What Is Social Psychiatry,” December 5, 1946, box 186, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as Wertham Papers).

67. Richard Wright, “A World View of the American Negro,” Twice a Year 14–15 (1946–47): 346–47.

68. See Dorothy Norman, Encounters: A Memoir (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 181–201; Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day, trans. Carol Cosman (1953; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Fabre, Unfinished Quest, 276.

69. See the anthology Bernard Sternsher, ed., The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930–1945 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), esp. “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution” by Richard M. Dalfiume, 298–316; see also Kenneth B. Clark on “Morale among Negroes,” in Civilian Morale: Second Yearbook of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, ed. Goodwin Watson (Boston: Reynal & Hitchcock, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1942).

70. “The Story of the City-Wide Citizens’ Committee on Harlem,” May 23, 1943, box 338, folder 5, series 14.9, Viola W. Bernard Papers, Columbia University Health Sciences Library Archives and Special Collections, New York. See also Gerald Markowitz and Mark Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (New York: Routledge, 2000), 6–12.

71. Report of the Exploratory Committee on Negro Welfare, 1939, quoted in Justine Wise Polier, Everyone’s Children, Nobody’s Child: A Judge Looks at Underprivileged Children in the United States (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), 241. See also Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power, 1–17.

72. See Dorothy Norman’s New York Post column “A World to Live In,” June 26, 1944, as well as Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power, 7–12.

73. Wright Journal, February 6, 1945, box 117, folder 1860, Wright Papers.

74. Ibid.

75. For a critical examination of the role of philanthropy in constituting a regime of racially liberal “official antiracism” that constrained more radical efforts to achieve racial justice in the United States see Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Oddly, Melamed fails to cite vital precursors to her argument on the topic, namely Ralph Ellison, “An American Dilemma: A Review” (1944), in Shadow and Act (1953; New York: Vintage Books, 1964) and John Stanfield, Philanthropy and Jim Crow in American Social Science (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).

76. Richard Wright, “The Children of Harlem,” 22–23, n.d., box 7, folder 150, Wright Papers.

77. Ibid., 41.

78. Wright Journal, February 12, 1945, box 117, folder 1860, Wright Papers.

2. “Intangible Difficulties”

1. F. I. Wertham Correspondence, series 4000 / folder 9, Adolf Meyer Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (hereafter cited as Meyer Papers). Wertham changed his name from Friedrich Ignanz Wertheimer to Frederick Wertham in 1928 and later dropped the k, then the second e, from his first name sometime in the 1930s and the 1940s, respectively.

2. Dr. Adolf Meyer to Dr. H. Gideon Wells, University of Chicago, November 12, 1931, series 4000 / folder 18, Meyer Papers.

3. Adolf Meyer to Dr. F. I. Wertham, January 5, 1931, series 4000 / folder 16, Meyer Papers.

4. See Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2005).

5. Wertham’s major book publications include The Brain as an Organ: Its Postmortem Study and Interpretation, introduction by Adolf Meyer, MD (New York: Macmillan Co., 1934); Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941); The Show of Violence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949); Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1954); The Circle of Guilt (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1956); A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence (New York: Macmillan Co., 1966); The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973).

6. Medical psychology refers to the study and treatment of mental or psychic functions in relation to medical approaches to health and illness. Medical psychology is to be distinguished from experimental or academic psychology; see Fredric Wertham, “The Social Basis of Psychotherapy,” lecture presented at Columbia University, November 13, 1947, 7, box 186, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter cited as Wertham Papers).

7. Robert Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” American Journal of Sociology 33 (1928): 881–93.

8. See Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001), 286, 294–95.

9. In 1895 the population of Nuremberg was 142,500, of which 4,737 (3.3 percent) were Jews. Anthony Kauders, German Politics and the Jews: Dusseldorf and Nuremberg, 1910–1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 14. Nuremberg would later become known as fertile soil for anti-Jewish sentiments and politics—as the city’s name would be attached to the laws stripping Jews of their civil rights. And anyone who has seen Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will must have an image of the Nuremberg rallies for the Nazi Party in the mid-1930s.

10. Ella Winter, And Not to Yield (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), chap. 1; James E. Reibman, “The Life of Dr. Fredric Wertham,” in The Fredric Wertham Collection: Gift of His Wife Hesketh (Cambridge, MA: Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, 1990), 11–13. Wertham’s sister Ida Macalpine coauthored several major studies with her son Richard Hunter, including Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry: 1535–1860 and George III and the Mad Business.

11. Ella Winter would later become a prominent Communist activist and writer married first to the famed muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens and then to screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, later a victim of the McCarthyite blacklist. It was she who first introduced Richard Wright and Fredric Wertham in 1941. Winter, And Not to Yield, 1963.

12. Paul Cohen-Portheim, Time Stood Still, 1914–1918 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1932), 65; see also Panikos Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War (New York: Berg Publishers, 1991), esp. 99–131.

13. “Medical Career of Mr. Friedel Wertheimer,” ca. 1920, series 4000/1, Meyer Papers.

14. See Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), and Paul F. Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

15. There were of course many important workers in medical psychology in European countries other than Germany and Switzerland, as well as in the United States, but my emphasis here is on the institutional and scientific context of Wertham’s initial encounters with clinical psychiatry in German-speaking Central Europe. See Eric Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany: A History of Psychiatric Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); for the U.S. context see Nathan G. Hale Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), esp. parts 1 and 2.

16. Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany, 4.

17. Fredric Wertham, “Episodes: From the Life of a Psychiatrist,” 31, box 108, Wertham Papers (hereafter cited as Wertham, “Episodes”).

18. Norman Cameron, “The Functional Psychoses,” in Personality and the Behavior Disorders, vol. 2, ed. J. McV. Hunt (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1944), 874. Cameron’s essay provides an invaluable digest of the state of knowledge on the psychoses during the period under discussion.

19. Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany. The eminent historian of the unconscious Henri Ellenberger counters the myth surrounding Kraepelin’s work: “Kraepelin has become the whipping boy of many present-day psychiatrists who claim that his only concern for his patients was to place diagnostic labels on them, after which nothing more was done to help them. In fact, however, he took the greatest care that every one of his patients should receive the best treatment available in his time, and he was an extremely human person.” See Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 285.

20. Wertham, “Episodes,” 30.

21. Eugen Kahn, “Emil Kraepelin Memorial Lecture,” in Epidemiology of Mental Disorder, ed. Benjamin Pasamanick (Washington DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, Publication No. 60), 24–25; Emil Kraepelin, Memoirs, ed. H. Hippius, G. Peters, and D. Ploog, in collaboration with P. Hoff and A. Kreuter, trans. Cheryl Wooding-Deane (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1987), 180; see especially Wertham’s Brain as an Organ. The relationship between neurology and psychiatry during the formative years of modern mental science in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries consisted of a complex (international) debate over the scientific understanding of the mind-brain problem in medicine. See Hale, “The Somatic Style,” in his Freud and the Americans, 47–97; and Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany, esp. 98–127.

22. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography (London: Longman Press, 1991), 112.

23. Anthony Nicholls, “Hitler and the Bavarian Background to National Socialism,” in German Democracy and the Triumph of Hitler, ed. Anthony Nicholls and Erich Matthias (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971), 109.

24. Hermann Oppenheim, “Seelenstorung und Volksbewegung,” Berliner Tageblatt, April 16, 1919, 1–2, quoted in Lerner, Hysterical Men, 2003, 217

25. Emil Kraepelin, “Psychiatrische Randbemerkungen zur Zeitgeschicte,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 16 (1919): 171–83, quoted in Lerner, Hysterical Men, 215–16. In an analysis of sixty-six Bavarian revolutionists, one of Kraepelin’s underlings, Eugen Kahn, concluded that “scarcely one of the sixty six can in any way be viewed as completely psychically in tact.” Kahn, “Psychopathen als revolutionäre Führer,” ZgNP 52 (1919): 90–106, quoted in Lerner, Hysterical Men, 215.

26. See Lerner, Hysterical Men, 214–17; Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (1987; New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), 139. See also Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

27. Kraepelin, Memoirs, 190.

28. Wertham, Show of Violence, 246; Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 210. For the history of interwar politics in Germany see Ian Kershaw, ed., Weimar: Why Did German Democracy Fail? (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990); for the relationship between German politics and public health issues, including mental health, see Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics.

29. Dr. Alfred E. Cohn to Dr. Adolf Meyer, December 16, 1920; Dr. Bernard Sachs to Dr. Adolf Meyer, November 28, 1921; Dr. F. I. Wertheimer to Dr. Adolf Meyer, January 15, 1922, series 4000/1, Meyer Papers.

30. Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth, restored text established by the Library of America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 244–57.

31. Gerald Grob, The Mad among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill (New York: Free Press, 1994), 141–49.

32. Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 79–80.

33. Grob, Mad among Us, 129–64; Hale, Freud and the Americans, 434–61.

34. See Ruth Leys, “Adolf Meyer: A Biographical Note,” in Defining American Psychology: The Correspondence between Adolf Meyer and Edward Bradford Titchener, ed. Leys and Rand B. Evans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

35. Hale, Freud and the Americans, 446–47.

36. For an overview of the historiography on Progressivism see Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (December 1982): 113–32. On the mental hygiene movement see John Chynoweth Burnham, “Psychiatry, Psychology and the Progressive Movement,” American Quarterly 12, no. 4 (Winter 1960), 457–65; Theresa R. Richardson, The Century of the Child: The Mental Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the United States and Canada (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), esp. chaps. 7 and 8; Gerald Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 1875–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), esp. chap. 6. Fred Matthews offers perhaps the most erudite and suggestive assessment of the mental hygiene movement in his essay “In Defense of Common Sense: Mental Hygiene as Ideology and Mentality in Twentieth-Century America,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 4 (1979): 459–516.

37. Sol Cohen, “The Mental Hygiene Movement, the Development of Personality and the School: The Medicalization of American Education,” History of Education Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 140.

38. For a discussion of psychophysical parallelism see P. Hoff, “Kraepelin,” in A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origins and History of Psychiatric Disorders, ed. German E. Berrios and Roy Porter (New York: NYU Press, 1995), 261–79.

39. Adolf Meyer, “Psychobiological Point of View,” in The Problem of Mental Disorder, ed. Madison Bentley and E. V. Cowdry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934), 70.

40. See the glossary of Meyerian psychobiology in Alfred Lief, ed., The Commonsense Psychiatry of Dr. Adolf Meyer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948), 641–52.

41. Adolf Meyer, “Substitutive Activity and Reaction-Types,” in Lief, Commonsense Psychiatry of Dr. Adolf Meyer, 203. For more on Meyer’s views of Kraepelinian, or German, nosology, as he referred to it during World War I, see his “The Aims and Meaning of Psychiatric Diagnosis,” American Journal of Insanity 74 (1917): 163–67.

42. Leys, “Adolf Meyer: A Biographical Note,” 46.

43. Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (1949; Boston: Beacon Press, 1957); see also Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

44. Leys, “Adolf Meyer: A Biographical Note,” 44–45.

45. See Paul R. McHugh, “Commentary on ‘Inpatient Diagnoses during Adolf Meyer’s Tenure as Director of the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, 1913–1940,’” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 174, no. 12 (1986): 752–53.

46. F. I. Wertheimer, “A Brief Survey of American Psychiatry, 1914–1924,” State Hospital Quarterly 11, no. 2 (February 1926): 167–80, trans. reprint from Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie 81 (1925): 442–55. For general histories of American psychiatry during this period see Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, and Nathan G. Hale Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

47. F. I. Wertheimer and Florence E. Hesketh, The Significance of the Physical Constitution in Mental Disease (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Co., 1926), 69. Florence Hesketh, who would soon marry Wertham, was a young woman visiting Johns Hopkins as a Charlton Fellow in Medicine. She illustrated all the images of subjects of the study.

48. Ibid., 8–9.

49. Wertham was referring to the work of Ales Hrdlicka; see Hrdlicka’s Anthropometry (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, 1925).

50. Wertham and Hesketh, Significance of the Physical Constitution, 5–7.

51. Ibid., 17.

52. See C. Macfie Campbell, “The Mental Health of the Community and the Work of the Psychiatric Dispensary,” Mental Hygiene 1, no. 4 (October 1917): 1–13.

53. Wertheimer to Dr. Richards, December 22, 1927, and January 4, 1928, series 4000/8, Meyer Papers.

54. Untitled and undated four-page report in series 4000/9, Meyer Papers.

55. Dr. Franklin C. McLean to Dr. Adolf Meyer, April 4, 1929, series 4000/10, Meyer Papers.

56. Dr. Adolf Meyer to Dr. Franklin C. McLean, April 11, 1929, series 4000/10, Meyer Papers.

57. Untitled and undated memorandum (ca. April 1929), series 4000/10, Meyer Papers.

58. Wertham to Adolf Meyer, August 28, 1929, series 4000/11, Meyer Papers; Adolf Meyer to Dr. G. C. Huber, September 25, 1929, series 4000/12, Meyer Papers; G. Carl Huber to Adolf Meyer, November 2, 1929, series 4000/13, Meyer Papers. Wertham published the results of his studies in Munich as The Brain as an Organ: Its Postmortem Study and Interpretation (1934).

59. Hans Jakob Ritter and Volker Roelcke, “Psychiatric Genetics in Munich and Basel between 1925 and 1945,” Osiris 20 (2005): 267.

60. See Paul Weindling’s excellent history of the science and politics of German racial hygiene during this era, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945, 1989. For mention of the role of eugenics in American psychiatry in the first decades of the twentieth century see Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 167–78.

61. Dr. Walther Spielmeyer to Adolf Meyer, February 21, 1930, and December 13, 1930, series 4000/15, Meyer Papers. For biographical information on Spielmeyer see Webb Haymaker and Francis Schiller, eds., The Founders of Neurology: One Hundred and Forty-Six Biographical Sketches by Eighty-Eight Authors, 2nd ed. (Springfield, IL: Thomas Publishers, 1970), 377.

62. F. I. Wertham to Adolf Meyer, December 6, 1930, series 4000/15, Meyer Papers; Adolf Meyer to F. I. Wertham, January 5, 1931, series 4000/16, Meyer Papers.

63. F. I. Wertham to Adolf Meyer, December 6, 1930, series 4000/15, Meyer Papers; Adolf Meyer to F. I. Wertham, January 5, 1931, series 4000/16, Meyer Papers. See John Higham’s classic study, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955); see also Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York: Harper & Bros., 1931), esp. 58–69. In the early 1920s, wrote Allen, “intolerance became an American virtue.” For a later period see Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930–1941, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

64. Writing in 1943, Wertham claimed that he had had an “analytic inspection” from “the man whom Freud called the best American psychoanalyst”: Wertham, “While Rome Burns: Review of Gregory Zilboorg’s Mind, Medicine and Man (1943),” New Republic, May 24, 1943, 707; Wertham, “A Thwarted Interview,” in “Episodes,” 44–47. Apart from these brief allusions to Frink, Wertham never offered an account of the process by which he became a psychoanalyst. It isn’t clear whether “analytic inspection” meant that he underwent the “training analysis,” which by the 1920s came to be a requirement among psychoanalytic societies in the United States. See Hale, Freud and the Americans, 323.

65. See Freud-Frink file, boxes 1 and 2, Wertham Papers. For the troubling history of Freud’s psychoanalysis of Frink see Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), 565–66, and Silas L. Warner, “Freud’s Analysis of Horace Frink, MD: A Previously Unexplained Therapeutic Disaster,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 22, no. 1 (1994): 137–52.

66. Department of Hospitals, Psychiatric Division of the Court of General Sessions, Report for the Year 1935, New York Public Library; Walter Bromberg, Psychiatry between the Wars, 1918–1945: A Recollection (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 110, 104; Wickersham Commission Report, quoted in Bromberg, Psychiatry between the Wars, 104.

67. Wertham to Adolf Meyer, January 1, 1932, series 4000/18, Meyer Papers.

68. Bromberg, Psychiatry between the Wars.

69. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, One Thousand Juvenile Delinquents: Their Treatment by Court and Clinic, introduction by Felix Frankfurter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939); Clifford Shaw, The Natural History of a Delinquent Career (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931).

70. Wertham, Show of Violence, 24–25.

71. Wertham to Adolf Meyer, May 3, 1937, series /4000/22, Meyer Papers.

72. Gerald Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 224–27.

73. Wertham, Show of Violence, 124.

74. Differential diagnosis is the clinical process of eliminating other possible disorders to arrive at the correct diagnosis of a patient.

75. Frederic Wertham, “The Catathymic Crisis: A Clinical Entity,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 37 (1937): 974–77; Wertham, Show of Violence, 179.

76. Richard Wright, Native Son, restored ed. by Library of America (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 85, 91; 425–30.

77. Ibid., 105, 429.

78. Wertham, Dark Legend, 19–20.

79. Ibid., 230.

80. See Wertham’s extended discussion of the social roots of violence in The Show of Violence (1949) and A Sign for Cain (1966).

81. Wertham, “Episodes,” 128–31.

82. Wertham to Adolf Meyer, September 16, 1942, series 4000/26, Meyer Papers.

3. “Between the Sewer and the Church”

The title of this chapter is drawn from Ralph Ellison’s handwritten notes in preparation for writing “Harlem Is Nowhere,” his 1948 essay on the Lafargue Clinic’s significance to Harlem and to American democracy more broadly. “Harlem Is Nowhere,” box 1:100, Ralph Ellison Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

1. Dr. Elizabeth Bishop Davis Trussell, interview by author, tape recording, New York, January 6, 2006. Shelton Hale Bishop may have been particularly attuned to the needs of those suffering from mental illness, as one of his sisters was reputedly in an insane asylum in the early 1940s. See George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 457.

2. Shelton H. Bishop, “A History of St. Philip’s Church New York City,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 15 (1946): 298–317.

3. One fellow minister noted how radical the aim of bringing the church and psychiatry together was at the time; see James H. Robinson, Road without Turning: The Story of Rev. James H. Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Co., 1950), 253; Dr. Elizabeth Bishop Davis Trussell interview.

4. Ralph G. Martin, “Doctor’s Dream in Harlem,” New Republic, June 3, 1946, 799; Hilde L. Mosse, “Child Psychiatry and Social Action: An Integral Part of the History of American Child Psychiatry,” n.d., 7, box 3, Lafargue Clinic Records, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (hereafter cited as Lafargue Clinic Records).

5. Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1948); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

6. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1957), 264.

7. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981).

8. See Cheryl Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

9. Alain Locke, “Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane,” Survey Graphic 25, no. 8 (August 1936): 457.

10. Historian Dominic Capeci notes that many residents of Harlem moved in for a brief time and left for opportunities elsewhere, only to be replaced by new migrants to the city; see Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977), 58–59.

11. Martin, “Doctor’s Dream in Harlem,” 799; Robert Bendiner, “Psychiatry for the Needy,” Tomorrow, May 1946, 22.

12. Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Signet Books, 1965), vii.

13. See “Editorial Comment,” Negro Quarterly 1, no. 4 (Winter–Spring 1943): 295–302, which most scholars believe to have been penned by Ralph Ellison while he served as managing editor of this short-lived journal; Nikhil Pal Singh’s incisive, provocative Black Is a Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) explores how, alongside such activists as A. Philip Randolph and his March on Washington movement, a small coterie of black male radical political intellectuals who had coalesced around Ellison, Wright, and Trinidadian-born C. L. R. James militantly challenged the United States’ exceptionalist self-image as they reckoned with the problem of national and racial allegiance and belonging for black Americans during World War II and its immediate aftermath; see also Richard M. Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” in The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930–1945, ed. Bernard Sternsher (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), 298–316; and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Marching Blacks: An Interpretive History of the Rise of the Black Common Man (New York: Dial Press, 1945).

14. Howard Odum, Race and Rumors of Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943).

15. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York: Bantam Books, 1964), 82.

16. “The Story of the City-Wide Citizens’ Committee on Harlem,” May 23, 1943, box 338, folder 5, series 14.9, Viola W. Bernard Papers, Columbia University Health Sciences Library Archives and Special Collections, New York (hereafter cited as Bernard Papers).

17. See Dominic J. Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977). Also see Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), and Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

18. Capeci, Harlem Riot of 1943, 119; Mark Schubart, “Richard Wright Feels Grip of Harlem Tension,” PM Daily, August 3, 1943, 8, reprinted in Kenneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre, eds., Conversations with Richard Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 49–50.

19. S. I. Hayakawa, “Second Thoughts,” Chicago Defender, January 11, 1947, reprint in box 3, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records.

20. “Psychiatrist Out to Prove Himself Wrong,” Chicago Defender, November 16, 1946, 13.

21. See Fiorello H. La Guardia, “Displaced Persons,” in The Struggle for Justice as a World Force: Report of the New York Herald Tribune Annual Forum (New York: Herald Tribune, 1946), 92–97.

22. Ralph Ellison, “Harlem Is Nowhere” (1948), in Shadow and Act (New York: Quality Paper Back Book Club, 1994).

23. Benjamin Malzberg, “Migration and Mental Disease among Negroes in New York State,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 21, no. 1 (January–March 1936): 107, 109.

24. Ellison, “Harlem Is Nowhere,” 299–300.

25. Richard Wright Journal, March 26, 1945, box 117, folder 1860, Richard Wright Papers.

26. Frazier, Negro in the United States, 266.

27. Population and Housing Statistics for Health Areas, New York City (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942), 1. Central Harlem comprised Health Areas 9 through 12.

28. “Report by Sub-Committee on Psychiatry as Related to Negro Children,” City-Wide Citizens’ Committee on Harlem, February 15, 1942, box 338, folder 2, Bernard Papers.

29. These nonmunicipal agencies included those associated with various Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish charities. See Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, “The Abandonment of Harlem’s Children,” in Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–17.

30. Constance Curtis, “Mental Hygiene Clinic Planned in Harlem Area,” New York Amsterdam News, May 18, 1946.

31. “Story of the City-Wide Citizens’ Committee on Harlem,” box 338, folder 5, Bernard Papers.

32. Lorraine Maynard (in collaboration with Laurence Miscall), Bellevue (New York: Julian Messner Inc., 1940), 61, 139–40; for an examination of racism in New York City hospitals at this time see also Cheryl Lynn Greenberg’s discussion of attempts to get black nurses on the staff of Bellevue Hospital in the mid-1930s, “Or Does It Explode?,” 86–91. See also Dennis Doyle, “‘Racial Differences Have to Be Considered’: Lauretta Bender, Bellevue Hospital, and the African American Psyche, 1936–52,” History of Psychiatry 21, no. 2: 206–23.

33. Richard Wright Journal, January 12, 1945, box 117, folder 1860, Wright Papers.

34. Wertham, “Episodes,” 51–53; Richard Wright Journal, February 24, 1945, box 117, folder 1860, Wright Papers.

35. Wertham, “Episodes,” 51–53. For critical examinations of race and philanthropy see John Stanfield, Philanthropy and Jim Crow in American Social Science (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985) and the first chapter of Jodi Melamed’s Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

36. Wertham to Wright, August 1, 1945, box 108, folder 1677, Wright Papers.

37. “The Committee for Mental Hygiene for Negroes,” January 10, 1943, box 338, folder 2, Bernard Papers.

38. “Report of the Third Annual Meeting for the Committee for Mental Hygiene for Negroes,” February 17, 1943, box 338, folder 2, Bernard Papers.

39. Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power, 43–89.

40. “Group Psychotherapy and the Treatment of Minority Problems,” Ninth Annual Conference, American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama, Commodore Hotel, February 17, 1951, p. 3, notes taken by Dr. Hilde L. Mosse, box 86, folder 17, Wertham Papers.

41. Meyer to Wertham, August 1, 1946, and Wertham to Meyer, series 4000/26, Adolf Meyer Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (hereafter cited as Meyer Papers), Adolf Meyer Collection.

42. “The Lafargue Clinic: A Mental Hygiene Clinic in and for the Community,” box 2, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Papers.

43. See James Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment—a Tragedy of Race and Medicine (New York: Free Press, 1981); Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006). For more information on the significance of Bishop’s and St. Philip’s embrace of Wertham’s brand of social psychiatry as practiced at Lafargue see Dennis Doyle, “‘A Fine New Child’: The Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic and Harlem’s African American Communities, 1946–1958,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 64, no. 2 (April 2009): 173–212.

44. St. Philip’s Church, Newsletter 11, no. 7 (March 15, 1946): 2–3, box 3, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records. There were of course other institutions and agencies providing mental hygiene services throughout Manhattan. Many of them were restrictive or prohibitive in some way for the majority of black New Yorkers. In June 1945, Wertham compiled a list of twenty hospitals, child guidance clinics, and miscellaneous under the title “Mental Hygiene Resources in or adjacent to Harlem Territory,” box 52, folder 10, Wertham Papers. From June 1947 to June 1952 the Veterans Administration maintained a contract with the Lafargue Clinic to provide treatment to veterans in New York: box 1, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records. There is some evidence to suggest the VA suspended the contract as a result of Wertham’s treating convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg while she was imprisoned awaiting execution. In a letter to Richard Wright dated May 12, 1953, Wertham noted that “the Veterans Bureau, which told me they liked our work exceptionally, cancelled its contract with the Harlem Clinic—you guess why”: box 108, folder 1677, Wright Papers. For the broader context of the psychiatric treatment of African American soldiers and veterans at this time see Ellen Dwyer, “Psychiatry and Race during World War II,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61, no. 2 (April 2006): 117–43.

45. Sidney M. Katz, “Jim Crow Is Barred from Wertham’s Clinic,” Magazine Digest, September 1946, box 3, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records.

46. “Objectives of Lafargue Clinic,” notes taken by Constance Karros at clinic conference January 29, 1952, box 51, folder 11, Wertham Papers.

47. “Lafargue Clinic Organization,” box 1, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records.

48. “Lafargue Clinic Organization,” September 1, 1952, box 1, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records; “Mrs. Zucker’s suggestion for first examination,” n.d., box 1, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records; James L. Tuck, “Here’s Hope for Harlem,” This Week Magazine, New York Herald Tribune, January 26, 1947, box 3, folder 1, Lafargue Clinic Records; Hilde L. Mosse, “Psychotherapy at the Clinic,” unpublished paper presented at the Joint Committee for Mental Hygiene Services meeting, May 6, 1947, box 51, folder 11, Wertham Papers.

49. In fusing psychoanalysis with other therapeutic methods, Wertham and his colleagues were putting into practice a suggestion made by Freud himself during the later years of World War I. In his address to the Fifth International Psycho-Analytical Congress held in Budapest in September 1918, Freud urged his fellow analysts to democratize and possibly hybridize their therapy when needed: “It is very probable too that the large-scale application of our therapy will compel us to alloy the pure gold of analysis freely with the copper of direct suggestion; and hypnotic influence, too, might find a place in it again, as it has in the treatment of the war neuroses. But, whatever form this psychotherapy for the people may take, whatever the elements out of which it is compounded, its most effective and most important ingredients will assuredly remain those borrowed from strict and untendentious psycho-analysis.” Lafargue physician-in-charge Mosse even quoted from this speech in her memorandum, “Psychotherapy at the Clinic,” box 51, folder 11, Wertham Papers.

50. Mosse, ““Psychotherapy at the Clinic,” box 51, folder 11, Wertham Papers. See also the interview with Wertham in Contemporary Psychotherapists Examine Themselves, ed. Werner Wolff (Springfield, IL: Thomas Publishers, 1956), 33–40.

51. Mosse, “Psychotherapy at the Clinic,” box 51, folder 11, Wertham Papers. For a detailed exposition of Mosse’s view of psychoanalytic principles see “Aggression and Violence in Fantasy and Fact,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 2 (1948): 477–83.

52. Mosse, “Psychotherapy at the Clinic,” box 51, folder 11, Wertham Papers.

53. Patient file 3–4–47, box 3, Lafargue Clinic Records.

54. See Helen Swick Perry’s introduction to Harry Stack Sullivan’s The Fusion of Psychiatry and Social Science (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1964); and Nathan G. Hale Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), chap. 10.

55. See Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 3, esp. 111–24; Hale, Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis, chap. 8.

56. Norman V. Bell and John P. Siegel, “Social Psychiatry: Vagaries of a Term,” Archives of General Psychiatry 14 (April 1966): 345; Gerald Grob, From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 102.

57. See Grob, From Asylum to Community, chapters 1, 2, and 5, for a discussion of the work of psychodynamic psychiatrists such as the Menninger brothers Karl and William.

58. Grob, From Asylum to Community, 7; Thomas A.C. Rennie, “Social Psychiatry—A Definition,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 1, no. 1 (Summer 1955): 10.

59. See Michael Staub, Madness Is Civilization: When the Diagnosis Was Social, 1948–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

60. Dr. Joshua Bierer, “Editorial,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 1, no. 1 (Summer 1955): 4, emphasis added.

61. Norman V. Bell, Ph.D and John P. Siegel, M.D., “Social Psychiatry: Vagaries of a Term,” Archives of General Psychiatry 14 (April 1966): 345; Grob, From Asylum to Community, 102.

62. See the anthology edited by Arnold M. Rose, Mental Health and Mental Disorder: a Sociological Approach. Prepared for the Committee of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (New York: W.W. Norton, 1955); and see Interrelations Between The Social Environment and Psychiatric Disorders (New York: Milbank Memorial Fund, 1953).

63. Wertham was, though, a member of the American Psychiatric Association; see “Fredric Wertham,” Current Biography (1949): 635.

64. The American Journal of Psychiatry did, however, publish Wertham’s 1962 article “The Scientific Study of Mass Media Effects,” American Journal of Psychiatry 11 (1962): 306–11.

65. For more on the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry and efforts to shift psychiatry toward a focus on socioenvironmental factors in the study and treatment of mental disorders see Grob, From Asylum to Community, esp. 24–43.

66. Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 81–82.

67. Wertham, “What Is Social Psychiatry?,” lecture read at the Brooklyn State Hospital Psychiatric forum on December 5, 1946, box 85, folder 8, Wertham Papers.

68. “The Head Fixers,” Monthly Review, November 1958, 282.

69. Wertham, “Analytic Psychotherapy,” in Wolff, Contemporary Psychotherapists Examine Themselves, 36.

70. “Lafargue Clinic Statistics,” box 1, folder 9, Lafargue Clinic Records.

71. Ibid. Jonathan Metzl convincingly argues that race and other primary categories of social identity are always already inscribed in the diagnostic criteria for mental disorders, but most especially in the major psychoses, namely schizophrenia and depression, where African Americans in particular are overdiagnosed in the former and underdiagnosed in the latter. See Metzl, Protest Psychosis.

72. Patient file 2–20–48, box 3, Lafargue Clinic Records.

73. Patient file 5–3–53, box 3, Lafargue Clinic Records.

74. Patient file 11–7–50, box 3, Lafargue Clinic Records.

75. Norman M. Lobsenz, “Human Salvage in Harlem,” Coronet, March 1948, 135–36, reprint, box 3, folder 1, Lafarge Clinic Records.

76. One exception to this is Bendiner, “Psychiatry for the Needy,” 22.

77. See Jay Garcia’s superb exploration of this topic, Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the Race Question in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

78. Ellison, “Harlem Is Nowhere,” 300, 299, emphasis added. Ellison wrote the essay for Magazine of the Year: ’48, but it wasn’t published until 1964, when it was included in his collection of essays, Shadow and Act. Magazine of the Year had folded, and Ellison had to sue in order gain the rights to publish the piece. See Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 335–36. See also Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (New York: Little, Brown, 2011) and Shelly Eversley, “The Lunatic’s Fancy and the Work of Art,” American Literary History 13, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 445–68

79. See Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?,” and Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

80. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001), 348; Constance Webb, Richard Wright: A Biography (New York; G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968), chap. 20; Florence Hesketh Wertham to Richard Wright, July 30, 1947; Via Radio France Telegram, August 7, 1947, box 108, folder 1677, Wright Papers.

4. Children and the Violence of Racism

1. Constance Curtis, “Mental Hospitals Bar Negroes,” April 27, 1946; “Charge ‘Favoritism’ at Bellevue,” May 4, 1946; “Psycho Race Bias Tough,” May 11, 1946; “Cure for Alcoholics of Negroes in N.Y. About Non-Existent,” May 18, 1946; “Jim Crow School Kids as Mentally Unfit,” May 25, 1946; “School Reshapes Courses for Retarded Kids,” June 1, 1946; “‘Retarded Kids’ Classes Changed following Blast,” July 13, 1946: all in New York Amsterdam News.

2. “Lost Children,” editorial, New York Amsterdam News, April 27, 1946.

3. Constance Curtis, “Mental Hygiene Clinic Planned in Harlem Area,” New York Amsterdam News, May 18, 1946.

4. See Ben Keppel, The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1995.

5. “Lafargue Clinic Statistics,” March 6, 1956, box 1, folder 9, Lafargue Clinic Records.

6. Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 135–36.

7. Fredric Wertham, “The Comics…Very Funny!,” Saturday Review of Literature, May 29, 1948, 6–7, 27–29.

8. See James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

9. Wertham, “Comics…Very Funny!,” 6–7, 27–29. Wertham, “Episodes,” Wertham Papers. See also Beaty, Fredric Wertham, 118–19; Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage, 98–99.

10. The historical literature on Wertham and Seduction of the Innocent is vast and growing, as is the critical discussion of his views (notably taking place on the Internet). See Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage; Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998); John A. Lent, ed., Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999); Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Bart Beaty’s Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, a sympathetic look at Wertham and the context of his arguments about the effects of comic books on children, is a valuable correction to much of the extant anti-Wertham literature, as is Andrea Friedman’s Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). David Hajdu, on the other hand, presents a flagrant caricature of Wertham in his popular history of the midcentury anti–comic book movement The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

11. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1954), 100–105.

12. Ibid.

13. The clinical orientation and evidence used in Seduction of the Innocent remain a source of historical debate and analysis. Carol Tilley, “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics,” Information & Culture 47, no. 4 (2012): 383–413.

14. Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 166.

15. Ibid., 157.

16. Invoking his favorite comparison, Wertham argued that “the problem of the effect of crime comic books is like a combined clinical and laboratory problem in infectious diseases. You not only have to study the possibly affected individuals; you have to investigate the potentially injurious agents themselves, their varieties, their lives, their habitat. There is a considerable distance from the pure culture of the bacillus to the clinical case”: Seduction of the Innocent, 30.

17. Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage, 107–8; Fredric Wertham, A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence (New York: Macmillan Co., 1966), 197.

18. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976).

19. See Kluger, Simple Justice, 305–14; David Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black White Relations: The Use and Abuse of An American Dilemma, 1944–1969 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); and especially Walter Jackson’s exhaustive, exceptional study, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

20. See Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

21. See Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (New York: Routledge, 2000); John P. Jackson Jr., Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case against Segregation (New York: NYU Press, 2001); Keppel, Work of Democracy.

22. Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” Journal of Negro Education 19 (1950): 341–50, quoted in Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 194.

23. Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice, 82–91.

24. Herbert Hill and Jack Greenberg, Citizen’s Guide to Desegregation: A Study in Social and Legal Change in American Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 92.

25. For a comprehensive, critical discussion of this argument see Scott, Contempt and Pity.

26. See Hill and Greenberg, Citizen’s Guide to Desegregation.

27. Kluger, Simple Justice, 316; Otto Klineberg quoted in Kenneth B. Clark, Prejudice and Your Child, 2nd ed., enlarged (1963; Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), xviii–xx. For more on Klineberg see Gardner Lindzey, ed., A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 6 (New York:Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1976).

28. Clark’s report appears in Helen Leland Witmer and Ruth Kotinsky, eds., Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth (New York: Harper & Bros., 1952), 145.

29. Kluger, Simple Justice, 320–21; Clark, Prejudice and Your Child, xx–xxi; Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 195–99; Keppel, Work of Democracy, 98–99; Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice, 110–13.

30. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 279–90. See also Leah Gordon, “The Question of Prejudice: Social Science, Education, and the Struggle to Define the ‘Race Problem’ in Postwar America, 1940–70” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008).

31. Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice, 114–24; Clark, Prejudice and Your Child, xxi.

32. See John Greenwood, The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 8.

33. Brett Gadsden, “‘He Said He Wouldn’t Help Me Get a Jim Crow Bus’: The Shifting Terms of the Challenge to Segregated Public Education, 1950–1954,” Journal of African American History 90, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2005): 9–28. And further, Gadsden’s Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

34. Peter Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 106–7; Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 143–44; Kluger, Simple Justice, 425–50; Daniel M. Berman, It Is So Ordered: The Supreme Court Rules on School Segregation (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1966), 20–22.

35. Kluger, Simple Justice, 346–56. On the lasting significance of the “doll tests” see Gwen Bergner, “Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem,” American Quarterly 61, no. 2 (June 2009): 299–332.

36. Excerpts of Clark’s testimony appear in Hill and Greenberg, Citizen’s Guide to Desegregation, 96–98; see also Kluger, Simple Justice, 346–56. For a detailed examination of Clark’s testimony see Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice, 135–52.

37. Jack Greenberg to Fredric Wertham, September 17, 1951, and Louis L. Redding to Fredric Wertham, October 15, 1951, box 18, folder 12, Wertham Papers; Kluger, Simple Justice, 444; Fredric Wertham, “Psychological Effects of School Segregation,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 6, no. 1 (January 1952): 95.

38. The best description of Wertham’s clinical method comes from Lafargue physician-in-charge Hilde L. Mosse. See Mosse, “Individual and Collective Violence,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis in Groups 2, no. 3 (1969): 23–30.

39. Dr. Elizabeth Davis Trussell, interview by author, tape recording, New York, January 6, 2006.

40. Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop’s daughter Dr. Elizabeth B. Davis became the first director of Harlem Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry in 1962, and Dr. June Jackson Christmas, who volunteered at Lafargue while an intern at Queens General Hospital, was appointed New York City commissioner of mental health in the mid-1970s; see Reaching Out: An Epic of the People of St. Philip’s Church (Tappan, NY: Custombook, 1986), 54.

41. Albert Deutsch, “State Psychiatric Institute Here Bars Negro Patients and Doctors,” PM, February 10, 1947, 24; “Report of Lafargue Clinic Statistics,” March 6, 1956, box 1, folder 9, La-fargue Clinic Records.

42. Wertham, “Psychological Effects of School Segregation,” 95; Fredric Wertham, “Nine Men Speak to You: Jim Crow in the North,” Nation, June 12, 1954, 497–98; Mosse, “Individual and Collective Violence,” 24–25.

43. Kluger, Simple Justice, 442–43.

44. Wertham, “Nine Men Speak to You,” 497.

45. Dr. Walter Barton quoted in Gerald Grob, From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 196.

46. “Psychiatrist Tells Court School Segregation Harmful,” News from NAACP, October 25, 1951, 5–6 (hereafter cited as “Psychiatrist Tells Court”), box 18, Wertham Papers.

47. Wertham, “Psychological Effects of School Segregation,” 97; Fredric Wertham, “Psychiatric Observations on Abolition of School Segregation,” Journal of Educational Sociology 26, no. 7 (March 1953): 334.

48. Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts, 145; For Wertham’s discussion of psychiatric testimony in criminal trials see his The Show of Violence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949).

49. Greenberg, Crusaders in the Court, 145–47.

50. “Psychiatrist Tells Court,” 5–6; Kluger, Simple Justice, 440; Greenberg, Crusaders in the Court, 145–47.

51. “Psychiatrist Tells Court,” 6; “Psychological Effects of School Segregation,” 97–98.

52. See W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic description of a quite similar process of conflict, repression, and overcompensation that appears in the first pages of “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in his The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903).

53. “Psychiatrist Tells Court,” 8–9. For more on Wertham’s arguments about the role of the state in protecting and/or threatening the basic rights and security of its citizens see Friedman, Citizenship in Cold War America, 157–91.

54. Ibid., 9–10; Kluger, Simple Justice, 444.

55. Fredric Wertham, “Psychiatric Observations on the Abolition of Segregation,” Journal of Educational Sociology 26 (1953): 334; here he was challenging the mainstream of intergroup relations theory as promulgated by such luminaries as John Dollard of Yale’s Institute for Human Relations and Harvard social psychologist Dr. Jerome Bruner, who would follow Wertham on the witness stand the very next day. See “Segregation Held Equal-School Bar,” New York Times, October 24, 1951, 36. See Daryl Michael Scott’s chapter on Brown v. Board in Contempt and Pity, 119–36.

56. “Psychiatrist Tells Court,” 14; Untitled Notes on Examination of Delaware Children, n.d., box 18, folder 12, Wertham Papers.

57. “Psychiatrist Tells Court,” 17.

58. Kluger, Simple Justice, 445.

59. “Psychiatrist Tells Court,” 18.

60. Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, 87 A.2d 862–71, Del. Ch. 1952; Irons, Jim Crow’s Children, 114–17; Kluger, Simple Justice, 447–50; Collins J. Seitz, “Segregation: What Is Past Is Prologue,” Delaware History 25, no. 4 (Fall–Winter 1991–92): 217–28.

61. Thurgood Marshall to Fredric Wertham, May 25, 1954, box 18, folder 12, Wertham Papers; Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, 87 A.2d, 864; Wertham, “Episodes,” 104; see footnote 10 in the opinion of the Court in Brown v. Board in Leon Friedman, ed., Argument: The Oral Argument before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1952–1955 (1969; New York: Free Press, 2004), 330.

62. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 197–98; Waldo E. Martin Jr., Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 173–74.

63. Kluger, Simple Justice, 706.

64. Paul L. Rosen, The Supreme Court and Social Science (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 156–57.

65. I do not have the space to address it here, but during 1951 Wertham was clearly tainted by his participation in the epochally controversial Rosenberg case, testifying in behalf of Ethel Rosenberg, informing the court that she was experiencing a form of prison psychosis and should be allowed to see her two sons and possibly her husband, Julius. See Robert and Michael Meeropol, We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

66. Clark, Prejudice and Your Child, 172.

67. Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice, 162.

68. Wertham discussed the distinctive quality of the clinical method in a number of works, but the clearest digest of his argument is found in the essay “The Scientific Study of Mass Media Effects,” American Journal of Psychiatry 119 (1962): 306–11. Justice Frankfurter’s comments are found in Friedman, Argument, 172–73.

69. Greenberg, Crusaders in the Court, 137; “Psychiatrist Tells Court,” 10–11.

70. Beaty, Fredric Wertham, 135–36.

71. Fredric Wertham to Jack Greenberg, March 31, 1974, quoted in James Reibman, “Ralph Ellison, Fredric Wertham, M.D., and the Lafargue Clinic: Civil Rights and Psychiatric Services in Harlem,” Oklahoma City University Law Review (Fall 2001): 1050; Bayard Webster, “Fredric Wertham, 86, Dies; Foe of Violent TV and Comic,” New York Times, December 1, 1981, D31; Letters to the Editor: “A Key Witness against School Segregation,” New York Times, December 11, 1981, A34.

Epilogue

1. Ralph Ellison, “Harlem Is Nowhere” (1948), in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1953).

2. I am drawing here on philosopher Lewis R. Gordon’s definition and discussion of oppression as the creation of a context in which extraordinary measures are required of individuals and/or collectives in order to live an ordinary life; see Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 86–91.

3. Gerald Grob, From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

4. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; New York: Grove Press, 1967), 11.

5. Wertham, “What Is Social Psychiatry?,” lecture read at the Brooklyn State Hospital Psychiatric Forum on December 5, 1946, box 85, folder 8, Wertham Papers.

6. See most especially Cornel West’s “A Genealogy of Modern Racism” in Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Westport, CT: Westminster Press, 1982).

7. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

8. See my discussion of Fredric and Florence Hesketh Wertham’s study The Significance of the Constitution in Mental Disease (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Co., 1926) in chapter 2. See also Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 2012). The term “normal science” derives from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (1962; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

9. Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), xi.

10. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Public Health Service, Mental Health: Culture, Race, Ethnicity; A Supplement to Mental Health: A Report to the Surgeon General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2004).

11. American Psychiatric Association, “Cultural Competencies for the Clinical Interaction,” cited in Metzl, Protest Psychosis, 200; see also President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, “Policy Options Subcommittee on Cultural Competence,” February 6, 2003, available at http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/mentalhealthcommission/subcommittee/ Sub_Chairs.htm.

12. See Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

13. See also Metzl’s conclusion to The Protest Psychosis, 199–212, and Jonathan M. Metzl and Helena Hansen, “Structural Competency: Theorizing a New Medical Engagement with Stigma and Inequality,” Social Science & Medicine 103 (2014): 126–33.

14. Grob, From Asylum to Community, 171–73; “Memorandum Re: Contracts with the N.Y.C. Community Mental Health Board,” September 16, 1955, box 1, Administrative Papers, Lafargue Clinic Records.

15. Dr. Hilde L. Mosse to Dr. Paul H. Hoch, August 20, 1955, box 1, Administrative Papers, Lafargue Clinic Records.

16. “Father Bishop Says NY Negroes Lack Real Adventuresome Spirit,” New York Amsterdam News, June 8, 1957, 19; “St. Philip’s Picks Rev. Moran Weston,” New York Amsterdam News, May 11, 1957, 2; “St. Philip’s Starts New Health Program,” New York Amsterdam News, June 21, 1958, 23; Fredric Wertham to New York State Department of Mental Hygiene Statistical Services, December 14, 1958, box 52, file 15, Wertham Papers.