Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices and

World War Il-era Civic Nationalism

Dan Shtffman is the author
of Rooting Multiculturalism:
The Work of Louis Adamic
{Farieigh Dickinson UP, 2003),
His essays on Depression-
era ethnic literature and
cuiture have appeared in
such journals as MELUS,
Mosaic, and Studies in
American Jewish Literature.
He currentiy teaches English
at Osaka Internationai
School,
S
peaking at the Fourth American Writer's Conference in June
1941, Richard Wright denounces the hypocrisy of America's
defense of liberty in Europe. His speech, "What We Think of
Tlieir War/' refers to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "Four
Freedoms" as a "metaphysical obscenity" in light of the War
Department's policy of racial segregation: "How is it possible for
any sincere or sane person to contend that the current war, World
War II, is a crusade for freedom, for the majesty of the human
soul, for a full life, in the face of official utterances [about segrega-
tion in the armed forces] which categorically reject the very con-
cept of freedom and democracy?" (Wright Papers).
As the war escalated, Wright tempered his harshest criticisms
about the nation's fight for democracy and along with the
American Communist Party dropped his anti-war position.
Nevertheless, when 12 Million Black Voices was published in
October 1941, Wright was still primarily concerned with what he
saw as the war's domestic front. Like the Pittsburgh Courier and
other black newspapers that used the "Double-V" in a play on the
ubiquitous victory symbol (Roeder 47), Wright championed victo-
ry both at home and abroad. He called for the defeat of fascism as
well as the end of discrimination, Jim Crow, and rapacious capi-
talism.
12 Million Black Voices, a sweeping historical narrative of
American black experience complemented by Farm Security
Administration photographs previously chosen by FSA editor
Edwin Rosskam, is an act of protest against these social forces,
one that expanded the work of reformers like Walter White and
A, Philip Randolph. In September 1940, NAACP leader White
and Randolph, editor of the Socialist Messenger, met with
President Roosevelt to push for the immediate desegregation of
the armed forces. Although their demandbacked by the threat
of a 100,000 strong black march on Washington was rejected,
they did secure a compromise, an executive order in June 1941
against discrimination in the defense industries (White 186-94).
Wright's text indirectly places White and Randolph's battle
against military segregation into the wider context of the histori-
cal exclusion of blacks from full cultural citizenship in the United
States. Wright's broader perspective on the war, however, did not
extend as far as W. E. B. Du Bois's "wide angle vision," which
saw "egalitarian potential" in Germany and Japan (Lewis 468).
Nevertheless, Wright's position was less conciliatory than that of
Ralph Bunche, who stated in 1940, "American Democracy is bad
enough. But in the mad world of today I love it, and I will fight to
preserve it" (qtd. in Young 62). In essence, Wright continued to
see the war as a two-fronted fight, but for him the domestic battle
was always more urgent.
African American Review. Volume 4 1 , Number 3
2007 Dan Shiffman
443
12 Million Black Voices appeared at a time when the US was both was brim-
ming with patriotism and trying to reconcile ethnic and class divisions. Populist
works such as Louis Adamic's From Many Lands (1940), and Tzvo-Way Passage
(1941), the US Office of Education's radio program "Americans Al l . . . .
Immigrants All" (1938-1939), the Atlantic magazine's We Americans (1939), and
patriotic immigrant affirmations like those found in / Am An American (1941)
championed the contributions of ethnic Americans and, moreover, the nation's
unassailable democracy. These texts contributed to what would be a long
process of re-rooting American historical identity from Plymouth Rock to Ellis
Island, and they responded to the enormous presence and influence of immi-
grants and their children. In spite of the severe quotas placed on immigration by
ttie Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, approximately two-thirds of residents of major US
dties in the 1930s were either foreign bom or the children of the foreign bom.
Furthermore, the rise of fascism in Europe provided a powerful impetus for the
celebration of American diversity. As historian Richard Weiss observes,
"Ruthless [Nazi] repression of ethnic minorities resulted in a counter identifica-
tion of democracy with minority encouragement and tolerance" (566). However,
this defensive civic creed came into conflict with a persistent racialism. Although
first- and second-generation immigrants were now generally considered to be
part of "white" America, the restrictive quotas that remained in place favored
northern and western European nations whose emigrants were perceived by the
US as more readily assimilable. In other words, eugenicist arguments made dur-
ing the 1910s and 1920s about the fundamental inferiority of non-Anglo or
Nordic stock and the dangers of racial contamination still held considerable
sway.
The gathering of national support for the war effort was more immediately
challenged by the fact that Asians were essentially wholly excluded from immi-
gration to America and that black troops remained segregated from white ones.
Efforts to include black experiences in the "Americans AH" campaigns, there-
fore, tended to be awkward or superficialor both.^
The nation's civic nationalism attempted to affirm diversity, which included
paying homage to the achievements of exceptional immigrants and the dedicat-
ed labor and sacrifice of many others who were helping to build modem
America. This ideology acknowledged economic injustice and racial discrimina-
tion and sought to ameliorate these problems by applying principles of faimess
and conscience through various New Deal initiatives. At the same time, civic
nationalism elided the reality that the immigrant-as-true-American was
premised on the exploitation of cheap foreign labor and on racial segregation.
This war-era social and historical context for 12 Million Black Voices has been
under-appreciated; instead, critics tend to consider the work's emotional power
or sentimentality,^ examine Wright's narrative style,-^ or discuss the influence of
Wright's communism.** My own approach to 12 Million Black Voices considers
Wright's political commitments but focuses on his critical relationship to
American pluralism. Wright's text revises the generic rags-to-riches immigrant
success story touted as quintessentially American.
War-era texts championing immigrants typically relied on enthusiastic cata-
loguing of ethnic scientific and artistic contributions, or they were built on the
passionate testimonials of successful immigrants. 12 Million Black Voices inserts
African American experience into the midst of this seemingly inclusive core
American identity. Wright declares, "We black folk, our history and our present
being, are a mirror of the manifold experiences of America. What we want, what
we represent, what we endure is what America is. If we black folk perish,
America will perish" (12 Million 146). The future of America, Wright boldly sug-
gests, depends on the guiding consciousness of African Americans. Through a
444 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
variety of rhetorical appeals, Wright's collective narrative challenges the War-era
discourses proclaiming that individual immigrant success stories represent
American promise; in those stories the sheer documentation of ethnic achieve-
ments supposedly confirms the nation's pluralist credentials.
12 Million Black Voices was written before Wright's public break with the
American Communist Party, but, as is well known, he was frustrated with Party
in-fighting and manipulation almost from the very beginning of his membership
in 1934. This is not to say, however, that Wright ever became disillusioned with
Marxist principles; to be sure, his admiration of Stalin seemed to survive the
German-Soviet Pact. When Wright drafted 12 Million Black Voices, the American
Communist Party had now shifted from its so-called Third Period to the Popular
Front. Rather than emphasizing the creation ofat least symbolically a black
republic, the Popular Front encouraged support from all classes and from black
and white alliances, and it selected New Deal initiatives like the FSA. As Barbara
Foley comments, however, the Party's phases were by no means rigidly distinct;
indeed, the Party had not surrendered its support for black nationalism in favor
of all forms of black and white cooperation (170-212). Wright's connection to the
Party, therefore, does not provide a clear explanation as to whether he is ulti-
mately advocating racially-centered social action, transracial solidarity, or some
other vision of social justice. While in 12 Million Black Voices Wright recognizes
the value of black and white cooperationfor example, the linked protests
against sharecropping practices and in support of the Scottsboro boysthe text
as a whole focuses on how the distinctive consciousness and experiences of
African Americans are shaped by their encounters with white America. Wright
is not so much advocating a particular path of social justice as he is attempting to
create a broadened, interconnected historical awareness for both blacks and
whites.
Certainly, Wright was dismayed by certain dimensions of the Popular Front.
For example, the Popular Front disbanded the John Reed Clubs that had helped
to awaken Wright's political passions. Bill Mullen calls attention to Wright's dis-
like of Popular Front art. He points to his "disdain for the commonplace Popular
Front strategy of remaking and reshaping 'white' Western artifacts to a black fit,
a strategy that reached its peak in Orson Welles's spectacular Harlem
Shakespeare productions of the late 1930s." Mullen argues that this attitude
"reveals [Wright's] commitment to a Third Period communism, the Popular
Front was meant to displace" (26).
Despite his distaste for Popular Front aesthetics, Wright understood the
force of using language and motifs that appealed to a broad audience, an audi-
ence familiar with and moved by the rhetoric of US promise. Wright did not
simply appropriate or manipulate this language to advance a preferred phase of
American Marxism. Like most Americans, he had internalized the high promises
of freedom and opportunity expressed in the nation's founding documents, and
was captivated by them. Thus, Wright's distancing from the Popular Front as a
whole can be overstated. Furthermore, 12 Million Black Voices reveals that the
establishment of a Black Belt had become exactly what African Americans did
not want: an alienated and exploited community. As Michael Denning writes,
"A history of urban disinvestment, slum clearance in neighborhoods adjoining
white neighborhoods, and the construction of high-density public housing to
contain the black population, combined with the government subsidy of mort-
gages and highways to build white suburbs, created a new Black Belt Nation,
not the Black Belt of the cotton South, but an archipelago of cities across the con-
tinent" (36). In essence, the new Black Belt had been constructed by white
American capitalism; any rooted understanding of black nationalism would
need to address this complex entanglement with whiteand now immigrant
America.
RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES AND WORLD WAR II-ERA CIVIC NATIONALISM 445
Wright's repeated use of "We" in 12 Million Black Voices advances the deep
and problematic interconnectedness between US exceptional ism and racial sub-
jugation. Well-known Depression-era documentaries such as Erskine Caldwell
and Margaret Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), Dorothea Lange
and Paul Taylor's An American Exodus (1939), and James Agee and Walker
Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) tend to depict seemingly passive
and downtrodden victims of poverty, thereby underscoring the value of New
Deal relief efforts. Many of the photographs in such texts evoke the dignity of
12 Million Black Voices incorporates and inten'ogates
the civic nationalism that regretted ill treatment of the
working poor but did not regard it as symptomatic
of systemic problems within a racist economy.
individual impoverished Americans, while the accompanying commentary
directly or indirectly describes how these individual lives are connected to wider
patterns of human displacement, alienation, and resilience. Wright's text, how-
ever, forgoes considering individuals to emphasize more immediately how
social and economic forces bind black workers and families as a whole. By
widening the scope of his reportage and focusing on collective history, Wright
infuses what Agee called "the cruel radiance of what is" (11) into the deliberate-
ly optimistic and obfuscating American nationalism of World War II.
Wright's first-person plural perspective counterpoints the immigrant success
stories and catalogues of ethnic contributions emerging in the late 1930s and
early 1940s, which were put forth as evidence of the nation's inclusiveness and
democratic opportunity. His "We" implies "We the People," appealing to
America's democratic conscience, and it also implies class consciousness:
Wright's "We" are black workers exploited by what he calls repeatedly the
"Lords of the Land" in the South and the "Bosses of the Buildings" in the indus-
trial North. 12 Million Black Voices, then, both incorporates and interrogates the
civic nationalism that viewed ill treatment of the working poor as deeply regret-
table and in need of redressing but not as symptoms of systemic problems in a
racist economy.
As Heruy Louis Gates, Jr., has argued more broadly of African American lit-
erature, the text, " 'repeats,' as it were, in order to produce difference (10).
Wright "signifies" appropriates, plays on, exposes the hypocrisy ofwar-era
civic nationalism. An early passage from 12 Million Black Voices indirectly cap-
tures the tactical and performative qualities of Wright's text: "We stole words
from the grudging lips of the Lords of the Lands, who did not want us to know
too many of them or their meaning. And we charged this meager horde of stolen
sounds with all the emotions and longings we had" (40). The "stolen sounds" of
Wright's text include the Roosevelt era immigrant-as-the-true-American motif
and the sentimental appeal to conscience and national unity. Rather than using
these appeals as a way to justify a New Deal ethos and programs, Wright
demands that America surrender paternalistic, denigrating, and exclusionary
practices toward African Americans. Notably, however, the notion of the immi-
grant-as-true-American was in itself a dramaticand to many, an unsettling-
revision of the Anglo-centered American founding myth. Part of the power of 12
Million Black Voices is that it simultaneously advances the ongoing revision of the
US as a multiethnic nation while forcefully observing that this revision had not
gone far enough.
446 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
The rhetoric of war-era civic nationalism attempted to close the gap between
old and new stock Americans to build a united front against fascism, to shore up
divisions between those in full possession of cultural citizenship and those who
had endured various forms of exclusion. Whereas nativist writers in the 1910s
and 1920s emphasized the social degeneracy of eastern and southern Europeans,
in the late 1930s and early 1940s essentially all European immigrants were
included in the same narrative of inevitable forward progress. Italian and Slavic
immigrants, for example, were championed for their contributions to the build-
ing of modem industrial America. For Wright, the Old immigrant/New immi-
grant paradigm was irrelevant; what mattered instead was that African
Americans remained largely cut off from the forward progress and sense of true
Americanism increasingly associated with the foreign born and their children.
Wright outlined a gap that needed to be closed; not a gap that separated older
stock Americans from the newer immigrants, but one that economically and
politically separated blacks from whites. These divisions could not simply be
smoothed over with patriotic rhetoric.
12 Million Black Voices traces African American experiences from slavery to
sharecropping, and on to the Great Migration. The text has four major sections:
"Our Strange Birth," "Inheritors of Slavery," "Death on the City Pavements,"
and "Men in the Making." Wright begins with descriptions of harrowing slave
ship conditions and the later deprivations of plantation life, and he discusses
how proponents of slavery rationalized it on religious grounds. Wright also
characterizes the development of a "genial despotism" in black-white relations,
a degrading and specious benevolence. He presents African American churches
and music as sources of solace and release from such ongoing oppression, but
he also proclaims them inadequate responses to the entrenched political and cul-
tural isolation experienced by this nation within a nation. The most forceful sec-
tion of Wright's narrative characterizes the "transitional" areas of urban, indus-
trial Chicago; Wright depicts deplorable living environments and abusive
restrictive covenants. He highlights the squalor of rent-inflated "kitchenettes,"
conditions in which black infant mortality is twice the rate of whites and one toi-
let often shared by 30 tenants (79).
Scholars have argued that Depression-era photo-documentaries, while
exposing harsh socioeconomic injustice, create a vague hopefulness in sympa-
thetic middle-class readers for the poor, a hope that tacitly endorses New Deal
social welfare programs.^ The photographs combined in 12 Million Black Voices
belie facile optimism. They depict people experiencing a range of emotions from
ecstatic to hopeful to impassive to anguished. David Bradley observes that "the
faces in the FSA photographs could easily have been [Wright's] face" (xviiii).
While the comment is valid, Bradley misses the ways that text and photo con-
struct social reality rather than merely reflect Wright's experience. Wright
employs seen:\ingly sentimental appeals and aggressive, subversive rhetoric that
match the emotional and aesthetic range of the photographs. William Stott
observes an awkward, mismatched relationship between text and photos (232),
but this disjunctive quality actually highlights the various registers through
which Wright advances the repressed history of African Americans. For exam-
ple, Dorothea Lange's eloquent portraits of field workers dignify their subjects
without romanticizing them, while Marion Post's photographs more deliberately
emphasize the degradations of sharecropping (see Figs. 1 and 2). Several AP
wire photos bluntly reveal the horrors of lynching and police intimidation (see
Fig. 3).^ In spite of the photographs' varying tenor, all of them are charged by
the intensified historical consciousness of Wright's surrounding text.
Consequently, the reader cannot merely respond to these pictures in an emotion-
ally circumscribed way, for example with complacent sympathy, paralyzing out-
rage, or affirmations of human resiliency.
RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES AND WORLD WAR II-ERA CIVIC NATIONALISM 447
The collective focus of 12 Million Black Voices was a dramatic tum from
Wright's starkly individualized portrait of Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940).
While Bigger Thomas arguably embodies the social degradation experienced by
African Americans, Wright demanded that his audience engage with this fictional
lifeto see him as a "living personality" ("How Bigger" 33) rather than to read
Bigger merely symptomatically. Indeed, u'hat matters deeply to Bigger as he
awaits his execution for murder is that his lawyer, Max, is interested in the
details of his short life, his dreams and aspirations. At the same time, Max's
futile efforts to save the 20-year-old man from the electric chair require that he
set aside Bigger as an individual. He declares during the trial that, to defend
Bigger, he must speak "in general terms" so that the judge will understand how
Bigger's violence has erupted from three centuries of US discrimination against
blacks (Native Son 328-29). Max's defense of Bigger demonstrates how his client's
impoverished life is the product of a nation that refused to see him as a human
being, that often refused to see him at all. The narrative approach that Wright
constructs for Max is similar to the novelist's ow^n narrative strategy in 12 Million
Black Voices: By describing the alienation and hierarchies collectively encoun-
tered by blacks, Wright challenges dismissive, condemning attitudes that his
audience might have about individual African Americans with whom they have
come into contact. Furthermore, as he did in Native Son, Wright encourages all
Americans to resist responding to black degradation merely with symptom-
treating social programs or by making speciously ethical distinctions between
"good" blacks and "bad" blacks. Both of these responses tend to be based on
localized, shortsighted impressions.
Not only does 12 Million Black Voices describe collective rather than individ-
ual experiences, but it furthermore does not distinguish various groups within
the larger black community. In his preface, Wright states that his focus deliber-
ately excludes black leadership. He explains that the "talented tenth is omitted
in an effort to simplify a depiction of a complex movement of a debased feudal
folk toward a twentieth-century urbanization" (xix). This disclaimer, however,
does not attempt to justify the sweeping generalizations that Wright will make.
He also states in the preface that he will "seize upon what is qualitative and
abiding in Negro experience." He aspires "to place within full view the collec-
tive humanity whose triumphs and defeats are shared by the majority" (xx).
Instead of providing the dense detail of particular lives, Wright builds a collec-
tive story underscored by his insistent use of "We."
In his study of FSA photo-documentaries, Nicolas Natanson takes Wright to
task for passing over the individuated experiences of African Americans, their
private acts of protest and endurance. Natanson argues that Wright indulges his
liberal white readership in a complacent sympathy. He even goes so far as to call
Wright's use of "We" a "fundamental act of cultural suppression" that depicts
the "black millions as a monolithic mass" (247). In contrast to Natanson, Ralph
Ellison views 12 Million Black Voices, not as a work of a cultural suppression, but
as an empowering narrative. In a November 3,1941, letter to Wright, Ellison
declares, "the book makes me feel a bitter pride; a pride which springs from the
realization that after all the brutalization, starvation and suffering, we have
begun to embrace the experience and master it. And we shall make of it a
weapon more subtle, more effective than a fighter plane!" (Wright Papers).
Ellison understands how 12 Million Black Voices harnesses the rhetorical power of
civic nationalism to form a pointed African American challenge to the dominant,
adrenaline-charged war era patriotism, a patriotism that tended to overlook the
vital domestic front against the ongoing oppression of blacks. Wright's bold gen-
eralizations about African American history both parallel and critique the
sweeping statements regarding ethnic contributions offered to buttress US
democracy against fascism.
448 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
t,^lp
To illustrate his broader history, Wright sometimes draws on stereotypes.
For example, in the "Inheritors of Slavery" chapter of the text, he evokes the
Mammy: "Because of their enforced intimacy with the Lords of the Land, many
of our women were allowed to remain in the slave cabins to tend generations of
black children. They enjoyed a status denied to us men . . . and through the years
they became symbols of motherhood, retaining in their withered bodies the bur-
den of our folk wisdom, reigning as arbiters in our domestic affairs until we men
were freed and had moved to cities where cash-paying mobs enabled us to
become the heads of our own families" (37). Wright suggests that Mammy's cel-
ebrated maternal qualities were not timeless but linked tragically to her sexual
victimization, her "enforced intimacy" with masters. Moreover, Wright's sweep-
ing historical statements imply that the slave-based capitalism that created the
Mammy also isolated black men from family life and left them feeling power-
less, a condition that did not change significantly after abolition. Wright's sar-
donic reference to the "cash-paying mobs" suggests that post-slavery capitalist
America continues to bind black men to narrow, stultifying roles.
Wright's verbal depiction of Mammy's motherhood and black men's eventu-
al migration to US cities meets an effective counterpoint in Jack Delano's "Rural
Negro family on their porch." This "family" photograph shows an older woman
sitting stiffly, with a detached expression, on the edge of a porch. Her hands are
folded on her lap. A young girl sits in a chair behind her; the girl's face is
obscured by a dark shadow. Next to the girl stands an even younger boy, head
turned to the side, looking down at the edge of the porch. The woman, girl, and
boy seem dissociated from one another, almost as if they exist in separate pho-
Fig. 1.[topL)
Dorothy Lange,
"A Ihirteen-year-
old sharecrop-
per, Georgia
(FSA)" from 12
Mitlioti Black
Voices, 27.
Fig. 2. [bottom L]
Marion Post,
"Migrant work-
ers in cabbage
field, Florida
(FSA)" from 12
Million Black
Voices. 82.
Fig. 3. [R]
AP/Wide World
Photos,
"Lynctiing,
Georgia" from
12 Million Black
Voices, 45.
RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES AND WORLD WAR II-ERA CIVIC NATIONALISM
449
tographs. The starkness and alienating effect of Delano's composition empha-
sizes an absent presencean adult male presence that might reconnect and ani-
mate these vacated individuals; the image thus establishes a relationship
between the Mammy's victimized social status and the ongoing exclusion of
black men from US society. Text and photograph work together to complicate
images of the Mammy by pointing to the social conditions that created her (see
Fig. 4).
In "Inheritors of Slavery" Wright complicates another idea familiarly associ-
ated with "good" American blacks: humble and intense devotion to the Church.
Wright offers a powerfully condensed description of how Christianity offers
African Americans spiritual expression that counters the dehumanization per-
petuated by the Lords of the Lands and the Bosses of the Buildings. In fewer
than 500 words, Wright outlines Christian history from Eden to Apocalypse. As
Wright implies, this story has two redemptive figures. The first and overt hero,
of course, is Jesus who "assumes Man's corrupt and weak flesh and comes down and
lives and suffers and dies upon a cross to show Man the way back up the broad highway
to peace..." (70-71). Wright's compressed narrative also provocatively suggests
Ludfer as a figure "whose soul is athirst to feel thiyigsfor himself (69). Such self-
consciousness is exactly what Wright positively claims the dhurch offers to
African Americans; "What we have dared not feel in the presence of the Lords of
the Lands, we now feel in church" (68). Wright concludes by stating that in "the
last battle the Armageddon will be resumed and will endure until the end of Time and of
Death" (72). Wright has juxtaposed the "broad highway to peace" offered by Jesus
with a pitched and enduring battle led by Lucifer. In this passage, he does not
scoff at the inspiring, gently inclusive and redemptive message of Christianity
but implies that the broad African American identification with Christianity car-
ries within it the menacing possibility of retributive justice.
While the story Wright tells inevitably blurs differences within the African
American community and relies on broad historical generalizations, notably, 12
Million Black Voices was published during a time when group identification had
distinctive significance and urgency. As Ellison observes in 1943, "despite the
very real class divisions during periods of crisisespecially during periods of
warthese divisions are partially suspended by outside pressures, making for a
kind of group unity in which great potential political power becomes central-
ized" (238). This potential powerthe repressed or misdirected creative energy
of millions of African Americansneeds to be "seized upon" and channeled by
both black and white leaders; Wright's text may not directly include the talented
tenth but one of his implied audiences is black leaders, a group that Ellison
describes as needing to "integrate themselves with the Negro masses" (239).
In 12 Million Black Voices, Wright's vision of social justice (rooted in a histori-
cal, folk consciousness) extends the ideas presented in his "A Blueprint for
Negro Writing," first published in 1937. Here, Wright states that black writers
must accept the "nationalist implications of their lives" (40), To make this hap-
pen, Wright encourages writers to give voice to an "unwritten and unrecog-
nized" Negro folklore. As his essay progresses, it becomes clear that Wright's
interest in folklore is more than archeological. Black oral traditions and familial
interactions reveal a nation that exists largely outside of the boundaries of
America's capitalist driven values. Wright's nationalism "carr[ies] the highest
pitch of social consciousness . . . its ultimate aims are unrealizable within the
framework of capitalist America, lit is] a nationalism whose reason for being lies
in the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of the interdepen-
dence of people in modem society" ("Blueprint" 47). To foster this nationalism,
black writers must be intensely aware of "the foreshortened picture of the
whole, nourishing culture from which [blacks] were torn in Africa, and of the
450 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
long complex (and for the most part, unconscious) struggle to regain in some
form and under alien conditions of life a whole culture again" (47). Wright
asserts that socially progressive black writers, whatever their particular subject
matter, should convey the total sweep of African American history to impress on
readers both the intense, disregarded humanity of blacks and the ways that this
humanity has been subjugated by a narrow and predatory capitalism. Moreover,
according to Wright, African American history crystallizes the conflicts and
transformations that have marked the entire development of European and
American civilization. In 12 Million Black Voices, he states, "Brutal, bloody,
crowded with suffering and abrupt transitions, the lives of us black folk repre-
sent the most magical and meaningful picture of human experience in the
Westem world. Hurled from our native African homes into the very center of
the most highly industrialized civilization the world has ever known, we stand
today with a consciousness and history such as few people possess" (146). Put
simply, African American history can teach America about itself.
In 1941 this lesson had not yet been heard by most Americans. Wright's nar-
rative suggests that, even though black and white histories have repeatedly con-
verged, they have not really spoken to one another. One reason for this incom-
municativeness is that the disparate values of the white and black communities
are not yet fully compatible. Wright, for example, generalizes how black families
are held together by love and voluntary association rather than by emphasis on
property that unites the families of the Lords of the Lands. He writes, "A black
mother who stands in the sagging door of her gingerbread shack may weep as
she sees her children straying off into the unknown world, but no matter what
they may do, no matter what happens to them, no matter what crimes they com-
mit, no matter what the world may think of them, that mother welcomes them
back with an irreducibly human feeling that stands above the claims of law or
property. Our scale of values differs from that of the world from which we have
been excluded; our shame is not its shame, and our love is not its love" {12
Million 61). The meaning of compassion and acceptance has different boundaries
for blacks and whites, but Wright makes no outright claims about who possesses
the "right" values for the US. A photograph complementing this passage, Arthur
Rothstein's "Sharecropper family," which depicts 15 members of an impover-
ished family lined across their dirt yard, underscores that Wright is not making
moralistic assertions about the superior, unconditional love of black families.
The men, women, teenagers, children, and toddlers look toward the camera with
expressions that reveal neither particular warmth nor contempt. What seems
most salient about this family is their matter-of-fact, yet intense, presence, a real-
ity that the photograph quietly demands we accept and address (see Fig. 5).
The under-acknowledged, inseparable presence of African Americans in US
history could not be meaningfully addressed merely by including a supplemen-
Fig. 4, IL]
Jack Delano,
"Rural Negro
family on their
porch, South
Carolina (FSA)"
from 12 Million
Black Voices. 37.
Fig. 5. [R]
Arthur Rothstein.
"Sharecropper
family, Okla-
homa (FSA)"
from 12 Million
Black Voices.
6 1 .
RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES AND WORLD WAR II-ERA CiVIC NATIONALISM
451
tal additional chapter to the American story. The "Americans All" rhetoric of the
time tended to overlook this reality and, instead, dwelled on the idea that Ellis
Island was as essential to American identity as Plymouth Rock. In 72 Million
Black Voices Wright interrogates this revised but still inadequate founding myth
by suggesting America's multicultural complicity in the slave trade: "The lean,
tall, blond men of England, Holland and Denmark, the dark, short, nervous men
of France, Spain and Portugal, men whose blue and gray and brown eyes glinted
with the light of the future, denied our human personalities, tore us from our
native soil, weighted our legs with chains" (12). Without sarcasm, Wright high-
lights the paradox that the same immigrants who sought political and social
freedom engaged in the slave trade that completely denied freedom to others.
He does not discredit the idea that these early immigrants were "flushed with a
new and noble concept of life, of its inherent dignity and unlimited possibilities"
(12); rather than debunking these exceptionalist myths, Wright exposes their limits.
Wright goes on to demonstrate how the culpability of the immigrant in the
inhumane treatment of African Americans extended into the era of sharecrop-
ping. He also describes the contemptuous response of his black voices: "If the
Lord of the Land for whom we are working happens to be a foreigner who came
to the United States to escape oppression in Europe and who has taken to the
native way of cheating us, we spit and mutter
Red, white and blue,
Your daddy was a Jew
Your ma's a dirty dago,
Now what the hell is you?... (43)
Ultimately, this strategy of turning ethnocentrism against the perpetrator
may be ineffectual and narrowly defensive, but in the world Wright depicts,
most African Americans do not have the means to focus their indignation
toward social reform. Indeed, the best they can hope for seems to be "genial
despotism." Wright describes, for example, that "[i]n exchange for our vote the
gangster-politicians sometimes give us so many petty jobs that the white news-
papers in certain northern cities contemptuously refer to their city hall as 'Uncle
Tom's Cabin' " (121).
With only petty or patronizing forms of social and political power available,
Wright argues, African Americans are drawn to far-flung sources of power. In
his view, blacks seek to become protectively merged with the least kriown and
farthest removed race, saying with a collective snicker of self-depreciation:
White folks is evil
And niggers is too
So glad I'm a Chinaman
I don't know what to do. . . . (47)
In this section of 12 Million Black Voices, Wright suggests that US society debases
African Americans beyond common sense. Blacks are more likely to assume
false and ultimately weak identities than they are to affirm a "common union"
(47) with poor whites and take direct action for social and economic justice. At
the same time, Wright's war era narrative presents the possibility of blacks form-
ing new and threatening alliances and, therefore, it is a veiled warning to white
readers. As he writes, "Fear breeds in our heart until each poor white face begins
to look like the face of an enemy soldier" (46).
In Native Son Wright had already exposed ways that cultural and political
oppression causes individuals to seek out dangerous and confused forms of
identification. Bigger's experience of exclusion provokes in him such intense
frustration that he comes to view Japan's incursions into China, Mussolini's
452 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
expanding power, and Hitler's extermination of Jews "as possible avenues of
escape" from his own thwarted existence (98). Bigger is unable to connect with a
wider America that, at its best, patronizes him with social charity. This lack of
native nationalist identification contributes to Bigger's becoming intrigued by
power regardless of its moral or political legitimacy in the eyes of the white
American majority. Gary Gerstle explains how Japan's conquest of Western-con-
trolled territories provided a lift for nonwhite minorities in the US, "for now
they could dare to imagine a world in which all imperialist powers were sent
home and rule based on racial subjugation would be banished from the earth"
(193-94). This sentiment is directly evident in 12 Million Black Voicey, Wright
describes how some in the black community "feel the need of the protection of a
strong nation so keenly that [they] admire the harsh and imperialistic policies of
Japan and ardently hope that the Japanese will assume the leadership of the
darker races" (143). Both the feelings of Wright's collective protagonist and
Bigger's confused attraction to militaristic regimes reflect how the denial of full
cultural citizenship to African Americans fuels recklessly powerful forms of
resistance.''
12 Million Black Voices implores the nation to confront its race-based capital-
ism and its selective history or face the consequences. Wright contributes to a
revisionist history by depicting the confluence of the two great American migra-
tions. He brings them together to underscore that African American migration
has become blocked, while Europeans continue to flow onwards towards the full
promises of America. He, for example, describes how African Americans remain
caught in the grimy, dilapidated "transitional areas" of northern industrial cities,
while immigrants progress to opportunities beyond manual labor: "For years we
watch the timid faces of poor white peasants Turks, Czechs, Croats, Finns, and
Greekspass through this curtain of smoke and emerge with the sensitive fea-
tures of modem men. But our faces do not change . . . years later, we pick up
[the newspaper] . .. and see that some former neighbors of ours, a Mr. and Mrs.
Klein or Murphy or Potaci or Pierre or Cromwell or Stepanovich and their chil-
drenkids we once played with upon the slag piles are now living in the subur-
ban areas, having swum upstream through the American waters of opportunity
into the professional classes" (102). Wright desires for the other major stream in
US history that of black migration to flow uninterrupted and to gain enough
power to wash away the Lords of the Land and Bosses of the Buildings.
12 Million Black Voices suggests the need for radical action that goes well
beyond New Deal reform efforts. At the same time, Wright does allow for the
possibility that the current political system has the potential to serve social jus-
tice. For this to happen, the judiciary must defend constitutional principles and
rise above deeply entrenched patterns of social exclusion. Wright observes ways
that courts presently defend residential segregation by "juggl[ing] words so that
these restrictive covenants are always 'constitutional' and in defense of public
policy, thereby assuming the role of policemen" (113). His sharp critique allows
the courts to honor more fundamental constitutional principles of equal protec-
tion. To do so the judiciary must rise above public sentiment. Wright describes a
complicit relationship between the government and public "morality":
"Newspapers, radio, Protestant and Catholic churches, Jewish synagogues,
clubs, civic groups fraternities, sororities, leagues and universities bring their
moral precepts to bolster their locking-in of hundreds of us black folks in single,
constricted areas" (113). This passage of 12 Million Black Voices ends with an
observation that evokes the two-fronted battle for social justice that consumed
Wright as the war in Europe escalated: "Even in times of peace some of the
neighborhoods in which we live look as though they had been subjected to an
intensive and prolonged aerial bombardment" (114). The extended passage
RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BMCK VOICES AUD WORLD WAR II-ERA CIVIC NATIONALISM 453
reveals a dialectic often apparent in the text: an interplay between the hope for
America to achieve its founding promises and the threat of black retaliation.
Wright takes each side of this dialectic quite seriously.
The very brief final chapter of Wright's text, "Men in the Making," weaves
back and forth between appeals to civic nationalism and implications that the
victims of race-based capitalism are mobilizing for action. The second photo-
graph in the chapter is 12 Million Black Voice's only image overtly depicting black
protest. However, this photograph appears at first to be rather ineffectual. An
APAVide World photo shows five women in front of the White House carrying
pickets denouncing lynching (see Fig. 6). One of the pickets reads, "Down with
Dastardly Practices. Stop Lynching"; another states "Stop Lynching. Let Real
Democracy Prevail" (142). Although only four women are fully visible and have
rather passive expressions, it is not clear from the picture where the line of
women stops or ends, quietly suggesting the possibility of a much more substan-
tial protest. This point resonates with Wright's text on the same page, "We have
tramped down a road three hundred years long" (142). Here, text and image
anticipate the final lines of the chapter that will proclaim that "men are moving"
(147) with increasing strength and energy. Wright highlights the inexorable chal-
lenge of black America to the nation's inclusive claims; more specifically, the
photograph protests Roosevelt's resistance to signing anti-lynching legislation.
"Men in the Making" is not merely prodding America's democratic conscience,
however. The final chapter creates a gathering sense of men and women coming
together to take action that goes beyond mere reform.
On one level, the final paragraphs of 12 Million Black Voices lack the critical
edge of the earlier sections. Some of Wright's closing comments evoke a willful
and somewhat implausible optimism; the text, in other words, seems to move to
safer territory. Wright asserts that similarities between blacks and whites are
more significant than their differences: "The common road of hope which we
have traveled has brought us into stronger kinship than any words, laws, or
legal claims" (145). And he comments reassuringly that the most qualitatively
significant progress for blacks has been achieved through peaceful and in the
case of the Scottsboro trials, biracial protest. Wright's final lines, which evoke
the rhetoric of forward progress, appear to capitulate to the vague idealism of
the early war years, when the nation's attention was drawn more to broad pur-
poses of the war rather than to specific strategic battles. He claims "the right to
share in the upward march of American life" (146). He observes, "We stand at
the crossroads. We watch each new procession. The hot wires carry urgent
appeals. Print compels us. Voices are speaking. Men are moving! And we shall
be with them . . . " (147). Consider these lines in contrast to the conclusion of an
early draft of the text:
The deeds of men are making the tides roll over the world. We shall he marshaled into
war, hut even when we go to fight, we shall be watching, waiting . . . even when dying in
"their" war, our eyes shall he riveted on what has propelled us thus far. Some of us will
survive all the wars and shall retum to that vast land of cotton, the pale white sentry of
death, shall retum to that wilderness of huildings with their blocks of locked-in life, and
we shall make the wide fields of the South green again. We shall bring new life to the lor\g
straight streets of the city. (Wright Papers, "Men in the Making")
Wright provocatively suggests that African Americans who retum from the war
will become prisoners under guard, seeking escape from a "locked-in" life. The
revised manuscript, then, eliminates overt references to America's democratic
failings and instead emphasizes an urgent sense of forward movement and
inclusiveness. The final photograph of 12 Million Black Voices, "Backyard of an
Alley Dwelling," by FSA photographer Carl Mydans, complements the hopeful
sentiments expressed in the published text (see Fig. 7). The photograph depicts a
454 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
young man standing in the doorway of a simple wooden residence. The young
man's eyes are raised upward and his expression appears to be the beginning of
a smile. Given Wright's verbal text, the reader is left wondering what this man
has to be happy about. While 22 Million Black Voices does include other pho-
tographs of African Americans smiling and enjoying themselves, these images
are connected to religion, music, and social relationships.^ This nascent smile,
placed on the final page of the manuscript is detached, non-contextual, inexplic-
able. Nevertheless, the young man's budding smile can be distinguished from
the many other FSA photographs of the downtrodden, passive victims of pover-
ty that the New Deal set out to help.
The conclusion of 12 Million Black Voices might be read as Wright having hit
the limit of acceptable criticism in a text designed to reach a wide audience. Or
the conclusion reads as surrendering to a willful war-era optimism about the
future. The very lack of specificity in the language and in the young man's smile
has unsettling implications, however. Wright does not disclose what the "hot
wires" and speaking voices in his final lines are urging blacks to do. It is as if the
young man knows something that Wright's readers do not. This uncertainty
gives the ending of 22 Million Black Voices a note of threat: if the democratic
opportunity reflected in the "Americans All" rhetoric of progress is not extended
to African Americans, the nation's post-war identity will be increasingly cor-
rupted and increasingly at risk.
This sense of threat was taken seriously by the FBI, who began investigating
whether Wright could be charged with sedition.*^ Putting aside such alarmist
reactions, even if we read the concluding section of Wright's text for its face
value as an endorsement of the "common road of hope" shared by all
Americans, 12 Million Black Voices is no less challenging. Wright does not capitu-
late to what John Higham has called the "rosy haze" (223) of American plural-
ism of the era, nor is he merely giving communist principles a Popular Front
spin. This is not to say that Wright's particular vision always transcended ideo-
logical influences; indeed, this essay has pointed out that Wright, while main-
taining a strong connection to Marxist ideals, also interacts with the emergence
of US pluralism. He knows that the immigrant story as the founding narrative of
American identity and democracy is blatantly hypocritical unless it accounts for
slavery and black migration. At the same time, 12 Million Black Voices demon-
strates that Wright is compelled by the rhetoric of American promise, even as he
recognizes that this rhetoric can be deceptive and hypocritical.
When Wright stated in 1940 that "we live by an idealism that makes us
believe that the Constitution is a good document of government, that the Bill of
Fig. 6. IL]
AP/Wide World
Photos, "Dem-
onstration,
VWashington, DC"
from 12 Million
Black Voices,
142.
Fig. 7. [R]
Carl Mydans,
"Back yard of
aliey dweiling,
Washington, DC
(FSA)" from 12
Million Black
Voices. 147,
RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES AND WORLD WAR II-ERA CIVIC NATIONALISM
455
Rights is a good legal and human principle to safeguard our civil liberties, that
every man and woman should have the opportunity to realize himself, to seek
his own individual fate and goals, his own peculiar and untranslatable destiny"
{"How Bigger" 35-36), he affirmed American equal opportunity and self-deter-
mination, even though his life and work exposed the limits and exclusions of
this ideology. Wright's complex, conflicted engagement with mainstream
American idealism forms part of the cosmopolitan fullness of identity that he
sought throughout his career. This relationship to American ideals is sometimes
discounted by critics who continue to measure Wright's perspective too exclu-
sively by his relationship to the Communist Party however complex that rela-
tionship may be understood. ^^ As Denning has argued, the broad impact of the
Popular Front has not been adequately appreciated because of a prevailing criti-
cal tendency to place the American Communist Party at the core of the struggle
against exploitive capitalism and on behalf of the rights of the worker. Such an
analytical framework positions Party members at the core of the Popular Front
with fellow travelers at the periphery, expressing sympathy with Party initia-
tives, though with a somewhat diluted or guarded level of commitment to radi-
cal social change. Denning helps us to consider the actual core of the Popular
Front as a broad, implicit coalition of activists, anti-fascists, and second genera-
tion immigrant laborers and artists who understood American life as rooted in
the sacrificing labor and inequities endured by workers. It is this revised notion
of a Popular Front to which Wright belongs.
Despite Wright's distancing himself from specific Popular Front efforts, he
nevertheless understood the value of language and rhetorical appeals that could
build connections across groups in the fight for social justice. 12 Million Black
Voices both incorporates and questions the rhetoric of civic nationalism of the
time, which raised public consciousness of social inequality and racism but
refused to consider how the vaunted ideal of the immigrant-as-true-American
was built to a significant extent on the ongoing exclusion of African Americans
from full opportunity and cultural citizenship. But it would be wrong to suggest
that the text merely exposes an unbridgeable gap between immigration and
black migration. Denning distills fundamental connections between these two
currents in US history: "The symbolic structures of ethnicity and race were the
products of slavery and migrant labor, segregated labor markets, legal codes of
exclusion and restriction, as well as the institutions of community culture and
self defense" (239). As a text that indicts how the Lords of the Land and Bosses
of the Buildings exploit a cheap and isolated labor market and as a text that
plays on the idea of the immigrant {or migrant)-as-tnie-American, seeking
promise and marching forward, 12 Million Black Voices shares common ground
with working class narratives of immigration and migration that also engaged
the rhetoric of American civic nationalism. An examination of this connection
lies beyond the scope of this essay, but I suggest that the broad power of
Wright's text might be further appreciated by considering its relationship to eth-
nic narratives of the era, including Henry Roth's Call it Sleep (1934), Pietro Di
Donato' s Christ in Concrete (1939), and Carlos Bulosan's America is itt the Heart
(1943), narratives that both invoke class consciousness and navigate through the
fog of American civic nationalism.
Notes 1, This contradiction between "civic nationalism" and "racial nationalism" is the focus of Gerstle's
synthesis. Civic nationalism is based on founding American principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness. These ideals have been increasingly extended to white immigrants but less so to
African Americans and Asian Americans. Racial nationalism, which bases American identity on the
4 5 6 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
notion of a common blood, is built on the exclusion of non-whites. According to Gerstle, the uneasy
relationship between these two nationalisms is reflected, in war-era movies, which sometimes
stretched the color line but essentially left it in place (210).
2. As Natanson asserts, the initial reviews of 12 Million Black Voices~m both the black and the
white press-for the most part praised the text's power (249). However, as Woller observes, this initial
wave of praise gave way to attacks that cited Wright's work for sentimental distortion (346-48).
3. See, for example, Woller, Moore, and Reilly.
4. Nichoils, for example, describes 12 Million Black Voices as a "genealogy of proletarian con-
sciousness" (113-30).
5. See, for example, Stott and Peeler.
6. The lynching photograph depicts Lint Shaw (the reference to the photograph listed at the end of
Twelve Million Black Voices does not specify the victim), who was murdered shortly before appearing
in courts to face assault charges. Commenting on a similar photograph of Shaw's body hanging from
a tree, Apel writes, "The men showcase the tortured body of their victim as evidence of having upheld
civilized society" (42). Writing more broadly of lynching photographs, Goldsby observes that they Tig-
ure the dead as signs of pure abjection who radiate no thought, no speech, no action, no will; who,
through their appearance in the picture's field of vision, become invisible" (231), To an extent, Shaw
remains invisible in 12 Million Black Voices because he is never named, but at the same time.
Wright's anti-lynching appropriation of the photograph critiques the social and economic forces that
have created a racially exclusive conception of "civilized society."
7. Rowley writes that in October 1942, a man sent a letter to the Secretary of War stating that pas-
sages like the one mentioning the "darker races" could lead to "many forms of sabotage" and "result
in a general breakdown of morale" (275).
8. Furthemiore. the handful of photographs in which whites and blacks appear together depicts the
stern faces of the sharecropper boss, governmental authority or lyncher,
9. For a discussion of the FBI's investigation of Wright, see Gayle.
10. Examining Wright's political vision by its relationship to American Communism, however
nuanced our understanding of the Left may be, is still limiting. In an overview of scholarship on
Depression-era radical literature, Wald notes that some critics have failed to recognize the complexi-
ties of Party members' creative Influences, despite what he knows was the "the real wei ght . . , of full-
time Party literary-critical functionaries" (23), Schulman has made a similar point with specific refer-
ence to Wright's artistic integrity and, moreover, Schulman challenges the critical tradition that
defines Wright by either his embrace or rejection of the Party (137-80),
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