This perhaps surprising judgment reflected the fact that, despite its many internal divisions, the Congress did manage to agree on certain things. One of these was the necessity for Africans to free themselves from white colonialism, exploitation, and racial discrimination if they were fully to come into possession of their common heritage and achieve “integration into the active cultural life of the world.” Another was the need to draw up an “inventory” of the various black cultures that had been “systematically misunderstood, underestimated, sometimes destroyed” by colonialism, so that peoples of African descent everywhere could gain an accurate appreciation of the values they all shared and begin to define themselves “instead of always being defined by others.” Finally, as announced by Alioune Diop to a restive audience on the sweltering afternoon of the conference’s closing day, the Congress resolved to create a permanent organization, “an international association for the dissemination of black culture.”34
The creation of the Société Africaine de Culture (SAC) only weeks af-
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ter the Congress’s conclusion was greeted with universal acclaim. It was not long, however, before the political and cultural tensions within the African diaspora resurfaced. In January 1957, Diop wrote to John Davis informing him that international members were being sought for SAC’s executive council—and that the individuals he had in mind to represent the United States were none other than Paul Robeson and W. E. B.
Du Bois.35 Davis, who had himself begun to organize the American delegation into a permanent entity, was aghast at this suggestion, immediately cabling Wright, “Cannot go along. Welcome your intercession. Please inform.”36 It was not that he did not respect Du Bois’s many accomplish-ments, Davis explained to Diop the following month: “We are all, in fact, a product of his ‘better tenth’ movement.” Rather, the problem was that Du Bois and Robeson “are now completely dedicated to a political doctrine,” and “uncritical acceptance of any political dogma destroys any man as a cultural being.” In any case, he and his American colleagues could not accept the principle that French Africans sitting in Paris had the right to select the U.S. members of the new movement’s governing body. Indeed, the Americans’ continued participation depended on their being able to nominate their own representatives.37
Confronted with this ultimatum, Diop opted for a conciliatory response.
It had never been his intention to impose candidates on the U.S. delegation, he reassured Davis. “We [were] unaware of the extent to which the names of these two cultured men, whom we admire, can arouse the anxiety of other Negro Americans,” he carried on. Of course, Davis and his friends should choose their own representation.38 Suitably mollified, the Americans proceeded to do just that, replacing Du Bois and Robeson with Duke Ellington (Davis’s “favorite of jazz musicians”) and the NAACP’s counsel in the
The new ascendancy among leading black Americans of a liberal, anticommunist approach to African affairs, as opposed to the earlier form of leftist engagement personified by Du Bois, could not have been clearer.
Encouraged by this victory, John Davis set about cementing his plans for a U.S. affiliate of the international society. The American Society of African Culture came into existence in June 1957, although active operations
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did not begin until November. The intervening months, it seems, were spent in working out the arrangements by which the organization would be funded and governed, with Orin Lehman, Bethuel Webster, and a new white “angel,” Philadelphia construction magnate, Matthew H.