Bandung was viewed by John Foster and Allen Dulles as marking the start of a new communist offensive in the postcolonial countries, and the 1956
Paris conference, which clearly owed some of its inspiration to the previous year’s event (Diop called it a “second Bandung”), likely stirred similar misgivings in Washington.14 Certainly Richard Wright, who had attended and reported on Bandung (with a grant from the Congress for Cultural Freedom), feared the possibility of the communists hijacking Diop’s initiative, just as he believed they had exploited the suffering of African Americans during the 1930s. In May 1956, with the conference scheduled for September, Wright called at the U.S. embassy in Paris, on the pretext of renewing his passport, and expressed “certain concerns over the leftist tendencies of the Executive Committee for the Congress,” an embassy officer reported to Washington. “To counteract such a tendency,” the report continued, “Mr. Wright wondered if the Embassy could assist him in suggesting possible American negro delegates who are relatively well known for their cultural achievements and who could combat the leftist tendencies of the Congress.” Wright returned to the embassy on several occasions to discuss how officials there might “offset Communist influence.”15
Precisely what happened next is unclear, but the delegation organized by John Davis, at the prompting of Wright and Wilkins, had all the hall-marks of a CIA front operation like earlier initiatives among intellectuals, students, and women. Shortly after the meetings in the Paris embassy, Davis approached Orin Lehman, “who agreed to underwrite the trip.”16
By the beginning of August, Wright had learned from Wilkins of Davis’s interest in coming to Paris, and arranged for Diop to issue formal invitations to the American Information Committee on Race and Caste.
“I’m sure glad that we have at long last got some response from the States,” Wright wrote Davis. “The influence of other countries and other ideas have flooded the preparation for this congress and other points of view will be welcome.”17 In the weeks that followed, Davis corresponded with such eminent African American intellectuals as Horace Mann Bond, president of Lincoln University (and father of future civil rights activist Julian Bond), informing them that his organization would pay their passage to Paris and a $20 per diem on condition that they all provided re-
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ports on the Congress after their return to the United States.18 By September 5, Davis was able to confirm with Wright that a five-man American delegation would be coming to Paris.19 The other members beside himself would be Bond, James Ivy (editor of the NAACP’s magazine,
Suspicions that the U.S. delegation was not all that it seemed abounded during the Paris Congress itself, which opened on the morning of Wednesday, September 19, in a hot, cramped lecture theater at the Sorbonne. Shortly after Alioune Diop had given a welcoming address, a message from W. E. B. Du Bois was read aloud. The American father of pan-Africanism apologized for his absence, explaining, “I am not present at your meeting because the U.S. government will not give me a passport.” This statement was greeted “by great waves of laughter, by no means good-natured,” reported African American novelist James Baldwin in the CCF magazine