Did Richard Wright want to “kiss the hand of the man who wrote American Negro Slave Revolts”? Yes, according to that hand’s owner. Notes on a mutual suspension of hostilities.

(Continuing the series)

I was taken aback when I first read those words.[1] I reproduced them in my review of Gary Murrell’s biography of Herbert Aptheker: “A biographer must leave out many things, of course, but one wonders why this meeting had to be one of them.”[2]

Aptheker, didn’t take kindly to apostates from Communism, the God who had failed the famous black novelist.

According to Aptheker, however, they agreed to meet in a Manhattan hotel room (almost certainly Wright’s). In fairness to Murrell, upon reflection, I believe Murrell omitted this story because no one else could corroborate it.[3] We have only Stuckey’s citation of Crowder’s interview referenced in a paper by Stuckey that Murrell otherwise drew upon several times.

Aptheker’s choice of words, however, makes it hard to question his veracity: the verb that would occur to me, were I making the whole thing up, would be “shake,” not “kiss.” But why would Aptheker confabulate such an event?

I can understand how Wright, pushing past his disgust with Aptheker’s party[4], would want to meet, however furtively, the author of American Negro Slave Revolts (ANSR). This would have been sometime after Aptheker’s discharge from the Army in 1946 and before Wright’s final voyage of expatriation to Europe in 1947.[5]

I further surmise that Wright did the inviting and that neither man had an interest in publicizing the meeting’s occurrence.

Whatever criticisms ANSR deserves, it was a pioneering work of research, one that excited African Americans who knew about it. In 1943, 80 years after Lincoln’s wartime Emancipation Proclamation, Aptheker’s dissertation about what enslaved Africans on American soil did to emancipate themselves (albeit unsuccessfully) was accepted by Columbia University Press’s history department and then published by its press.

So, in 1946, as the Cold War was hotting up, a famous African American met with a notable, but not yet infamous, Communist historian because of what he had uncovered about African American history.[6] But how could they have missed each other in the preceding ten years?

Before enlisting in the army on Lincoln’s birthday in 1942, Aptheker was studying at Columbia’s Seth Low campus in Brooklyn, the New York City borough to which still-Comrade Wright had emigrated from Chicago in 1937, settling in the Fort Greene section—less than a mile and a half from Brooklyn Heights where Fay and Herbert Aptheker lived.

Was Aptheker not cognizant of Wright as the author of roughly 200 contributions to the Daily Worker in the late 1930s, at least some of which were written under his byline?[7]

Aptheker, a Columbia University doctoral student, was already lecturing and publishing in a field of great interest to Wright, even before Aptheker formally joined the Party in 1939.

That same year, Wright was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1940, his Native Son became a Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC) main selection, a first for a black novelist. Was this not of interest to Aptheker?

Wright soon quit the New Deal’s Federal Writers Project: at last, he could support his family as a writer. He was in the same league as John Steinbeck, whose The Grapes of Wrath was a BOMC choice in 1939.

The issues Wright had with the Party didn’t go away. He did “stick it out” for two more years, but his mind was already beyond the Party, and now he had the means to act on that mental shift. He could explore his growing interest in Pan-Africanism free of Party strictures, dictated as they were by Stalin’s foreign policy objectives. Once in Paris, he could, and did, freely meet Pan Africanists such as George Padmore, C. L. R. James’s friend from Trinidad and ex-Comintern operative.

It is worth noting that in 1944, the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) could have easily “taken out” the renegade Wright given Paris’s unsettled political atmosphere after the end of Nazi occupation. Communists, Gaullists, Socialists, and others were all vying for influence in the Fourth Republic.

The Moscow-backed PCF was powerful, and Soviet intelligence and influence operations were active in the City of Lights, especially in intellectual and artistic circles. Wright’s 1944 Atlantic Monthly essay “I Tried to Be a Communist,” a searing indictment of the Party’s authoritarianism, intellectual dishonesty, and racism, was an affront to Stalinism. This made him a target of Communist-aligned intellectuals both in the U.S. and abroad.

Parisian Communists reviled him, but did not threaten him physically, at least not overtly. Soviet spies in post-war Paris kept a watchful eye on anyone viewed as a threat to Communist hegemony, especially ex-Communists like Wright. They almost certainly had him under surveillance, and his awareness of this took a considerable toll on his psyche.

In late 1946, there was, if we accept Herbert Aptheker’s report, a temporary “ceasefire,” a mutual suspension of hostilities between the Communist researcher in black history and the anti-Communist black novelist. It is possible, however improbable, their paths had not crossed before.

For a few hours, their mutual respect overrode whatever divided them; again, taking Aptheker’s word for it, the encounter was tinged with a kind of reverence on the part of the radical black novelist toward the radical white scholar seven years his junior. Some enterprising scholar should see if there isn’t more to be learned about this tantalizing story.

To be continued.

Notes

[1] Sterling Stuckey, “From the Bottom Up: Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts and Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States,” in African American History and Radical Historiography: Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker, ed. Herbert Shapiro, Minneapolis: MEP, 1998. 62. Stuckey’s source is a conversation with Aptheker conducted and recorded by his University of California Riverside colleague Ralph Crowder in May 1997. Stuckey provides no other information. Murrell cites “From the Bottom Up” several times in his “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press 2015, 379 n. 15, n. 23, n. 28, but does not note this alleged encounter.

[2] Anthony Flood, “Willful Blindness,” American Communist History, 15:1, 2016, 167. A version of this review of Murrell’s life of Aptheker, cited in the first note above, appears in my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, self-published, 2019. I plan on publishing a second, expanded edition.

[3] I could find none in any of the many books by or about Wright that I consulted.

[4] Wright joined the Communist Party in Chicago in 1934, five years before Aptheker, and effectively left it by 1942. It took 52 years for Aptheker to leave it in disgust after addressing its 25^th convention in 1991, post-Soviet collapse. See Gary Murrell, “Herbert Aptheker’s Unity of Theory and Practice in the Communist Party USA: On the Last Night, and During the First Two Decades,” Science & Society, Vol. 70, No. 1, January 2006, 98–118. Murrell expands upon this in his biography.

[5] “. . . [W]hat slaves might have put into the soup was anybody’s guess, as Richard Wright suggested to me [Aptheker] when he spoke of his work in a New York City hotel.” Herbert Aptheker, “Resistance and Afro-American History,” in In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History, ed. Gary Okihiro, Amherst: UMass Press, 1986, 16.