Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices and World War II-era civic nationalism.

Speaking at the Fourth American Writer's Conference in June 1941, Richard Wright denounces the hypocrisy of America's defense of liberty in Europe. His speech, "What We Think of Their War," refers to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" as a "metaphysical obscenity" in light of the War Department's policy of racial segregation: "How is it possible for any sincere or sane person to contend that the current war, World War II, is a crusade for freedom, for the majesty of the human soul, for a full life, in the face of official utterances [about segregation in the armed forces] which categorically reject the very concept of freedom and democracy?" (Wright Papers).

As the war escalated, Wright tempered his harshest criticisms about the nation's fight for democracy and along with the American Communist Party dropped his anti-war position. Nevertheless, when 12 Million Black Voices was published in October 1941, Wright was still primarily concerned with what he saw as the war's domestic front. Like the Pittsburgh Courier and other black newspapers that used the "Double-V" in a play on the ubiquitous victory symbol (Roeder 47), Wright championed victory both at home and abroad. He called for the defeat of fascism as well as the end of discrimination, Jim Crow, and rapacious capitalism.

12 Million Black Voices, a sweeping historical narrative of American black experience complemented by Farm Security Administration photographs previously chosen by FSA editor Edwin Rosskam, is an act of protest against these social forces, one that expanded the work of reformers like Walter White and A. Philip Randolph. In September 1940, NAACP leader White and Randolph, editor of the Socialist Messenger, met with President Roosevelt to push for the immediate desegregation of the armed forces. Although their demand--backed by the threat of a 100,000 strong black march on Washington--was rejected, they did secure a compromise, an executive order in June 1941 against discrimination in the defense industries (White 186-94). Wright's text indirectly places White and Randolph's battle against military segregation into the wider context of the historical exclusion of blacks from full cultural citizenship in the United States. Wright's broader perspective on the war, however, did not extend as far as W. E. B. Du Bois's "wide angle vision," which saw "egalitarian potential" in Germany and Japan (Lewis 468). Nevertheless, Wright's position was less conciliatory than that of Ralph Bunche, who stated in 1940, "American Democracy is bad enough. But in the mad world of today I love it, and I will fight to preserve it" (qtd. in Young 62). In essence, Wright continued to see the war as a two-fronted fight, but for him the domestic battle was always more urgent.

12 Million Black Voices appeared at a time when the US was both was brimming with patriotism and trying to reconcile ethnic and class divisions. Populist works such as Louis Adamic's From Many Lands (1940), and Two-Way Passage (1941), the US Office of Education's radio program "Americans All.... Immigrants All" (1938-1939), the Atlantic magazine's We Americans (1939), and patriotic immigrant affirmations like those found in I Am An American (1941) championed the contributions of ethnic Americans and, moreover, the nation's unassailable democracy. These texts contributed to what would be a long process of re-rooting American historical identity from Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island, and they responded to the enormous presence and influence of immigrants and their children. In spite of the severe quotas placed on immigration by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, approximately two-thirds of residents of major US cities in the 1930s were either foreign born or the children of the foreign born. Furthermore, the rise of fascism in Europe provided a powerful impetus for the celebration of American diversity. As historian Richard Weiss observes, "Ruthless [Nazi] repression of ethnic minorities resulted in a counter identification of democracy with minority encouragement and tolerance" (566). However, this defensive civic creed came into conflict with a persistent racialism. Although first- and second-generation immigrants were now generally considered to be part of "white" America, the restrictive quotas that remained in place favored northern and western European nations whose emigrants were perceived by the US as more readily assimilable. In other words, eugenicist arguments made during the 1910s and 1920s about the fundamental inferiority of non-Anglo or Nordic stock and the dangers of racial contamination still held considerable sway.

The gathering of national support for the war effort was more immediately challenged by the fact that Asians were essentially wholly excluded from immigration to America and that black troops remained segregated from white ones. Efforts to include black experiences in the "Americans All" campaigns, therefore, tended to be awkward or superficial--or both. (1)

The nation's civic nationalism attempted to affirm diversity, which included paying homage to the achievements of exceptional immigrants and the dedicated labor and sacrifice of many others who were helping to build modern America. This ideology acknowledged economic injustice and racial discrimination and sought to ameliorate these problems by applying principles of fairness and conscience through various New Deal initiatives. At the same time, civic nationalism elided the reality that the immigrant-as-true-American was premised on the exploitation of cheap foreign labor and on racial segregation.

This war-era social and historical context for 12 Million Black Voices has been under-appreciated; instead, critics tend to consider the work's emotional power or sentimentality, (2) examine Wright's narrative style, (3) or discuss the influence of Wright's communism. (4) My own approach to 12 Million Black Voices considers Wright's political commitments but focuses on his critical relationship to American pluralism. Wright's text revises the generic rags-to-riches immigrant success story touted as quintessentially American.

War-era texts championing immigrants typically relied on enthusiastic cataloguing of ethnic scientific and artistic contributions, or they were built on the passionate testimonials of successful immigrants. 12 Million Black Voices inserts African American experience into the midst of this seemingly inclusive core American identity. Wright declares, "We black folk, our history and our present being, are a mirror of the manifold experiences of America. What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is. If we black folk perish, America will perish" (12 Million 146). The future of America, Wright boldly suggests, depends on the guiding consciousness of African Americans. Through a variety of rhetorical appeals, Wright's collective narrative challenges the War-era discourses proclaiming that individual immigrant success stories represent American promise; in those stories the sheer documentation of ethnic achievements supposedly confirms the nation's pluralist credentials.

12 Million Black Voices was written before Wright's public break with the American Communist Party, but, as is well known, he was frustrated with Party in-fighting and manipulation almost from the very beginning of his membership in 1934. This is not to say, however, that Wright ever became disillusioned with Marxist principles; to be sure, his admiration of Stalin seemed to survive the German-Soviet Pact. When Wright drafted 12 Million Black Voices, the American Communist Party had now shifted from its so-called Third Period to the Popular Front. Rather than emphasizing the creation of--at least symbolically--a black republic, the Popular Front encouraged support from all classes and from black and white alliances, and it selected New Deal initiatives like the FSA. As Barbara Foley comments, however, the Party's phases were by no means rigidly distinct; indeed, the Party had not surrendered its support for black nationalism in favor of all forms of black and white cooperation (170-212). Wright's connection to the Party, therefore, does not provide a clear explanation as to whether he is ultimately advocating racially-centered social action, transracial solidarity, or some other vision of social justice. While in 12 Million Black Voices Wright recognizes the value of black and white cooperation--for example, the linked protests against sharecropping practices and in support of the Scottsboro boys--the text as a whole focuses on how the distinctive consciousness and experiences of African Americans are shaped by their encounters with white America. Wright is not so much advocating a particular path of social justice as he is attempting to create a broadened, interconnected historical awareness for both blacks and whites.

Certainly, Wright was dismayed by certain dimensions of the Popular Front. For example, the Popular Front disbanded the John Reed Clubs that had helped to awaken Wright's political passions. Bill Mullen calls attention to Wright's dislike of Popular Front art. He points to his "disdain for the commonplace Popular Front strategy of remaking and reshaping 'white' Western artifacts to a black fit, a strategy that reached its peak in Orson Welles's spectacular Harlem Shakespeare productions of the late 1930s." Mullen argues that this attitude "reveals [Wright's] commitment to a Third Period communism, the Popular Front was meant to displace" (26).

Despite his distaste for Popular Front aesthetics, Wright understood the force of using language and motifs that appealed to a broad audience, an audience familiar with and moved by the rhetoric of US promise. Wright did not simply appropriate or manipulate this language to advance a preferred phase of American Marxism. Like most Americans, he had internalized the high promises of freedom and opportunity expressed in the nation's founding documents, and was captivated by them. Thus, Wright's distancing from the Popular Front as a whole can be overstated. Furthermore, 12 Million Black Voices reveals that the establishment of a Black Belt had become exactly what African Americans did not want: an alienated and exploited community. As Michael Denning writes, "A history of urban disinvestment, slum clearance in neighborhoods adjoining white neighborhoods, and the construction of high-density public housing to contain the black population, combined with the government subsidy of mortgages and highways to build white suburbs, created a new Black Belt Nation, not the Black Belt of the cotton South, but an archipelago of cities across the continent" (36). In essence, the new Black Belt had been constructed by white American capitalism; any rooted understanding of black nationalism would need to address this complex entanglement with white--and now immigrant--America.

Wright's repeated use of "We" in 12 Million Black Voices advances the deep and problematic interconnectedness between US exceptionalism and racial subjugation. Well-known Depression-era documentaries such as Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor's An American Exodus (1939), and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) tend to depict seemingly passive and downtrodden victims of poverty, thereby underscoring the value of New Deal relief efforts. Many of the photographs in such texts evoke the dignity of individual impoverished Americans, while the accompanying commentary directly or indirectly describes how these individual lives are connected to wider patterns of human displacement, alienation, and resilience. Wright's text, however, forgoes considering individuals to emphasize more immediately how social and economic forces bind black workers and families as a whole. By widening the scope of his reportage and focusing on collective history, Wright infuses what Agee called "the cruel radiance of what is" (11) into the deliberately optimistic and obfuscating American nationalism of World War II.

Wright's first-person plural perspective counterpoints the immigrant success stories and catalogues of ethnic contributions emerging in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which were put forth as evidence of the nation's inclusiveness and democratic opportunity. His "We" implies "We the People," appealing to America's democratic conscience, and it also implies class consciousness: Wright's "We" are black workers exploited by what he calls repeatedly the "Lords of the Land" in the South and the "Bosses of the Buildings" in the industrial North. 12 Million Black Voices, then, both incorporates and interrogates the civic nationalism that viewed ill treatment of the working poor as deeply regrettable and in need of redressing but not as symptoms of systemic problems in a racist economy.

As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has argued more broadly of African American literature, the text, " 'repeats,' as it were, in order to produce difference (10). Wright "signifies"--appropriates, plays on, exposes the hypocrisy of--war-era civic nationalism. An early passage from 12 Million Black Voices indirectly captures the tactical and performative qualities of Wright's text: "We stole words from the grudging lips of the Lords of the Lands, who did not want us to know too many of them or their meaning. And we charged this meager horde of stolen sounds with all the emotions and longings we had" (40). The "stolen sounds" of Wright's text include the Roosevelt era immigrant-as-the-true-American motif and the sentimental appeal to conscience and national unity. Rather than using these appeals as a way to justify a New Deal ethos and programs, Wright demands that America surrender paternalistic, denigrating, and exclusionary practices toward African Americans. Notably, however, the notion of the immigrant-as-true-American was in itself a dramatic--and to many, an unsettling-revision of the Anglo-centered American founding myth. Part of the power of 12 Million Black Voices is that it simultaneously advances the ongoing revision of the US as a multiethnic nation while forcefully observing that this revision had not gone far enough.

The rhetoric of war-era civic nationalism attempted to close the gap between old and new stock Americans to build a united front against fascism, to shore up divisions between those in full possession of cultural citizenship and those who had endured various forms of exclusion. Whereas nativist writers in the 1910s and 1920s emphasized the social degeneracy of eastern and southern Europeans, in the late 1930s and early 1940s essentially all European immigrants were included in the same narrative of inevitable forward progress. Italian and Slavic immigrants, for example, were championed for their contributions to the building of modern industrial America. For Wright, the Old immigrant/New immigrant paradigm was irrelevant; what mattered instead was that African Americans remained largely cut off from the forward progress and sense of true Americanism increasingly associated with the foreign born and their children. Wright outlined a gap that needed to be closed: not a gap that separated older stock Americans from the newer immigrants, but one that economically and politically separated blacks from whites. These divisions could not simply be smoothed over with patriotic rhetoric.

12 Million Black Voices traces African American experiences from slavery to sharecropping, and on to the Great Migration. The text has four major sections: "Our Strange Birth," "Inheritors of Slavery," "Death on the City Pavements," and "Men in the Making." Wright begins with descriptions of harrowing slave ship conditions and the later deprivations of plantation life, and he discusses how proponents of slavery rationalized it on religious grounds. Wright also characterizes the development of a "genial despotism" in black-white relations, a degrading and specious benevolence. He presents African American churches and music as sources of solace and release from such ongoing oppression, but he also proclaims them inadequate responses to the entrenched political and cultural isolation experienced by this nation within a nation. The most forceful section of Wright's narrative characterizes the "transitional" areas of urban, industrial Chicago; Wright depicts deplorable living environments and abusive restrictive covenants. He highlights the squalor of rent-inflated "kitchenettes," conditions in which black infant mortality is twice the rate of whites and one toilet often shared by 30 tenants (79).

Scholars have argued that Depression-era photo-documentaries, while exposing harsh socioeconomic injustice, create a vague hopefulness in sympathetic middle-class readers for the poor, a hope that tacitly endorses New Deal social welfare programs. (5) The photographs combined in 12 Million Black Voices belie facile optimism. They depict people experiencing a range of emotions from ecstatic to hopeful to impassive to anguished. David Bradley observes that "the faces in the FSA photographs could easily have been [Wright's] face" (xviiii). While the comment is valid, Bradley misses the ways that text and photo construct social reality rather than merely reflect Wright's experience. Wright employs seemingly sentimental appeals and aggressive, subversive rhetoric that match the emotional and aesthetic range of the photographs. William Stott observes an awkward, mismatched relationship between text and photos (232), but this disjunctive quality actually highlights the various registers through which Wright advances the repressed history of African Americans. For example, Dorothea Lange's eloquent portraits of field workers dignify their subjects without romanticizing them, while Marion Post's photographs more deliberately emphasize the degradations of sharecropping (see Figs. 1 and 2). Several AP wire photos bluntly reveal the horrors of lynching and police intimidation (see Fig. 3). (6) In spite of the photographs' varying tenor, all of them are charged by the intensified historical consciousness of Wright's surrounding text. Consequently, the reader cannot merely respond to these pictures in an emotionally circumscribed way, for example with complacent sympathy, paralyzing outrage, or affirmations of human resiliency.

The collective focus of 12 Million Black Voices was a dramatic turn from Wright's starkly individualized portrait of Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940). While Bigger Thomas arguably embodies the social degradation experienced by African Americans, Wright demanded that his audience engage with this fictional life--to see him as a "living personality" ("How Bigger" 33)--rather than to read Bigger merely symptomatically. Indeed, what matters deeply to Bigger as he awaits his execution for murder is that his lawyer, Max, is interested in the details of his short life, his dreams and aspirations. At the same time, Max's futile efforts to save the 20-year-old man from the electric chair require that he set aside Bigger as an individual. He declares during the trial that, to defend Bigger, he must speak "in general terms" so that the judge will understand how Bigger's violence has erupted from three centuries of US discrimination against blacks (Native Son 328-29). Max's defense of Bigger demonstrates how his client's impoverished life is the product of a nation that refused to see him as a human being, that often refused to see him at all. The narrative approach that Wright constructs for Max is similar to the novelist's own narrative strategy in 12 Million Black Voices: By describing the alienation and hierarchies collectively encountered by blacks, Wright challenges dismissive, condemning attitudes that his audience might have about individual African Americans with whom they have come into contact. Furthermore, as he did in Native Son, Wright encourages all Americans to resist responding to black degradation merely with symptom-treating social programs or by making speciously ethical distinctions between "good" blacks and "bad" blacks. Both of these responses tend to be based on localized, shortsighted impressions.

Not only does 12 Million Black Voices describe collective rather than individual experiences, but it furthermore does not distinguish various groups within the larger black community. In his preface, Wright states that his focus deliberately excludes black leadership. He explains that the "talented tenth is omitted in an effort to simplify a depiction of a complex movement of a debased feudal folk toward a twentieth-century urbanization" (xix). This disclaimer, however, does not attempt to justify the sweeping generalizations that Wright will make. He also states in the preface that he will "seize upon what is qualitative and abiding in Negro experience." He aspires "to place within full view the collective humanity whose triumphs and defeats are shared by the majority" (xx). Instead of providing the dense detail of particular lives, Wright builds a collective story underscored by his insistent use of "We."

In his study of FSA photo-documentaries, Nicolas Natanson takes Wright to task for passing over the individuated experiences of African Americans, their private acts of protest and endurance. Natanson argues that Wright indulges his liberal white readership in a complacent sympathy. He even goes so far as to call Wright's use of "We" a "fundamental act of cultural suppression" that depicts the "black millions as a monolithic mass" (247). In contrast to Natanson, Ralph Ellison views 12 Million Black Voices, not as a work of a cultural suppression, but as an empowering narrative. In a November 3, 1941, letter to Wright, Ellison declares, "the book makes me feel a bitter pride; a pride which springs from the realization that after all the brutalization, starvation and suffering, we have begun to embrace the experience and master it. And we shall make of it a weapon more subtle, more effective than a fighter plane!" (Wright Papers). Ellison understands how 12 Million Black Voices harnesses the rhetorical power of civic nationalism to form a pointed African American challenge to the dominant, adrenaline-charged war era patriotism, a patriotism that tended to overlook the vital domestic front against the ongoing oppression of blacks. Wright's bold generalizations about African American history both parallel and critique the sweeping statements regarding ethnic contributions offered to buttress US democracy against fascism.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

To illustrate his broader history, Wright sometimes draws on stereotypes. For example, in the "Inheritors of Slavery" chapter of the text, he evokes the Mammy: "Because of their enforced intimacy with the Lords of the Land, many of our women were allowed to remain in the slave cabins to tend generations of black children. They enjoyed a status denied to us men ... and through the years they became symbols of motherhood, retaining in their withered bodies the burden of our folk wisdom, reigning as arbiters in our domestic affairs until we men were freed and had moved to cities where cash-paying mobs enabled us to become the heads of our own families" (37). Wright suggests that Mammy's celebrated maternal qualities were not timeless but linked tragically to her sexual victimization, her "enforced intimacy" with masters. Moreover, Wright's sweeping historical statements imply that the slave-based capitalism that created the Mammy also isolated black men from family life and left them feeling powerless, a condition that did not change significantly after abolition. Wright's sardonic reference to the "cash-paying mobs" suggests that post-slavery capitalist America continues to bind black men to narrow, stultifying roles.

Wright's verbal depiction of Mammy's motherhood and black men's eventual migration to US cities meets an effective counterpoint in Jack Delano's "Rural Negro family on their porch." This "family" photograph shows an older woman sitting stiffly, with a detached expression, on the edge of a porch. Her hands are folded on her lap. A young girl sits in a chair behind her; the girl's face is obscured by a dark shadow. Next to the girl stands an even younger boy, head turned to the side, looking down at the edge of the porch. The woman, girl, and boy seem dissociated from one another, almost as if they exist in separate photographs. The starkness and alienating effect of Delano's composition emphasizes an absent presence--an adult male presence that might reconnect and animate these vacated individuals; the image thus establishes a relationship between the Mammy's victimized social status and the ongoing exclusion of black men from US society. Text and photograph work together to complicate images of the Mammy by pointing to the social conditions that created her (see Fig. 4).

In "Inheritors of Slavery" Wright complicates another idea familiarly associated with "good" American blacks: humble and intense devotion to the Church. Wright offers a powerfully condensed description of how Christianity offers African Americans spiritual expression that counters the dehumanization perpetuated by the Lords of the Lands and the Bosses of the Buildings. In fewer than 500 words, Wright outlines Christian history from Eden to Apocalypse. As Wright implies, this story has two redemptive figures. The first and overt hero, of course, is Jesus who "assumes Man's corrupt and weak flesh and comes down and lives and suffers and dies upon a cross to show Man the way back up the broad highway to peace ..." (70-71). Wright's compressed narrative also provocatively suggests Lucifer as a figure "whose soul is athirst to feel things for himself" (69). Such selfconsciousness is exactly what Wright positively claims the church offers to African Americans: "What we have dared not feel in the presence of the Lords of the Lands, we now feel in church" (68). Wright concludes by stating that in "the last battle the Armageddon will be resumed and will endure until the end of Time and of Death" (72). Wright has juxtaposed the "broad highway to peace" offered by Jesus with a pitched and enduring battle led by Lucifer. In this passage, he does not scoff at the inspiring, gently inclusive and redemptive message of Christianity but implies that the broad African American identification with Christianity carries within it the menacing possibility of retributive justice.

While the story Wright tells inevitably blurs differences within the African American community and relies on broad historical generalizations, notably, 12 Million Black Voices was published during a time when group identification had distinctive significance and urgency. As Ellison observes in 1943, "despite the very real class divisions during periods of crisis--especially during periods of war--these divisions are partially suspended by outside pressures, making for a kind of group unity in which great potential political power becomes centralized" (238). This potential power--the repressed or misdirected creative energy of millions of African Americans--needs to be "seized upon" and channeled by both black and white leaders: Wright's text may not directly include the talented tenth but one of his implied audiences is black leaders, a group that Ellison describes as needing to "integrate themselves with the Negro masses" (239).

In 12 Million Black Voices, Wright's vision of social justice (rooted in a historical, folk consciousness) extends the ideas presented in his "A Blueprint for Negro Writing," first published in 1937. Here, Wright states that black writers must accept the "nationalist implications of their lives" (40). To make this happen, Wright encourages writers to give voice to an "unwritten and unrecognized" Negro folklore. As his essay progresses, it becomes clear that Wright's interest in folklore is more than archeological. Black oral traditions and familial interactions reveal a nation that exists largely outside of the boundaries of America's capitalist driven values. Wright's nationalism "carr[ies] the highest pitch of social consciousness ... its ultimate aires are unrealizable within the framework of capitalist America, [it is] a nationalism whose reason for being lies in the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of the interdependence of people in modern society" ("Blueprint" 47). To foster this nationalism, black writers must be intensely aware of "the foreshortened picture of the whole, nourishing culture from which [blacks] were torn in Africa, and of the long complex (and for the most part, unconscious) struggle to regain in some form and under alien conditions of life a whole culture again" (47). Wright asserts that socially progressive black writers, whatever their particular subject matter, should convey the total sweep of African American history to impress on readers both the intense, disregarded humanity of blacks and the ways that this humanity has been subjugated by a narrow and predatory capitalism. Moreover, according to Wright, African American history crystallizes the conflicts and transformations that have marked the entire development of European and American civilization. In 12 Million Black Voices, he states, "Brutal bloody, crowded with suffering and abrupt transitions, the lives of us black folk represent the most magical and meaningful picture of human experience in the Western world. Hurled from our native African homes into the very center of the most highly industrialized civilization the world has ever known, we stand today with a consciousness and history such as few people possess" (146). Put simply, African American history can teach America about itself.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

In 1941 this lesson had not yet been heard by most Americans. Wright's narrative suggests that, even though black and white histories have repeatedly converged, they have not really spoken to one another. One reason for this incommunicativeness is that the disparate values of the white and black communities are not yet fully compatible. Wright, for example, generalizes how black families are held together by love and voluntary association rather than by emphasis on property that unites the families of the Lords of the Lands. He writes, "A black mother who stands in the sagging door of her gingerbread shack may weep as she sees her children straying off into the unknown world, but no matter what they may do, no matter what happens to them, no matter what crimes they commit, no matter what the world may think of them, that mother welcomes them back with an irreducibly human feeling that stands above the claims of law or property. Our scale of values differs from that of the world from which we have been excluded; our shame is not its shame, and our love is not its love" (12 Million 61). The meaning of compassion and acceptance has different boundaries for blacks and whites, but Wright makes no outright claims about who possesses the "right" values for the US. A photograph complementing this passage, Arthur Rothstein's "Sharecropper family," which depicts 15 members of an impoverished family lined across their dirt yard, underscores that Wright is not making moralistic assertions about the superior, unconditional love of black families. The men, women, teenagers, children, and toddlers look toward the camera with expressions that reveal neither particular warmth nor contempt. What seems most salient about this family is their matter-of-fact, yet intense, presence, a reality that the photograph quietly demands we accept and address (see Fig. 5).

The under-acknowledged, inseparable presence of African Americans in US history could not be meaningfully addressed merely by including a supplemental additional chapter to the American story. The "Americans All" rhetoric of the time tended to overlook this reality and, instead, dwelled on the idea that Ellis Island was as essential to American identity as Plymouth Rock. In 12 Million Black Voices Wright interrogates this revised but still inadequate founding myth by suggesting America's multicultural complicity in the slave trade: "The lean, tall, blond men of England, Holland and Denmark, the dark, short, nervous men of France, Spain and Portugal, men whose blue and gray and brown eyes glinted with the light of the future, denied our human personalities, tore us from our native soil, weighted our legs with chains" (12). Without sarcasm, Wright highlights the paradox that the same immigrants who sought political and social freedom engaged in the slave trade that completely denied freedom to others. He does not discredit the idea that these early immigrants were "flushed with a new and noble concept of life, of its inherent dignity and unlimited possibilities" (12); rather than debunking these exceptionalist myths, Wright exposes their limits.

Wright goes on to demonstrate how the culpability of the immigrant in the inhumane treatment of African Americans extended into the era of sharecropping. He also describes the contemptuous response of his black voices: "If the Lord of the Land for whom we are working happens to be a foreigner who came to the United States to escape oppression in Europe and who has taken to the native way of cheating us, we spit and mutter

   Red, white and blue,
      Your daddy was a Jew
   Your ma's a dirty dago,
      Now what the hell is you? ... (43)

Ultimately, this strategy of turning ethnocentrism against the perpetrator may be ineffectual and narrowly defensive, but in the world Wright depicts, most African Americans do not have the means to focus their indignation toward social reform. Indeed, the best they can hope for seems to be "genial despotism." Wright describes, for example, that "[i]n exchange for our vote the gangster-politicians sometimes give us so many petty jobs that the white newspapers in certain northern cities contemptuously refer to their city hall as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'" (121).

With only petty or patronizing forms of social and political power available, Wright argues, African Americans are drawn to far-flung sources of power. In his view, blacks seek to become protectively merged with the least known and farthest removed race, saying with a collective snicker of self-depreciation:

   White folks is evil
      And niggers is too
   So glad I'm a Chinaman
      I don't know what to do.... (47)

In this section of 12 Million Black Voices, Wright suggests that US society debases African Americans beyond common sense. Blacks are more likely to assume false and ultimately weak identities than they are to affirm a "common union" (47) with poor whites and take direct action for social and economic justice. At the same time, Wright's war era narrative presents the possibility of blacks forming new and threatening alliances and, therefore, it is a veiled warning to white readers. As he writes, "Fear breeds in our heart until each poor white face begins to look like the face of an enemy soldier" (46).

In Native Son Wright had already exposed ways that cultural and political oppression causes individuals to seek out dangerous and confused forms of identification. Bigger's experience of exclusion provokes in him such intense frustration that he comes to view Japan's incursions into China, Mussolini's expanding power, and Hitler's extermination of Jews "as possible avenues of escape" from his own thwarted existence (98). Bigger is unable to connect with a wider America that, at its best, patronizes him with social charity. This lack of native nationalist identification contributes to Bigger's becoming intrigued by power regardless of its moral or political legitimacy in the eyes of the white American majority. Gary Gerstle explains how Japan's conquest of Western-controlled territories provided a lift for nonwhite minorities in the US, "for now they could dare to imagine a world in which all imperialist powers were sent home and rule based on racial subjugation would be banished from the earth" (193-94). This sentiment is directly evident in 12 Million Black Voices; Wright describes how some in the black community "feel the need of the protection of a strong nation so keenly that [they] admire the harsh and imperialistic policies of Japan and ardently hope that the Japanese will assume the leadership of the darker races" (143). Both the feelings of Wright's collective protagonist and Bigger's confused attraction to militaristic regimes reflect how the denial of full cultural citizenship to African Americans fuels recklessly powerful forms of resistance. (7)

12 Million Black Voices implores the nation to confront its race-based capitalism and its selective history or face the consequences. Wright contributes to a revisionist history by depicting the confluence of the two great American migrations. He brings them together to underscore that African American migration has become blocked, while Europeans continue to flow onwards towards the full promises of America. He, for example, describes how African Americans remain caught in the grimy, dilapidated "transitional areas" of northern industrial cities, while immigrants progress to opportunities beyond manual labor: "For years we watch the timid faces of poor white peasants--Turks, Czechs, Croats, Finns, and Greeks--pass through this curtain of smoke and emerge with the sensitive features of modern men. But our faces do not change ... years later, we pick up [the newspaper] ... and see that some former neighbors of ours, a Mr. and Mrs. Klein or Murphy or Potaci or Pierre or Cromwell or Stepanovich and their children--kids we once played with upon the slag piles are now living in the suburban areas, having swum upstream through the American waters of opportunity into the professional classes" (102). Wright desires for the other major stream in US history--that of black migration--to flow uninterrupted and to gain enough power to wash away the Lords of the Land and Bosses of the Buildings.

12 Million Black Voices suggests the need for radical action that goes well beyond New Deal reform efforts. At the same time, Wright does allow for the possibility that the current political system has the potential to serve social justice. For this to happen, the judiciary must defend constitutional principles and rise above deeply entrenched patterns of social exclusion. Wright observes ways that courts presently defend residential segregation by "juggl[ing] words so that these restrictive covenants are always 'constitutional' and in defense of public policy, thereby assuming the role of policemen" (113). His sharp critique allows the courts to honor more fundamental constitutional principles of equal protection. To do so the judiciary must rise above public sentiment. Wright describes a complicit relationship between the government and public "morality": "Newspapers, radio, Protestant and Catholic churches, Jewish synagogues, clubs, civic groups fraternities, sororities, leagues and universities bring their moral precepts to bolster their locking-in of hundreds of us black folks in single, constricted areas" (113). This passage of 12 Million Black Voices ends with an observation that evokes the two-fronted battle for social justice that consumed Wright as the war in Europe escalated: "Even in times of peace some of the neighborhoods in which we live look as though they had been subjected to an intensive and prolonged aerial bombardment" (114). The extended passage reveals a dialectic often apparent in the text: an interplay between the hope for America to achieve its founding promises and the threat of black retaliation. Wright takes each side of this dialectic quite seriously.

The very brief final chapter of Wright's text, "Men in the Making," weaves back and forth between appeals to civic nationalism and implications that the victims of race-based capitalism are mobilizing for action. The second photograph in the chapter is 12 Million Black Voice's only image overtly depicting black protest. However, this photograph appears at first to be rather ineffectual. An AP/Wide World photo shows rive women in front of the White House carrying pickets denouncing lynching (see Fig. 6). One of the pickets reads, "Down with Dastardly Practices. Stop Lynching"; another states "Stop Lynching. Let Real Democracy Prevail" (142). Although only four women are fully visible and have rather passive expressions, it is not clear from the picture where the line of women stops or ends, quietly suggesting the possibility of a much more substantial protest. This point resonates with Wright's text on the same page, "We have tramped down a road three hundred years long" (142). Here, text and image anticipate the final lines of the chapter that will proclaim that "men are moving" (147) with increasing strength and energy. Wright highlights the inexorable challenge of black America to the nation's inclusive claims; more specifically, the photograph protests Roosevelt's resistance to signing anti-lynching legislation. "Men in the Making" is not merely prodding America's democratic conscience, however. The final chapter creates a gathering sense of men and women coming together to take action that goes beyond mere reform.

On one level, the final paragraphs of 12 Million Black Voices lack the critical edge of the earlier sections. Some of Wright's closing comments evoke a willful and somewhat implausible optimism; the text, in other words, seems to move to safer territory. Wright asserts that similarities between blacks and whites are more significant than their differences: "The common road of hope which we have traveled has brought us into stronger kinship than any words, laws, or legal claims" (145). And he comments reassuringly that the most qualitatively significant progress for blacks has been achieved through peaceful--and in the case of the Scottsboro trials, biracial--protest. Wright's final lines, which evoke the rhetoric of forward progress, appear to capitulate to the vague idealism of the early war years, when the nation's attention was drawn more to broad purposes of the war rather than to specific strategic battles. He claims "the right to share in the upward march of American life" (146). He observes, "We stand at the crossroads. We watch each new procession. The hot wires carry urgent appeals. Print compels us. Voices are speaking. Men are moving! And we shall be with them ..." (147). Consider these lines in contrast to the conclusion of an early draft of the text:

   The deeds of men are making the tides roll over the world. We shall
   be marshaled into war, but even when we go to fight, we shall be
   watching, waiting ... even when dying in "their" war, our eyes
   shall be riveted on what has propelled us thus far. Some of us will
   survive all the wars and shall return to that vast land of cotton,
   the pale white sentry of death, shall return to that wilderness of
   buildings with their blocks of locked-in life, and we shall make
   the wide fields of the South green again. We shall bring new life
   to the long straight streets of the city. (Wright Papers, "Men in
   the Making")

Wright provocatively suggests that African Americans who return from the war will become prisoners under guard, seeking escape from a "locked-in" life. The revised manuscript, then, eliminates overt references to America's democratic failings and instead emphasizes an urgent sense of forward movement and inclusiveness. The final photograph of 12 Million Black Voices, "Backyard of an Alley Dwelling," by FSA photographer Carl Mydans, complements the hopeful sentiments expressed in the published text (see Fig. 7). The photograph depicts a young man standing in the doorway of a simple wooden residence. The young man's eyes are raised upward and his expression appears to be the beginning of a smile. Given Wright's verbal text, the reader is left wondering what this man has to be happy about. While 12 Million Black Voices does include other photographs of African Americans smiling and enjoying themselves, these images are connected to religion, music, and social relationships. (8) This nascent smile, placed on the final page of the manuscript is detached, non-contextual, inexplicable. Nevertheless, the young man's budding smile can be distinguished from the many other FSA photographs of the downtrodden, passive victims of poverty that the New Deal set out to help.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

The conclusion of 12 Million Black Voices might be read as Wright having hit the limit of acceptable criticism in a text designed to reach a wide audience. Or the conclusion reads as surrendering to a willful war-era optimism about the future. The very lack of specificity in the language and in the young man's smile has unsettling implications, however. Wright does not disclose what the "hot wires" and speaking voices in his final lines are urging blacks to do. It is as if the young man knows something that Wright's readers do not. This uncertainty gives the ending of 12 Million Black Voices a note of threat: if the democratic opportunity reflected in the "Americans All" rhetoric of progress is not extended to African Americans, the nation's post-war identity will be increasingly corrupted and increasingly at risk.

This sense of threat was taken seriously by the FBI, who began investigating whether Wright could be charged with sedition. (9) Putting aside such alarmist reactions, even if we read the concluding section of Wright's text for its face value as an endorsement of the "common road of hope" shared by all Americans, 12 Million Black Voices is no less challenging. Wright does not capitulate to what John Higham has called the "rosy haze" (223) of American pluralism of the era, nor is he merely giving communist principles a Popular Front spin. This is not to say that Wright's particular vision always transcended ideological influences; indeed, this essay has pointed out that Wright, while maintaining a strong connection to Marxist ideals, also interacts with the emergence of US pluralism. He knows that the immigrant story as the founding narrative of American identity and democracy is blatantly hypocritical unless it accounts for slavery and black migration. At the same time, 12 Million Black Voices demonstrates that Wright is compelled by the rhetoric of American promise, even as he recognizes that this rhetoric can be deceptive and hypocritical.

When Wright stated in 1940 that "we live by an idealism that makes us believe that the Constitution is a good document of government, that the Bill of Rights is a good legal and human principle to safeguard our civil liberties, that every man and woman should have the opportunity to realize himself, to seek his own individual fate and goals, his own peculiar and untranslatable destiny" ("How Bigger" 35-36), he affirmed American equal opportunity and self-determination, even though his life and work exposed the limits and exclusions of this ideology. Wright's complex, conflicted engagement with mainstream American idealism forms part of the cosmopolitan fullness of identity that he sought throughout his career. This relationship to American ideals is sometimes discounted by critics who continue to measure Wright's perspective too exclusively by his relationship to the Communist Party--however complex that relationship may be understood. (10) As Denning has argued, the broad impact of the Popular Front has not been adequately appreciated because of a prevailing critical tendency to place the American Communist Party at the core of the struggle against exploitive capitalism and on behalf of the rights of the worker. Such an analytical framework positions Party members at the core of the Popular Front with fellow travelers at the periphery, expressing sympathy with Party initiatives, though with a somewhat diluted or guarded level of commitment to radical social change. Denning helps us to consider the actual core of the Popular Front as a broad, implicit coalition of activists, anti-fascists, and second generation immigrant laborers and artists who understood American life as rooted in the sacrificing labor and inequities endured by workers. It is this revised notion of a Popular Front to which Wright belongs.

Despite Wright's distancing himself from specific Popular Front efforts, he nevertheless understood the value of language and rhetorical appeals that could build connections across groups in the fight for social justice. 12 Million Black Voices both incorporates and questions the rhetoric of civic nationalism of the time, which raised public consciousness of social inequality and racism but refused to consider how the vaunted ideal of the immigrant-as-true-American was built to a significant extent on the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from full opportunity and cultural citizenship. But it would be wrong to suggest that the text merely exposes an unbridgeable gap between immigration and black migration. Denning distills fundamental connections between these two currents in US history: "The symbolic structures of ethnicity and race were the products of slavery and migrant labor, segregated labor markets, legal codes of exclusion and restriction, as well as the institutions of community culture and self defense" (239). As a text that indicts how the Lords of the Land and Bosses of the Buildings exploit a cheap and isolated labor market and as a text that plays on the idea of the immigrant (or migrant)-as-true-American, seeking promise and marching forward, 12 Million Black Voices shares common ground with working class narratives of immigration and migration that also engaged the rhetoric of American civic nationalism. An examination of this connection lies beyond the scope of this essay, but I suggest that the broad power of Wright's text might be further appreciated by considering its relationship to ethnic narratives of the era, including Henry Roth's Call it Sleep (1934), Pietro Di Donato's Christ in Concrete (1939), and Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart (1943), narratives that both invoke class consciousness and navigate through the fog of American civic nationalism.

Works Cited

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York: Viking, 1941.

Apel, Dora. Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. New Brunswick, N J: Cited Rutgers UP, 2004.

Bradley, David. Introduction. Wright, 12 Million Black Voices xii-xix.

Denning, Michael. Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1997.

Ellison, Ralph. "The Negro and the War." 1943. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Boston: St. Martin's P, 1995. 233-40.

Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in US Proletarian Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Gates. Henry Louis, Jr. "Criticism in the Jungle." Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Routledge, 1984. 1-24.

Gayle, Addison. The Ordeal of Richard Wright. Garden City, NY: Anchor P, 1980.

Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.

Goldsby, Jacqueline. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.y

Higham, John. Send These to Me: Immigrants and Urban America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.

Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 19191963. New York: Holt, 2000.

Moore, Jack B. "The Voice in 12 Million Black Voices." Mississippi Quarterly 42 (Fall 1989): 415-24.

Mullen, Bill V. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-1940. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999.

Natanson, Nicholas. The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photograph. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1992.

Nicholls, David. Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.

Peeler, David. Hope Among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1987.

Reilly, Richard. "Richard Wright Preaches the Nation: 12 Million Black Voices." Black American Literature Forum 16.3 (1982): 116-18.

Roeder, George R., Jr. The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.

Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Holt, 2001.

Schulman, Robert. The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000.

Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Wald, Alan. "The Left in U.S. Literature Reconsidered." Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture. Eds. Bill Mullen and Sherry Lee Linkon. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 13-28.

Weiss, Richard. "Ethnicity and Reform: Minorities and the Ambience of the Depression Years." The Journal of American History 66.3 (1979): 566-85.

White, Walter. A Man Called White. New York: Viking, 1948.

Woller, Ian. "First Person Plural: The Voice of the Masses in Farm Security Administration Documentary." JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 29.3 (1999): 340-66.

Wright, Richard. "A Blueprint for Negro Writing." 1937. The Richard Wright Reader. Eds. Michael Fabre and Ellen Wright. New York: Harper, 1978. 36-49.

--. "How Bigger Was Born." 1940. Bigger Thomas. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House: 1990. 23-42.

--. Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940.

--. 12 Million Black Voices. 1941. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1988.

Wright, Richard, et al. Richard Wright Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New Haven, CT.

Young, James, O. Black Writers of the Thirties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1973.

Notes

(1.) This contradiction between "civic nationalism" and "racial nationalism" is the focus of Gerstle's synthesis. Civic nationalism is based on founding American principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These ideals have been increasingly extended to white immigrants but less so to African Americans and Asian Americans. Racial nationalism, which bases American identity on the notion of a common blood, is built on the exclusion of non-whites. According to Gerstle, the uneasy relationship between these two nationalisms is reflected, in war-era movies, which sometimes stretched the color line but essentially left it in place (210).

(2.) As Natanson asserts, the initial reviews of 12 Million Black Voices-in both the black and the white press--for the most part praised the text's power (249). However, as Woller observes, this initial wave of praise gave way to attacks that cited Wright's work for sentimental distortion (346-48).

(3.) See, for example, Woller, Moore, and Reilly.

(4.) Nicholls, for example, describes 12 Million Black Voices as a "genealogy of proletarian consciousness" (113-30).

(5.) See, for example, Stott and Peeler.

(6.) The lynching photograph depicts Lint Shaw (the reference to the photograph listed at the end of Twelve Million Black Voices does not specify the victim), who was murdered shortly before appearing in courts to face assault charges. Commenting on a similar photograph of Shaw's body hanging from a tree, Apel writes, "The men showcase the tortured body of their victim as evidence of having upheld civilized society" (42). Writing more broadly of lynching photographs, Goldsby observes that they "figure the dead as signs of pure abjection who radiate no thought, no speech, no action, no will; who, through their appearance in the picture's field of vision, become invisible" (231). To an extent, Shaw remains invisible in 12 Million Black Voices because he is never named, but at the same time, Wright's anti-lynching appropriation of the photograph critiques the social and economic forces that have created a racially exclusive conception of "civilized society."

(7.) Rowley writes that in October 1942, a man sent a letter to the Secretary of War stating that passages like the one mentioning the "darker races" could lead to "many forms of sabotage" and "result in a general breakdown of morale" (275).

(8.) Furthermore, the handful of photographs in which whites and blacks appear together depicts the stern faces of the sharecropper boss, governmental authority or lyncher.

(9.) For a discussion of the FBI's investigation of Wright, see Gayle.

(10.) Examining Wright's political vision by its relationship to American Communism, however nuanced our understanding of the Left may be, is still limiting. In an overview of scholarship on Depression-era radical literature, Wald notes that some critics have failed to recognize the complexities of Party members' creative influences, despite what he knows was the "the real weight ... of fulltime Party literary-critical functionaries" (23). Schulman has made a similar point with specific reference to Wright's artistic integrity and, moreover, Schulman challenges the critical tradition that defines Wright by either his embrace or rejection of the Party (137-80).

Dan Shiffman is the author of Rooting Multiculturalism: The Work of Louis Adarnic (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2003). His essays on Depression-era ethnic literature and culture have appeared in such journals as MELUS, Mosaic, and Studies in American Jewish Literature. He currently teaches English at Osaka International School.