Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.

One of the blurbs on the cover of Michele Wallace's Black Popular Culture claims that this gathering of voices "comes smoking straight" from today's "best black minds." And so it does (from some of them, anyway), convening about thirty culture workers from the African diaspora in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, addressing the issues at hand. The book's title is the first one I've seen in a very long time without a handle on it. In other words, there is no colon here with a line of explanation behind it. Ably edited by Gina Dent, a graduate student at Columbia University, this book serves up "black popular culture" in the generic, unmodified by time, place, and circumstance. One relishes the superb self-confidence of this gesture and indeed discovers to her endless delight that this absorbing concoction has some of everything in it, from words on "Afro-kitsch" and the black nude in painting, to meditations on black film, to multiculturalism and the ubiquitous culture of "hip-hop." For those of us who have missed the wonders of "rap," for instance, Black Popular Culture proffers an entree.

Handsomely packaged by Seattle's Bay Press, under the auspices of New York's Dia Center for the Arts, the paperback version of this 1992 miscellany provides liberal margins to scribble in, is smooth and sensuous to the feel in its good-looking black-and-yellow-on-orange semigloss binding, and offers an impressive array of graphics -- beautiful black-and-white prints of Detroit's now-dismantled "Heidelberg Project," mixed-media work on urban themes, stills from video and movie footage (including Marlon Riggs's 1991 Tongues Untied, a televisual study of black gay sexuality), and other inscriptions of the moving image.

At least two of these juxtapositions are striking by virtue of their political weightiness: One of them involves a well-known photographic capture of the Hill-Thomas Senate Hearings. Situated on either side of the fold of what would be pages 336-337, in the midst of Wallace's "Afterword," it is searing in its dramatic intensity, its gesture toward the confrontational, and its power to effect a collective recoil. Then there is an exquisite study by Jason Miccolo Johnson, covering the top half of page 90, that is so incredibly telling of Manning Marable's "race"-"ethnicity" distinction in this volume that words cannot describe it ... but one must try: The occasion takes us back to the early days of the previous administration, and we presume that it might be Bush's inaugural week in the "memory" of the photograph. Depicting a reception for black appointees to the new administration, there are happy faces in the background so sharply etched that I can make out one female figure's frosted hairdo on the right side of the frame and a male figure's mustache curling over a toothy grin on the left. But there in the foreground, as though lit by an adroit cinematographer (who understood perfectly well the erotic history of the key light, but was insistent on its subtly subversive potential in the moment), are the "stars" of this mise en scene: The Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell himself, is holding First Lady Barbara Bush in his arms in a turn on the dance floor. The latter's left hand, with the fingers splayed against the General's epaulet on the right shoulder, fractures the image across officialdom and something else. Because that hand bears her wedding ring and the nails are shapely, beautifully manicured, we seem all of a sudden to be voyeurs of an illicit moment of sincere flirtation, the sweet secret cheat, except that somebody saw. And now we all might. There's more: The body of the handsome general is gallantly bent and rounded slightly inward, toward Mrs. Bush, whose fine silver coif is thrown back, tilting up toward his face, neck straining to greet ... a word? a lip-match? At any rate the joke's on us, since, rather like the imagined lovers on Keats' urn, the moment is frozen in eternal interrogation. Then, too, it occurs to me that it could all be a wonderful put-on, a funny man's sight gag.

I belabor the point for two reasons: First of all, the photograph not only signals the new and ambiguous status of the black professional classes, but goes far to illuminate my own curiosity concerning General Powell's seemingly absolute commitment to a man and a political regime that carried disdain for a civil rights agenda to a new high (or low, depending on your viewing angle). This marks the unbearable irony and the political danger, perhaps, of today's highly visible black Republican. Second, this graphic parked in a text devoted to work on "black popular culture" apparently ill fits the vocation of the "popular" (of the "black"? of which "culture"?) and raises a central question that this volume does not address and ought to have: What is the relationship between popular culture and, I suppose, now, "other" culture? One leaves the volume thinking that, at a minimum, "black popular culture" is black folks' contemporaneity and its involvements in the "current event." If that is so, then ought it be "black (popular) culture," or popular "black culture"? Either way, all blacks -- like it or not -- are situated in it, so what does the modification specify? Then, too, how can one think "black popular culture" without eventually thinking "style" in its near-infinite variety -- food ways, the fashion statement, the old arts and crafts of household adornment, from the beloved quilt to the family Bible? And what about those small, "handmade," Southern black Baptist churches that some of us grew up in, the ones with the pews that splintered a too-quick knee? In its narrow focus on East coast (if not so strictly New York) intellectuals and its sometimes tedious concentration on certain products of the electronic high-tech media, Black Popular Culture effects few gestures toward the material surround -- where the "people" make it happen -- and the concrete ways in which diasporic communities have always demonstrated a synthesis of transformative means. African Americans, as we know, didn't start making "popular culture" yesterday with MTV and Kris Kross.

But whatever we might miss here, Michele Wallace and Gina Dent have done a splendid job -- even an exciting one -- of choreographing some of the most important spokespersons (from both sides of the Atlantic) and their words on matters of some urgency now. In her role of public intellectual, one of few African American women so positioned, Wallace straddles the academy and the print media, with their conduits into a wider world, as a highly informed interventionist and "translator."

Currently an associate professor of English and Women's Studies at CUNY, Wallace entered the scene powerfully in 1978 with the Dial Press publication of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Visiting a close friend in DC one weekend one season that year, I purchased Black Macho at one of the high-gloss, high-rent bookstores in the Capital. Not knowing exactly who Michele Wallace was then, but having heard that she had done something controversial, I read her book with some anxiety because it addressed black sexual politics of the nationalist sixties with a dash of assurance that older black women scholars and writers had simply not gotten around to yet. What had we been waiting for?

The book's title straightforwardly asserts its mission, as Wallace takes on the high jinks, the posturing, the failings of a heroic moment of black political culture in the United States. For anyone interested in tracking commentary on those years of struggle, with views on Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other figures along that route, Black Macho is imperative reading. Not biting its tongue, it is bravely articulate about the misogynistic strain coursing through black male/female sexual politics. The waters are still troubled here, but one of the tasks Black Macho sets for itself is to confront the topic, as an antidote to its seductive poisons.

Some years after Black Macho, Wallace's essays, which had appeared in several popular sources -- among them, The Village Voice, The Women's Review of Books, and Heresies -- were collected in the 1990 Verso publication Invisibility Blues -- From Pop to Theory. Having matured in her own outlook on the black culture critique, and African American women's relationship to it, Wallace poses one key question throughout the pieces published between 1975-1989: What is the situation of African American women as writers of non-fiction -- specifically, of "criticism" and "theory"? Again, A Wallace title tells us much: The basic thesis here is that black women academics, critics, and theorists (some people don't easily believe that any of the last group exist) are fundamentally "invisible" to the politics of discourse, of canon formation, and of the consolidation of the "enterprise" of African American literary/culture "theory."

My anxiety, again, is that Wallace is not only absolutely right about what she has seen, but lucid to the point that one cries "Uncle!" in the middle of the night! In all fairness to that community of women, however, Wallace wants to make clear that this functional social and political "inferiority" is partly induced by the systematic exclusion of black women intellectuals from the strategies and rooms of decisiveness that shape and define what and who are valuable, whose words count, and so on. Concretely, black women as intellectual producers and consumers do not have open access to organs of public opinion, so that their "muteness" or "silence," or whatever one wants to call being "gagged," quite literally springs from a well of contempt and loathing so pure and so deep in the national psyche that, if one could gauge its full and vicious strength, she would never write another line. Wallace must know that too.

Near the close of Invisibility Blues, Wallace draws our attention to the workings of access in a concrete example. Referring to an interview that she conducted with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for the magazine Emerge, she alleges (and she is totally right) that the black press would normally have little or no interest in literary criticism, but that Gates marks an exception for two reasons: first, the high visibility he gains by writing, often, for the New York Times and, second, his premier status as the consolidating figure of an African American literary "tradition." What she goes on to suggest, in passing, is that these functions are, in fact, related. One can accede to headmanship, if the right engines endorse him/her. This is certainly not to say that Professor Gates himself is not a most fit cultural interpreter and spokesperson; the point, rather, is that we have to deal here with systematicity and symptomaticity, since individuals, wherever they are mapped onto axes of significance, are akin to pawns in the hands of a genuine "invisibility" that wishes to remain so Wallace well knows this and has had the insight and the courage to say it all. A "black feminist" standpoint is thus far "untheorized" -- and she gets that right, too, except that there are small pieces of it coming out of and/or into the computer at the moment.

But what, in addition, must not have escaped her own keen notice, really, is that the strategic staging of the Fall 1991 Conference on Black Popular Culture that stands behind the new volume tends to reinforce those very power dynamics that worry the content of Invisibility Blues. This is curious: Wallace claims in the "Afterword" to the new volume that one of the two central purposes that the Conference served "was to move the center of African-American cultural discourse beyond literary criticism into other politically significant precincts such as popular culture" -- and in a bound, one might ask? While purporting to move the "center," neither the volume nor the conference did a good deal, as far as I can see, to shift the orbit of the heavens and this earth. The "Deans" of the African American literary/cultural enterprise are here -- all two of them -- as male "stars" privileged in the invocatory position: Stuart Hall opens, ably followed by Cornel West. One has no quarrel with these arrangements, really, and one would most certainly not want to insist that a woman, for the sake of our deepest political impulses, ought to have begun. But the volume assumes for me, at least, an overwhelming maleness of tone and appeal, which exactly apes the "Center" of African American cultural discourse by way of the literary. Further, the presentation is occasionally vexed by the "overhead" fly-buzz of male ego-investment and the sort of panicked vulgar bullying that silenced quite a few of us black intellectuals, especially the women, as Angela Davis correctly observes in her remarks, during the late '60s and early '70s.

Ironically enough, shifting the "center" -- if we can imagine for the moment that any one of us and our individual projects can successfully do that over a weekend, or in a single published volume, or by fiat -- would likely "write out" of cultural enterprise clearly one-half of those "best-known black feminist critics" whom Wallace litanizes in Invisibility Blues and whose work arises, in part, against the center's grain. While we are certainly fortunate to have the important volume of writings on aspects of popular culture in African diasporic life-worlds, we must wonder -- and this is precisely the kind of deconstructive inquiry that Wallace is matchless in engaging -- to what extent the work of black intellectuals, just like Pop, is increasingly shaped and driven by market imperatives. This unrelenting "invisible" mechanism bears down on all, and there is little use resisting. Besides, "resistance" is no longer a fashionable idea, if it ever were.

Still, we ought to eye, with some concern, it seems to me, the tightening press on the intellectuals to produce the "tastings" -- work that is ephemeral, underinformed, and that moves, accordingly, away from the syntheses that perspective and patience might breed. As we ponder the ins and outs of this latest "black popular culture," we might well want to watch out for whose means of cultural production we are handmaiding, and be even hipper, since every school girl knows the answer to that one, what difference it makes, in fact, and who cares. Twain had tried to pull black speech into the drawing room, had tried to substitute slave-quarter break dancing for white formality and propriety.

Twain's performance can in part be seen as rebellion, but it also has in it a large component of Twain's lifelong respect, and admiration, for the authority expressed by excellent talk, by first-rate oral creativity. Twain's choice can be seen, in part, as a preference for Homer over Plato. As Fishkin points out, it is "hard for people rooted in a literate world view to appreciate the creativity involved in" oral performance:

Mark Twain was an avid reader and a painstaking writer, but he aspired all his life to be

"an effective talker-performer" .... "Good talking" excited him.... His greatest novel ...

was inspired, in large part, by the creative aspects" of the "oral atmosphere" in which

speakers like Jimmy and Jerry lived.

The instant authority that readers sense in Huck's opening gambit, in which Huck distinguishes between his own forthcoming approach to veracity and the repeated "stretchers" told by Mr. Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, adds equally instant authority to Fishkin's claim.

Fishkin's book succeeds -- most amazingly -- in the persuasive brevity with which it pins down the case for adding black voices to reading lists still shaped by an "American criticism" that, even today, "remains both segregationist and racist" If the voice of Mark Twain, long recognized -- especially after Ernest Hemingway's oft-quoted lines in Green Hills of Africa (1935) -- as a force in shaping modern American literature, in large part derives from both the experience and the tonality of black voices, then other voices, William Faulkner's as well as Ralph Ellison's, cannot be heard or read as exemplifying segregation. If the music of "Stephen Foster's `Camp-Town Races,' a song recognized throughout the world as uniquely American, turns out to be a tune sung by Yoruba mothers to their children," then the fantasy of racial exclusivity in art becomes as fantastic as in the biological realities of the pre-Civil War South. If one is to understand contemporary American writing, the originating force of its black antecedents needs to share the attention so far directed mostly to white writers only.

Professor Fishkin successfully argues a variety of significant "cases"; she also draws a number of inescapable implications and offers some cogent suggestions. As I began by saying, this is an amazing book. It deserves a place of honor, within easy reach, on the shelf of every scholar and teacher concerned with issues of race and literature as these two areas of disturbing interest interact with each other.

Scanning the title of this book, I mused to myself, "What conversations with Richard Wright?" For unlike African American novelists Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, who were widely interviewed throughout their careers in conversations that became important revelations of their work, Wright had always seemed to me to be a much more reclusive figure, a person less inclined to submit himself to, or reveal himself in, literary interviews. But as this book of interviews edited by two important Wright scholars clearly establishes, such was not the case. Although interviews with Wright have not been widely reprinted or anthologized, they represent a significant body of material which contains invaluable insights into Wright as a man, a political thinker, and an artist. In a very real sense, this book may be seen as an interesting part of the project undertaken in recent years to recover lost dimensions of Wright's voice for contemporary readers. just as the Library of America editions of Wright's major work and the recently published edition of Rite of Passage now enable us to read texts which were either denatured by editors or ignored by publishers, Conversations with Richard Wright enables us now to encounter Richard Wright's voice directly as he discusses a great variety of important topics over his entire public career.

Kinnamon and Fabre have dug deeply and productively into the Wright archives, collecting a fascinating series of newspaper interviews and transcripts of radio broadcasts which until now have been largely forgotten or known only to a small group of Wright specialists. Taken over a period of twenty-three years, when Wright emerged as a major writer and an internationally respected authority on racial matters, these "conversations" include not only formal interviews but also little-known discussions on radio programs, sometimes in a round-table format and sometimes with a single interlocutor. A kind of self-interview by Wright is also included. Featuring interviews given in places as diverse as Argentina, France, Norway, and Italy, this book is a vivid reminder of Wright's cosmopolitan life and his internationalist world view.

Virtually all of Wright's important concerns are either touched on or explored in depth, including his growing up in the segregated South, his methods of writing, his reading, his assessments of the Cold War, his involvements in leftist politics, his exile in France, and his responses to black nationalism. Unlike many twentieth-century American writers such as Robert Frost and William Faulkner, who sometimes took an almost perverse pleasure in playing games with their interviewers, Wright is refreshingly honest and direct when being questioned. As a result, these conversations have enormous value for all Wright scholars and students of American and modern literature.

The collection is especially valuable in revealing Wright as a person. Usually imagined by his readers as a distant and brooding pessimist who most nearly resembled fellow naturalists Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell, the Wright who can be reconstructed from these interviews is, much to the contrary, a surprisingly buoyant, warm, and engaging personality whom Kinnamon and Fabre rightly characterize as "a pleasure to know" (xiii). Indeed, many interviewers comment on the rather remarkable difference between Wright's actual personality and the authorial persona implied by his works. Michel Gordy, in a 1947 interview, observed that in his two-hour talk with Wright he was "struck by the calm, serene lucidity of the man whose outcries of revolt and protest had been resounding for a decade with increasing vigor" (117). A Brazilian interviewer, likewise, remarked that, although the very serious nature of Wright's literary work had caused him to view the author as a "large black man" who was "sad, rebellious, and aggressive," he was quite taken aback by a person who was exactly the opposite of what he had imagined, a disarmingly "cheerful" (134) person who supplied very balanced, nuanced, and restrained assessments of the racial dilemma in America. Nearly all of the interviewers comment on Wright's softspoken manner and his lively sense of humor. Interviewing Wright for the Daily Worker in 1938, Marcia Minor noticed Wright's "boyish charm" and "mirth" (18). Charles Rolo in 1945 characterized Wright as "affable, poised, quick to smile, almost gay" (71). The first quality which a French reviewer noticed about Wright in 1946 was his "big, resonant laugh" (87). Even toward the end of his life when his spirits were no doubt dampened by his worsening health and his declining literary reputation in the United States, Wright maintained at least a public posture of congeniality and good humor. Maurice Nadeau, interviewing Wright for Les lettres nouveau in 1960, was impressed by his "welcoming warmth," his "gaiety," and "the congenial aura his personality exudes" (196).

The collection also contains several other noteworthy surprises. On two occasions Wright cites fellow Mississippian William Faulkner as one of his favorite writers. Although most of his comments about religion are predictably negative, there are times when he reveals the importance of his religious background. He repeatedly stresses his fascination with the spirituals, and in a 1960 interview he observed, "The religious spirit always endures. Up to now, man has always been a religious animal and secular art is a sublimination of the religious feeling" (210). (Wright's complex use of his religious background has never been adequately explored, and some of his positive remarks about religion could be used as a point of departure for a study of the crucial role which religion played in shaping his art.) Wright's surprising optimism, even when viewing racial problems in America, is also a persistent motif in these interviews and might cause some readers to reevaluate their view of Wright as an absolute determinist or a despairing existentialist. Several months before his death, on November 28,1960, he stressed that his vision of life was ultimately affirmative: "I believe in the beauty of life, in its infinite richness. One can experience dread and anguish at the idea of being nothing, but then one finds again the multiple potentialities offered by life." In the same interview, he takes a surprisingly hopeful view of his native land: "America is not a conformist country as has been so often said and written. It renews itself constantly" (209).

These interviews clearly establish that, for all of Wright's quarrels with America, he remained, even in his French exile, surprisingly American in outlook and temperament. As he stressed in a 1951 conversation in Paris, "I am an American and will live and die as an American" (151). He regarded living in France as a means by which he could see his own country more clearly rather than as a renunciation of his American identity, stressing at one point that he was "not ... going in the Henry James direction" (153). At times, Wright's very American impulses made him uncomfortable with practices of the French, such as their customary two-hour lunch break. In a 1950 interview from France-Etats-Unis, he claimed that the French had much to learn from their more pragmatic American counterparts, since American civilization was "new" and "strong" and could teach the French much about "industrial organization" (146). Indeed, one can see a gradual softening of Wright's attitude toward America the longer he stayed in France. In a 1959 interview for a Norwegian newspaper, he remarked, "I have to say the situation is slowly getting better in my native land" (193). Shortly before his death, he revealed to Maurice Nadeau, "I am willing to die for my country but I refuse to lie for it" (197).

Some of the most fascinating interviews focus on Wright's discussions of his craft as a writer. Opposing the conventional view of his work that it was autobiographically "powerful" in content but stylistically crude, he stresses that he used his own lived experiences as raw materials but worked hard as a conscious artist to endow those materials with coherent form. In a 1938 radio conference sponsored by the New York Federal Writers' Project, he emphasized that his "own experience had a significance that went beyond the personal.... I used what I lived and read and observed and felt, and I used my imagination to give it a form which would make it appeal to the emotions of other people" (7). He reminded a 1940 New York Sun interviewer, "I sweat over my work.... I wish I could say it just flows out, but I can't" (28).

Wright was also careful to point out how much he strove to "attain some sort of balance in [his] books" (203). He therefore consciously resisted the tendency which Baldwin and others accused him of, writing crude propaganda which oversimplified reality by vilifying white people and envisioning black people only in terms of their being victimized by racist systems. But he also makes it clear in several interviews that he rejected the opposite extreme of writing "safe," apolitical novels which refused to encounter honestly the hard facts of racial oppression and conflict. When asked in 1955 why he had become a writer, he responded that writing freed him of all such external pressures and enabled him to become a free man who could envision his world in ways which were fair, complex, and balanced:

Writing is my way of becoming a free man, of expressing my relationship to the world

and to the society in which I live. My relation to the society of the western world is

dubious because of my color and my race. My writing therefore is charged with the burden of

my concern about my relation to that society. The accident of race and color has placed me

on both sides: The Western World and its enemies. If my writing has any aim, it is to try to

reveal that which is human on both sides, to affirm the essential unity of man on earth.

(163)

Centering his work on what Du Bois had earlier described as the "double-consciousness" of the African American intellectual and what Ralph Ellison would later characterize as a "complex double vision" of black American culture, Wright was able to achieve a profound and enduring humanism.

These interviews clearly document that, as Wright matured, he became increasingly more committed to this broadly humanistic view of art. Arguing that imagination is of crucial importance in a modem world of fragmentation and alienation because it allows people "to know what is happening to other people," he insisted that the ultimate purpose of art is to unify people, "to build a bridge between individuals" (234).

Wright's extensive reading put into practice what he preached in theory. His lifelong passion for reading enabled him to build many "bridges" between himself and the world, thus deepening his vision and enriching his art. From the earliest interviews given in the late 1930s to conversations just a few weeks before his death, Wright stresses that his literary foregrounding was an incredibly rich mixture of influences ranging from African American folk art (especially the spirituals and the blues), to American naturalists and realists such as Anderson, Dreiser, and Farrell, to the masters of modern European literature, particularly Dostoevsky, Malraux, Sartre, and Camus. The two most important literary influences are Dreiser, whom he describes as "the greatest writer this country produced" (139), and Dostoevsky, whom he credits with teaching him most about "the psychological state of modern man" (163). Books, which became for Wright "the windows through which [he] looked at the world" (81), enlarged his vision by allowing him to connect his own experiences with a vast range of other experiences. They enabled him to overcome the most crippling effects of American segregation and become a major modern writer.

Conversations with Richard Wright is an important book because it provides us with previously unpublished or difficult to find direct testimony from Wright himself about matters which are of great significance to a fuller understanding of his work. These interviews also provide us with a refreshingly sane, courageous, and honest voice which can help us to see our present cultural situation in clearer, more productive ways. America in the 1990s is beset with a clatter of voices which feed our tendency toward narcissism and divide us as a nation by romanticizing cultural boundaries, stressing our differences, and obscuring those aspects of American life which should allow us to rediscover common goals and unifying values. Wright, who had an understandably intense hatred of boundaries and who saw modern fragmentation as an illness to overcome rather than a condition to be striven for, speaks to us in these conversations with a wise voice which we should not only listen carefully to but engage in a serious and ongoing conversation.

Archibald Grimke (1849-1930) has at last received the scholarly attention he deserves in this first full-length biography by Dickson D. Bruce, jr. Identified with many causes, including women's rights, economic reforms, and prohibition, Grimke was preeminently a champion of a fully integrated society shorn of all forms of racial segregation and discrimination. He battled racism and its manifestations wherever he found them, but often did so in ways that diverged from those of other African American leaders. Written in lean, graceful prose, Bruce's study rests on deep and wide-ranging research, especially in the large collection of Grimke family papers at Howard University and Grimke's numerous published works. The result is a skillfully drawn portrait of an original thinker and tough-minded activist.

Archibald Grimke was the son of Henry Grimke, a member of an old South Carolina family noted for its wealth, culture, and eminence in public affairs. Unlike his sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimke, who became conspicuous in the anti-slavery and women's rights movements in the North, Henry Grimke maintained a strong attachment to slavery and white supremacy. Notwithstanding his belief in the inferiority of African Americans, he established a liaison with Nancy Weston, a mulatto slave who had nursed his wife in her final illness and cared for his children and who managed his rice plantation. The first-born in Grimke's "second family" across the color line was Archibald, who significantly was named by his father. Grimke maintained a "distant but affectionate" relationship with his second family, and he never treated either his three mulatto sons or their mother as slaves. At his death in 1852, his white son, Montague, inherited his father's "shadow" family and for eight years thereafter ignored but did not free Nancy Weston and her sons. Their quasi-free status abruptly ended in 1860 when Montague Grimke subjected them to the most degrading form of slavery, replete with floggings and imprisonment. Unwilling to tolerate the cruelty of his white half-brother, Archibald escaped and hid out in Charleston until the city was liberated by the Union Army in 1865.

Once legally free, Archibald and his brother Francis for the first time regularly attended school. The Grimke boys came to the attention of the Pillsburys, white New Englanders residing in Charleston who arranged for them to enter Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Here they were discovered by their aunts, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, who assumed the role of parents and sought to mold them "into the kind of individuals they admired." The young men were selective in following the abundant advice provided by their famous aunts, but both did pursue advanced study, Francis at Princeton Seminary and Archibald at Harvard Law School. Graduating in 1874, Archibald began the practice of law in Boston, where through his aunts and their friends he gained entry to the so-called "Boston clique," a group that fostered the ideals of abolitionism. For the next half-century, as he moved with ease in both the white and black worlds, he continued and added luster to the Grimke tradition by making his mark in law, journalism, literature, public affairs, and civil rights activism.

Unquestionably, Grimke's white relatives helped shape his thought and career -- he never forgot the floggings at the hands of his white half-brother or the assistance of his white aunts -- but, as his biographer makes clear, the central figure in his life was his mother, a fiercely independent and resourceful woman who held the family together and provided it with its moral center. Never hesitant to resist an insult or wrong, she "raised her sons in a way that distanced them from the institution [of slavery] as much as possible." Nancy Weston's unwillingness to accommodate to slavery was mirrored in her son's resolute opposition to anything less than complete equality for African Americans.

That Grimke exhibited throughout his career a penchant for independence in his roles as intellectual, politician, and activist is the underlying theme of this superb biography. Its detailed and illuminating analysis of his intellectual quest for new perspectives on the problem of racial oppression is based on the sizable body of his published works, including well-received biographies of William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner, numerous papers issued by the American Negro Academy, and scores of magazine and newspaper articles. Of fundamental importance in shaping Grimke's thought was the influence of abolitionism, which buttressed his militancy in pressing the case of equal justice and Emersonian transcendentalism, with its emphasis on a world governed by moral law, which reinforced his commitment to action and optimism in the most difficult times. His thought later assumed a decidedly economic orientation, due in part to the influence of works by T. Thomas Fortune and Henry George. But throughout his career Grimke attacked as misguided those African Americans who stressed racial identity and unity, even to the point of segregation; he insisted on balancing "manhood" with "racehood," so that the latter would not place limits on him or other African Americans. Because Grimke "gave no place to a distinctly black way of looking at the world," he took exception to W. E. B. Du Bois's emphasis on black distinctiveness as both a complement and an alternative to the dominant society in the United States. Such an emphasis, in Grimke's view, could be used to justify "a caste system ... along the color line."

Despite his prominence in the affairs of numerous organizations, especially the American Negro Academy, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and both major political parties, Grimke never functioned as an "organization man" and insisted on his right, indeed his responsibility, to pursue the course he considered most eff-ective in combatting racial injustice. Not surprisingly, party regularity in politics had little appeal for him. Beginning his political career in 1883 as a Republican in Boston, where he edited a black newspaper, he later shifted his allegiance to the Democratic Party and was ultimately rewarded with an appointment as consul to Santo Domingo, a post that he filled with competence and honor between 1894 and 1898. He endorsed Republican Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 but parted ways with him over his treatment of black soldiers accused of involvement in the Brownsville incident. He returned briefly to the Democratic fold four years later. Disillusioned with the existing party structure, Grimke outraged many African American politicians by championing Roosevelt's Progressive Party in 1912; he did so on the grounds that the third party offered the best hope for altering the wholesale disfranchisement of black voters in the South.

Few other portions of this work demonstrate so clearly Bruce's mastery of the art of biography as those assessing Grimke's complex relationships with African American advocates of different and competing strategies for thwarting the rising tide of Jim Crowism. Foremost among such strategists, in terms of prestige and power, was Booker T. Washington, whom Grimke genuinely liked as an individual. He also appreciated Washington's work among rural blacks and understood his use of dissimulation in dealing with whites, even perhaps seeing him as another Denmark Vesey. Even though Grimke was identified with Washington for some years, he never subscribed to his accommodationist approach to segregation and remained as outspoken as ever in condemning all evidences of white prejudice. The hope of using Washington's powerful organization to achieve more militant objectives accounted for his willingness to remain associated with the Washington camp for so long.

Once Grimke cast his lot with Washington's opponents, he found an outlet for his activism in the NAACP. He not only served on the board of directors of the national organization for a decade (1913-1923), but also headed its largest and most influential local chapter in the District of Columbia, a position that he used to monitor and influence action on racial matters at the federal level. Although Grimke had become acquainted with Du Bois earlier, it was through the NAACP that their differences evolved into a full-fledged feud. Emerging as the leader of the anti-Du Bois faction of the NAACP board of directors, Grimke on one occasion bluntly reminded Du Bois of his error in putting "all our difficulties on the ground of race prejudice."

Bruce's assessment of the Grimke-Du Bois struggle clearly indicates that it involved ideological differences as well as a personality clash between two talented, strong-willed, and sharp-tongued individuals. By the mid-1920s Grimke found his views out of step with prevailing African American thought, which celebrated Du Bois's idea of racial distinctiveness.

Bruce has provided a richly textured, multi-dimensional portrait of Grimke that skillfully weaves together the lives of the private individual and the public man. Especially revealing are his treatments of Grimke's marriage across the color line that produced a daughter and ended after four years, the close relationship between him and his daughter Angelina Weld Grimke, whom he reared, and his lengthy courtship of Bertha Bauman. While Bruce has shied away from psychoanalyzing his subject, it is clear that Grimke possessed an original mind and abundant energy and that his relationships in private, as well as public, life were incredibly complex.

Informed by Bruce's knowledge of African American literature and history, this thorough examination of the career of Archibald Grimke vastly enriches our understanding of race relations and the dynamics of African American thought and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.