For their part, Davis and his party regarded many of the non-American delegates with an equal measure of mistrust, as their postconference reports make clear. Horace Mann Bond, for example, suspected (with good reason) that the British delegation, led by a white woman, Dorothy Brooks, was communist-dominated and financed. He also believed that the audience for a speech by a founding member of the Negritude movement, the Martinique-born Aimé Césaire, was stacked with communists, who cheered the anti-American remarks of the leftist deputy and poet “to
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the rafters.”21 Another, anonymous report echoed Bond by describing the conference session featuring Césaire’s lecture as “obviously stacked” and went on to recount how the same audience howled down an inoffensive speech by a Protestant pastor from Cameroon. Generally, though, the communists were surprisingly reticent and self-effacing, the report continued—“very calm, very sweet to everybody. Everything is rosy, peaches and cream.”22 Bond wondered whether the conference organizers themselves were not subject to communist control. “While speculating on where they found the financial resources (e.g., to pay for simultaneous translation),” he reported, “I could not but hope that their earnest efforts would not be ‘captured’ by agencies and interests hostile to American democracy.”23 Interestingly, neither report made much of the presence at the Congress of the young theoretician of Third World revolution, Frantz Fanon, whose paper included the charge, “Racism haunts and vitiates American culture.”24
Interwoven with these political divisions were unexpected racial tensions, which constantly threatened to undermine the Congress’s appeals to pan-Africanism and Negritude. Encounters with different diasporic cultures could be rewarding and pleasurable—the American delegates, for example, clearly enjoyed the African dishes and Haitian rum on offer at a Parisian café during one conference mealtime. Such meetings, however, were often beset with mutual misunderstanding and prejudice. In particular, many Francophone Africans and Haitians felt, as an officer of the American Society of African Culture put it a few years later, “that the American delegation was far more American than Negro,” an attitude expressed in insensitive and sometimes chauvinistic remarks about skin color.25 The very light-skinned John Davis, for example, was asked “just why he considered himself a Negro—he certainly did not look like one”
(as Baldwin recalled). Davis responded to this question by trying to explain that “he was a Negro by choice and by depth of involvement—by experience.” This statement was met with blank stares.26 One Haitian even suggested that “mulattoes” were unreliable as allies in the black freedom struggle, a barb clearly aimed at the U.S. delegates (although, ironically, it was the communist-controlled British contingent that took offense at the remark).27 For their part, “the Americans were struck by the fact that the Africans were exceedingly French or British.”28
Caught in between the two camps was the “liaison man,” Richard
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Wright, a literary lion whom (Baldwin reported) “both factions tended to claim . . . as their spokesman.”29 Wright’s natural position was a combination of the American and African viewpoints. On the one hand, he was fiercely anticommunist. “We start neck and neck with the Communists in bidding for the loyalty of Africa,” he wrote privately. “I’m certain that the Communists will be swiftly overhauling their concepts and if we don’t they will have the advantage in terms of being much freer to act effectively.” On the other hand, Wright was deeply sensitive to the new currents of black nationalism sweeping postcolonial Africa—Americans must engage with Africans “in terms of sympathy and identification,” he insisted30—and he was horrified by the possibility of being perceived along with the other American blacks present as “agents of some kind.” “We had a message today that hurt me,” he told the Congress’s organizers during a closed session on the evening of the first day, in obvious reference to Du Bois’s greeting.31 Small wonder, given these conflicting impulses and pressures, that by the end of the event Wright should have begun to show signs of emotional and mental strain. “The consciousness of his peculiar and . . . rather grueling position weighed on him, I think, rather heavily,”
observed Baldwin.32 A few days after the Congress closed, Wright told a friend that it had left him “terribly depressed.” All the same, he was prepared to acknowledge that it had been “a success of a sort.”33