Wright advised, is “sit down and devise another method of working with these African boys.” In part, this was a matter of “approach,” which should be “modest [and] slow,” not unlike the manner in which he himself had won the confidence of the Diops. “There are delicate techniques which we must learn to master if we would influence other people,” he elaborated. “We simply cannot go in like a salesman.” But it was not just a matter of technique: AMSAC also needed a more “constructive outlook and program” than it had come up with so far. “The aim should be not only to defeat Communism in Africa; that is a negative aim,” Wright explained. “A healthy, free Africa bent upon industrialization is about all that anybody can honestly ask for.” One other thing was crucial: African Americans must avoid any hint of apologizing for the U.S. government.
“If our actions carry the faintest overtones of American official policy, we are licked before we start.”46 The irony was that all of Wright’s recommendations for winning hearts and minds in Africa were remarkably similar to the secret tactics of the Eisenhower administration.
AMSAC did come to regret its “Uncle Moneybags” image and backed away from the American-in-Paris proposal.47 Still, Wright’s qualms about the organization were not assuaged; indeed, if anything, they seem to have deepened. Despite pleading from Harris that he participate, Wright turned down an invitation to a second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists taking place in Rome in 1959, after hearing rumors that the event was to be underwritten by the Italian government.48 “I’m for all governments except those of African or black nationalist origins being kept out of this organization,” he told John Davis, with possibly deliberate ambigu-ity.49 “My political experience has taught me that one should never conduct a fight on grounds chosen by others and for ends that are not one’s own.”50 In May 1959, with his financial affairs at rock bottom, Wright halfheartedly approached Davis, asking for $10,000 to enable him to undertake a seven-country tour of West Africa so that he could research a book about the “highly fragile and tragic Black Elite.”51 This time, it was AMSAC’s turn to hang back. “While I personally . . . feel it would do the French Africans a whole lot of good,” Davis responded, “there is still the question of our sponsorship doing us harm or good in the work in which we are interested. . . . After you have finished the book, it may turn out that we may feel that we ought not to associate ourselves with it from purely organizational reasons.”52 Wright accepted this judgment without
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demur. “I’d not like to go there with the feeling that I’d have to inhibit myself in whatever I’d write,” he told Davis. “I think that the wiser course for me would be to seek some more disinterested sponsorship.”53
This exchange was the last act in Richard Wright’s association with AMSAC. Although the documentary record is sparse, it seems clear that by the time of his death on November 28, 1960, the writer was thoroughly disillusioned with the American effort in the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds, which in his own case involved the CIA’s vacillating between secretly sponsoring and spying on him. “My attitude to Communism has not altered but my position toward those who are fighting Communism has,” he told one correspondent. “I lift my hand to fight Communism and I find that the hand of the Western world is sticking knives into my back.
The Western world must make up its mind as to whether it hates colored people more than it hates Communists or . . . Communists more than . . .
colored people.”54
Soon after its launch in the fall of 1957, AMSAC embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious program of events and activities, all intended, as a handsomely produced publicity pamphlet explained, “to spread understanding of the validity of African and Negro cultural contributions” and thereby “provide a basis for mutual respect between Americans and Africans.”55 Starting with a three-day planning meeting in June 1958, the organization sponsored a series of annual conferences featuring a glittering array of black intellectuals, artists, and performers. The 1959 event, staged (like so many other important engagements in the cultural Cold War) at the Waldorf-Astoria, was addressed by Massachusetts senator John F.