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argued among themselves about the cultural politics of Negritude, the racial politics of federal funding for the arts, and the Cold War politics of events such as the festival itself. Ralph Ellison, Harry Belafonte, and James Baldwin, the latter having been a friendly observer at the Paris Congress of Negro Writers and Artists a decade earlier, stayed away in protest.108

Whether it was because of this spectacle, fears of imminent exposure, or changes within the CIA is not known, but throughout 1966 signs were clear that the Agency intended withdrawing its patronage from AMSAC.

First came the news that the Council on Race and Caste in World Affairs grant for the coming financial year would be its last. As Hank Raullerson explained to the Executive Council, “The CORAC board feels that it has given AMSAC a start, a generous one, and [AMSAC] now should develop sources of funds apart from those provided by it (CORAC), the foundations and individuals CORAC and AMSAC have appealed to in the past.”109 The blow was softened by the news that the terminal grant would be for $100,000 and that Rusty Van Vechten would be on hand to offer free investment advice.110 Then it was announced that AMSAC-Lagos was to be closed and James Baker recalled home. The official line was that the African office cost too much to run and that its functions could largely be duplicated in New York, but later oral testimony suggests that the real reason for the closure was that AMSAC’s reputation in Nigeria had become so bad that Baker’s personal safety could no longer be guaranteed.111 Finally, AMSAC suffered a slew of resignations by its officers, including the highly capable and well-liked Hank Raullerson, who left in October 1966 to become head of the East African division of the Peace Corps.112

Hence, by February 1967, when the New York Times exposed its CIA funding, AMSAC was a shadow of its former self. The exposé resulted in some internal recriminations, with Adelaide Cromwell Hill in particular demanding from Davis a complete disclosure of the organization’s dealings with the Agency, but there was nothing on the same scale as the controversy that engulfed the Committee of Correspondence in the wake of the revelations, perhaps reflecting the relatively higher proportion of witting members in AMSAC.113 Predictably, the loudest complaints came from Paris, with the Société Africaine de Culture’s Administrative Secretary, Kala-Lobe, demanding that Alioune Diop’s name be removed from the

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editorial board of African Forum (a quarterly journal of African affairs launched by Davis in summer 1965) and speculating darkly about the motives of past AMSAC actions, such as the controversial opening of the Lagos office.114 There was some debate about relaunching the organization as a domestic venture (ironically, the preferred strategy of earlier critics such as Diop and Martin Kilson) that would be geared toward checking the worst excesses of the young black nationalists “and those who excite the rage of the Negro poor by referring to the African and slave past” (as Davis put it in a begging letter to Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Charles Frankel).115 The discussion proved academic, however, as pleas for replacement funding addressed to the State Department, the Ford Foundation, Chase Manhattan Bank’s African Section, and the Carnegie Foundation all fell on deaf ears.116 Not even James Farmer, now serving Richard Nixon as Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, answered AMSAC’s distress calls.117 The organization eventually went into suspended animation in the summer of 1969.118

What are we to make of the African Americans who belonged to AMSAC? A “combination of careerists, slick articulate operators with little conviction, and leaders of the integrationist Negro intellectual establishment” was how black radical Harold Cruse described them. “They were liberals without a base whose legitimacy came entirely from their association with established groups like AMSAC,” Cruse continued. “I even doubt they were capable of thinking this kind of operation up themselves.”119 Certainly, John Davis’s many references to the “talented tenth”