McCloskey, all prominently involved in the discussions.40 The most important of these occurred on September 24, 1957, when it was decided that, in addition to carrying on its research function, the American Information Committee on Race and Caste would “serve as directing and coordinating agency for related groups and functions,” including the newly formed AMSAC. The only problem with this proposal, it was agreed, was the committee’s name. “The word ‘information’ had very unpleasant con-notations,” a minute of the discussion noted in a rare moment of frank-ness, “and was a sure indicator to certain groups of the nature of sponsorship.”41 The possibility of such embarrassment was averted the following month, when a special meeting of the committee’s directors in the Wall Street office of Webster’s law firm agreed to rename the organization the Council on Race and Caste in World Affairs (CORAC). At that meeting Davis reported that the American Society of African Culture had acquired office space on East Fortieth Street (the same midtown territory occupied by such front organizations as the Committee of Correspondence and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom) and an apartment on Fifth Avenue for use as guest quarters; it had also taken on staff, including James T. “Ted” Harris, Jr., a former president of the National Student Association and director of the NSA’s Foreign Student Leadership Program, who would assist Davis in his role as Executive Director. These measures, Davis explained, would “provide an excellent means of disseminating accurate information concerning the progress of Negroes under American democracy.”42 This remark, the involvement of such well-connected whites as Webster (who earlier in the 1950s had helped set up the American Fund for Free Jurists as a conduit for CIA funds to the International Commission of Jurists), the change of name, the lavishness of AMSAC’s accommodation, and the appearance of Harris: all these circumstances point to the hidden hand of the CIA’s International Organizations Division.
Something else AMSAC shared in common with other Agency fronts was the ambivalent response it provoked abroad, a peculiar mixture of suspicion and opportunism. Within days of becoming operational, the Amer-
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ican Society of African Culture received a letter from Diop begging for a loan to bale SAC and
Would Wright investigate the likely reception of such a proposal at
Davis’s proposal found Wright more torn between his various intellectual allegiances than ever. He agreed with Davis that there was a “real and urgent” need for more dialogue between American and French African intellectuals. “The tide of black nationalism rolls strongly on, gathering in its momentum more and more blacks from every point of the intellectual compass,” he observed. “The movement will forge ahead and I think it is better for them to obtain money from an American source than from behind the Iron Curtain.” Still, he could not think of any individual capable of meeting the “stupendous” challenges that the role envisioned by Davis would pose. Moreover, it was “indelicate” for the suggestion to be made at the same time that a possible loan was being mooted, not least because Alioune Diop had just returned from a trip to the United States in an anti-American frame of mind. “With the exception of a few . . . intellectuals, which he counted on the fingers of his two hands, he found that the American Negro seems to have been caught in some stagnant intellectual eddy in the stream of life,” Wright bluntly told Davis.45
By April 1958, Wright’s objections to AMSAC’s tactics had multiplied. Diop and his brother, Thomas, were “scared stiff that the American section is out to grab control of SAC,” he reported to Ted Harris. “If they are made to feel that the Americans are out to control the organization, they will then mobilize Communist support in order to stay in power!
This is the danger.” What “you fellows there in New York” must do,
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