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On a cold night in early November 1960 an audience gathered at the American Church on the Quai D’Orsay in Paris to hear a lecture entitled “The Situation of the Black Artist and Intellectual in the United States.” The speaker, Richard Wright, was the son of an illiterate Mississippi sharecropper who had won literary fame and fortune during the 1940s as the creator of one of the great characters in African American fiction, Bigger Thomas, the antihero of Wright’s debut novel, Native Son. Now, however, living the life of the exiled American writer in Paris, Wright was plagued by illness, self-doubt, and financial hardship. Di-sheveled and visibly ailing, he stunned his listeners by launching into a furious tirade against his country of birth. Black American artists lived in “a nightmarish jungle” under a government that systematically silenced those who tried to speak out against the racial status quo.1 Overseas, the same government not only spied on expatriate U.S. citizens in cities such as Paris, including Wright himself, it also secretly funded apparently radical groups in an effort to defuse challenges to its growing global power. “I’d say that most revolutionary movements in the Western world are government-sponsored,” Wright claimed. “They are launched by agents provocateurs to organize the discontented so that the Government can keep an eye on them.” The writer concluded his long, rambling speech with an implied promise of more revelations to come. “I think that mental health urges us to bring all of these hidden things into the open where they can be publicly dealt with,” he said.2

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A few weeks later, Wright lay dead in a Parisian clinic. He was only fifty-two years old.

The aim of this chapter is not to investigate the mysterious circumstances of Wright’s death (there have been recurrent rumors that he was murdered).3 Rather it is to explore his claim that the U.S. government was involved in the covert funding of black nationalist groups. In particular, the chapter will tell the story of the CIA’s principal front organization in the African American community, the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC)—a group that, ironically, Richard Wright himself had helped to create.

The suggestion that the CIA fielded an African American front group is less implausible than it might at first sound. The U.S. Communist Party had a long tradition of front activities among American blacks, a group historically neglected by more mainstream white reformers. (Wright himself had been a communist during the 1930s, before breaking with the party in the early 1940s, then contributing to the confessional classic, The God That Failed. ) In the post-1945 period, this tradition merged with the exigencies of the Cold War to produce a series of protest actions that seriously embarrassed American officialdom in its confrontation with the Soviet Union, such as the presentation to the United Nations by the communist-controlled Civil Rights Congress of a petition alleging that the United States was engaged in a campaign of genocide against its black citizens.4

By the mid-1950s, two developments had occurred that made the need for a response to such provocations all the more urgent. One was an esca-lation in the racial violence endemic in the American South, as the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision and the emergence of the civil rights movement threatened the survival of the region’s segregationist order, and southern white supremacists resorted to any means necessary to preserve it. The other was the continuing retreat of the European powers from their colonial dominion in the Third World and the ensuing contest between the superpowers for the political allegiance of the “emerging nations.” Images of southern police turning dogs and fire hoses on nonviolent black protestors played particularly badly in postcolonial Africa, a region of growing strategic and economic importance where Cold War

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propagandists had to compete for ideological influence with new currents of black cultural nationalism. It was against this background that U.S.

government agencies, including the CIA, began casting around for black American leaders who might be called on to paint a positive picture of their country’s race relations and help steer newly independent African nations away from the communist camp.5