Race, Rights and Reform: Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to the Cold War 1108486975, 9781108486972

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RACE, RIGHTS AND REFORM Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to the Cold War SAR AH C . D UNS TAN

Race, Rights and Reform Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to the Cold War

Sarah C. Dunstan constructs a narrative of black struggles for rights and citizenship that spans most of the twentieth century, encompassing a wide range of people and movements from France and the United States, the French Caribbean and African colonies. She explores how black scholars and activists grappled with the connections between culture, race and citizenship and access to rights, mapping African American and francophone black intellectual collaborations from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to the March on Washington in 1963. Connecting the independent archives of black activist organizations within America and France with those of international institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Comintern, Dunstan situates key black intellectuals in a transnational framework. She reveals how questions of race and nation intersected across national and imperial borders and illuminates the ways in which black intellectuals simultaneously constituted and reconfigured notions of Western civilization. Sarah C. Dunstan is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.

Global and International History Series Editors Erez Manela, Harvard University John McNeill, Georgetown University Aviel Roshwald, Georgetown University The Global and International History series seeks to highlight and explore the convergences between the new International History and the new World History. Its editors are interested in approaches that mix traditional units of analysis such as civilizations, nations and states with other concepts such as transnationalism, diasporas, and international institutions.

Titles in the Series Kirwin R. Shaffer, Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Manela, The Development Century: A Global History Amanda Kay McVety, The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century Michele L. Louro, Comrades against Imperialism Antoine Acker, Volkswagen in the Amazon: The Tragedy of Global Development in Modern Brazil Christopher R. W. Dietrich, Oil Revolution: Anti-Colonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization Nathan J. Citino, Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in U.S.-Arab Relations, 1945–1967 Stefan Rinke, Latin America and the First World War Timothy Nunan, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism Stephen J. Macekura, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century

Race, Rights and Reform Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to the Cold War

SARAH C. DUNSTAN Queen Mary University of London

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108486972 doi: 10.1017/9781108764971 © Sarah C. Dunstan 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-108-48697-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments

page vi

Notes on Terminology and Language

xi

Introduction 1 Black Is a Country, n’est-ce pas? Race, Rights and Nation in the Wilsonian Moment

1

2 Anti-imperial Comrades: Black Radicalism and the Communist Possibility 3 La vogue nègre: Racial Renaissance at the Intersection of Republic, Empire and Democracy 4 Civilization’s Gone to Hell? Revolutionary Poetry, Humanism and the Crisis of Sovereignty 5 Give Me Liberty! Black Intellectual Struggles against Fascism in the Fight for Democracy 6 “A New Fascism, the American Brand”: Anti-communism, Anti-imperialism and the Struggle for the West 7 “The Sword of Damocles”: Présence Africaine and Decolonization in the Face of the Cold War Epilogue

14 48 86 114 148 190 237 279

Bibliography Index

284 309

v

Acknowledgments

It would take another book, at the very least, to properly thank the people who have made mine possible. My debts traverse continents. I am deeply grateful to the many people who have offered me advice, kindness and patience. A common adage is that you should never meet your heroes. My experience has been the exception that proves the rule. As a postgraduate and early career scholar, I have had the opportunity to meet many of the scholars whose work has inspired and galvanized me. On every occasion, I have been met with intellectual generosity and lively debate. One such example is my PhD supervisor, Shane White. Shane’s brilliant work on African American life first brought me to the University of Sydney, and his intellectual spirit and committed mentorship (not to mention his brilliant literary recommendations and exhortations to live beyond academia) have sustained me throughout every step of the project. From the beginning, he has challenged me to be the best that I can, both as a historian and as a writer. His attention to detail – both historical and grammatical – is impressive, along with his passion for African American history. I continue to benefit greatly from his wisdom and his friendship, for which I am most grateful. The History Department at the University of Sydney is peopled with exceptional scholars and human beings. I only had the privilege of having Stephen Robertson as my associate supervisor for a few months before he moved to George Mason University in Washington, DC. Despite this, he made a point of offering support from afar – advice on archival organization and reassuring conversations when we met up at conferences. This brings me to Marco Duranti, who stepped in as my associate supervisor after Stephen left. A human rights scholar and vi

Acknowledgments

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European historian, Marco’s mentorship made my work stronger with his critical engagement and his constant encouragement. While Marco was on sabbatical at Cambridge, Glenda Sluga kindly stepped in as an associate supervisor for the final months of my dissertation. Unofficially, however, Glenda’s advice and support have shaped my intellectual trajectory from the beginning of my postgraduate degree. Her warmth and intellectual verve have been indispensable. Our conversations about transnational and international history carried over into her brilliant mentorship in my position as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the International History Laureate in 2017–2018 and have indelibly shaped this work. At the Laureate, I had the good fortune to work alongside Ben Huf, Claire Wright and Beatrice Wayne, who provided both intellectual challenge and a great deal of fun. At Sydney, I also had the good fortune of being able to discuss French imperial history (and swap tales of freezing Paris winters) with Robert Aldrich. Several of my chapters have benefitted greatly from Robert’s comments, criticisms and suggestions. Chris Hilliard’s cultural and intellectual history seminars were a source of inspiration and prompted careful reflection about my own methodologies. Michael McDonnell has been similarly thoughtful and supportive, offering crucial advice on the structure of this book. For their conversation, enthusiasm and encouragement, I would also like to thank Thomas Adams, Frances Clarke, Sophie Loy-Wilson, Iain McCalman and Mark McKenna. As a Fulbright Postgraduate Fellow, I spent a year at Columbia University in New York. There I had the good fortune of working with Eric Foner and Mark Mazower. Although incredibly busy, Eric read my work attentively and took the time to help me tease out the intricacies of the arguments I wanted to make. He gave me indispensable advice on everything from methodology to writing and archival research. Beyond this, he helped make me feel like New York was a home away from home by inviting me for Thanksgiving. Mark was also generous with his time, encouraging me to present my work in several intellectual and European history forums at Columbia. He also offered me crucial bibliographic leads and encouraged me to return to France to pursue lingering research questions raised by my time in the United States. At his invitation, I became a visiting scholar at Columbia’s Global Center in Paris in 2016. In Paris, I enjoyed a warm welcome and fruitful discussions with scholars including Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Claire Parfait and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol. In New York, the late Judith Stein graciously welcomed me into her home. Our conversations about Marcus Garvey

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and the African American wartime experience were most inspiring. She is sorely missed. Research for this book has included time at multiple archives throughout the United States and France, as well as several online repositories, including that of the Communist International Archives. I would like to thank the staff at the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, the New York Public Library Collections, the United Nations Archives, the Moorland-Spingarn Collection at Howard University, the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, the National Archives in Washington, DC, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, the Library of Congress, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at Yale University, the UNESCO archives, the Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris, the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothéque Nationale de France, and the Centre d’Archives d’OutreMer. Funding for this research came from the Australian Postgraduate Award, a series of grants from the University of Sydney’s History Department, the John Frazer Travelling Scholarship, the AustralianAmerican Fulbright Commission Postgraduate Fellowship and the International History Laureate ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship. Some sections of Chapter 1 expand upon ideas I first explored in my article “Conflicts of Interest: The 1919 Pan-African Congress and the Wilsonian Moment,” Callaloo, 39:1 (Winter 2016): 133–150. Portions of Chapter 2 likewise make use of arguments I first formulated in “A Question of Allegiance: African American Intellectuals, Présence Africaine and the 1956 Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs,” Australasian Journal of American Studies, 34:1 (July 2015): 1–16. This book would not be what it is without the influence and guidance of the three examiners for my dissertation: Gary Wilder, James Campbell and Earl Lewis. Their detailed suggestions for transforming the dissertation into a book were most helpful. I owe special thanks to Gary Wilder for his support and conversations about all things French history on several of my follow-up archival trips to New York. So too am I grateful for the enthusiasm and wonderful feedback given to me by the editors for the Global and International History series, Erez Manela, Aviel Roshwald and John McNeill. Likewise, I am much indebted to Cambridge University Press and to Debbie Gershenowitz, who from our first conversation about this book at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting in New Orleans, back in 2017, has believed in this project and helped shape it into the piece it is today. When Debbie

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moved on to take up a new position at the University of North Carolina Press, the lovely Lucy Rhymer and Emily Sharp stepped in with enthusiasm to shepherd the book through the production process. The anonymous reviewers for the press also offered invaluable critiques that have vastly improved the work. I offer heartfelt thanks to all of those scholars whose commentary, discussion and feedback at conferences and workshops have refined my thinking and most certainly improved this project. They include Matthew Connelly, Clare Corbould, Mamadou Diouf, Brent Hayes Edwards, David Engerman, David Goodman, Jim Grossman, Paul Kramer, Alys Moody, Michael Ondaatje, Andrew Preston, Akbar Rasulov, Christian Tams, Ian Tyrrell and Michael Williams. Particular thanks go to Stephen Tuck for his encouragement and wonderful conversations about African American history and the relationship between rights and religion, along with his invitation to take part in the special issue of Callaloo on African and African American histories in Europe. Likewise to Roland Burke, whose knowledge of human rights and brilliant sense of humor have been most sustaining. I am indebted also to Peter Jackson at Glasgow University, who, since we first met at a workshop in 2016, has been a mentor par excellence and a good friend. So too has William Mulligan offered great support and friendship. I would also like to thank Stefanos Geroulanos, whose intellectual generosity and brilliance have pushed me to make links I would not have anticipated. The same goes for Martin Evans, who warmly welcomed me to Sussex and whose conversations on French history, art and music sustained me through manuscript revisions. My work with the Leverhulme Women and the History of International Thought Project at the University of Sussex has also been instrumental in shaping my own thought in ways that I could not have imagined. For that, I owe Patricia Owens, Katharina Rietzler, Kimberly Hutchings and Joanna Wood. Among the cohort of postgraduates, now scholars, that I met at Sydney, at Columbia, in Paris and through various conferences, I was lucky to get to know some truly remarkable human beings and historians who are both intellectual interlocutors and friends: Felicity Berry, James Farquharson, Pamela Maddock, Jamie Martin, John Raimo and Boyd Van Dijk have my particular gratitude. A special mention is certainly owed to my coeditors at the Journal of the History of Ideas website, Derek K. O’Leary and Spencer Weinreich. Both have been a source of intellectual enrichment and friendship as this book came to fruition. Outside of university life, I have the great fortune of friends who have persevered despite my tendency to “talk shop.” The lovely Laura Céline

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Haughey and I started talking at a party more than eight years ago. Neither of us has drawn breath since. She, like Tara Willoughby and Hope Sneddon, has shown that continents and time zones stand for little in the face of friendship. Jo Wood, too, has been a cherished comrade-inarms. For their good humor and kindness, I must also thank Tiarne Barratt, Guy Cavé, Chris Challen, Kyra Challen, Lynn Dixon, Areej Mehdi, Desiree Peña, and Nicole Sutherland. As I revised the manuscript from dissertation to book, James R. Kipping was a source of endless support, joy and love, for which I am most grateful. My grandparents, Anne, Dick, Margaret and Charlie, have given me so much love. They instilled in all of their children and grandchildren a thirst for knowledge. Anne and Dick lived to see me begin this project. Their unflagging belief in my potential and their continued directives to keep pressing on with my research meant the world, along with their letters and telephone conversations. Mandy and Dermot, my aunt and uncle, never failed to ask me about this project or send me relevant articles as they came across them. Their encouragement means so much. From dissertation to book, my immediate family has truly lived this project with me and shaped its course. The menagerie residing at our various houses – Ellie, Tamsin, Rupert, Sophie, Cas, Harry and Charlie – have done their best to give me companionship (and distraction!) while I worked. My parents, Hugh Dunstan and Margaret Macdonald, possess a passion and genius for their own work in the sciences that has never ceased to inspire me. They first taught me to ask questions and set the example of how to do so with integrity. My siblings, Jennifer and Nicholas Dunstan, not only gave me the gift of their constant support and good humor but stoically helped with last-minute spell checks and bibliographical panics. All four of them have kept my feet on the ground and a smile on my face. I can never thank them enough. This book is dedicated to them.

Notes on Terminology and Language

Discussing race across national boundaries, languages and temporalities is not without its difficulties. Vocabularies of racial belonging and identification are contingent upon specific historical and geographical location. In this book, I have made the choice to use more contemporary terms in the sections of my own writing – such as people of color, African diasporic or African American. Where older racial terminology was employed in the documents that form the basis of my research, I have used them only in the context of quotation. For the sake of clarity, when discussing a particular movement or concept discussed at length by the intellectuals studied here – such as the “New Negro” movement – I have kept the name in quotation marks. Such terms are deployed in this study as historical categories and are not intended as ontological designation. Throughout the book, I have translated most words from the original French, except where nuance or clarity requires me to use the original term or name for an organization, governing body or text. As noted previously, this is particularly the case when analyzing discourse on race. For the most part, in acknowledgment of the historical specificity of their usage, I have kept terms such as “nègre” and “noir” in their original form, rather than attempting to affix an English equivalent term. Occasionally, I have translated both as “black.”1

1

A wonderful explication of these particular terms can be found in Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 20–38.

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More generally, the reader will note the change in terms as the chapters move from 1919 through to the 1950s and early 1960s. Most often, the adoption of new terms was an intentional choice of the activists who form the focus of the book, and my discussion seeks to reflect some of the rationales behind these changes. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

Introduction

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. W. E. B. Du Bois Nobody is better qualified than the West to understand the nature of our impatience and of our awakening into revolt. It has itself taught us to diagnose this evil. Jacques Rabemananjara

African American novelist Richard Wright bought a farmhouse in Ailly, France, in 1955. The “peace and quiet” of the small farming village offered Wright and his family a refuge from the urgency of city life and the demands of the writer’s career.1 While few African Americans had the financial wherewithal to buy property in France, the country was the destination of choice for many black men and women seeking respite from America’s race relations. In the 1950s, some of the most famous writers of the century made their way to see Wright and his family at their Ailly farmhouse. One summer, C. L. R. James, a Trinidadian historian and journalist, came for the weekend. James’s clearest memory of his time in Ailly was the tour Wright gave him of his office. Pointing to his collection of books by the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, Wright had declared to James, “Everything he writes in those books I knew before I had them.”2 Of 1 2

See Margaret Walker, Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (New York: Amistad, 1988), 272. C. L. R. James, “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student” in At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), 196.

1

2

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course, Wright’s personal library contained more than just Kierkegaard. He had read the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Friedrich Nietzsche feverishly and used Nietzsche’s thinking to elaborate the idea that “the black man’s . . . is a perspective, an angle of vision held by oppressed people. . . . It is what Nietzsche once called a ‘frog’s perspective.’”3 As far as Wright was concerned, as a black man raised in the Jim Crow South of the United States, he was both heir to these Western philosophical traditions and best poised to perceive how the dynamics of oppression affected the human experience. As the lines quoted above from eminent African American scholaractivist W. E. B. Du Bois and the Madagascan politician and activist Jacques Rabemananjara tell us, this sense of kinship to European intellectual traditions was not unique to Wright. Although they were speaking over fifty years apart – Du Bois in 1903 and Rabemananjara in 1959 – the two men shared the feeling that as educated men of African descent they were at once a part of the West and separate from it. When Rabemananjara declared that the West had “taught us to diagnose this evil,” he was pointing to the way that the principles of citizenship rights and democracy running through post-Enlightenment thought were antithetical to black experiences of exploitation and exclusion. In the same speech, Rabemananjara affirmed the desire and the right of black peoples “to share with others the responsibilities of universal culture.”4 Du Bois also laid claim to membership of Western civilization. He, like Wright, believed that Western modernity had been indelibly shaped by race and by those who had been excluded on the basis of race.5 Although he did not call it a “frog’s perspective,” Du Bois argued throughout his career that “we who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans can not.”6 C. L. R. James agreed. It seemed natural to him that Wright would find his own experience in Kierkegaard because Wright’s very identity as a black man in the United States had given “him an insight into what today is the universal opinion and attitude of the modern personality.”7

3

4

5

6 7

Richard Wright, “Foreword” in George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? (London: Dobson, 1956), 11–12. Jacques Rabemananjara, “The Foundations of Our Unity Arising from the Colonial Epoch,” Présence Africaine, 1:24–25 (February–May, 1959): 85. Paul Gilroy makes this point about Wright too, also drawing from C. L. R. James’s essay: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 159. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” Crisis, 32 (October 1926): 296. C. L. R. James, “Black Studies,” 196.

Introduction

3

All four men explicitly asserted their belonging to these European philosophic and intellectual traditions because they were writing in contexts where notions of Western civilization and modernity were a priori assumed to be distinct from black thought. They sought to emphasize that African and African-descended peoples have always been part of what historian Robin Kelley has called “a shared if asymmetrical modernity.”8 The purpose of this book is to chart the ways that black thinkers from within the French Empire and the United States grappled with the reality of this “asymmetrical modernity” from the so-called Wilsonian moment associated with the Paris of 1919 until the end of the Algerian War in 1962 and the March on Washington in 1963. Collaboration across these two republican states occurred at conferences like the Pan African Congress of 1919 and the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists as well as through journals such as Les Continents, Opportunity, La Revue du monde noir and Présence Africaine. The connections created in these formal spaces lingered on in powerful personal and institutional exchanges between the black Americans and their counterparts in the French Republics. These exchanges were hugely influential in shaping black activism and thinking around race and rights on a national, imperial and diasporic level, and they are demonstrative of the centrality of the black experience to Western modernity as it was lived in France and the United States. That is not to say that there is such a thing as a universal black experience. To the contrary, this book is a history of a multiplicity of ways in which activists of African descent understood their racial identity and its relationship with Western civilization, as well as their access to citizenship rights. Consensus was rare, and belonging to the African diaspora did not equate to a shared sense of political or cultural identity. As Nikhil Pal Singh put it in the title of his 2004 book, “Black is not a country.”9 Race, as experienced and understood by each of the figures who populate this book, was (and remains) a situational identity contingent upon the specific historical and personal context of each individual. W. E. B. Du Bois’s experiences, for example, as a highly educated African American scholar and radical activist were very different from Claude

8

9

Robin D. G. Kelley, “How the West Was One” in Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 124. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is Not a Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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McKay’s, a working-class Jamaican immigrant who became a communist, poet and novelist. Along the same lines, although Leopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire became close friends and collaborators from the 1930s onward, their experiences of French citizenship varied along lines of class and regional identity. Senghor came from a wealthy family in Senegal’s Quatre Communes while Césaire had grown up as the child of laborers in the Antilles and witnessed the deprivations of that life firsthand. The deep socioeconomic differences and inconsistencies in access to citizenship rights that existed across French territories also operated to foster division across African diasporic groups. This was certainly the case in the fraught relationship between francophone African and Antillean communities in the early to mid-twentieth century. Not only did male Antilleans have greater access to political rights than most of their African counterparts; they were also often integrated into the colonial administration in French-African territories, a power dynamic that divided the communities. Conversely, within the French Empire, the political and social realities of being a colonized subject also often brought activists together across racial and geographical groupings. The formation of the Union Intercoloniale and its associated publications, such as Le Paria, are a case in point (see Chapter 2). While influential thinkers and activists familiar to histories of the twentieth-century British Empire do appear in this study as they engage movements and individuals from the United States and the French Empire – C. L. R. James and George Padmore, for example – this book focuses primarily on connections across the French and American Republican Empires. I contend that there was a particular relationship between groups across these two political entities, grounded in a shared sense of the potential of republican democratic systems, that needs to be distilled as distinct from the British imperial case. Republicanism, and specifically an idealized French republicanism inflected with memories of the French revolution of 1789, became the lingua franca of much antiracist and anti-imperialist thinking emanating from and across these states.10 Scholars of French Empire have hitherto pointed to the tensions between the promises of French republicanism and the realities of colonialism, noting that anti-colonial activists in both the interwar and postwar periods frequently leveraged these contradictions when laying claim to 10

Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 215–217.

Introduction

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citizenship rights.11 In much the same way, black activists within the United States mobilized the rhetoric of the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1788 Constitution to lay claim to full citizenship rights within their own republican state. Across the time period my study traverses, comparisons between the political machinery of the two republican nations were frequent. Most often, France became an effective symbol of a “color-blind” Republicanism which African American thinkers used to frame criticisms of the United States. So too did francophone black thinkers lobby for reform within France on the basis of the dangerous consequences of the racism of the American Republic. In the chapters that follow, I document many of the ways in which these men and women sought to mobilize the notions of popular sovereignty and citizenship they connected with 1789. They grappled with the way that the very idea of a political system grounded in popular sovereignty requires the construction of a singular people, a notion all too frequently conflated with racial and/or cultural identity.12 Often they elaborated citizenship claims in terms of shared political affiliation rather than a racial identity. Their evocations of these principles were not calls for the erasure of cultural or racial difference but the construction of a democratic system in which the degree of difference would not map onto the access to political rights. A large number of the thinkers studied in this book also equated understandings of Western modernity with the Republican state. From this perspective, they saw France and the United States as the best manifestations of Western modernity thus far achieved. When Wright, Du Bois and Rabemananjara, for example, laid claim to the legacies of the Western civilization, they also understood themselves to be articulating a belonging to their respective republican nations. Often, they did so by asserting an identity of “civilized masculinity” that operated – implicitly and explicitly – to exclude women of color. Throughout this study, I show how gender operated in tandem with the dynamics of race and class to shape the visions of citizenship and modernity individual

11

12

Frederick Cooper, “Provincializing France” in Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan and Peter C. Perdue (eds.), Imperial Formations (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 341–378; Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis; Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). On the construction of the idea of “a people” and its relationship to race and culture, see Bernard Yack, “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism,” Political Theory 29: 4 (2001): 517–536; Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the Predicament of Sovereignty: China, 1900–1945,” American Historical Review, 104:2 (1997): 1030–1051.

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thinkers put forward. So too have I brought the contributions of women thinkers – often overshadowed in histories by male figures such as Du Bois – to the fore. These include the Martinican intellectuals Paulette and Jane Nardal and Suzanne Césaire, as well as the Congolese politician Jane Vialle and African American writers such as Jessie Fauset and Clara Shepherd, among others.13 The encounters and exchanges that occurred between black intellectuals in the United States and the francophone world provided each group with new ways of understanding and acting on their own historical predicaments in ways that have hitherto remained ignored in the scholarship. Historians of the African American experience have tended to confine their studies to America’s political borders. Those who have expanded these parameters often place African Americans at the forefront of diasporan politics.14 The observation of historians Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, that “the history of African Americans is nothing less than the dramatic saga of a people attempting to remake the world” is not uncommon.15 This makes sense. African Americans engaged with the most pressing questions of their time throughout their struggles for freedom. However, they were not the only group within the African diaspora who sought to engage in transnational activism in order to reconfigure the 13

14

15

In so doing, I build upon the excellent work of scholars who have sought to rectify the elision of women of color from intellectual histories. See Mia E. Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones and Barbara Savage, Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). For studies that have attended to the African American experience in France, see Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Michel Fabre, “René Maran: The New Negro and Negritude,”Phylon 36:3 (September 1975): 340–351; Eileen Julien, “Terrains de Rencontre: Césaire, Fanon, and Wright on Culture and Decolonization,”Yale French Studies, 98 (2000): 149–166; and Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). For histories of African American activism beyond the United States more generally, see Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: the United Nations and the African American Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Bortelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, “Preface” in Robin D. G. Kelley, Earl Lewis (eds.), To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ix.

Introduction

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relationships between race and rights. Black thinkers from throughout the French Empire played a significant yet underacknowledged role in shaping African American thought and activism. Similarly, a plethora of recent books have explored the relationship between citizenship, rights and colonialism and mapped out francophone black thinking on the subject.16 These works utilize the framework of the French Empire to make their case. As a result, they refer to the African American relationship only in passing. The literature that does bring the two experiences together focuses attention upon the interwar period and the city of Paris. Historian J. S. Spiegler was among the first to privilege interwar Paris as a site that “afforded young colonials possibilities for association with militant French intellectuals” and the “chance for contacts with natives of other colonies.”17 Since Spiegler, a number of literary scholars and historians have studied the significance of Paris in the interwar years as a site of vibrant intellectual exchange among writers and activists of African descent.18 Most recently, Michel Goebel has explored the social landscape of Paris to establish patterns of interaction between Algerian, Senegalese, Vietnamese and Latin American thinkers in the interwar period.19 Such attention to the exchanges of the interwar period provides a stark contrast to the postwar years, which rarely are studied in such a way. Instead, histories of the African American experience beyond the United States in the postwar are written in the shadow of the Cold War. The influence of the contemporary clash between the United States and the Soviet Union should not be underestimated. Nor should studies of decolonization be uncoupled from the French imperial frame. However, to insist upon the temporal division of the interwar and the postwar is to underestimate 16

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18

19

Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation State: Négritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Négritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation and Citizenship in the French Colonies, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). J. S. Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought among French-Speaking West Africans, 1921–1939” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1968). Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir; Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris; Michel Fabre, “René Maran: The New Negro and Negritude,” 340–351; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature. Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1.

8

Race, Rights and Reform

both the continuity of conversations across the two periods and to neglect the perspectives of black thinkers themselves. My book redresses these omissions. Scholars such as Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright certainly saw the experiences of World War II and afterward as a continuation of the same struggles against fascism, totalitarianism and colonialism that blacks had been fighting against for a much longer time. Relationships begun in interwar Paris carried on far past World War II and far beyond Paris. Recognizing this continuity also has a particular resonance for contemporary debates over the history of human rights. The idea that the struggle against colonial domination after World War II was a departure from the interwar period pervades the literature. Historians such as Jan Eckel argue that human rights only became “available as a possible justification for the colonies’ struggle for freedom” in this moment.20 Pointing to the new international rights regimes of both the United Nations and the European Council, Eckel argues that decolonization put these new regimes to the test. Eckel, alongside Samuel Moyn and others, takes pains to distinguish between the right to self-determination – so important to anti-colonial actors – and the human rights regimes of the 1940s and beyond.21 They emphasize that the right to self-determination only became associated with human rights much later and thus occlude the interwar history of this idea from their narratives. Indeed, as Frantz Fanon noted in his 1963 work Wretched of the Earth, “nationalist political parties during the colonial period” took “action of the electoral type: a string of philosophico-political dissertations on the themes of the rights of peoples to self-determination, the rights of man to freedom from hunger and human dignity, and the unceasing affirmation of the principle ‘One man, one vote.’”22 For scholars such as Eckel, these trends provide evidence of the way that anti-colonial activists only sporadically employed human rights as a strategy for freedom. More often they focused on the integrity of sovereign rights for the nascent states that emerged in this 20

21

22

Jan Eckel, “Human Rights and Decolonization: New Perspectives and Open Questions,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development, 1:1 (Fall 2010): 111. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 84–119; Samuel Moyn, “Imperialism, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Human Rights” in Akire Iriye, Petra Goedde and William I. Hitchcock (eds.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century: An International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 159–178. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 59.

Introduction

9

period.23 Similar observations have been made about the efforts of African Americans to achieve rights in the United States. As historians such as Mary Dudziak and Carol Anderson have documented, African American activists embraced the rhetoric of human rights in the aftermath of World War II but quickly narrowed the frame of their activism to civil rights.24 My study adds a new dimension to this scholarship by showing how these postwar trends were the continuation of an earlier, interwar, anticolonial and anti-racist discourse focused on civic citizenship. Popular sovereignty and the right to self-determination were, for many of these thinkers, fully achievable within republican democratic nation-states despite racial or cultural differences and did not, therefore, necessarily require recourse to international law in the way that our contemporary evocations of human rights do.25 By encompassing the period from the end of the Wilsonian moment through to postwar decolonization and the dawn of the French Fifth Republic in this monograph, I demonstrate the persistence of this perspective in black thought. Moreover, I illustrate the way that the relationship between black francophone and American thinkers extended beyond Paris, throughout French imperial circuits and into the United States. One of the primary aims of this book, then, is to bring into conversation the two disparate historiographies of rights and race in the United States and the French Empire and to break down the division between the “interwar” and “postwar” periods. The result is a history of race and citizenship rights in both republics from “the frog’s perspective.” The rationale for doing so is twofold. As historians Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori contend in their anthology Global Intellectual History, “historically specific forms of connectedness provide an epistemological foundation for specific kinds of comparison.”26 Bringing together the experience of black intellectuals within the United States and France and reconstructing their collaborations is not just an exercise in revealing the specific diasporic relationship between the two groups. It also draws attention to the underacknowledged but deep engagement of these particular groups of thinkers with not only nonblack intellectual legacies but 23 24 25 26

Jan Eckel, “Human Rights and Decolonization,” 119. Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize; Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia, 117. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History” in Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 7.

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Race, Rights and Reform

with the internationalist institution building that was occurring during the four decades in question. Connecting the independent archives of black activist organizations within America and France with those of international institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Comintern, my book situates key black American and francophone intellectuals in a transnational framework that acknowledges the role of diasporic entanglements and other political discourses. It reveals how questions of race and nation intersected across national and imperial borders and illuminates the ways in which black intellectuals from both republics simultaneously constituted and reconfigured Western civilization. Imagining a form of statehood that would allow for plurality while universally guaranteeing rights is the thread that runs through the fortyyear period covered by this monograph. Black notions of sovereignty and citizenship emerged from conditions of oppression and discrimination that forced them to ask structural questions of the societies and polities in which they lived. From a position of exteriority, they sought to formulate methods through which to assert the principle of the indivisibility of humanity and thereby achieve universal rights. Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, elaborated an understanding of cultural hegemony that is useful here. Essentially, he argued that the state does not and cannot rule by physical force alone. Instead, it generates an ideology of normality – a dominant culture that justifies inequalities along lines of race, class and gender.27 The men and women who form the focus of this study generated transnational counterhegemonic cultures aimed – explicitly and implicitly – at challenging the dominant culture of Western civilization that positioned their race outside the promises of republican democracy. As such, they manifested a kind of black internationalism largely characterized in terms of what Edward Said has called “adversarial internationalizations” – cultures and dialogues fostered from a shared sense of exclusion from the humanist discourses of the West.28 In order to account for the different experiences that stem from similar structural impetus towards racialization and forced migration, I also attend to Earl Lewis’s framing of this concept in terms of a multitude of “overlapping diasporas.”29 Across 27

28

29

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Edward Said, “Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture,” Raritan, 9 (Winter 1990): 31. Earl Lewis, “To Turn as On a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review, 100 (June 1995): 765–787.

Introduction

11

national borders and colonial territories, race relations in the United States, imperial injustices in the French colonies and the rise of fascism in central Europe no longer seemed like a succession of isolated injustices but a larger pattern of inequality. The process of challenging racism and overcoming inequality in citizenship status and access, then, rested on addressing a dominant culture that pervaded Western civilization as a whole. The tools that these intellectuals employed to disseminate their counter-culture form a large portion of my archive. From the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas and Langston Hughes, to the Congresses of the Pan-African Association and the League against Imperialism through to the petitions W. E. B. Du Bois delivered to the League of Nations and the United Nations, I have looked to these documents to reconstruct their thinking. I have incorporated the personal journals and correspondence between many of these thinkers in order to tease out the intricacies of their thought. My research also relies heavily upon the kind of archival material that Foucault has labeled “police text,” the literature of “a complex documentary organization” that indicates “attitudes, possibilities, suspicions – a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour” that is often simply inaccessible elsewhere.30 From the files of the US State Department to the Paris Police Prefecture and the Colonial Surveillance documents of the French Empire, I have drawn on a wealth of such material. The breadth of “police text” available on these men and women that this monograph reveals indicates the extent to which they were considered threatening to established imperial and racial norms. In many instances, these documents provide the sole window into their lives and aspirations. Lamine Senghor, a Senegalese activist central to black and communist organizations in 1920s France, is a case in point. He left no personal papers and few published works. And yet his significant influence upon black and communist organizing, not to mention the activities of colonial surveillance officers, is made clear in the police archives. Quite often, as in the Colonial Ministries misreading of Du Boisian Pan-Africanism as a manifestation of Germanic Bolshevism (detailed in Chapter 1), these reports are ludicrously incorrect. The errors, however, provide insight into the thinking of those compiling and analyzing this information, creating a feedback loop of knowledge that this book explicates. 30

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 214.

12

Race, Rights and Reform

Scholars of the intellectuals I study here tend to discuss their thinking and work as being influenced by “Western,” “European” or “American” movements and thinkers.31 Using such a framework forces a reading of their work that retains the mold of “other” rather than allowing for them to exist within their contemporary intellectual landscapes more broadly. Richard Wright, for example, was considered by many contemporary readers as a “failed existentialist,” whose engagement with European philosophy severed his connection to authentic African American culture.32 On the other hand, the Martinican journal Tropiques, run by writers including Aimé Césaire, René Ménil and Suzanne Roussy Césaire, has long been discussed in terms of the influence of André Breton’s surrealism. More recently, scholars such as Brent Hayes Edwards, Robin Kelley and Gary Wilder have argued that Aimé Césaire’s work should be considered as a departure from or transformation of surrealism, best considered in light of Césaire’s visions for a more equal French future. Here, I follow in their footsteps by positioning journals such as Tropiques and the work of thinkers like Wright as contributions in their own right that existed at the interstices of multiple intellectual constellations. This illuminates how such relationships formed part of a larger black engagement with the connection between blackness and humanity, a link necessary to assert in order to claim access to rights. In so doing, I contribute to the growing literature that refuses to see intellectual movements within the West as distinct from non-European thought.33 The stakes of being a black thinker were high. They demanded – and still demand today – a negotiation of the divergent philosophical positions that identified what it meant to be black and what it meant to be an intellectual. Black intellectuals and indeed the black community at large never operated in a race vacuum in the way that they tend to be segregated in professional publications.34 My book is an inquiry into the experience 31

32

33

34

On the American historiography, see Thomas Bender, “Historians, the Nation and the Plenitude of Narratives” in Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age, 1. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 156; Michel Fabre, “Richard Wright and the French Existentialists,” MELUS, 5:2 Interfaces (Summer, 1978): 39–51. See, for example, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “Bergson in the Colonies: Intuition and Duration in the Thought of Senghor and Iqbal,” Qui Parle, 17:1 (Fall/Winter, 2008): 125–145; Robin D.G. Kelley, “How the West Was One: The African Diaspora and the Re-Mapping of U.S. History” in Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age; Vaughn Rasberry, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Gary Wilder, Freedom Time. Edward J. Blum, “The Triumph of the Negro Intellectual,” Modern Intellectual History, 12:1 (2015): 263.

Introduction

13

of being a black intellectual caught between the possibilities of republican democracy and the idea of self-determination, and the reality of centuries of racial oppression. The exchanges that occurred during this period lend themselves to myriad conceptions of national belonging, of citizenship and of Western modernity. From the anti-universalist nationalism advocated by Frantz Fanon to the négritude of Léon-Gontran Damas, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, from the poetics of liberty envisaged by Suzanne Roussy Césaire to the dialectics of Richard Wright, this book documents their cultural, philosophical and political rewriting of the narrative of modernity and Western civilization in ways that profoundly shaped the twentieth century. It is a chapter in the story of what Richard Wright called “the fight of the West with itself, a fight that the West blunderingly began, and the West does not to this day realize that it is the sole responsible agent, the sole instigator.”35

35

Richard Wright, White Man Listen! (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1964), 2.

1 Black Is a Country, n’est-ce pas? Race, Rights and Nation in the Wilsonian Moment

The elevated number of Negroes in the United States (Approximately 15 million) has created for the white race of the Republic the danger of degeneration if a separation of Blacks and Whites is not ensured. As this danger does not exist for the French race, the French public has accustomed itself to treating le “Noir” with familiarity, and becoming very indulgent in his regard. Lieutenant Colonel Jean Louis Albert Linard

These are hard words to read. They are extracted from a confidential military memorandum known as the circulaire Linard, named after its author, Lieutenant Colonel Jean Louis Albert Linard. Circulated in August 1918, the document was the product of a tension at the heart of the military alliance between the United States and France: the treatment of black troops. Initially only intended for select members of the French military leadership, an administrative error led to Linard’s memorandum being disseminated widely.1 Officials tried and failed to confiscate and

*

1

This chapter title is a reference to the argument, and title, of Nikhil Pal Singh’s Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). For further context on the tensions between the French and the American allies due to the question of racial assimilation, see Benjamin Doizelet, “L’intégration des soldats noirs américains de la 93e division d’infanterie dans l’armée française en 1918,” Revue historique des armées, 265 (2011): 3–13; Jennifer D. Keene, “French and American Stereotypes during the First World War” in William Chew and Dominique Laurent (eds.), National Stereotypes in Perspective : Americans in France, Frenchmen in America (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2001), 261–281. On racial assimilation in the armed forces in general during World War I, see Dominique Chathuant, “Connexions et circulations: l’assimilationnisme

14

Black Is a Country, n’est-ce pas?

15

destroy all available copies, and the document’s complacent racism caused a political furore, particularly among those francophone colonial troops who felt deeply insulted in the face of their wartime service. Blaise Diagne, the Senegalese deputy to the Chamber and a key figure in the conscription of the tirailleurs sénégalais, protested particularly fiercely, complaining directly to the Minister for War.2 One year later, Linard’s memorandum would reach black American audiences when an enraged W. E. B. Du Bois, eminent scholar and activist, published it in the original French with an English translation in the Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).3 Black Americans had also sacrificed much for this European war. They too saw their patriotic sacrifice as the duty of a country’s citizenry. Black men born in America were American citizens, but theirs was a proscribed citizenship. Unlike their white counterparts, only some could vote, and their socioeconomic freedoms were severely curtailed by segregationist policies at a state and federal level. Many in the black community hoped that their war service would improve their conditions.4 Mainland France did not have anywhere near the same number of “noirs” or “nègres” as the United States. Where white French were outnumbered in the colonies, however, specific legal codes applied to each group, depending upon their particular stage of “civilisation.”5 Few among France’s colonial populations had citizenship:

2

3

4

5

dans un conflit mondialisé (1914–1919),” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 168 (Mai–Août 2014): 105–133. The tirailleurs sénégalais were colonial troops recruited not just, as the name suggests, from Senegal but from throughout French West Africa. Many served at the front in France and, in some cases, were amalgamated with African American troops. For more on this, see Marc Michel, Les Africains et la Grand Guerre, L’Appel à l’Afrique, 1914–1918 (Paris: Karthala, 2003); Blaise Diagne au ministre de la Guerre, 16 novembre 1918, Service Historiques de la Défense, GR 6 N96. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Documents of War,” Crisis, 18:1 (May 1919): 16–17; see also W. E. B. Du Bois to the Executive Board of the NAACP, January 4, 1919, NAACP Administrative Subject File, Pan African Congress Nov 9, 1918–April 1919, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. On the relationship between war service and citizenship claims for African Americans, see Chad Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 13–61. For francophone activists, see Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouvements nègres en France, 1915–1939 (Paris: L’Éditions Harmattan, 1985), 10; Gilbert Meynier, “La France coloniale de 1914 à 1931” in Jacques Thobie, Gilbert Meynier, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and CharlesRobert Ageron (eds.), Histoire de la France coloniale, 1914–1990 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), 124. Emannuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 97.

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Race, Rights and Reform

only Antillean men and the men of Senegal’s Quatres Communes had the same formal legal citizenship rights as French men. Most others were considered French subjects. The distinction between citizen (citoyen) and subject (sujet) in the French imperial framework lay in their relation to the metropole. Subjects were not citizens and were les indigènes subject to the code de l’indigénat. It was a distinction that operated primarily in terms of the application of the power of the state upon the individual rather than upon the limits of an individual’s participation in the state.6 Suffrage, a right intrinsic to American concepts of citizenship, was not central to the definition of either category. For the most part, delegates to the National Assembly who represented a colony were white and part of the colonial administration. The attainment and practice of French civility or civilization were the presumptive conditions for the exercise of French citizenship, but men such as Blaise Diagne attempted to expand the narrow boundaries of this definition by including the performance of citizenship duties, most obviously apparent in wartime service.7 In this chapter, I will explore the ways that key black intellectuals from the United States and the French imperial nationstate sought to configure the relationships between racial and national belonging and political access to citizenship rights in the immediate aftermath of World War I.

1.1 a new world order In the aftermath of World War I, the political order of the international landscape was ripe for change. Speaking to Congress on February 11, 1918, US President Wilson offered a vision of a new world order organized around nation-states and predicated upon the right of self-determination. He meant something very different to the “self-determination” contemporaneously touted by Lenin and the Bolshevik governments and was, like the British Prime Minister Lloyd George, attempting to forestall the spread of that socialist-Marxist concept and gain control of the peace. Politicians such as Wilson and Lloyd George interpreted the phrase to mean the consensual foundation by civilized (implicitly white) men of a political unit governed by democratic principles, a right conceived in collective 6 7

Saada, Empire’s Children, 96. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 424.

Black Is a Country, n’est-ce pas?

17

rather than individual terms.8 The implication of this political principle was that geopolitical boundaries should be formed along the lines of nationality – an identity often conflated at this time with understandings of race.9 In a world of states and empires comprised of multiple ethnic, religious and linguistic groups, the question quickly became: who had the right to self-detrmination?10 Neither Wilson nor any of the Allied powers who set out to negotiate the peace at Versailles believed that each race – a category in any case too slippery to define – should have its own nation. Wilson was as unlikely to suggest that African Americans be offered a nation of their own as his French counterpart, Georges Clemenceau, was to offer independence to France’s colonial subjects.11 Nevertheless, the flaw underpinning a heterogeneous nation-state was immediately evident: democratic representation in a nation-state dominated by one nationality but home to other minorities would by default prevent any but the largest nationality from possessing political power.12 As the attitude encapsulated by the circulaire Linard suggested, it was exactly this retention of majority control in the face of such a large “minority” population that was desirable. The situation was different, however, in the case of other “white” races, such as the Jews in Poland. Wilson was particularly interested in achieving the self-determination of subject peoples who had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a result, the Allied powers would grapple with the question of how to protect a minority nationality’s rights within larger nation-states. This ongoing debate underpinned the peace negotiations of 1919 through 1923 and ushered key precepts surrounding minority status and rights protection into both international law and domestic thinking around the relationship between racial and national belonging and access to rights. The black men and women from the United

8

9

10 11

12

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Originals of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 39–43. Wilson, it seems, specifically meant race when he referred to nationality: Commission of Inquiry, “Preliminary Survey,” n.d., in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: Paris Peace Conference, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1942–1947), 18–20. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 21–22. It should be noted that this observation is equally applicable to Wilson’s attitudes to Filipinos, Hawaiians, Alaskans and Puerto Ricans, for that matter. Commission of Inquiry, “Preliminary Survey,” vol. 1, 17–21; Eric D. Weitz, “From Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” American Historical Review (December 2008), 1329.

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Race, Rights and Reform

States and the French Third Republic who form the focus of this chapter would both engage and deploy these ideas in their struggles against racism and imperialism. Erez Manela has noted that the scholarship on the “Wilsonian moment” is mainly concerned with the leaders of the great powers or the failure of the peace treaties to realize the potential, however unintended, of Wilson’s rhetoric.13 There is thus a great need to flesh out this moment from the perspective of black activists agitating for full citizenship rights within the French and US republican spheres, as I do here.

1.2 defining the right to self-determination Within the United States and specifically among the African American community, the right to self-determination was often read as the right to vote for every male citizen. That black American citizenship did not automatically equate to either suffrage or equality before the law was an issue that many activist groups thought should be brought to international attention at the Peace Conference in Paris. Black activist groups within the United States, including Marcus Garvey’s nascent Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the short-lived International League of Darker Peoples and the National Equal Rights Association, had lobbied for representation on the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.14 Some believed that they could use the forum to bring attention to the race problem in the United States and thus place international pressure on the

13

14

Margaret Macmillan’s seminal Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, for example, is finely attuned to the reactions of the Allied powers to the requests of oppressed peoples but not to the requests themselves or to those making them. More recently, historians such as Glenda Sluga and Manela himself have recovered new dimensions to the Peace Conference by studying the proceedings from the perspective of marginalized groups, instead of through the actions of the key power brokers. My intention is to build upon this scholarship by charting the way that black intellectuals from the United States and the French Third Republic engaged with these contemporary debates about the connection between racial belonging and rights. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 123, 3; Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003); Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology and International Politics, 1870–1919 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). The leaders of these organizations were inundated with letters from the black community requesting that they attempt to utilize the Paris Peace Conference to resolve the “Negro problem”: The World Forum, Organ of the ILDP, 1:1 (1919), File 10218–296, DNA RG 165, US National Archives at College Park (hereafter NACP).

Black Is a Country, n’est-ce pas?

19

government to improve the situation. Others saw race problems in America as an internal matter but believed that any delegation should include representatives of its black population. Neither perspective influenced President Wilson, who refused to grant an audience to most of those who petitioned him prior to his departure for Paris. Independent travel to the peace negotiations was also difficult, as the State Department refused to grant passports to anyone other than official delegates and journalists.15 One of the few black activists who managed to obtain a passport was W. E. B. Du Bois. He had petitioned unsuccessfully to be on the official delegation and was only able to travel to France as the editor of the Crisis. Ostensibly, his mission was to gather information and to report the wartime experiences of black troops back to the NAACP. This alone had drawn the attention of the US military, given concerns over the impact of French attitudes upon African American troops.16 Du Bois, however, had much more than war journalism on his mind. He believed that decision-making over the future of Germany’s African colonies provided an unmatched opportunity for the key black intellectuals from the countries represented by the Allied powers to establish themselves as equal participants in the modern, civilized world by negotiating for better conditions for native peoples. To this end, he wanted to organize a Pan-African Congress in Paris that would culminate in resolutions to be presented to the Allied powers at the Peace Conference.17

15

16

17

Robert R. Moton, Finding a Way Out (Garden City: Doubleday, 1920), 152–153; Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 57; Whitehouse to W. E. B. Du Bois, November 29, 1918, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst (hereafter W. E. B. Du Bois Papers). US Army Infantry Division, 92nd, Memorandum from United States Army NinetySecond Division to Intelligence Officers, January 1, 1919, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Editorial,” Crisis, 18:1 (May 1919): 9. The 1919 Pan-African Congress has long been dismissed as a conservative American precedent to the more radical Pan-Africanism that followed on the heels of the Second World War. Where it has been studied in detail, it is most often understood in relation to W. E. B. Du Bois’s contributions to black activism. Clarence G. Contee’s 1972 article on the Congress is the most comprehensive example of this perspective. Contee focuses primarily on Du Bois, and this has the effect of not only marginalizing the involvement of other participating scholars and activists but also defining it in terms of the African American experience in the United States. James T. Campbell’s piece on Du Bois’s interwar PanAfrican Congress, in contrast, lays the foundation for the argument I make in this chapter. Seriously considering Manela’s injunction to remember that the “Wilsonian moment” also involved nonwhite groups, Campbell positions Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism at this time in relation to Wilson’s intellectual trajectory and the seismic shifts occurring in both the American domestic landscape and the international arena. He also points to the

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Race, Rights and Reform

Upon his arrival in France, Du Bois immediately sought out prominent black figures who could help him organize a Pan-African Congress. Those he contacted included fellow countrywoman and wife of an American consul to Saint-Étienne, Ida Gibbs Hunt, as well as Blaise Diagne, Gratien Candace (Guadeloupean Delegate to the Chamber of Deputies), Achille René-Boisneuf (Guadeloupean Representative at the Chamber of Deputies) and Joseph Lagrosillière (Martinican Representative at the Chamber of Deputies). It was Diagne who convinced Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau to grant official permission for the Congress to be held. He persuaded the French leader, who was already suspicious about Wilson’s agenda and smarting at the heavy handedness of American leadership, that allowing the Congress would (re-)establish France’s democratic credentials vis-à-vis the United States by showing a deep commitment to a color-blind equality.18 Diagne was motivated partially by the concern that American racial attitudes were beginning to spread to France. In several French towns where US military bases were located, black French citizens had suffered from racially inspired violence at the

18

significance of Du Bois’s relationship with the Senegalese deputy Blaise Diagne. Here I go further down this path, exploring the context-internal politics of the French Third Republic as well as the political and personal agendas of delegates such as Diagne and Gratien Candace, among others. I will also pay particular attention to the gendered nature of these men’s visions for the future of the race. Clarence G. Contee, “Du Bois, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Congress of 1919,” Journal of Negro History, 57:1 (1972): 13–28; James T. Campbell, “‘A Last Great Crusade for Humanity’: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Pan-African Congress” in Bruce Schulman (ed.), Making the American Century: Essays on the Political Culture of Twentieth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 71–91. It should be noted that works which address the Congress from a French perspective also tend to dismiss it in a matter of lines. See Dominique Chathuant, “Une élite politique noire dans la France du premier xxe siècle,” Vingtième siècle, 101 (2009): 133–148; François Manchuelle, “Le rôle des Antillais dans l’apparition du nationalisme culturel en Afrique noire francophone,” Les Cahiers d’études africaines 32:127 (1992): 375–408; Pap Ndiaye, “Présence Africaine avant ‘Présence Africaine.’ La subjectivation politique noire en France dans l’entre-deuxguerres,” Gradhiva, 10 (2009): 64–79. Hakim Adi’s chapter on Du Boisian PanAfricanism is an exception here. He briefly elaborates on the domestic implications of the Belgium and French sessions. I build upon his analysis: Hakim Adi, Pan Africanism: A History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 57–63. James Weldon Johnson to Carl Murphy, February 4, 1919, NAACP Administrative Subject File, Pan-African Congress Nov. 9, 1918–April 1919, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. For further insight into Clemenceau’s attitude toward Wilson and the United States, see Margaret MacMillan’s Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: J. Murray, 2001); Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 167–193.

Black Is a Country, n’est-ce pas?

21

hands of soldiers.19 Diagne, alongside Candace, René-Boisneuf and Lagrosillière, had been placing direct pressure upon the French authorities to forcefully condemn such incidents as direct infringements of French sovereignty. The NAACP Board of Directors belatedly approved funding for Du Bois’s Pan African Congress on the condition that he carried it out in tandem with his research on black troops.20 In order to justify this expenditure, the NAACP published a manifesto in the Crisis entitled “The Future of Africa.” As Du Bois had done in an earlier article in the Atlantic Weekly, the NAACP article firmly linked the roots of the war to the European powers’ “lust for conquest and exploitation of the native [African] population.”21 The preamble was followed by an article drafted by Du Bois about the need to allow African indigenous populations the right to controlled self-determination. While he accepted that “the principle of self-determination which has been recognized as fundamental by the Allies cannot be wholly applied to semi-civilized peoples . . . it can be partially applied.”22 Du Bois’s vision of the partial application of selfdetermination involved the oversight of those German-educated Africans who were “Chiefs and intelligent,” the “twelve million civilized Negroes of the United States,” officials from the independent black states such as Haiti and Liberia and representatives of the “educated classes” from within the British, French and Portuguese nations.23 The NAACP executive board clearly stated its agreement with Du Bois’s position, notably positioning the organization as among the “colored and white leaders of liberal thought” in implicit contrast with the indigenous Africans whose fate they hope to decide.24 Despite the initial positive reception, in Du Bois’s absence from America, this enthusiasm quickly cooled. Responding to concerns that NAACP membership dues were being spent overseas while domestic white supremacy intensified and while the women’s suffrage movement required so much energy, the executive board took pains to couch the 19

20

21 22 23 24

Yves Nouailhat, Les Américains à Nantes et à Saint-Nazaire, 1917–1919 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1972), 201; Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 15. NAACP Board of Director Minutes concerning W. E. B. Du Bois’s trip to France, February 10, 1919, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Future of Africa,” Crisis, 17: 3 (January 1919): 119. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Future of Africa,” 119. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Future of Africa,” 119. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Future of Africa,” 120.

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Congress in terms of the domestic fight for equality.25 NAACP field secretary James Weldon Johnson stated: “the association is primarily interested in assuring the Negro here . . . the freedom . . . every American is entitled. We are interested in African democracy because that too means the liberation of Negroes and the liberation of the Negro in the public mind.”26 At the root of this criticism, however, was the anxiety that Du Bois’s attempts to construct a Pan-African identity would irrevocably link African Americans to black “primitivism.” Such fears were grounded in the concern that identification with Africans would perpetuate stereotypes of black cultural inferiority within America.27 Given that contemporary US and European representations of Africa emphasized the backwardness of the natives, these anxieties were justifiable.28 Du Bois, Diagne and Candace were not impervious to these issues. A memorandum published in the Crisis outlined the organizing committee’s two aims. The first was to claim serious consideration for the rights of black people and to suppress all negotiations which failed to take into account the desires of the Africans themselves. The second was to unify all those of African descent “without diminishing their national loyalties and to inspire them to work together to defend their rights and develop their culture.”29 Viewed in tandem, these goals are very telling. Not only did they speak directly to the Paris Peace Conference’s emphasis upon national sovereignty but they also emphasized existing desires to prove civilizational parity with whites within national frameworks. Du Bois boasted that the fifty-seven 25

26

27

28

29

Mary White Ovington to W. E. B. Du Bois, February 11, 1919, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; “African and the World Democracy: A Report,” Crisis, 17:4 (February 1919), 173–176; John Murphy, “N.A.A.C.P. Head Asks Internationalization of Africa, Convention of Negroes to Meet in Paris, During Peace Conference Primarily Interested In Democracy Here,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 20, 1918, 1; “Africa for Africans,” Evening Transcript, December 21, 1918. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. James Weldon Johnson quoted in John Murphy, “N.A.A.C.P. Head Asks Internationalization of Africa,” 1. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 92. On racial stereotypes in France at this moment, see Dana S. Hale, “French Images of Race on Product Trademarks during the Third Republic” in Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (eds.), The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 131–146; Dana S. Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized Peoples, 1886–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Joe Lunn, “Les Races Guerrières’: Racial Preconceptions in the French Military about West African Soldiers during the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History, 34:4 (October 1999): 517–536. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Memorandum to M. Diagne and others on a Pan-African congress to be held in Paris in February, 1919,” Crisis, 17:5 (1919), 224–225.

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23

delegates who attended the Pan-African Congress represented communities from the British, French and Spanish colonies, as well as the independent nations of Haiti and Liberia. This representation was theoretical at best, as all those in attendance were products of colonial and educational privilege that was entirely inaccessible for the majority of black people across the diaspora. The wider black community and most pertinently, those indigenous peoples that the Congress claimed to speak for such as those from the old German colonies, were not represented by a single delegate. Not one came from Belgium’s colonies and Portugal sent the white colonial administrator Alfredo Augusto Freire de Andrade.

1.3 the first pan-african congress and its aftermath The first order of business at the Congress was the official establishment of a Pan-African Association. Blaise Diagne was named President, Du Bois the Secretary and Ida Gibbs Hunt became the Assistant Secretary. Diagne set the tone of the Congress in his opening speech. Arguing that blacks of French, American and British nationality who had assimilated were far more advanced than indigenous and “inherently backwards” Africans, he advocated a program of tutelage by more civilized leaders.30 He went so far as to suggest that the real value of the Pan-African Congress lay in its open recognition of the African race’s backwardness in contrast to the “genius of evolution” that was the gift of other races.31 In this articulation of the situation, the decision to remove Germany’s colonies from its possession was imperative, not because the indigenous peoples were entitled to selfdetermination but because the style of German colonial governance “was contrary to all human feeling and to the right to life which belongs to all men.”32 France, Diagne maintained, stood in stark contrast, as it offered all of its citizens the rights that they deserved. This connection between the rights of the male individual and state citizenship was a strong theme in his speech as he emphasized repeatedly that “[e]ach one of us who has come here is guided by the most genuine loyalty to the nation from which they have come.”33 In such a gendered understanding of citizenship, the First World

30

31 32 33

Discours inaugural de M. Diagne au congrès pan-africain les 19-20-21 février 1919, 4, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Discours inaugural de M. Diagne au congrès pan-africain les 19-20-21 février 1919, 4. Discours inaugural de M. Diagne au congrès pan-africain les 19-20-21 février 1919, 1. Discours inaugural de M. Diagne au congrès pan-africain les 19-20-21 février 1919, 1.

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War had proved a wonderful opportunity for black men to prove their loyalty through patriotic sacrifice.34 Echoing earlier African American hopes that participation in the war would finally allow them to be seen as true American citizens, Diagne expounded upon the “fraternité” of mankind that been demonstrated by the war. This “fraternité” would make the “better evolved” races of the world more likely to treat the “backward blacks” with the generous treatment their moral, social and physical condition required. The Peace Conference of 1919 was the perfect moment to ask the Allied powers to make a commitment to remedying this backwardness. The French delegates further confirmed Diagne’s conflation of nationality, civilization and rights, with Candace, René-Boiseneuf and Lagrosillière, testifying to their positive experiences under the French system.35 Their positions, as well as Diagne’s speech, should not be understood as uncritical declarations of loyalty to France. To the contrary, they were an extension of the political lobbying the men had been undertaking in the French Chamber in an attempt to reconfigure the status of French colonial subjects by pressing the connections between the performance of patriotic duties and access to citizenship rights.36 Essentially, these men were pushing for an understanding of citizenship that gave greater weight to the duties of the citizen than to his civilizational attainment. This argument carried more weight in French popular and journalistic opinion than it did in the United States as many government officials openly admitted that France’s success in the war had drawn much from the colonies both in terms of manpower and raw materials.37 Diagne himself had seen it bear fruit: before agreeing to aid in the conscription of Senegalese troops for the French forces in World War I, he had stipulated that all of the male natives of the Senegalese Quatres Communes be granted full citizenship status – including voting rights – in return for their patriotic sacrifice. As a result, the so-called Blaise Diagne Laws had been passed in the form of the French Citizenship Law of 1916.38 Nonetheless, in privileging nationality over race, Diagne and the others were effectively working at crosspurposes to Du Bois’s original vision of a transnational platform. Their 34 35 36

37

38

Discours inaugural de M. Diagne au congrès pan-africain les 19-20-21 février 1919, 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Pan-African Congress,” Crisis, 17:6 (June 1919), 271. Iba Der Thiam, Le Sénégal dans la guerre 14-18 ou le prix du combat pour l’égalité (Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions africaines du Sénégal, 1992), 42–43. Claude Liauzu, Aux origines des tiers-mondes (Paris: Harmattan, 1982); Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation State: Négritude & Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 51. Alfred Stepan, “Stateness, Democracy, and Respect: Senegal in Comparative Perspective”; in Mamadou Diouf (ed.), Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 215.

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outlook was predicated upon an imperial political consciousness that only overlapped with a broader diasporic one where it related to French territories. Notably, this outlook was predicated upon a male-oriented understanding of citizenship. Patriotic sacrifice was the domain of men rather than women (despite the latter’s sacrifices on both the home front and as medical support). This elision of women from the equation of duties for rights did not go unnoticed by the few women delegates in attendance: African American nurse and activist Addie Hunton urged the delegates to remember the “importance of women in the world’s reconstruction and regeneration.”39 She was, however, largely ignored by her male colleagues. Du Bois was careful to relay back to the NAACP and the Crisis a view of the Congress that both pandered to membership concerns about the efficacy of international activism and stressed the civilizational fitness of the participants. Accounts of the delegates’ speeches emphasized their critique of American race relations and, particularly in the case of the francophone politicians, emphasized their high positions within the European government. Gratien Candace, Du Bois reported, had declared the racial situation in the United States “a matter for special deprecation” while the “two other deputies from the French West Indies, M. Lagrosillière and M. RenéBoisneuf“ had “expressed their inability to understand how Americans could fail to treat as equals those who in common with themselves were giving their lives for democracy and justice.”40 This gave the impression that recognition of the American domestic situation and possible strategies for amelioration was one of the main concerns of the Congress.41 While the United States was heavily criticized for its racial problems, no one advocated intervention in order to remedy them.42 By clothing his report in the utopian language that Wilson had connected to the Peace Conference, Du Bois emphasized expressions of black solidarity and ignored the content of the Congress discussions. In short, he sought to convince his readership that the Congress had been a worthwhile investment for the NAACP. In reality, the resolutions that the Pan-African Congress arrived at were focused, as Du Bois’s draft platform had been, on African colonial conditions.

39

40 41 42

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Pan-African Congress,” 272; Adele Logan Alexander, “Introduction” in Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson, Two Colored Women With the American Expeditionary Forces (New York: Brooklyn Eagle Press, 1920), xxii. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Pan-African Congress,” Crisis, 17:6 (April 1919), 271. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Editorial,” Crisis, 17:6, 1919, 267; “The Pan-African Congress,” 271. Discours inaugural de M. Diagne au congrès pan-africain les 19-20-21 février 1919; Alfredo Augusto Freire de Andrade, Discours de M. Andrade, February 1919, 2; W. E. B. Du Bois “The Pan-African Congress,” 271–274.

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It was strongly urged that there should be no imposition of culture or religion on African peoples except for those cases where existing practices were directly contradictory to the best-established principles of civilization.43 That is to say, the litmus test for access to self-determination lay in the ability of black peoples to emulate successfully Western (European, implicitly French) culture. This placed the burden on the trustee powers to implement an education system for indigenous Africans to compensate for their perceived backwardness. Overwhelmingly, the Pan-African Resolutions maintained a sharp distinction between indigenous Africans and members of the black diaspora living in Western countries. Those African American thinkers who had been anxious that the Congress would link them irrevocably to the primitivism of Africans need not have been concerned. The entire content of the Resolutions seemed designed as a poignant reminder that being African did not automatically equate to cultural and intellectual inferiority.44 Moreover, the claim to civilization should be read in direct relation to the francophone delegates’ understanding of the complex relationship between civilizational attainment and citizenship status under French law. Many other groups made this claim to the imperial powers present in Paris. From the delegates of the Pan-African Congress to Chinese nationalists and Algerian indigènes, those seeking the rights Wilson had espoused stressed their attainment of civilization and strongly supported the republican conception of sovereignty of a people as the basis of representative rights.45 In the end, the mandate system established by the League of Nations established self-determination as a legislative expression of the civilizing mission.46 The guarantee that the imperial powers gifted with this “sacred trust of civilization” would cultivate actively the capacity for self-determination in their mandated territories theoretically lay in the League of Nations’ right to intervention.47 But such 43 44

45

46

47

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Pan-African Congress,” 272. This was certainly the way that they were editorialized in the Chicago Defender, which ran a piece stating that the importance of the resolutions was in “the hope that the peace conference would consider them . . . the desires and demands of enlightened colored men”: “Col. Roscoe Simmons Tells Main Points of the Pan-African Conference,” Chicago Defender, May 24, 1919, 20. Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 154. Susan Pedersen, The Guardians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2–17, 107–112; Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 174–175. Covenant of the League of Nations,” Part 1, article 22 of the Treaty of Versailles, in Lawrence Martin, The Treaties of the Peace, vol. 1 (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1924), 19.

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a guarantee was meaningless in the face of the acknowledged right of each nation to sovereignty.48 The implications of this tension were subsumed by a Western consensus in the correlation between civilizational attainment and the right to self-determine. In that sense, the Pan-African Congress Resolutions aligned with the moment.49 Even American publications found nothing to criticize in the propositions of the Congress. The New York Herald editorialized: “There is nothing unreasonable in the program. . . . It calls upon the Allied and Associated Powers to draw up an international code of law for the protections of the nations of Africa, and to . . . further the racial, political and economic interests of the natives.”50 Maurice Delafosse, colonial administrator, Professor at the École des langues orientales and the École colonial, agreed with this view. In a supplement to the French colonial Bulletin du Comité de l’Afrique française, Delafosse was at pains to make clear that the Congress had proposed conditions that – if interpreted correctly – were aligned with those that the most efficient (French) colonial administrators had already implemented.51 All the Congress delegates were asking for, Delafosse wrote, was simply the guarantee “of equality in each of their respective nations or on the part of each of the states to which they belong.”52 Phrased like this, the resolutions seemed eminently reasonable and, Delafosse was at pains to point out, emphasized the criticism of the American treatment of its black community, reinforcing the impression Diagne had given of France as a standard-bearer for equality.53 This result apparently gave great satisfaction to the French government, to the extent that when Du Bois sent the French Minister for War the Congress Resolutions, he wrote back directly, thanking him for his letter.54 While such a response was symbolic at best, it demonstrated a marked difference between French and American 48

49

50

51

52 53 54

The same can be said of the bilateral minority rights treaties, which rested on the guarantee of intervention by the League of Nations. “Le Congrès panafricain,” Le Petit Parisien, February 22, 1919, 3; “Rights of Coloured Races,” The Times, Monday, February 24, 1919, 9; “Pan-African Charter,” The Observer, February 23, 1919, 10; “Pan-African Congress, Negro Delegates in Paris,” Manchester Guardian, February 24, 1919, 4. “The Pan-African Congress,” New York Herald, February 24, 1919: 2. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Maurice Delafosse, “Le Congrès panafricain,” Renseignements Coloniaux (Bulletin du Comité de l’Afrique française), 3–4 (March–April 1919), 53–59. Maurice Delafosse, “Le Congrès panafricain,” 55. Maurice Delafosse, “Le Congrès panafricain,” 55. France, Ministère de la guerre, to W. E. B. Du Bois, February 26, 1919, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers.

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attitudes to the Congress. Du Bois’s attempts to share the Resolutions with the American delegation were largely unsuccessful. Where they did capture American attention was in the Military Intelligence Division. The Division had spent the war years reporting on the possible domestic problems that could come from African American perceptions of the French as having better race relations.55 Their concern was that the Congress would confirm this notion. A worried “African expert” reiterated the view stated in the circulaire Linard – namely, that “if 10% of the population of France were colored . . . race distinctions and feelings would be more pronounced.”56 This would be inevitable because “French girls show[ed] a lack of discrimination to the point of embarrassment” when it came to troops of color. Eventually, the result would be “an increasing number of mulattoes” that the French people could hardly ignore.57 Further evidence of the so-called French indulgence of le noir appeared soon after the Congress when white American soldiers’ attacks upon Antillean students in Saint Nazaire and Nice restarted debates around the circulaire Linard, this time in Chamber of Deputies. René-Boisneuf forcefully demanded the punishment of those been behind the attacks because the violence impugned the very essence of the French nation. Pitting conceptions of the American republic against that of the French, he argued, “the prestige of the French white race is the product not of brutality but of the superiority of their conception of human rights (du droit humain) and of their ideal of justice, of generosity and fraternity.”58 René-Boisneuf’s articulation of French Republican identity was characterized by a real fear that US race relations might spread to France. It was not, however, a declaration of solidarity with his African American counterparts. To the contrary, despite his attendance at Du Bois’s Pan-African Congress months earlier, he made it very clear that the “Americans could have amongst themselves such relations as they deem necessary” as that was their sovereign right.59 The chamber exploded with applause and 55

56

57 58

59

See Correspondence of the Military Intelligence Division, “Negro Subversion,” M1440, RG 165, Reel 1, NACP. Harry Worley to Woodrow Wilson, April 5, 1919, Woodrow Wilson Papers, Series VB, Box 26, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress quoted in full in Worley H., Clarence G. Contee, “The Worley Report on the Pan-African Congress of 1919,” The Journal of Negro History, 55:2 (April 1970): 142. Harry Worley to Woodrow Wilson, 141, 142. Journal officiel de la République Française, Débats Parlementaires, Chambre de députés, 2e séance, 1919/07/05, 3732. Journal officiel de la République Française, Débats Parlementaires Chambre de députés, 2e séance, 1919/07/05, 3731.

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voted unanimously to uphold the rights of man and citizen in a condemnation of racism and racist outbursts. The French Chamber could afford this magnanimous approach to race as, by June 1919, when the peace treaty was finally signed, the many hundreds of thousands of colonial laborers who had been brought to France during the war had been repatriated. Only a few thousand remained in mainland France.60

1.4 postwar disenchantment and the assertion of african diasporic bonds By June 1919, many of the black troops who had served in France had returned to the United States. The ensuing racial violence made many among the African American community feel that the opportunities presented by the Paris Peace Conference had disappeared. As James Weldon Johnson stated: “One by one the idealistic war dreams are vanishing, and, as they vanish the solid outlines of the old, pre-war conditions loom up clearer and clearer.”61 In a country where the Ku Klux Klan had reinvented itself as the champion of white civilization, black hopes for equality seemed frail at best. White southerners directly connected this increased racial violence to black attempts to overcome their status as second-class citizens and Worley’s concerns about the French influence on blacks became common. After the infamous and particularly violent Hartfield lynching, Mississippi Governor Bilbo blamed the French for the racial violence, arguing that they had ruined the returning black soldiers with ideas of equality.62 The democratic America that the African Americans had “closed ranks” for during the war seemed not to exist. In the words of Challenge Magazine, “The ‘German Hun’ is beaten, but the world is made no safer for democracy. Humanity has been defended, but lifted no higher.”63 The question, then, was how to lift humanity a little 60

61

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Mary Lewis, “Une théorie raciale des valeurs? Démobilisation des travailleurs immigrés et mobilisation des stéréotypes à la fin de la Grande Guerre” in Hervé Le Bras (ed.), L’Invention des populations: biologie, idéologie et politique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000), 223–240. James Weldon Johnson, “Views and Reviews: Vanishing War Dreams,” New York Age, June 7, 1919, 4. “Gov Bilbo Blames French Reception and Negro Press, Admits It Is Practically Impossible to Prevent Rapist Lynching,” Jones County News, July 8, 1919, 1. “American Huns,” Challenge Magazine (August 1919) in William Katz (ed.), The American Negro: His History and Literature (New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1968), 146.

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higher and, specifically for African Americans, how to win equal recognition within the context of American democracy.64 If the question was unanimously heralded as relevant, the answer was hotly contested. The African American leadership stood divided by furious passions with no obvious path forward. Growing in popularity, Marcus Garvey offered his diasporic politics as a solution and counterpart to Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism. Garvey had conceived of the Paris Peace Conference as a choice between peace or war, between “abolishing racial discrimination” or maintaining colonial rule.65 Unhappy with the Mandates clause the Allies agreed upon, the first UNIA international convention offered an alternate way of applying the Wilsonian vision of self-determination. “We are assembled here tonight as the descendants of a suffering people and we are also assembled as a people who are determined to suffer no longer,” Garvey told a capacity crowd at Madison Square Garden on August 3, 1920. “If Europe is for the white man . . . then, in the name of God, Africa shall be for the black peoples of the world.” Delegates hailing from the United States, the Caribbean and parts of Africa crafted a charter, the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, to “guide and govern the destiny of four hundred million Negroes.” To great acclaim, Garvey was elected Provisional President of Africa.66 This firmly established the idea that UNIA itself was intended to be a government in exile from the land it should be governing. Icons and symbols of nationhood – anthem, military, flag – were crafted. This endeavor was not just about a nation-state organization but the establishment of a “vast Negro empire.”67 Garvey was conceiving of rights in terms of belonging to a geographically demarcated nation-state that was most properly constituted by a homogenous population.68 64

65

66

67

68

H. H. Harrison, “The Two Negro Radicalisms (1919)” in T. McCarthy and J. McMillan (eds.), The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition (New York: The New Press, 2003), 329–332. “Editorial,” November 30, 1918, in Robert Hill (ed.), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983–2011), 302. “Report of Madison Square Garden Meeting, 3 August 1920” in Robert Hill (ed.), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983–2011): 497–508. “Speech by Garvey,” April 5, 1919, in Robert Hill (ed.), The Marcus Garvey Papers, vol. 1, 397. Scholarship on Garvey can be separated into studies of Garvey himself, studies which chart the activities of the organization in various locales throughout the African diaspora and those which map out the various strands of the so-called “New Negro” moment. Here I add to this literature by positioning Garvey’s thinking and the ideology underpinning UNIA in terms of broader conversations between African Americans and

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In reaction to what Garvey’s UNIA was doing and as the continuation of the civilizational rhetoric of the Pan-African resolutions, Du Bois utilized his role as Crisis editor-in-chief to advocate the need to demonstrate black fitness for Western citizenship through the production of literature and art: the cultural markers of civilization. Working with fellow NAACP members Jessie Fauset and James Weldon Johnson, he established a Crisis literary section and directed NAACP funds to be used to encourage and support emerging black scholars and writers. This approach converged with the opinions of men such as the first black Rhodes scholar Alain Locke, who was championing young black writers such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Du Bois, Locke, Johnson and Fauset’s logic originally sprang from their conception of the relationship between mental capacity and access to rights, something Johnson was to make clear later in his 1922 compilation of African American poetry with the argument that “nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.”69 This “elitist” approach alienated other activists such as the left-wing poet Claude McKay and the labor organizer, Chandler Owen, who were quick to note that such an agenda effectively excluded the majority of the black population – uneducated workers – from participating in their own emancipation.70 It was this sense of an elitist and directed literary movement that led historian David Levering Lewis to brand the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance “as a somewhat forced phenomenon” reacting to the racial chauvinism of Garvey and the allure of Marxist promises (explored in Chapter 2).71 Nevertheless, the thinking of Johnson

69

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francophone blacks about the relationship between nation and race. See Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959); Amy Jacques Garvey, Garvey and Garveyism (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1970); Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); Winston James, Hold Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia (London Verso, 1998); Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Colin Grant, Negro with A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How A Jamaican Activist Created A Mass Movement and Changed Global Mass Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). James W. Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 3. A. Philip Randolph, “W. E. B. Du Bois,” Messenger (March 1919), 21–22. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), xvi.

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and Du Bois among others directly correlated with the ideas around civilizational achievement and access to rights that were contemporaneously being enshrined into international law with the creation of the Mandates Commission by the League of Nations. These ideas were also a direct counter to the rise of a culture of race thinking popularized by eugenicist thinkers such as Madison Grant and his protégé Lothrop Stoddard, which firmly categorized all nonwhite races as lower in intelligence than whites.72 Further confirmation of the validity of pursuing a literary movement came in the form of the announcement of the 1921 Prix Goncourt.73 For the first time in the prestigious literary prize’s history, it had been awarded to a black man, René Maran, for his book Batouala. Born in Martinique, Maran was a French citizen who occupied a post in the colonial administration of the French Equatorial African colony of Ubangi-Shari.74 Batouala was a fictionalized tale about an African tribal chief from that colony. In the African American literary community, Maran took on the status of an icon in those publications associated with the creation of a “New Negro” identity. Those fluent in French, such as Crisis editor Jessie Fauset and Alain Locke, read it immediately and recommended it to friends. Maran’s photograph graced the front cover of the Crisis, several editions featured reviews of the book and, when it was translated into English in 1922, this merited a two-page advertisement of Maran’s achievements.75 Batouala’s reception evidenced the power of literary excellence in demonstrating that being cultured was not determined by race. Notably, however, this avenue for activism seemed to be open only to black male thinkers, not to women. Jessie Fauset, for example, felt forced to decline the opportunity to translate it from the original French because the tribal themes of the novel meant she would never “be considered 72

73

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Mattew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 7. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of the Light (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 48, 54; Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in Paris, 1840–1980 (Chicago: Illini Press, 1993), 69. On the use of educated black Antilleans as colonial administrators, see Henri Brunschwig, Noirs et blancs dans l’Afrique noire francaise ou comment le colonisé devient colonisateur, 1870–1914 (Paris: Flammarion, 1983). The Ubangi-Shari or Oubangui-Chari was a French colony that would become the Central African Republic in 1958. Front Cover, “Painting of René Maran by Albert Smith,” Crisis, 24:1 (May 1922): 1; Jessie Fauset, “The Looking Glass,” Crisis, 24:1 (May 1922): 34; “The Whole World Is Reading It,” Crisis, 24:6 (October 1922), 277; Jessie Fauset, “Book Review: Batouala by René Maran,” 23:5 (March 1922), 208–209. Jessie Fauset, “‘Batouala’ is Translated: Book Review of Batouala by René Maran,” Crisis, 24:5 (September 1922), 218–219.

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‘respectable’ again” if she did.76 Fauset’s sensitivity to the question of respectability is perhaps not representative but her reluctance does point to the way that gender could differentiate participation in this elite cultural activism. Insofar as the award of the Prix Goncourt was concerned, it also confirmed for African Americans the idea that France was free of the problems of racial discrimination. This was ironic, given that the preface to Batouala was a damning critique of the French colonial practice in Equatorial Africa. Unsurprisingly, the French reception of the book was not quite so celebratory. Although certain French reviewers received Batouala as evidence of anti-colonial activism intended to stir up revolt in Africa through black international solidarity, Maran saw himself as a reformer, rather than a revolutionary; a French citizen practicing “civic republicanism” rather than an African.77 His preface was an affirmation of France (la patrie) and French values and a declaration of loyalty to the founding principles of the French Republic. The literary judges of the Prix Goncourt obviously agreed but colonial commentators such as Maurice Delafosse did not. Several books – fictional and anthropological – purporting to show the truth about indigenous Africans were published to counter Batouala in the years that followed.78 Why they took such exception to Maran’s work when he had so clearly framed it as an act of loyalty is best explained by the example of a book published that same year by the poet and ethnographer Blaise Cendrars, Anthologie nègre.79 A collection of African tales that both emphasized African primitivism and framed les nègres as artefacts, Anthologie nègre would come to be considered one of the first examples of the Parisian vogue nègre.80 It was a deliberate attempt to keep understandings of Africa locked in a static past at a moment when the evidence of black modernity manifested in Paris through cultural

76

77

78

79 80

Jessie Fauset to Joel Spingarn, January 25, 1922, Joel Spingarn Collection, New York Public Library, quoted in Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 58. G. Barthémey, “Batouala,” Les Annales Coloniales, 24:1 (January 2, 1923); Iheanachor Egonu, “Le Prix Goncourt et la ‘querelle de Batouala,’” Research in African Literatures, 11:4 (Winter 1980): 530; on his self-positioning, see Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation State, 163–164; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 69–98. See, for example, René Trautmann, Au pays de Batouala: noirs et blancs de l’Afrique (Paris: Payot, 1922); Gaston Joseph, Koffi, roman vrai d’un noir (Paris: Editions du Monde Nouveau, 1922). Blaise Cendrars, Anthologie nègre (Paris: Editions de la Sirene, 1921). Martin Steins, Blaise Cendrars: bilans nègres (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1977), 10.

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expression such as jazz, African art and books, notably Batouala.81 It was also emblematic of contemporary representations of Africa. The utility of these representations was all too obvious in the context of colonial administration: men such as Delafosse, for example, could characterize African backwardness as the rationale for colonialism. In this light, the specter of a black, inescapably modern and civilized man, not only speaking for himself but framing this act as one of French citizenship was jarring.

1.5 the second pan-african congress Nevertheless, Maran’s understanding of himself as a French man practicing French republican virtues resonated with the thinking underlying Du Bois’s assimilationist brand of Pan-Africanist organizing. As we have seen, the 1919 Pan-African Congress sought to assert black attainment of Western civilization as demonstrative of their fitness for political rights such as the right to self-determination. Du Bois would use a similar rhetoric when, that same year, he successfully urged the NAACP Board to fund a second PanAfrican Congress.82 Once again, this Congress was designed to advocate for black involvement in the League of Nations on the basis of its delegates’ status as “civilized men,” here defined in terms of intelligence and education.83 Unlike the 1919 Congress, the 1921 event was arranged so that the three sessions of the Congress would be held in different locations – London, Brussels and Paris. This was partly to allow for greater attendance and partly an effort by Du Bois to avoid the domestic politics of Diagne and Candace. Scholars have, on the whole, paid little heed to this 1921 Congress. Those who have mentioned it have focused upon the London session because it issued a set of eight resolutions, a result suggesting a meeting of minds far more united and radical than would occur in the subsequent sessions in Brussels and Paris.84 However, radical is a relative term, and the second 81 82

83

84

Brent Hayes Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 3. W. E. B. Du Bois, Memorandum to the Board of Directors from the Director of Publications of Research, 1920, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Memorandum from Mary White Ovington to W. E. B. Du Bois, October 25, 1920. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the World, Manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress,” Crisis, 23:1 (November 1921): 5. There are two key exceptions: David Levering Lewis’s biography of Du Bois and Hakim Adi’s Pan-Africanism: A History. In Lewis’s case, he frames the Congress in terms of the longer intellectual and activist trajectory of Du Bois. Adi’s work offers a more comprehensive view of the politics of the participants. Here, I build upon both their works by positioning the conference in terms of approaches to race and rights between the United States, the French Third Republic and the League of Nations: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The

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two sessions warrant deeper examination in tandem with the London session. Doing so is revealing of the nature of black collaboration across the national borders of France and the United States. The London resolutions included a critique of colonial practices of all the contemporary imperial powers, including the United States. Britain and the United States came in for censure for failing to apply the ideas of civil rights that underpinned their political systems to their colonial populations and peoples of color.85 The second resolution of the document demanded that the right to self-determination be granted on a local level to indigenous populations, in the spirit of 1919 Wilsonianism. However, the authors of the resolutions also included an endorsement of the French republican spirit in regard to its citizens of color: “France alone . . . has sought to place her cultured black citizens in a place of absolute legal and social equality . . . and given them representation in her highest legislature.”86 This appreciation of the recognition that attainment of culture and thus the right to political rights such as representation did not run along racial lines was a key tenet of the document. The very first resolution did not pertain to colonial abuses at all but to the rights of civilized black men asking for the recognition of civilized men as civilized regardless of race or color.87 This theme continued in the petition to the League of Nations also drafted at this session. It laid out three demands. These included the establishment of a special section for black peoples in the International Labor Bureau (to become the International Labor Organisation or ILO), the inclusion of a black man of appropriate character and training in the Mandates commission, and the exertion of the League of Nations’ “moral power” to affirm the equality of races in the eyes of the world. In her articles on the Congress for the Crisis, Jessie Fauset called these resolutions the true realization of “a new and perfect African brotherhood.”88 Fauset’s use of the word “brotherhood” underlined the extent to which many of the participants in this Congress staked their claims to rights in terms of their identity as civilized men, as well hinting at the influence of the French concept of fraternité. She spoke repeatedly of the Pan-African leadership in terms of powerful black men coming together in a “spectacular brotherhood” and made no mention of the role that women might play in this emancipation. Similarly, the

85 87 88

Fight For Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 37–49; Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism, 57–63. 86 W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the World,” 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the World,” 8. W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the World,” 5. Jessie Fauset, “Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress,” Crisis, 23:1 (November 1921): 13.

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resolutions from the London session conjured up a vision of “intelligent . . . educated” men, in ways that excluded the unique nature of black women’s oppression. Neither these resolutions nor Fauset’s Crisis articles reflected the enthusiasm of black women for Du Boisian Pan-Africanism or Fauset’s own position on the contributions of women to the advancement of the race.89 Although in the minority, women were by no means absent from the Second Pan African Congress. We know of at least twelve attendees across the three sessions, a number of whom delivered papers.90 These included the prominent African American activist and representative of the International Council of the Women of the Darker Races, Helen Curtis; the social reformer and co-founder of the NAACP, Florence Kelley; the Belgian colonial reformist and educator, Jeanne Saroléa (née Rogissart); as well as Fauset herself.91 At the London session of the Congress Fauset spoke about the work of women such as the Sierra Leonian activist and education pioneer, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, and Hayford’s niece, the missionary and artist, Kathleen Easmon. In Brussels, Fauset detailed the achievements of “the colored graduates in the United States and the first women who had obtained the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.”92 Prior to the Congress, Fauset had also traveled in the United Kingdom, stopping to give a talk in Glasgow on the important role that American women of color had played in “all the movements for emancipation.” She did not, however, incorporate this thinking into her Crisis articles, instead choosing a celebratory tone that emphasized the achievements of the London session over the disagreements that beleaguered the second and third sessions.93

89

90

91

92 93

On elite African American enthusiasm for Du Boisian Pan-Africanism and internationalist organizing more generally, see Michelle Rief, “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally: The International Agenda of African American Clubwomen, 1880–1940,” Journal of African American History 89:3 (Summer 2004): 211. On the need to understand the gender dynamics of Pan-Africanist activism, see Keisha Blain, Asia Leeds, and Ula Y. Taylor, “Women, Gender Politics, and Pan-Africanism,” Women, Gender and Families of Color, 4: 2 (Fall 2016): 139–145. “110 Delegates to the Pan-African Congress By Country,” Crisis, 23:2 (December 1922): 68–69. Jessie Fauset, “What Europe Thought of the Pan-African Congress,” Crisis, 23:2 (December 1921):66. Jessie Fauset, “Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress,” 13. David Levering Lewis draws heavily on Fauset’s recollections of the Congress in his biography of Du Bois. Despite the fact that Fauset either translated or arranged for translation for Du Bois (through the young African American scholar Rayford W. Logan), Lewis frames her participation in terms of her romantic relationship with Du Bois. He writes that Fauset “was barely able to screen her feelings of amorous worship [for Du Bois] from the readers of

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In contrast to the first session, which had been primarily anglophone in language and attendance, the participants in Brussels and Paris were disproportionately francophone and disproportionately évolués or assimilés such as Diagne and Candace. Despite the concession to the French in the colonial critique of the London resolutions, neither man was impressed by the document, deeming it far too radical. It is important to realize that both men were aware that their participation at the Congress was being closely monitored by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.94 Moreover, they knew too that the Minister firmly believed the Congress to be a front for Garveyism and an advocate of what he referred to as “les tendances germano-bolchévistes” of the NAACP.95 Surveillance reports of the London session had reinforced this belief by suggesting that French blacks had abstained from attending because of supposed Bolshevist tendencies. Belgian publications such as La Dépêche politique also painted the session as a new Bolshevik endeavor led by Marcus Garvey.96 Thus, in just attending the second session in Brussels, Diagne and Candace were risking associating themselves with Garveyite and Bolshevik politics. Diagne took steps to avoid this by publishing an article in two Belgian journals that cast the Pan-African Congress as a battleground between dangerous radicals and patriotic Frenchmen like himself who sought only to uplift the less fortunate of his race. A copy of the article made it into reports to both the French Foreign Minister and the Minister of the Colonies.97 Both men decided it was in their interests to discreetly encourage the efforts of Diagne to suppress “le mouvement nègre” and not to let it pass the boundaries of a legitimate attempt to improve the intellectual and moral status of “la race noire.”98 Diagne took this agenda with him to the Belgian session, and this may account for the reason why most of the speeches erupted into tense arguments. Fauset, for her part, commented

94

95 96

97

98

‘Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress.’” Here, I hope to redirect understandings of Fauset to encompass what I see as a genuine commitment on her part to Du Bois’s vision of Pan-Africanism: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 49. Ministre des Affaires a Ministre des Colonies, 5 Octobre 1921, Service de liason avec les originaires des territoires français d’outre-mer (SLOTFOM), Series 3/84, Centre d’Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (CAOM). Ministre des Affaires a Ministre des Colonies, 5 Octobre 1921, SLOTFOM 3/84, CAOM. This article appears in Robert A. Hill (ed.), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. IX: Africa for the Africans June 1921– December 1922 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 216–217. Blaise Diagne, “Article in La Nation Belge,’ Ministre des Affaires a Ministre des Colonies, 5 Octobre 1921, SLOTFOM 3/84, CAOM. Blaise Diagne, “Article in La Nation Belge,’ Ministre des Affaires a Ministre des Colonies, 5 Octobre 1921, SLOTFOM 3/84, CAOM.

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that Diagne and Candace’s speeches in Brussels offered no substance. Worse still, at the third session in Paris, she believed that Diagne was actively involved in suppressing the contributions of other francophone black participants.99 By the end of the Parisian session, Diagne and Du Bois were no longer speaking. As a result, Candace replaced Diagne as the Pan-African Association’s President. The French Ministers for Foreign Affairs and for the Colonies, meanwhile, were deeply concerned about the cumulative impact that the Pan-African Congresses might have upon the French colonies. All of the Colonial Governors in Africa were asked to launch investigations into the impact of the 1921 Congress upon their peoples.100 Further concerns were raised by the intention to petition the League of Nations.101 The French mandate over former German territories would not go into effect until 1922 and 1923 and French officials were very wary about the kind of controls the League of Nation Mandate Commission might implement. In the end, the French need not have feared the petition from the second Pan-African Congress to the League. Despite being brought to the floor of the Assembly of the League of Nations by the Haitian diplomat to France, Dantès Bellegarde, it had little direct impact. The request that the Commission appoint at least one member of color was discussed: the League’s Secretary-General Sir Eric Drummond’s assistant, Philip Baker, privately recommended that Du Bois be considered but his recommendation came to nothing.102 The ILO did maintain a native affairs research section for some years but it had little effect.103

1.6 the spread of the “american” race problem The relief of the French Foreign Minister and the Minister for the Colonies was short-lived. Less than a year later, a UNIA convention in New York 99

100

101

102 103

Jessie Fauset, “Impressions,” 16. Studies of this second Congress tend to emphasize Fauset and Du Bois’s commentary without giving weight to the pressure of the French Colonial administration. French conflation of Garveyism, Du Boisian Pan-Africanism and Bolshevism has also received little attention. David Levering Lewis, Du Bois, 29–30, 47–49. “Rapport des colonies sur l’état d’esprit des populations indigènes: la répercussion des congrès panafricains de Bruxelles et de Paris (1921)” SLOTFOM 3/84, CAOM. Le Ministre des Pensions, des Primes et des Allocations de Guerre, Chargé d’Intérim du Ministre des Colonies a Monsieur le Président du Conseil, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, 10 Novembre 1921, SLOTFOM 3/84, CAOM. Susan Pedersen, The Guardians, 61. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 2, 45–48.

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would organize a new petition to the League of Nations. In an attempt to achieve the radical goal of “Africa for the Africans,” this petition demanded that the League of Nations grant UNIA control of the Mandates previously in the hands of the Germans.104 In keeping with the spirit of the Mandate clause, the request indicated that UNIA intended to utilize this stewardship to “assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa.”105 What the French made of such a request coming on the heels of the failure to consider a more realistic petition from a group they also thought was Garveyite is unclear. The French Colonial Minister was, however, so concerned by the threat of Garveyism at this time that he called it “his central preoccupation” in directives to colonial governors.106 Perhaps he exaggerated, but nonetheless, this sentiment points to the extent to which the French believed Pan-Africanist movements had the potential to stir up revolution in their colonies, a point that hitherto scholars have not mentioned. It was certainly an issue of minor contention in American-French diplomatic relations as the French believed the Americans were underestimating the great inconvenience the 1922 convention might cause France, England and Italy. The French Ambassador to Washington, M. Jusserand corresponded directly on the issue with Raymond Poincaré, the French President and Foreign Minister. Their concern would prove unwarranted, however, as the UNIA delegation was not even permitted to present the petition for the League’s consideration.107 Garveyism was not the only race-related problem emanating from the United States that Poincaré and his cabinet would be forced to confront. The issue of American racism spreading to France arose again in the summer of 1923, when a growing tourism industry brought Americans – and their racial prejudices – to Paris. Fights between white and black Americans broke out regularly in Montmartre bars and French bartenders hoping to attract American clientele adopted segregationist policies.108 The incident that brought the issue to a head was dubbed by the press l’affaire Montmartre. It involved a Dahomean barrister named Kojo Tovalou

104

105 106

107 108

“Garveyisme: Congres des travailleurs noirs americains,” 1922, SLOTFOM 3/84, CAOM. Marcus, Garvey, “The True Solution of the Negro Problem” (1922), 53. Monsieur le ministre de colonies a monsieur le président de conseil, ministre des affaires étrangères, 12 mai 1922, 2, SLOTFOM 3/84, CAOM. Note de 6 Octobre 1922, 11, SLOTFOM 3/84, CAOM. “Test-Case to Be Brought in Paris after ‘Color-Line’ Row,” New York Herald, August 8, 1923, 1; The Chicago Defender, August 11, 1923.

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Houénou.109 He had served in World War I with the French armed forces until injury forced his honorable discharge. This service had enabled his successful application for the status of citizenship in 1915, a privilege he had previously been denied. Houénou was not just from Dahomey, he also claimed the title of Prince as his mother was the sister of the last King of that region. Neither citizenship nor pretensions to a royal title could protect Houénou from racism, however, and on two occasions in 1923, he was expelled violently from bars at the behest of their American clientele. After the second incident at a club known as Él Garon, Houénou prosecuted the bartender responsible for the assault and urged Diagne and Candace to pressure the French Chamber to take a stand against this epidemic of racial discrimination. The incident was reported in the press as well as being debated in the Chamber of Deputies.110 Poincaré responded with an open letter in which he declared that “the application of French laws requiring equality will be strictly observed . . . all of those who break them, whether foreigners or French, will be punished.”111 The message was clear: French citizenship may not be open to all France’s subjects but those who had it were equal before the law. In New York, this argument over American racism and the staunch defense of the principle of equality of citizenship did not go unnoticed. Du Bois released a statement to the press announcing that Candace had been in the newspapers lately because “of his successful determination in forcing the French government to take a stand on American Negro prejudice.”112 The stand, in reality, was less an indictment of American prejudice than a struggle to maintain what ground had been won for black and colonial rights within the French Third Republic. Undoubtedly Du Bois was aware of this but he was, once again, attempting to foment African American support (and funding) for a 1923 Pan-African Congress. Having seen little tangible return for the first two investments in the project, the NAACP refused to offer more than a minor contribution.113 Compounding this lack of interest were the continued 109

110

111

112 113

Houénou is usually excluded from American-centered histories of Pan-Africanism. The first scholar to bring his activism to light in the French case was J. Ayo Langley. J. Ayo Langley, “Pan-Africanism in Paris, 1924–1936,” Journal of Modern African Studies, 7:1 (April 1969): 69–94. Arrêt de lac 11e chambre, 23 Octobre 1923, Débats à la chambre des députés; “Les incidents entre Américains et gens de couleur,” Le Pétit Parisien, August 12, 1923, 2. “Les français de couleur- une lettre de M. Poincaré,” Le Pétit Parisien, August 18, 1923, 2; “Les français de couleur,” La Lanterne, August 19, 1923, 2. Pan African Congress, ca. 1923. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. The Third Pan African Congress, 1923, 1–2, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers.

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poor relations between Du Bois and the francophone contingent: within the first weeks of planning, Candace resigned from the Pan-African Association.114 This decision was partly in frustration with Du Bois’s overbearing manner and partly the product of the fear that continued participation would result in the French authorities labeling them Garveyites. Unimpressed, Du Bois wrote that the difficulty with the “French Negro group” was that they considered themselves Frenchmen first and Africans second, an accusation that was undeniable.115 As Diagne and Candace eschewed diasporic activism, Prince Kojo Tovalou Houénou began to explore its possibilities. Declaring that his experiences at Él Garon had prompted a racial epiphany, Houénou founded the Ligue universelle pour la défense de la race noire, an organization intended to “develop the bonds of solidarity and universal brotherhood between all members of the black race.” The rationale for such an aim lay in the need to ensure that the principles underpinning the French Republic be applied to all people, regardless of race. Toward such an end, Houénou also established a journal, Les Continents. The editor-in-chief at Les Continents was a white Frenchman, Jean Fangeat. He was aided by René Maran, who had left his post in the colonial administration in the aftermath of the furore over Batouala and come to Paris. The establishment of the Ligue marked a milestone in French colonial agitation: it was the first time a francophone organization had been formed at the intersection of racial and colonial identity. Hitherto, activists had grouped themselves along lines of their status as French colonials or on the basis of their colonial territory of origin.116 From its first issue, Les Continents explicitly framed itself as an instrument for renewing “the great traditions of France of the Rights of Man and Citizen.”117 Such an endeavor, for Les Continents’ editorial team, required nothing short of the expansion of French political freedoms to the colonies and beyond. Part of this project involved bearing witness to the “betrayals” of the French Republican values that were occurring in the 114

115

116

117

Letter from Ida Gibbs Hunt to W. E. B. Du Bois, October 1, 1923; Extract of a letter from the Secretary General, Prof. Béton to Mrs. Ida Gibbs Hunt, September 18, 1923. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Third biennial session of the Pan African Congress, ca. December 1923, 3, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Jennifer Ann Boittin, “Among Them Complicit? Life and Politics in France’s Black Communities, 1919-1939” in Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken (ed.), Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 65. René Maran, “Réflexions,” Les Continents, 1 (1923):1.

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colonies.118 Equally important was the demonstration of black capacity for cultural achievement along Western lines. In consequence, the journal was eager to incorporate examples of the kind of African American literary work Du Bois and Alain Locke were encouraging in Harlem.119 This connection between black literary luminaries in New York and Paris would also lead to a partnership of sorts between Les Continents and Opportunity. Opportunity was an African American journal that had been founded only months before Les Continents by the National Urban League. Originally edited by Charles S. Johnson, the journal quickly became a proponent of the literary “New Negro” movement initially championed by the Crisis. With this literary movement came a turn toward the black diaspora. For all three journals, Opportunity, Les Continents and the Crisis, advertising black literary achievement across national boundaries was about demonstrating that race did not correlate with capacity. René Maran, after winning the Prix Goncourt, was a regular reference point from Opportunity’s inaugural issue onward.120 His prominence in the magazine would be cemented by an exchange of open letters between Locke and Maran published in both Les Continents and Opportunity in June 1923.

1.7 tensions between national belonging and international black solidarity An article by Locke published in Opportunity in praise of French treatment of their black soldiers prompted the exchange.121 Focusing on the black military presence on the Rhine which had begun in 1919, Locke pointed to the ways in which France did not just exploit its black men as soldiers but saw them as citizens, equal participants in social relations.122 Locke’s comments were the product of African American collective memories of the wartime experience, a recollection reinforced by contact with francophone blacks such as Diagne and Candace and by the French governmental responses to the circulaire Linard. When Maran read this

118

119 120

121 122

F. Gouttenoire de Toury, “Lutter pour les indigenes de nos colonies, c’est travailler pour la civilisation,” Les Continents, 8 (September 1924): 1. W. E. B. Du Bois to René Maran, August 25, 1924. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Alain Locke, “The Colonial Literature of France,” Opportunity, 1 (November 1923): 331; “More about René Maran,” Opportunity, 1 (January 1923): 30; Countee Cullen, “The Dance of Love,” Opportunity, 1 (April 1923): 23. Alain Locke, “Black Watch on the Rhine,” Opportunity, 2 (January 1924), 8. Alain Locke, “Black Watch on the Rhine,” Opportunity, 2 (January 1924), 8.

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article, he took umbrage and wrote an open letter in response. Locke replied in kind. The entire exchange – which was published in both Les Continents and Opportunity – has been the subject of extensive analysis elsewhere.123 It is worth revisiting here, however, for the insight it gives into each man’s conception of citizenship and the ways in which they thought this might be achieved. In elaborating this, I will place their discussion within the broader context of reactions to the black soldiers on the Rhine. Maran’s key criticism of Locke’s first article was its failure to expose the gap between rhetoric and reality inherent in French Republican practice vis-à-vis its colonial subjects and citizens.124 As Brent Hayes Edwards has argued, this was Maran’s way of refusing to allow Locke to use the experiences of non-American blacks in the services of his domestic activism.125 Locke was quick to acknowledge this, writing that he had not intended to discuss French policy in Africa but to contrast “this treatment of the man of color in the armies of France with that of our own American army.”126 His timing was, however, awry. From 1919 onward, German newspaper headlines had portrayed the tirailleurs sénégalais comprising part of the French presence in the Rhine in terms of a Schwarze Schmach (black horror) or Schwarze Schande (black disgrace). Often accompanying these reports were graphic illustrations of Africans raping white German women.127 The German representation of the tirailleurs as rapists depicted the service of black soldiers not in terms of patriotism – as Locke and Maran’s writing did – but in terms of unbridled and primitive masculinity, a masculinity unfit for citizenship rights. It was an effective tactic. While the German press elicited no official American governmental response, they still augmented feelings of racial 123

124

125 126 127

Brent Hayes Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 104–110; Chidi Ikonné, “René Maran and the New Negro” in Cary D. Wintz (ed.), Analysis and Assessment, 1940–1979 (New York: Garland, 1996), 182–197. René Maran, “Lettre ouverte au professeur Alain-Leroy Locke,” Les Continents, 1:3 (June 15, 1924), 1, reprinted in Opportunity as “To Professor Alain LeRoy Locke . . ., ” Opportunity, 21 (September 1924), 261–263. Brent Hayes Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 107. Locke, “Dear Friend and Kinsman,” Opportunity, 2 (September 1924): 262. For a discussion of media representations inside Germany, see Christian Koller, Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt: die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914– 1930) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001);Iris Wigger, “‘Black Shame’ – The Campaign against ‘Racial Degeneration’ and Female Degradation in Interwar Europe,” Race & Class 51:3 (2010): 38.

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hatred and fears about miscegenation among Americans in the United States. A case in point was the February 1921 rally against the black French presence in the Rhine which attracted 10,000 protesters to Madison Square Garden.128 As Claude McKay wrote in the same journal as Locke’s initial letter, “[h]owever splendid the gesture of Republican France towards colored people, her use of black troops in Germany . . . should meet with nothing less than condemnation from the advanced section of Negroes. The propaganda that Negroes need to put over in Germany is not black troops with bayonets.”129 Maran, who had probably also read McKay’s piece, agreed with this sentiment, calling for “Europeans, Asiatics, Negroes” of like mind to collaborate in the collection of evidence against all racist views of blackness.130 Despite Locke’s distinction between national belonging and racial solidarity in his exchange with Maran, other pieces he wrote at the same time privileged black international solidarity over national affiliation. In an article entitled “Apropos of Africa,” he articulated an understanding of the relationship between rights and group belonging heavily influenced by the ideas around minority protection embedded in the League of Nations and the Mandate Commission: “[M]inorities have as their best protection today the court of world opinion. . . . [W]e must develop the race mind and race interests on an international scale. For that reason we should be most vitally interested in the idea of the League of Nations and all kindred movements.”131 In calling for this minority identity and affirming faith in “the court of world opinion,” Locke drew a direct comparison between the black diaspora and the Jewish diaspora. He would develop this theme most famously in his The New Negro (1925). It is worth noting that developments on the Rhine also prompted other African Americans to think carefully about the court of international opinion. Writing for the Crisis, divinity student William S. Nelson argued that the incident on the Rhine indicated very clearly that “the Battleground of the race is no longer bounded by America’s shores. To-day, it is the world.”132 When Houénou came to Harlem, he articulated some of his own meditations on the relationship between difference, citizenship and 128

129

130 131 132

Keith L. Nelson, “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy,” Journal of Modern History 42:4 (December 1970): 620. Claude McKay, “Soviet Russia and the Negro,” Crisis, 27 (December 1923– January 1924): 97. René Maran, “To Professor Alain LeRoy Locke,” 262. Locke, “Apropos of Africa,” Opportunity, 2 (February 1924): 37. “The American Negro and Foreign Opinion,” Crisis, 23 (August 1923): 160–161.

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black internationalism in a speech delivered at the 1924 UNIA convention in Liberty Hall. The decision to attend Garvey’s convention may have alienated members of the NAACP – Du Bois was particularly enraged by Houénou’s involvement with that “demagogue” and refused to meet with him at all – but it certainly drew the attention of the black American press and the French authorities.133 In his speech, Houénou formulated an approach to international black solidarity that acknowledged different aims: “The black race provides important groups throughout the whole world; they must be allowed to contribute to the work of redemption according to their own methods, disciplines, and activities.”134 Particularity notwithstanding, Houénou envisaged his Ligue as the organization best placed to lead these diverse groups and to present their claims to the League of Nations. Part of his reasoning seems to come from the group’s physical location: France and specifically Paris was the true heart of the black races because it was “the sole nation which not only was not racist but which fought against racism” and it had declared itself for the rights of man “without distinction of race or nationality.”135 To his American audiences, at least, Houénou painted a picture of France that tallied with general perceptions of the country as free of racial prejudice. Such loyalty was not, however, unqualified. Months earlier, in an article he published in Les Continents, Houénou had touted the argument that Diagne had made so much of at the 1919 Pan-African Congress – namely, that the duties rendered by French blacks entitled them to the rights enjoyed by Frenchmen and that any modification of these rights amounted to tutelage. In a moving passage, he went one step further than Diagne and proffered a vision of what the future might look like if France did not acquiesce: “We have shed our blood for France as our mother country. . . . We demand to be citizens, whatever the country,

133

134

135

W. E. B. Du Bois to René Maran, August 25, 1924. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Claude McKay, “What Is and What Isn’t,” Crisis, 27 (April 1924): 259; “The Prince of Dahomey Arrives from France,” Negro World (May 1924): 15. “Notre Directeur en Amérique: du Liberty Hall au Carnegie Hall et à Philadelphie,” Les Continents, 9 (September 1924): 1. “Paris, cœur de la race noire (discours de Tovalou devant le congrès de l’UNIA),” Les Continents, 10 (Octobre 1924): 1; “Discours prononcé le 19 Aout, 1924 au Congrès Annuel de l’Association Universelle pour l’Avancement de la Race Noire, par le Prince Kojo Tovalou Houénou, Président de la Ligue Universelle pour la Défense de la Race Noire, Directeur Fondateur du Journal ‘Les Continents,’” Negro World (September 13, 1924): 4.

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and that is why, if France rejects us, we call for autonomy: or, if she welcomes us, then for total assimilation and integration.”136

1.8 the contested nature of blackness These conversations over the perceived virtue and possibility of the French Republican system were cut short by continued controversy over French colonial participation in the War. In the October 1924 issue of Les Continents, an unsigned article ironically entitled “The Good Apostle” appeared. The piece, which was probably written by Maran, alleged that Diagne had been paid a commission by the French government for every black African soldier conscripted into the army during the war. Diagne, who saw this as a vicious attempt by his critics and enemies to discredit him and ruin his political career, sued Les Continents for libel. Buckling under the financial pressure, the paper folded. A few months later, Marcus Garvey would be arrested for fraud by American authorities, leaving the French surveillance officers to assert gleefully that confusion reigned in “the camp of pan-nègre sympathisers.”137 This assessment could not have been further from the truth. Garvey’s arrest certainly did not end PanAfrican or “pan-nègre” thinking and activism; nor did the collapse of Houénou’s Ligue signal an end to African American and black francophone conversations about the best ways to achieve full citizenship rights. Being black meant something different in their respective American and French contexts in the period from 1919 to 1924, but a shared sense of exclusion on the basis of race brought the thinkers studied in this chapter together. More often than not, they agreed with the Wilsonian vision of the right to self-determination as the province of civilized men and their activism during the period was explicitly motivated by the desire to demonstrate that race was neither a marker of civilizational capacity nor of nationality. Even where rights claims were made on the basis of the fulfillment of patriotic duties – as in the case of war service – these articulations of citizenship were all predicated upon the idea of a political unit being constituted by civilized men. Consensus on what it meant to belong to a nation-state or on the markers of the citizen did not, 136

137

Prince Kojo Tovalou-Houénou, “L’Esclavagisme colonial: nous ne sommes pas des enfants” in Les Continents (July 1924), reprinted in Prince Kojo Tovalou Houénou, “The Problem of Negroes in French Colonial Africa,” Opportunity, 62 (July 1924): 203–207. “Extrait de la note de 8 février 1923,” Le débâcle du Garveyisme aux Etats-Unis, SLOTFOM 3/84, CAOM.

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I have suggested in this chapter, automatically translate to transnational activism nor international black solidarity. To the contrary, a belief in the necessity of inviolable sovereignty – whether imposed or genuine – led many of the key figures of this period (from Diagne and Candace to Garvey) to pin their hopes of overcoming racism and inequality upon nation-state frameworks instead. Black was not, after all, a country but an identity these men and women considered open to interpretation.

2 Anti-imperial Comrades: Black Radicalism and the Communist Possibility

The oppression of Negroes assumes two distinct forms: on the one hand they are oppressed as a class, and on the other as a nation. This national (race) oppression has its basis in the social-economic relation of the Negro under capitalism. George Padmore The same day, at the same hour, amongst the bronzed, the yellows, amongst all the non-VIVE LA RÉVOLUTION!!! Lamine Senghor

Lamine Senghor’s 1927 publication La Violation d’un pays condensed the history of French imperialism into an allegorical story. The closing lines – quoted above – indicated the future he imagined (or threatened) if the French did not fulfill the promises of the Republican system by offering all of their subjects full citizenship. It never reached the colonial audiences of “the bronzed, the yellows . . . the non-whites” that Senghor had in mind. Denounced as Communist propaganda, the publication was confiscated by French authorities. While evidently subversive and inflected with a communist vocabulary, La Violation d’un pays was not necessarily guilty as accused. The story had been published by a Communist publishing house and prefaced by the Communist writer Paul Vaillant-Couturier – future editor of the PCF’s L’Humanité – but Senghor’s advocacy of revolution was firmly rooted in the language of the most famous Revolution of all, that of the French Revolution of 1789.1 1

Michael Goebel also makes this observation in Anti-imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 216.

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49

The novella was remarkable for being the first piece of anti-colonial fiction produced by an African. The mélange of Republican and Communist backing and political language speaks to the complex ways in which institutional communism shaped black activism in the 1920s.2 For thinkers such as Lamine Senghor and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté in France and Richard Moore, George Padmore and Lovett Fort-Whiteman in the United States, their turn to Marxist thinking and organizing coincided with their disenchantment with the promises of Wilsonian self-determination and the likelihood that their respective nations would not live up to their Republican promise.3 As the above excerpt from the 1931 piece by George Padmore indicated, some black radicals began to theorize their oppression in Marxist terms, expanding the political theory to incorporate race. Moreover, at various moments the Communist International (Comintern) and the national Communist Parties such as the PCF and the CPUSA offered financial, institutional and rhetorical support that brought black activists together. In this chapter, I will focus on the moments in which institutional Communism as well as Marxist thinking brought activists and thinkers from the French Empire and the United States into contact as they fought to gain rights within their respective national contexts.4

2.1 thinking through lenin’s vision of self-determination At the Paris Peace conferences, the United States, Britain and France sought successfully to define their platform in opposition to the Bolshevik ideas

2

3

4

Papa Samba Diop noted that it was the first piece of fiction written by an African: “Un Texte sénégalais inconnu: La Violation d’un pays (1927) de Lamine Senghor,” Komparatistische Hefte 9–10 (1984): 123–128. For an elaboration of the ramifications of this disillusionment in the case of Egypt, India, China and Korea, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). In so doing, I will build upon the work of historians such as Robin D. G. Kelley, who has argued persuasively that communism offered certain African American activists a discursive space not available elsewhere for an articulation of black nationalism. My work will add to this perspective by placing it in the context of ties with francophone anti-racist and anti-imperial activists: “Afric’s Sons with Banner Red: African-American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919–1934” in Sidney J. Lemelle and R. D. G. Kelley (eds.), Imagining Home: Class Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (New York: Verso, 1994): 35–54. For work on black communism and diaspora, see also Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 244–245. On communism in Harlem, see Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

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emanating from Lenin’s Soviet Russia and the newly minted Third or Communist International. When it became apparent that Wilson’s promises would not result in concrete change, some black thinkers began to explore the alternatives proffered by socialism. In both France and the United States, the Bolshevik Revolution led to the fragmentation of the Socialist Parties. Lenin invited the Socialist Party of America (SPA) to join the Comintern in January of 1919. In August, a splinter group separated from the Socialists to form the Communist Labor Party. Days later, another section would form the Communist Party of America. It was not until May 1921 under the directive of the Comintern that the two groups would merge into the Communist Party of America (CPUSA). Likewise, the French Communist Party (PCF) formed after the French Section of the Workers International (SFIO) split over the Communist issue in 1920. Lenin was particularly interested in the role that could be played by oppressed peoples such as African Americans in the United States and France’s colonial communities, arguing that the success of the Soviet Union and the international revolution depended upon forging alliances with oppressed peoples and victims of imperialism within nations.5 Drawing Lenin’s particular attention was the rise of Pan-Islamic and PanAsian movements responding to Wilson’s self-determination rhetoric. He advised branches of the Communist Party throughout America and colonized populations elsewhere to take pains to cultivate these movements lest they be co-opted into imperialist and racialist mind-sets.6 While the CPA (in both its early incarnations) and the SPA were predominantly white and reluctant to associate with the black cause, the French counterpart (the PCF) had been founded partially by francophone colonial activists.7 Moreover, the Paris of 1919, much more so than New York, was a city far more receptive and enthusiastic to the idea of revolution.8 Nevertheless, the anticolonial position was not always popular among the white French communists in the first few years of the decade despite the Comintern’s directives. Although the Committee for Colonial 5

6 7 8

V. Lenin, “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” in John Riddell (ed.), Workers of the World and Oppressed People Unite: Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1919 Volume 1 (New York: Pathfinder, 1991), 285. Notably Lenin does not make reference to the nascent Pan-African movement, perhaps because the 1919 Resolutions of the Pan-African Congress suggested that such imperial co-option had already occurred. V. Lenin, “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” 288. Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis, 180. Tyler Stovall, Paris and the Spirit of 1919: Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism and Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2–3.

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Studies was formed as a subsection for the PCF in 1921 in response to these orders, it was underfunded and mostly ignored.9 L’Humanité, the PCF’s organ journal, was noticeably uninterested in the colonial question too.10 As a result, dissatisfied Antillean, Malagasy and Vietnamese activists living in Paris founded the Union Intercoloniale or Intercolonial Union (UI) in 1921. Originally comprised of approximately 220 members, the group’s goal was to foster solidarity among colonial peoples. Left-wing in orientation, many of the UI activists had remained members of the SFIO rather than joining the PCF. Political solidarity was a means of agitating for the fulfillment of the promises of the French Republican system and a form of praxis of imperial citizenship, rather than instigating outright revolution. This platform was reflected in the UI’s journal, Le Paria. The very first issue announced that the paper was the product of the “ardent communion of comrades from North Africa, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, Madagascar, Indochina, the Antilles, and French Guyana.”11 Members hoped to use the paper “to denounce the political abuses, the administrative arbitrariness, the economic exploitation of which the populations of the vast overseas territories are the victims,” with the ultimate goal of liberating “the oppressed from the forces of domination, and the realization of love and fraternity.”12 While Le Paria’s founders hoped that they would be able to distribute the journal throughout the French Empire, the reality was that few copies survived colonial censorship.13 Most of those who read it were residing in or visiting the French mainland. Many articles in Le Paria in the early 1920s bore witness to atrocities that fell outside the “love and fraternity” inherent in the French Republican promise. Such faith in the possibilities of Republican leadership can partially be explained as a reaction to the visions of French empire emanating from the Chamber of Deputies. April 1921 marked the announcement of a new colonial project by the Minister of the Colonies, Albert Sarraut, to the Chamber of Deputies. Later published as La mise en valeur des colonies françaises (1923), the plan envisioned the colonies as part of a larger French nation, la plus grande France. Such

9

10

11 13

For more on this split, see Claude Liauzu, Aux origines des tiers-mondismes: Colonisés et anticolonialistes en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1982), 99–136; J. S. Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought among French-Speaking West Africans, 1921–1939” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1968), 81–112. Alain Ruscio, La question coloniale dans “L’Humanité,” 1904–2004 (Paris: Dispute, 2005). 12 “Appel!,” Le Paria, April 1, 1922, 1. “Appel!,” Le Paria, April 1, 1922, 1. J. S. Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought,” 126.

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a vision was by no means homogenous as each of the colonies was considered to have specific characteristics which constituted the larger, united whole of France.14 Although Sarraut’s plan was never brought to a vote, it did reflect the slow reorientation of the relationship between the French metropole and the colonies toward what Gary Wilder has called a colonial humanism that was predicated upon ethnology informed administration.15 The metropole’s re-orientation in attitude did not reflect colonial practice “on the ground” so to speak and the contributors to Le Paria took an active role in pointing to the discrepancies between theory and praxis. In turn, the French Ministry for the Colonies kept a careful eye on the individuals attached to Le Paria – as well as those involved with the PCF and the UI more broadly. In 1923 a special police branch funded by the Ministry and dedicated to monitoring anti-colonial activity in the metropole as well as its possible effects on the colonies emerged under the name Service de Contrôle et d’Assistance aux Indigènes aux Colonies (CAI), or the Service for the Control and Assistance of the Natives from the Colonies.16 Often, officials in the leadership of the CAI understood the branch’s role in terms of the move toward a more benevolent, albeit still paternalist, approach to colonial administration and sought to mitigate the worst of the problems facing colonial subjects.17 Indeed, many of the anti-colonial activists operating in the orbit of Le Paria and affiliated groups reported on their own movements to the CAI in exchange for a salary or, in some cases, naturalization as French citizens.18 Although Le Paria’s emphasis was on the French colonies, it also covered racism elsewhere. American imperialism in Haiti featured regularly, as did Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).19 The UI was not the only left-wing group to take interest in 14

15

16

17 18

19

Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 51–97. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation State: Négritude & Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 54. For more on the CAI and associated bodies, see Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis, 46–51. Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis, 48. For more on this see Olivier Sagna, “Des pionniers méconnus de l’indépendance: africains, antillais et luttes anti-colonialistes dans la France de l’entre-deux-guerres (1919–1939)” (PhD diss., Université Paris VII, 1986), 144–159; Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis, 45–52. Le Paria can be found in Service de liason avec les originaires des territoires français d’outre-mer (SLOTFOM), Series 5, Microfilms: 2Mia241, Centre d’Archives d’OutreMer, Aix-en-Provence (CAOM).

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UNIA. Closer to home, in Harlem, the newly formed African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) would find some common ground with Garvey’s UNIA, a move positioning the ABB in firm opposition to less radical organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The ABB had been founded in 1919 by Caribbean émigrés Cyril Briggs, Otto Huiswood, Richard B. Moore and African American Grace Campbell.20 The organization’s membership was comprised primarily of Caribbean migrants such as the Jamaican writer and socialist Claude McKay. Speaking on behalf of the Brotherhood through its journal, the Crusader, Briggs rejected the possibility of gaining rights through American citizenship and instead emphasized the necessity of creating change through international race loyalty. In such an articulation of the contemporary racial situation, African diasporic unity was not necessitated by the “fact” of skin color but by the socio-political and economic realities that denied them equal rights under “existing white governments.”21 Unlike the American-oriented program of Chandler Owen and A. Phillip Randolph’s socialist journal the Messenger, the short-lived Crusader called for international racial unity on the basis that only a workers’ revolution and the liberation of Africa would allow blacks access to the individual rights that they sought. Briggs positioned this thinking squarely within the context of the Wilsonian moment, taking Wilson to task for failing to include Africans in the groups entitled to selfdetermination.22 Lenin’s version of self-determination seemed to offer a more inclusive approach to group rights although the ABB was by no

20

21

22

Huiswood came from Dutch West Indies (Suriname), while Moore and Briggs came from the British West Indies (Barbados and Nevis, St. Kitts and Nevis). For more on Caribbean émigrés to Harlem in the 1920s, see Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism In Early Twentieth Century America (New York: Verso, 1998); Michelle Stephens, The Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean intellectuals in the United States 1914–1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Joyce Moore Turner, Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). Cyril Briggs, “Bolshevist,” “Negro First,” Crusader (October 1919): 9; “Ethiopia Expects That Every Negro This Day Will Do His Duty,” Crusader (February 1920): 29. Cyril Briggs, “Editorial,” Crusader (April 1919): 8–9. An unsigned explanation of the ABB’s aims claimed that “post commands have been established in the United States, the West Indies, Central and South America, and in West Africa,” but there is no evidence, as such, that this occurred: Unsigned, Crusader (June 1920), 7. Nevertheless, the ABB’s selfimage was avowedly internationalist. For a comprehensive study of this, see Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

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means unquestioning in its affiliation with the ideas of the Comintern. This determination to chart an independent course is clear in Briggs’s response to those who accused the ABB of being Bolshevists. He declared, “Bolshevist is the epithet that present-day reactionaries delight to fling around loosely against those who insist on thinking for themselves and on agitation for their rights. . . . If to fight for one’s rights is to be Bolshevists, then we are Bolshevists.”23 At the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, there was clear evidence that Bolsheviks were indeed interested in engaging with the ABB’s cause. For the first time, the “Negro Question” was discussed in detail by Comintern members. Both Claude McKay and Otto Huiswood attended this 1922 Congress as representatives of the ABB. Building upon Lenin’s 1919 thesis on the need to support Africans in the struggle against colonialism, Huiswood delivered a speech arguing that the racial situation in the United States “was another phase of the race and colonial question.”24 He urged the Comintern to turn its attention to the issue of race because race could not just be considered in the same terms as the plight of “white workers” or “workers of the world.” To the contrary, “although the Negro problem as such is fundamentally an economic problem,” it was a problem “aggravated and intensified by the friction which exists between the white and black races.”25 A “Negro Commission” was established to deliberate upon the “Question of the Negro” vis-à-vis communism. The resulting “Thesis on the Negro Question,” indubitably driven by Huiswood and McKay, was diasporic in formulation but insisted upon the United States as the leader of the diaspora, describing it as “the centre of Negro culture and the crystallisation of Negro protest.”26 This may have been the case but the thesis paid scant heed to the differences between the black condition in the United States and in colonial territories such as the Antilles, West Africa or the like.27 In part, this was due to the lack of contact at this early stage between African American communists and their Antillean and

23 24

25 26

27

Cyril Briggs, “Editorial,” Crusader (October 1919): 9. Otto Huiswood, “Speech to the 4th World Congress of the Comintern on the Negro Question, 22nd Session, Nov. 25, 1922,” Bulletin of the IV Congress of the Communist International, 22 (December 2, 1922): 18. Otto Huiswood, “Speech to the 4th World Congress,” 18. “Thesis on the Negro Question,” as cited in Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939 (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2013), 23. Bulletin of the IV Congress of the Comintern, December 22, 1922, 22.

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francophone African counterparts. In the years between the fourth and fifth Congresses of the Comintern, such activists became increasingly critical of the PCF for its lack of engagement or work regarding the “Negro Question,” and stronger diasporic bonds began to form.28

2.2 toward stronger trans-atlantic connections At the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern in 1924, black American Communists such as Lovett Fort-Whiteman met with men such as Guadeloupean lawyer Joseph Gothon-Lunion as well as other members of the PCF’s colonial subcommittee, such as Nguyen Ai Quoc (who would later become known as Ho Chi Minh). A writer for the Messenger, member of the ABB and part of the Worker Party leadership, Fort-Whiteman believed that “in the heart of the race-problem” lay “the economic problem, the problem of exploitation and class-rule.”29 Capitalism had created race by transforming human beings into property, and the resulting systemic inequalities needed to be overturned before any kind of equality could be achieved. Fort-Whiteman’s thinking certainly impressed his Comintern audience, or at least indicated the potential support for world revolution to be found among black working-class populations if the obstacle of racial divisions between black and white proletarians could be overcome. To this end, the Comintern ordered the dissolution of the ABB and the formation of an American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) as a formal corollary to the CPUSA. The purpose of the ANLC was to spread communism within the black community and to advance the rights of African American workers. It also had an international agenda as it hoped to link black workers in the US to those elsewhere. Based in Chicago, which had a long history of black union organization, the ANLC seemed set to succeed. Despite resentment over the dissolution of the ABB and wariness of Fort-Whiteman’s caprice, Otto Huiswood and Richard Moore did their best to help the venture. Huiswood in particular had always believed that the route to equality lay in solidarity between white and black workers and this inclusion into 28

29

Sheridan Johns, Raising the Red Flag: International Socialist League and the Communist Party of South Africa, 1914–1932 (Belleville: Mayibuye Books, 1995), 210; Adi Hakim, Pan-Africanism and Communism, 28–29. James Jackson (pseudonym of Lovett Fort-Whiteman), “The Negro in America,” Communist International, November 1924, 50–54; see also Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 51.

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the CPUSA seemed to hold open this possibility.30 Moreover, funding from the Comintern ensured that the organizers’ salaries and travel expenses were fully paid.31 One of its first initiatives was the organization of a founding convention to be held at the ANLC’s base in Chicago. The venture initially met with resistance from the NAACP and other reformist groups within America but two articles published in the NAACP’s Crisis, one by the eminent black activist W. E. B. Du Bois and another by a black professor of economics, Abram Harris, indicated that this opposition was not straightforward. Both authors saw the turn toward labor organization and even Bolshevism as a natural response to the racism they faced.32 Writers for the Chicago Defender had agreed also: in the face of inequality, it was entirely reasonable to seek out alternate forms of political organization that promised emancipation from the socio-historical category of race that so dominated American political and social landscapes.33 From a diasporic vantage point, Gothon-Lunion indicated that the UI was supportive of the idea of an ANLC convention and intended to participate.34 Despite directives from the Comintern, the PCF leadership did not share this enthusiasm. Under pressure from the UI, the PCF eventually nominated Lamine Senghor and one of the co-founders of the UI, the Guadeloupean lawyer Max Clainville-Bloncourt, to represent them in Chicago at the convention. The PCF leadership refused, however, to spend any money on the venture.35 When Senghor inquired as to suggestions for alternate ways of raising funding to cover travel costs, the party leadership suggested that he make his way across the Atlantic as a stowaway.36 Such patent disdain was the last straw for Senghor and, in 1926, he left the UI, although remaining a member of the PCF. Together, 30

31

32

33 34 35

36

Otto Huiswood had emphasized this point in his 1922 speech: Otto Huiswood, “Speech to the 4th World Congress of the Comintern on the Negro Question, 22nd Session, Nov. 25, 1922,” 17–22. Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 120. See Makalani for more on the US domestic politics at play in the ANLC, 121–133. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Black Man and Labor,” Crisis, 31 (December 1925): 60; Abram L. Harris Jr., “Lenin Casts His Shadow over Africa,” Crisis, 33 (April 1926): 274. “That Labor Congress,” Chicago Defender, November 7, 1925, 10. Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History (RGASPI) 495/155/33/5, 6–7. For a biography of Lamine Senghor, see Amadou Lamine Sarr, Lamine Senghor (1889– 1927): Das Andere des senegalesischen Nationalismus (Vienna: Wien Kö ln Weimar Bö hlau, 2011). See Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouvements nègres en France, 1915–1939 (Paris: L’Éditions Harmattan, 1985), 112–113. On the American Negro Worker’s Congress, see Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator, 1978), 143–147.

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he and Gothon-Lunion formed a new group of black workers in the metropole: the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre (CDRN), with their own journal, La Voix de nègres. They were not alone in their dissatisfaction with the Communist Party; around the same time, other disaffected Paris-based Marxist groups would form along geopolitical and racial lines, including the Étoile Nord-Africaine and the Annamese Independence Party. Unlike the Union Intercoloniale, these new groups emphasized racial identities and would eventually manifest in nationalist movements in North Africa (Algeria), Vietnam and West Africa, respectively.37 The future trajectories of these groupings, alongside PCF interpretations of the split, have tempted historians such as Philippe Dewitte and Claude Liauzu to see nascent nationalisms or, at the very least, racecentric organizing in this split.38 As Michael Goebel has persuasively argued, however, it is more indicative of the commitment of these groups to a logic of communist internationalism. It stemmed from internal controversies between the PCF and the UI over the way votes on specific cases in the colonies should be decided. Many of those from ethnically-identified subgroups within the UI challenged this hierarchy of colonial status, believing instead that decisions should be based on experiential knowledge of the colony in question and on their ability to promote the implantation of communist thinking in both the Parisian communities and back in the colonies. The refusal of the PCF to subsidize Senghor and Bloncourt’s passage to Chicago was representative of this lack of engagement with the issues that concerned the UI membership.39 The trajectory of Senghor’s own political activism is a case in point.

2.3 intersecting diasporic and communist networks Lamine Senghor had first risen to notoriety for his role as a witness for Prince Kojo Tovalou Houénou and René Maran in the case between Blaise Diagne and Les Continents. A member of the PCF and the UI, Senghor had himself been a tirailleur in the War and wrote often on this issue for Le

37

38

39

Claude Liauzu, Aux origines des tiers-mondes (Paris: Harmattan, 1982), 99–136; Olivier Sagna, “Des pionniers méconnus de l’indépendance,” 277–293. See Claude Liauzu, Aux origines des tiers-mondes, and Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouvements nègres en France. Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis, 198.

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Paria. Senghor had initially joined the UI and PCF in 1924 at the behest of the CAI in the hope that his service would be rewarded with enough funds to return with his French wife to Senegal.40 Ironically, it was not long before he began to identify with the politics of the groups he was supposed to be infiltrating and he broke with the CAI to become one of interwar Paris’s most prominent anti-colonial activists.41 Senghor became integrated into the PCF political structure, to the extent that he was nominated as a Party candidate for election in the municipal elections of 1925.42 He was unsuccessful. It is important to note, however, his platform hinged not on the issue of race but on the same socioeconomic questions raised by noncolonial, white PCF candidates.43 Nevertheless, Senghor had been attracted to the program of the PCF because he believed communism offered a link between the retention of his own traditional African culture and a political modernity. At one party meeting, he argued that before French occupation, his people had already adhered to a kind of “communisme primitif” that was well adapted to their “temperament and their blood.”44 Political identity, in his view, was intertwined with racial and cultural identities. The leadership of the PCF did not share his view and the avoidance of race-based or colonial questions that had marked his candidacy was the source of some criticism by the PCF from UI members. Part of the problem lay in the PCF’s reliance on electoral politics. It lacked both the ability (and the will, at times) to effect change in North Africa, for example. Most African colonial subjects did not have suffrage and specific African colonial questions thus had little electoral weight in 1920s France. Insofar as PCF and UI membership was concerned, this correlation between PCF policy and the concerns of those who were already French citizens – rather than subjects – triggered organizational changes that would reorient black activist thinking about the possibilities of inter-racial organization. Police reports lumped Senghor’s new organization in the same category as Houénou’s Ligue, which they had believed to be revolutionary and thus dangerous.45 Both groups, one agent lamented, were nationalists of the

40 41 42

43

44

45

Amadou Lamine Sarr, Lamine Senghor, 34–35. For Senghor’s CAI surveillance reports, see 3SLOTFOM45, CAOM. “Le. P.C. présente deux candidatures de travailleurs coloniaux,” L’Humanité, April 25, 1925, 4. “Le. P.C. présente deux candidatures de travailleurs coloniaux,” L’Humanité, April 25, 1925, 4. Lamine Senghor, paraphrased in Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris (APP), Séries I, W1907 105984 Senghor, Lamine, “Réunion organisé par le part communiste.” APP, Séries I, W1907 105984 Senghor, Lamine, “Juin 1926.”

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Wilsonian kind, demanding the recognition that all peoples had the right to self-determination. The same report acknowledged that these groups were not completely under Communist sway. A firm belief in the viability of Wilsonian principals, however, led the Ligue to approve of the Third International, insofar as statements on the colonial question were concerned.46 Unintentionally, the Paris police had captured the significance of Communism for the African diaspora in this period: it offered them the space to engage with the possibilities of Wilsonian selfdetermination and to transcend racial categories. However, the CDRN was not primarily a Communist group. Frequent meeting attendees such as Léo Sajous, Maurice Satineau and René Maran, for example, were certainly not Communists. To the contrary, they saw the group as a potential force for change within the French republican sphere and believed that inter-imperial alliances would be useful to that end. CDRN campaigns certainly emphasized this platform with posters appealing to “universal Conscience” to enact the utopian visions of Republican possibility begun by humanitarian workers and abolitionist thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, such as Victor Schoelcher.47 Even the ceremony at the CDRN’s foundation embodied this goal because it was timed to coincide with an annual pilgrimage to Schoelcher’s grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery. The procession in 1926 was led by the Haitian Minister to France, the Guadeloupian lawyer Max Clainville-Bloncourt had initiated the tradition earlier in the 1920s.48 The broad coalition of political thinking across CDRN membership also characterized the types of alliances the ANLC was making across the Atlantic.49 In August 1926, Lovett Fort-Whiteman and Richard Moore attended the Fifth International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World in Harlem. By this time, Garvey had been in a Federal Penitentiary for almost two years. During this time, the UNIA had fallen into extreme financial difficulties. The combined pressure of debt and the absence of Garvey himself led the organization to splinter. From within jail, Garvey had been engaged in a leadership struggle with UNIA National Vice

46 47 48 49

APP, Séries I, W1907 105984 Senghor, Lamine, “Juin 1926.” “Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre” 30 mars 1926, SLOTFOM 3/37, CAOM. “Rapport d’Agent Désiré,” July 27, 1926, SLOTFOM 3/37, CAOM. Although historians have pointed to the broad spectrum of political positions in the CDRN, none have made the following comparison with the American groups. The parallel development of these radical groups is informative because it indicates the extent to which race-based organization was necessitated by Communist refusal to fund transracial initiatives.

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President William Sherrill and the Vice President of the New York City Division of the UNIA, Antiguan-born Methodist chaplain George Weston.50 The 1926 Convention had been organized by Sherrill and Weston as part of their campaign to wrest control of UNIA from Garvey. The resulting Convention resolutions demonstrated the shift in thinking catalyzed by both the influence of Fort-Whiteman and Moore’s engagement with the group and the influence of this new leadership. Entitled “The Social and Political Status of the Negro Peoples of the World,” the document urged the consolidation of black diasporic unity and called for activists within the United States to “secure the complete economic, political and civil equality of our people.”51 Connecting the experience of racial discrimination with class-based exploitation, these resolutions were a far cry from Garvey’s original dream of a strong capitalist United States of Africa. Moreover, while they offered support to “every struggle of the African peoples,” the resolutions were clearly focused on coordinating African Americans rather than making a claim to independent national sovereignty on the basis of racial identity. The ANLC and the Worker’s Party were particularly excited about the access to black rural communities that collaboration with UNIA might offer. The CDRN also continued to think through the relationship between class and race in the first issue of their journal, La Voix des nègres. Key to their analysis was a discussion of the word “nègre.” In the French of the period, three main expressions were used to configure race: hommes de couleur, noirs and nègres. Far from being purely racial epithets, these phrases mapped out class differences. Les hommes de couleurs were intellectuals who had studied at the les grandes écoles and whose access to French citizenship was privileged vis-à-vis the majority of colonized peoples. Those who had not arrived at such a degree of education but who occupied the same jobs as a white man were les noirs. Both les hommes de couleur and les noirs had assimilated into white capitalist systems that made them see the less fortunate nègres as backward members of the race. This, the committee argued, was a cunning strategy by racists to divide

50

51

On this leadership struggle see Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 402–404. For more on Sherill, see Kenneth Jolly, “By Our Own Strength”: William Sherrill, the UNIA, and the Fight for African American Self-Determination in Detroit (New York: Peter Lang, 2012). “Press Release of Rival UNIA Convention, August 16, 1926” in Robert Hill (ed.), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 6 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983–2011): 431–432.

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and conquer. They reclaimed the word nègre, with a capital N at its head, in the name of overcoming these divisions.52 This kind of argument speaks to the way in which the CDRN saw the relationship between cultural identity and class division. Black solidarity was a way to overcome the divides enforced by a capitalist imperialism rather than an attempt to stake a claim for national independence by virtue of a monolithic racial identity. Nevertheless, in her column for Opportunity, the bilingual African American writer Gwendolyn Bennett would interpret this first issue as “in direct line with the new race consciousness among colored people of intelligence in America,” part and parcel of the Harlem Renaissance.53 Thematically similar, the second issue of La Voix des Nègres was primarily dedicated to the 1927 League against imperialism Congress, an event organized by the German millionaire Willi Münzenberg that was to have resonance throughout the diaspora.54 While references to it crop up in many interwar histories of communism and radical politics, much of the more detailed scholarship on the League against Imperialism remains in German, perhaps because of its conflation with the activities of the organizer, Willi Münzenberg.55 Münzenberg certainly organized the most famous of the Ligue’s activities, a Conference in Brussels in 1927, and it 52 53 54 55

Le Comité, “Le mot ‘Nègre,’” La Voix des nègres, 1 (January 1927), 1. Gwendolyn Bennett, “The Ebony Flute,” Opportunity, 5 (March 1927), 90–91. La Voix des nègres, 2 (March 1927), 2. Jurgen Dinkel, “Globalisierung des Widerstands: Antikoloniale Konferenzen und die ‘Liga gegen Imperialismus und fur national Unabhangigkheit’ 1927–1937” in Sönke Kunkel and Christopher Meyer (eds.), Aufbruch ins postkoloniale Zeitalter: Globalisierung und die Außereuropäische Welt in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2012); Babette Gross, Willi Münzenberg: eine politische Biografie (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1967); Mustapha Haikal, “Willi Münzenberg et la ligue contre l’impérialisme et pour l’indépendence nationale,” trans. Guillaume Dreyfus, in Willi Münzenberg, 1889–1940: Un homme contre (Aix-enProvence: Bibliothèque Méjanes/L’Institut de l’Image, 1993), 119–128; Sean McMeekin’s The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar to the West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Hans Piazza ed., Die Liga gegen Imperialismus und für nationale Unabhängigkeit (Leipzig: Karl-Marx Universität, 1987). Recently, more attention has been paid to the league in the English language scholarship, but this has tended to focus on connections with Germany or antiimperialism in India. See Michele L. Louro, “‘Where National Revolutionary Ends and Communist Begins’: The League against Imperialism and the Meerut Conspiracy Case,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33: 3 (December 1, 2013): 331–344; Michele. L. Louro, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), especially 65–102; Frederik Petersson, “Hub of the Anti-imperialist Movement: The League against Imperialism and Berlin, 1927–1933” interventions, 16:1 (2014): 49–71. Hakim Adi has

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was his initiative that founded the Comintern front organization in the first place. He managed to persuade the Comintern to donate 10,000 dollars to the organization of the Conference.56 The conversations and networks facilitated by the Conference itself and the Ligue’s various branches are, however, more significant here. An example of this kind of ideological constellation can be found in the links between the Brussels Conference and the fourth Pan-African Congress’s engagement with imperialism and race-based organization. Although historians have neglected all of the interwar Pan-African Congresses, the fourth, held in New York in August 1927, is the least known. Dismissed as the final gasp of Du Bois’s interwar Pan-Africanism, it is often mentioned only in passing.57 In reality, Du Bois’s participation was symbolic and consultative. He acted as the Presiding Chair, but the Congress was the product of the hard work of a subsidiary of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations. More specifically, it was the brainchild of Addie Hunton, who had been a wartime volunteer with the YMCA and attended the first Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. She, alongside Nina Du Bois, Lillian Alexander and Minnie Pickens, among others, had labored hard to reignite NAACP enthusiasm for Pan-Africanism.58 The

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written on the League in reference to attempts by the Comintern to organize African and Caribbean workers in Britain and France and on its connections more broadly. I build on this perspective to focus specifically on the League’s role in the relationship between African American and francophone black activists: Hakim Adi, “The Comintern and Black Workers in Britain and France 1919–1937,” Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, 28: 2–3 (December 2010): 224–245; PanAfricanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013). Sean McMeekin, The Red Millionaire, 197. David Levering Lewis, in his biography of Du Bois, makes reference to Du Bois’s lack of enthusiasm for the conference. His portrait of the Congress paints Hunton as a “legend among feminists and civil rights leaders” but a relatively incompetent organizer whose disagreements with Du Bois arose from misunderstandings rather than anything else. I would contend that their correspondence is far more indicative of a genuine commitment to Pan-African organization on the part of these women than Lewis allows. Moreover, the crucial work of women in facilitating forums for diasporic discussion has long been overlooked in favor of the speeches delivered on the day, an oversight that unfairly skews toward masculine genealogies of Pan-Africanism: W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight For Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 208. Manning Marable, in his biography of Du Bois, also only mentions Hunton in passing: Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boulder: Routledge, 2015), 119. See, for example, Executive Committee to NAACP Board of Directors, November 4, 1926; Executive Committee to James Weldon Johnson, July 2, 1927, Administrative File,

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resolutions passed at the Congress were perhaps the most radical and interracially focused of all the interwar Pan-African Congresses. They reflected growing disenchantment with the possibilities that had seemed apparent in the foundation of the League of Nations and in the participation of more diverse political thinkers, including those who supported the projects of the League against Imperialism. Münzenberg did his best to mask Comintern affiliations but news of the League against Imperialism and the Brussels Conference initially filtered through to the United States via the fragile coalition of the ANLC and the Weston-led UNIA. This was enough to make more conservative groups such as the NAACP and the National Urban League suspicious of the Conference. Neither group was willing to miss the occasion entirely, however, so both named delegates. NAACP Field Secretary and friend of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, William Pickens, persuaded the NAACP to select him as their representative. Roger Baldwin, attending on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), agreed to also act as the National Urban League delegate. Richard Moore, Hubert Harrison and George Weston were selected to front for the ANLC and UNIA, respectively. On the other side of the Atlantic, the PCF hoped to allay concerns that the Conference would be Communist with their choice of delegate and spent some time deliberating on the matter. Known as a reformist and prized because of his links to the African American community, René Maran was touted briefly as a possibility.59 Eventually, however, Max Bloncourt, Lamine Senghor and Étoile Nord-Africaine leader Hadj Ali were selected. Although all three men remained members of the PCF’s Colonial Commission, Bloncourt was the official UI representative while Senghor, alongside his Guadeloupian colleague Narcisse Danaë, went on behalf of the CDRN.60 Unfortunately, Münzenberg was forced to postpone the Conference three times due to the Comintern’s reluctance to provide financial support. The changes to the schedule meant many Asian and African delegates were unable to attend. Of those African Americans who had hoped to attend, Moore was the sole one to do so.

59 60

Pan African Congress, August 30, 1923, August 26, 1927, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Claude Liauzu, Aux origines, 32. “La Question Nègre devant le congrès de Bruxelles, la lutte contre l’oppression coloniale et l’impérialisme,” La Voix des Nègres, 2 (March 1927): 1.

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Nevertheless, the LAI included William Pickens’s name in the printed transcripts and resolutions of the Congress, listing the NAACP as a participant organization.61

2.4 a special role for the international black community La Voix des nègres covered the Conference closely, taking pains to emphasize the interracial and cross-class solidarity on display: “for five days and five nights, the delegates of all the races and all the classes met in a veritable Tower of Babel, they came each in their turn to denounce the crimes and the exactions of imperialism in their respective countries.”62 Senghor’s speech in Brussels – which George Padmore would later call the apex of antiimperialist sentiment at the Congress – listed the offenses of French imperialism and lamented the way that blacks had been used to enforce colonial rule: “French imperialists have sent blacks to Indochina, commanding them to shoot upon the Indochinese if they revolt against French colonization. They tell them that they are not of their race, and that they must kill them if they revolt.” He warned that the time for such exploitation was coming to an end because the black race was finally awakening: “Comrades, the blacks have slept too long. But beware! He who has slept long and soundly, once he has awakened will not fall asleep again.”63 Richard Moore also saw a special role for the international black community in the fight against imperialism.64 However, unlike Senghor, 61

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Liga gegen Imperialismus und fü r nationale Unabhä ngigkeit, Das Flammenzeichen vom Palais Egmont. Offizielles Protokoll des Kongresses gegen koloniale Unterdrückung und Imperialismus Brüssel, 10.-15. February 1927. Herausgegeben von Liga gegen Imperialismus und für nationale Unabhängigkeit, 1 (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1927), 236. “La Question Nègre devant le congrès de Bruxelles: la lutte contre l’oppression coloniale et l’impérialisme,” La Voix des Nègres, 2 (March 1927): 1. Padmore was writing years later and had not actually attended the Congress at all: PanAfricanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa (New York: Double Day, 1956, reprint 1971), 324. For Senghor’s speech, see “Au Congrès de Bruxelles du 10 au 15 Février 1927: Discours de Senghor,” La voix des Nègres, 2 (March 1927), 2. Brent Hayes Edwards has suggested that Senghor’s speech “remained very much in the intercolonial paradigm the alliance” between French colonial groups at this time: Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Shadow of Shadows,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11:1 (Spring 2003): 25. Richard B. Moore, “Statement at the Congress of the League against Imperialism and for National Independence, Brussels, February 1927” in W. Burghardt Turner and Joyce Moore Turner (eds.), Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem: Collected Writings, 1920–1972 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988), 143–146.

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he pointed to the importance of a strategy that emphasized changing people’s thinking: “the fight against imperialism is first of all an incessant struggle against imperial ideology.”65 During his turn, Bloncourt criticized French practices in the Antilles as well as American imperialism. During the war, the French had contracted a huge debt to the Americans and Bloncourt declared angrily that the burden of this debt fell on the shoulders of the French workers.66 Worst of all, there was talk that the French sought to repay their debt by handing over the Antilles to the United States. Referring to Haiti, Bloncourt made it very clear that he saw no difference between French and American imperialism: both sought to deny the Wilsonian right of peoples to self-determination.67 He advocated an internationalist remedy for nothing but the solidarity of the oppressed peoples of all races would prevail against the current world order because the nature of the oppression they faced was fundamentally similar.68 The final resolutions, despite the small number of American delegates, specifically addressed the race problem in the United States. One resolution pointed to the hypocrisy of the gap between the American Constitutional guarantee of citizenship rights and the reality of oppression and forced servitude experienced by the African American community.69 A separate resolution addressed Bloncourt’s accusation that the French Republic intended to hand over the Antilles to pay war debts to the United States. The League, the resolutions promised, would take all possible measures to prevent this from occurring. In the Voix des nègres issue covering the resolutions, Narcisse Danaë made it clear that he believed that the only “moral and human” answer to the problem of imperialism lay in complete independence: “We demand independence for all colonial peoples and wish without delay that Haiti, Dominica, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and other neighboring islands form the Confederation of the West Indies.”70 At the end of the Conference, Roger Baldwin and Moore traveled back through Paris and spent time with the anti-colonial groups supported by

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67 68 69

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Richard B. Moore, “Statement at the Congress of the League against Imperialism and for National Independence,” 143–146. “Discours de Max Bloncourt, délégué des Antilles,” La Voix des nègres, 2 (March 1927): 3. Das Flammenzeichen vom Palais Egmont, 119–123. Das Flammenzeichen vom Palais Egmont, 119–123. “La Question Nègre devant le congrès de Bruxelles: Les Décisions du congrès,” La Voix des Nègres, 2 (March 1927), 3. Narcisse Danaë, “Pour l’indépendence,” La Voix des Nègres, 2 (March 1927), 1.

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the PCF. Baldwin was quick to distinguish between the communist affiliations of these men and women and that of the communists in the United States, arguing that the French communists embodied the “old revolutionary spirit in Paris.” Far from showing loyalty to the Soviet Union, he implied that the PCF’s manifestation of communism was the natural legacy of 1789.71 This differentiation of French Marxism from the Third International indicated the extent to which the PCF at this time provided the main outlet for black francophone Republicanism. Moore, however, was less concerned with marking out these political affiliations and more interested in concrete organizing. After stopping in Paris with Baldwin, Senghor and Danaë, he traveled down to Marseilles to meet members of that branch of the CDRN and to talk to Claude McKay.72 Upon Moore’s return to Harlem, he did his best to publicize the Congress resolutions. Du Bois was enthusiastic about the potential benefits for the African American community and reprinted the resolutions in the Crisis alongside glowing recommendations.73 These resolutions went to print at the same time as Addie Hunton and her fellow activists were attempting to attract attendees to the Fourth PanAfrican Congress. Once again the rationale for the Fourth Pan-African Congress was rooted in the idea that “race equality” would never be achieved in the United States as long as the “rights and status” of the peoples of Africa are “undetermined and in serious question.”74 The Congress was intended to lay down a general plan to “guide the darker races toward eventual self-realization and emancipation.”75 In much the same way as the previous three Congresses, the resolutions maintained the need for an elite cohort that would lead the struggle against imperialism and racism within their national polities. This elitism nonetheless differed from the previous Congresses in that it emphasized the need for mutual co-operation instead of automatically assuming a hierarchy of capacity based on national affiliation. While delegates were more likely to come 71

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Roger Baldwin, “The Capital of Men without a Country,” The Survey, August 1, 1927, 464. Richard B. Moore, Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem: Collected Writings, 1920–1972, 54. McKay’s activism is explored at greater length in Chapter 3. “The Colonial Congress and the Negro,” Crisis, 35:5 (July 1927), 165–166. “The object of the Fourth Pan African Congress,” June 9, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries (hereafter W. E. B. Du Bois Papers); Addie Hunton, Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations. About Pan-African Congresses Bulletin 2, 1927, 2. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. “The object of the Fourth Pan African Congress, June 9, 1927,” W. E. B. Du Bois Papers.

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from an educated and anglophone black elite, there were also attendees from West Africa, Haiti and South America too.76 Gratien Candace and Blaise Diagne were not invited but their earlier involvement in the PanAfrican Association was credited on the Congress pamphlets.77 Perhaps at the behest of Moore, the CDRN was officially invited as an organization and individual invitations were also sent to Senghor and Bloncourt. Funding difficulties once again meant that these men were unable to cross the Atlantic for the Congress.78 Disillusionment with the possibilities of the Wilsonian idea of selfdetermination differentiated this Congress from its three predecessors. William Pickens spoke about the resolutions of the LAI Brussels Conference and urged his listeners to follow suit by working collaboratively with all of the oppressed peoples of the world.79 Morning sessions at the Congress were given over to expositions of conditions by the natives of different countries. Afternoon sessions included efforts to improve their chances of self-determination, including sections on African missions, education, art and literature, and African economic development and its future.80 Implicitly, this involved an independent investigation into the Mandated territories to see if the promises of cultivating the capacity for self-determination were being kept. Specific conclusions pertaining to each power were also detailed: the French administration in Africa, for example, was cautiously praised for its nascent education systems and its select granting of political rights but Congress attendees urged the granting of these rights to larger numbers of the natives.81 Belgium, Portugal and the Union of South Africa fell under particular criticism, whereas British efforts in West Africa were considered encouraging, if in need of further development.82 In the resolutions of the Congress, recommendations for each of the Mandate powers were listed briefly.

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77 78 79

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Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Casely Hayford, September 7, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Jenner Bastien to Countee Cullen, October 29, 1927, Folder 9, Box 1, Countee Cullen Papers, Amistad Research Center. “Foreign Invitations Sent,” March 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Letter from Addie W. Hunton to W. E. B. Du Bois, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. William Pickens, “The Brussel Congress,” Address to the Fourth Pan-African Congress, New York, August 21, 1927, Reel 11, Box 11, Folder 1, William Pickens Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Addie Hunton, Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations. About Pan-African Congresses Bulletin 1, 1927, 3, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. “Pan African Congress. Pan African Congress resolutions [fragment], 1927 ?,” 3, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. “Pan African Congress. Pan African Congress resolutions [fragment], 1927 ?,” 2.

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It was not just members of the African diaspora who were considered in these recommendations. Delegates resolved also that freedom and national independence be granted to countries such as Egypt, China and India, and they demanded that the United States refrain from interfering in Central and South America. Although the Congress had styled itself as a “forum” rather than an event supporting a particular political platform, the Soviet Union was praised for its “liberal attitude toward the colored races” and for the help it sporadically offered in the fight against oppression.83 Moreover, the language of the Resolutions was embedded with the rhetoric of Marxism and Communism, littered with reference to “workers” and the exploitation of “colored labor.” The choice to employ language such as this in a Congress explicitly intended to be apolitical and organized by women activists whose political activities operated within the sphere of American democratic republicanism rather than Marxist Revolution speaks to the political context. If only for a brief moment, in 1927 the language of Communism offered a tool kit for analyzing the inequality rife throughout the world. Moreover, the Soviet Union seemed to be the one world power making any progress on the race question. This was a point given further emphasis by the enthusiastic reports of the LAI Brussels meeting relayed to the Fourth Pan-African Congress by Richard Moore and William Pickens. The influence of Moore and Pickens upon proceedings can be seen in the Congress’s decision to fully endorse the resolutions reached by the League against Imperialism regarding “the Negro Question.”84 In his speech, Pickens had disparaged “the powerful tradition of the myth of race” and argued that “a likeness in economic condition is a far sounder basis for cooperation among men.”85 Moore also submitted amendments to the resolutions passed which were both more radical in content and tailored to specific rights. In the case of the USA, he urged a Congressional investigation into peonage for the purposes of its abolition and the enforcement of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution. US imperialism also came under target when he demanded: “the abolition of 83

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“Political forum,” Addie Hunton, Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations. About PanAfrican Congresses Bulletin 1, 1927, 2, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; “Pan African Congress. Pan African Congress resolutions [fragment], 1927 ?,” 5. “Pan African Congress resolution, 1927,” W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. William Pickens, “The Brussel Congress,” Address to the Fourth Pan-African Congress, New York, August 21, 1927, Administrative File, Pan-African Congress, August 30, 1923–August 26, 1927, 1, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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oppressive naval rule in the Virgin Islands and for self-government and civil liberties for these peoples.”86 Insofar as Africa was concerned, the rights he demanded were at the bedrock of liberal Republicanism: “freedom of speech, press and assembly; freedom of movement and the right to responsible self-government and self-determination of African peoples.”87 Overall, the Fourth Congress reached the consensus that all of the imperial powers had an attitude toward Africa that was “fundamentally wrong” because they sought profit, trade and industry rather than “civilization and spiritual uplift.”88 By failing to extend equal political rights to colonized subjects, the fate of “modern democratic culture” in its entirety was endangered.89 Pan-Africanism, in this sense, was about overcoming inequality: diasporic solidarity was a means to this end rather than an overarching political identity. Press releases emphasized that the Congress delegates desired to transcend racial and national lines in the goal of economic solidarity.90 They were also peppered with references to Du Bois and Pickens, with little mention of the women organizers. Despite being difficult and dismissive of the project in the lead up to the Congress, Du Bois was quick to capitalize upon this success.91 As Ida Gibbs Hunt would comment in a letter to Hunton, this was not the first time Du Bois had been dismissive of the crucial involvement of women in facilitating his Pan-Africanism.92

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87 88 89 90

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Richard B. Moore, “Amendments to Pan African Congress resolution on peonage, 1927,” W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Richard B. Moore, “Amendments to Pan African Congress resolution on peonage,” 1. “Pan African Congress. Pan African Congress resolutions [fragment], 1927 ?,” 2. “Pan African Congress. Pan African Congress resolutions [fragment], 1927 ?,” 2. NAACP, “Press Release: 4th Pan-African Congress Ends Session: Issues Manifesto,” August 26, 1927; “Oppression lies deeper than color Pickens tells Pan-African Congress,” [1927]; “Comment on the Pan-African Congress,” [1927]; Esther Lowell, “Pan-African Congress Favors Unionization of Negro Workers throughout the World,” August 30, 1927, The Daily Worker; W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Faces the Modern World,” The Register, August 26, 1927, Administrative File, Pan-African Congress August 30, 1923–August 26, 1927, 1, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to the chairman and Executive Committee of the Fourth Pan African Congress, ca. March 1927, 1, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Letter from Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations to W. E. B. Du Bois, March 8, 1927. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Addie W. Hunton, August 3, 1927, 1, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Addie W. Hunton, August 12, 1927, 1–2, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Letter from Ida G. Hunt to Addie W. Hunton, September 1927, 1, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers.

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Nevertheless, Du Bois took it upon himself to notify both the League of Nations and the League against Imperialism of the resolutions.93 A response from the League of Nations indicated that the Pan-African Association had been entered into the League’s “Handbook of International Organisations” and that the Quarterly Bulletin of the Section of the International Bureaux intended to mention the Fourth Congress.94 More enthusiastic was the response from the French branch of the League against Imperialism. The League hoped that Du Bois might be able to help them set up a press and emphasized the desire to create cross-Atlantic solidarity.95 The Executive Committee of the International League against Imperialism telegraphed William Pickens to pledge their support to the Pan-African Congress.96 A more personal telegram was also sent to the NAACP on behalf of the LAI executive members including Lamine Senghor.97

2.5 the racial fault lines of communism By this time, the tension between those who adhered to revolutionary Communist politics and those who advocated reform had split the CDRN. Maurice Satineau became the CDRN leader while Senghor, alongside the French Sudanese activist Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, left the group to form the Ligue pour la défense de la race noire (LDRN), with its journal La

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Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to W. N. Jones, August 3, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to T. Albert Marryshow, March 10, 1927, 1, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Letter from The League of Nations, Section of International Bureaux to W. E. B. Du Bois, November 26, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Ligue Internationale contre l’impérialisme, October 29, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Louis Gibrarti, Letter from Ligue Internationale contre L’impérialisme to W. E. B. Du Bois, November 12, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Letter from The League of Nations, Section of International Bureaux to W. E. B. Du Bois, November 26, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Letter from The League of Nations, Section of International Bureaux to W. E. B. Du Bois, November 26, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; W. E. B. Du Bois to Ligue Internationale contre l’impérialisme, October 29, 1927. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Louis Gibrarti, Letter from Ligue Internationale contre L’impérialisme to W. E. B. Du Bois, November 12, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. “Telegram to Professor Pickens,” August 23, 1927, 1:19 pm; Administrative File, PanAfrican Congress August 30, 1923–August 26, 1927, 1, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. “Telegram,” August 23, 1927, 12:56 pm; Administrative File, Pan-African Congress August 30, 1923–August 26, 1927, 1, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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Race nègre. Blaming their entanglements with the PCF for the fragmentation of the CDRN membership, René Maran exhorted black activists to avoid the “trouble” of communists and instead defend their own race first.98 Surveillance reports suggest there was more than political antagonism at play in this divide: racial hierarchies contributed to the split too. The newly formed LDRN had a primarily African membership, whereas the CDRN maintained a strong Antillean base. Martinican and Guadeloupian activists were often accused of looking down upon black Africans, a source of tension that the PCF Chairman of the Colonial Commission believed stemmed from the Antillean tendency to “pretend not to be Negroes.”99Much of this animosity was based on class: Africans tended to be workers while Antilleans in Paris had a higher percentage of students, although both groups included members from each region. Perhaps more pertinently, Antilleans had been full French citizens since 1848, but only Africans from Senegal’s Quatre Communes could claim this status. The citizenship of the Antilleans was by no means equivalent to that of their white counterparts, but a long history of Antilleans appointed to administrative positions in French Africa had consolidated a sense of difference between Antilleans and Africans.100 It was a refusal to accept designations of “backwardness” that seems to have primarily driven the split. Frequently drawing upon the “Declarations of the Rights and Man and Citizen,” the leadership of the LDRN beseeched “the people of France” to live up to their own foundational documents and allow “the assimilation of the natives without restrictions.”101 The possibility of a politically assimilated Republic was not yet foreclosed for these activists, even if they also did resort to the threat of revolution should citizenship remain unavailable to them.102 In 1929, Georges Hardy – reformist director of l’Ecole colonial – would attribute colonial unrest to a tripartite threat: Pan-Islamism, communism and “Pan-Negro propaganda transmitted by blacks from America.”103 As 98

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Archives Nationales (AN), Paris, France, Notes sur la propagande révolutionnaire intéressant les Pays d’Outre-Mer (PROM), F/7/13166, March 1927:11. Minutes of PCF Colonial Commission Meeting, September 4, 1926, 3SLOTFOM24, CAOM; Rapport d’Agent Désiré, February 1, 1927, 3SLOTFOM24, CAOM. On the use of Antilleans as administrators, see Véronique Hélènon, “Les Administrateurs coloniaux originaires de Guadeloupe, Martinique et Guyane dans les colonies françaises d’afrique, 1880–1939” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1997). LDRN, “Au people de France,” n.d. [1927], SLOTFOM 2/5, CAOM. LDRN, “Au people de France,” n.d. [1927], SLOTFOM 2/5, CAOM. Raoul Girardet, L’Idée colonial en France (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972), 292; Georges Hardy, Nos grandes problèmes coloniaux (1929, Paris: Armand Colin, 1933), 195.

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we have seen, the latter two, communism and “Pan-Negroism,” were often incorrectly conflated by colonial authorities, and attempts to imagine and build a black diasporic community were by no means a oneway stream from America to France and its empire. When Senghor passed away in 1927 and Kouyaté took over the leadership of the LDRN, letters were sent out to key individuals in the United States, such as James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois, and organizations such as the NAACP, inviting their participation in projects of mutual benefit.104 Kouyaté’s efforts toward rapprochement with his African American counterparts were also somewhat motivated by his desire to achieve economic independence from the PCF. The LDRN was in dire financial straits by the time he took over from Senghor, not least because of some creative accountancy. Senghor’s resignation, just prior to his death, had coincided with Kouyaté accusing him of appropriating some of the LDRN’s much-needed funds.105 Stronger links across the Atlantic, with more financially stable organizations such as the NAACP, were certainly appealing to Kouyaté at this moment. By this stage, radical Pan-Africanist groups in France such as the LDRN were deeply embedded in Communist political organization. As late as 1929, the LDRN was covering most of the publication costs for La Race nègre with subventions from the PCF in the order of 800–1000 francs per month. Kouyaté also represented the LDRN at the July 1929 Congress of the League against Imperialism, which had by then been outed as a Communist organization. When the Conference ended, Kouyaté traveled to Hamburg, where he helped set up a German branch of the LDRN among Cameroonian radicals.106 Called the Liga zur Verteidigung der Negerrasse and led by Cameroon activist Joseph Bilé, the group shared an address with the Liga gegen den Imperialismus, the German Parent Organization of the League against Imperialism. However, the speech Kouyaté delivered at Frankfurt notably put more weight on the possibilities of mutual support between different black groups than on Communist solidarity. He was also beginning to articulate an understanding of the race problem as separate from, if overlapping with, the issue of 104

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Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté to James Weldon Johnson, c. September 1928, SLOTFOM 3/ 24, CAOM; Ligue de Défense de la race nègre circular letter, June 14, 1929, SLOTFOM 111/111, CAOM. “Rapport,” 5 Novembre 1927, SLOTFOM 5/3, CAOM; “Rapport,” 19 Novembre 1927, SLOTFOM 5/3, CAOM. Letter from the Commissaire central (Bordeaux) to the Director de la Sureté Générale, March 19, 1930, “Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre folder,” SLOTFOM 3/11, CAOM.

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class.107 While he advocated solidarity between all those suffering from the oppression of capitalism and imperialism – “the Vietnamese, the North Africans and the nègres” – he also wrote enthusiastically of the potential for “un grand état nègre.”108 Meeting African Americans James Ford and William Patterson and a young George Padmore at the Congress also reinforced the potentiality of race-based organizing for Kouyaté. Ford had become involved with Communism through the ANLC in Chicago. All four men served on the Provisional Executive Committee on the Negro Question, a committee formed to set up a strategy for long term organization of black workers. Ford was representing the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUC-NW), an organization founded at the 1928 Sixth Comintern Congress in an effort to attract more black workers from the imperial colonies and the Americas. In one of his first official acts on behalf of the then barely-existent ITUC-NW, Ford criticized the Comintern and the LAI for the inadequacy of their work among African American communities.109 The result of their failure had been, he argued, to push black workers toward organizations such as the NAACP rather than the CPUSA. Such an accusation was particularly pointed given the recent policy shift of the Comintern into the so-called Third Period (1928–1933), which directly forbade any kind of collaboration with those considered reformists. Kouyaté offered a similar critique of the PCF and suggested that the LDRN would step in where Communist organizing hitherto had failed. As far as he was concerned, this kind of race-based organizing was imperative if any advances were to be made. In the strategy he envisioned, this would not just be a relationship between black metropolitan activists and black masses in the colonies but a movement of mutual support between blacks in Africa and the United States.110 Kouyaté’s subsequent trip to Germany to found the Liga was the result of Ford’s efforts in coordinating a trip to Moscow for a small group of blacks. Hoping to shore up Comintern interest in racial questions, Ford believed this trip would consolidate relationships between national groups and the Soviet Union. The initiative did meet with some success as it resulted in Kouyaté’s 107 108

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Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, “Vox Africae,” La Race Nègre, 2 (March 1929): 1. Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, “Vers l’élaboration d’un programme,” La Race Nègre, 2 (March 1929): 1. RGASPI 495/261/6747, 6, Autobiography by Ford, April 1932; RGASPI 495/155/77, 184–186, Report on the Negro Question of the League against Imperialism Congress, Moscow, 3/10–1929. Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté quoted by Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 354.

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decision to establish the Liga in Germany.111 Nevertheless, Ford was disgruntled at the lack of assistance he received from his fellow travelers.112 Around this time, Kouyaté also approached Du Bois and the NAACP for financial aid. In a letter that declared solidarity with black America, Kouyaté emphasized the importance of the American contingent of the black diaspora utilizing its relative wealth to prop up less wealthy groups elsewhere.113 Confiscated by the French police, the letter supposedly never reached Du Bois, although a copy of it can be found in Du Bois’s personal papers. Either way, Du Bois did not respond; it remained a missed opportunity. The letter was both a gesture of diasporic solidarity and evidence of an attempt to become independent financially from the Communist Party. Ford and Patterson would have disapproved of these attempts to reach out. They had done their best to prevent the NAACP representative, Pickens, from attending the 1929 League against Imperialism Congress on the grounds that he was not sufficiently capable of theorizing the relationship between race and imperialism and was too invested in capitalist systems.114 Their apprehension was well placed. Pickens was shocked by the Congress’s hostility to organizations such as the NAACP and to A. Phillip Randolph’s union organizing efforts, describing the speeches as “a violent attack upon liberalism everywhere that was not communism.”115 He made no bones about his belief in the need for reform rather than revolution and took the opportunity to interrogate Ford openly about his communist affiliations.116 As a result, his membership in the League was revoked.

2.6 the scottsboro trial as litmus test In 1931, Communist parties at a national and international level seemed to address the criticisms levied at them by activists such as Ford and

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RGASPI 495/155/77, 404–408, Kurzer Tätigkeitsbericht der Liga zur Verteidigung der Negerrasse. Kouyaté, Berlin, to the Eastern Secretariat, Moscow, 30/11–1930. RGASPI 495/155/77, 184–186, Report on the Negro Question of the League against Imperialism Congress, author: Ford, Moscow, 3/10–1929. Kouyaté to W. E. B. DuBois, dated April 29, 1929, cited in full in J. A. Langley, “PanAfricanism in Paris, 1924–1936,” Journal of Modern African Studies, 7:1 (April 1969): 86–87. RGASPI 495/18/664, 1–3 (Secret) Draft letter to the LAI by comrade Wilson (W. Patterson), Moscow, 25/3–1929. William Pickens, “American Delegates Greet their Flag” (1929), 1, William Pickens Correspondence 1927–1933, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. RGASPI 542/1/92, 17–32, “Complete” [list of attendance], Frankfurt am Main, July 1929.

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Kouayaté by their commitment to the Scottsboro Trial. Tensions between those who believed in the possibility of reform within the American democracy (including the NAACP, Du Bois and Pickens) and those who sought more revolutionary ends (such as Ford, Patterson and Padmore) would also come to the fore. In much of the historiography, historians treat the case as emblematic of Communist Party involvement in the Southern racial landscape.117 It certainly attracted unprecedented numbers of African Americans to CPUSA membership.118 For the purposes of this chapter, however, Scottsboro illuminates interesting and hitherto unattended aspects of the Franco-American race relations.119 Discovering nine black men in the company of two white women on a freight train, local police arrested them for rape on March 25, 1931, in Paint Rock, Alabama. Over a period of four days, four separate all-white juries declared eight of the nine defendants guilty and sentenced them to death. The ninth defendant’s case ended in a mistrial. The trial-appealretrial process continued until 1937. Not until 2013 were all nine defendants entirely pardoned. Initially the NAACP, led in this instance by Walter White, responded cautiously to the case. The Communist Party – mainly James S. Allen and Helen Marcy (pseudonyms for Sol and Isabel Auerbach, respectively) – had monitored the case from the beginning, with representatives of the International Labor Defense (ILD) office attending from the pretrial stage. Shortly after the sentences were handed down, the CPUSA published a lengthy defense of the so-called “Scottsboro boys” in the Daily Worker. That same day, April 10, the ILD voted to defend them and dispatched several lawyers to work on their behalf. After Communist Party involvement became apparent, Walter White also visited the men in jail and attempted to convince them and their mothers to hand their

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James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rusenhaft, “Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys,” American Historical Review, 106:2 (April 2001): 387–430; Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 118; Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 95–285; Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression, chapters. 3–5; Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 77. Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 109. Great attention has been paid to reactions in Britain and in Germany: James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rusenhaft, “Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys,” 387–430.

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defense over to NAACP lawyers.120 They declined, much to Walter White’s fury.121 In an excoriating statement about their decision, he revealed much about his opinions of black working-class women and their capacity to make their own decisions by blaming the men’s mothers and casting them as “ignorant and uncouth victims . . . being led to the slaughter” by Communist radicals.122 White’s public comments and the NAACP’s caution were a gift to the CPUSA. Quick to cast the NAACP as class enemies, the CPUSA used the example of the Scottsboro case to undermine the value of race-based activism and this theme would continue throughout the next few years, formulated as class warfare.123 It was not, James S. Allen wrote, just a struggle over the question of who would carry out the legal defense of the Scottsboro boys. It was a struggle between two opposing class forces, “between revolutionary forces led by the Communist Party and reformist forces represented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.”124 George Padmore described Du Bois and other American civil rights leaders as a “wing of misleaders” intent on perpetuating ad infinitum the subjugation of the black masses.125 This working-class rather than racial identity was emphasized again and again in appeals apparently issued by the boys and published in The Negro Worker: “We’s only poor working-class boys whose skin is black. . . . We ain’t done nothing wrong. We are only workers like you are. Only our skin is black.”126 Race was incidental to class identity. Much like the American communist papers, the PCF’s L’Humanité characterized the case in terms of innocent workers being denied a fair trial because of their class status.127 The defendants’ skin color was repeatedly downplayed as being of minor consequence. Similar stories appeared from time to time in 120

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Walter White, “The Negro and the Communists,” Harper’s Monthly, 164 (December 1931): 62–72. James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker and Eve Rusenhaft, “Mother Ada Wright,” 391. “Mothers of Scottsboro Victims Denounces NAACP Leaders as Bunch of Liars, Fakers,” Daily Worker, July 17, 1931, 1. “Mothers of Scottsboro Victims Denounces NAACP Leaders as Bunch of Liars, Fakers,” Daily Worker, July 17, 1931, 1. James S. Allen, “The Scottsboro Struggle,” The Communist (May 12, 1933): 440. George Padmore, “Bankruptcy of Negro Leadership,” Negro Worker, 1:12 (December 1931): 5. “Scottsboro Boys Appeal from Death Cells to the Toilers of the World,” Negro Worker, May 1932, cited in Philip S. Foner and Herbert Shapiro, American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1930–1934, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 292–293. APP, Séries BA, art 2176, Cabinet du préfet: affaires générales, Clipping, 8 Juillet, L’Humanité.

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the SFIO journal, Le Populaire. Often the journalists invoked “l’affaire Dreyfus” or “le drame Saco-Vanzetti” as reference points for this critique of the United States, warning of the failures of republicanism where the working class was concerned.128 L’Humanité also provided information for readers on how best to help the Scottsboro innocents, including writing letters of protest to the American Ambassador to France.129 The L’Humanité campaign and the activities of the CPUSA seemed to be further proof of Communist loyalty to the black cause. In the Cri des nègres, the LDRN leadership noted that “neither the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, nor the social democrats, so quick to protest when it concerns the just punishment of the saboteurs of the Soviet economy, have expressed interest in the fate of these eight innocent victims.” Articles repeatedly emphasized that it was a capitalist miscarriage of justice, a crime against workers, a group among whom black people were represented disproportionately. In a front-page article of Le Cri des nègres, Maxim Gorki opined that the death sentence had been handed down in the Scottsboro case because “the negro masses are more and more attracted to the revolutionary movement, in solidarity with white workers.”130 Again and again, this argument was repeated in the journal, with statements such as “the significance of the trial of Scottsboro lies in the attempt of the American bourgeois to resuscitate the fossilised hatred of race.”131 128

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Both cases involved questions of civil liberties and national belonging. The Dreyfus Affair refers to the political scandal that engulfed France between 1894 through to 1906. It began with the conviction for treason of the Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The case was mobilized by anti-Semitic groups as an example of the disloyalty of French Jewish peoples and resulted in several anti-Semitic riots. Writer Émile Zola famously published an open letter “J’Accuse!” in defense of Dreyfus, a declaration that rallied many to Dreyfus’s defense. He was ultimately acquitted of the crime but not before the faultlines of the French justice system and deep divisions in French public life were laid bare. The Saco-Vanzetti case refers to the conviction of two anarchist activists and Italian immigrants to the United States, Nicola Sacci and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, of the armed robbery of Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts. The case was appealed several times over issues of evidence and amidst allegations of antiimmigrant and anti-Italian prejudices, alongside political persecution. The two men maintained their innocence and the case drew worldwide attention in the press. Protests were held in Paris, London and elsewhere. Despite the outcry, the two men were executed by electric chair in 1927. APP, Séries BA, art 2176, Cabinet du préfet: affaires générales, Clipping, 8 Juillet, L’Humanité. “Le Terreur contre les Nègres aux Etats-Unis,” Le Cri des nègres, SLOTFOM, Microfilms, Séries 5 2Mia242, CAOM. “Pour sauver nos frères de Scottsborough: Que notre protestation s’éleve énergique et puissante,” Le Cri des negres; “Au paradis américain,” Le Cri des nègres, 1 (August 1931): 1.

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Based in Paris when the Scottsboro case began, black poet Countee Cullen corresponded with Walter White about the trials and asked permission to pass on Wright’s opinions to some of the Communist circles within which he moved. Despite the animosity between White and the CPUSA, the NAACP Secretary was happy to oblige, writing “I assume that since they are friends of yours they are more intelligent than the American variety. I shall send you . . . an article by Dr. DuBois on the whole question of the Scottsboro cases, Communism, and the Negro, which is in my opinion the sanest and most intelligent discussion that has yet been written.”132 While it is unclear just exactly whom Cullen was referring to, the exchange illuminates the nature of the animosity between White and the CPUSA.133 It was a question of leadership of the African American community rather than a real antipathy for Communist thinking at large.

2.7 anti-racism in the face of a “new” imperialism As the protests over the Scottsboro case garnered international attention in 1931, anti-racists and anti-imperialists in Paris had another pivotal event on their mind: the six-month-long French Colonial Exposition. The Exposition and the Scottsboro trial often shared front page space in radical black francophone newspapers.134 In part, this reflected the efforts of black francophone radicals such as those contributing to La Race nègre to link the sufferings of African Americans to the plight of subjects of European imperialism. African American thinkers outside of Communist organizations had hitherto been reluctant to make this connection. The growth of social science departments at black universities, however, saw the question attract more attention. The philosopher and Harlem Renaissance activist Alain Locke had been one of the first scholars to pursue a study of the League of Nations mandates.135 A firm believer in internationalism, Locke subscribed to the view that the importance of the 132

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Walter White to Countee Cullen, August 6, 1931, Box 6, Folder 8, Countee Cullen Papers, Amistad Research Centre. Through Allan Taub of the National Committee for the Defence of Political Prisoners, Cullen had become a member of an international committee including PCF members and anti-imperialists such as Andre Gide and Romain Rolland. It is possible these were the friends to whom he referred: Allan Taub (of the National Committee For the Defense of Political Prisoners) to Countee Cullen, June 14, 1934, Box 5, Folder 16, Countee Cullen Papers, Amistad Research Centre. See, for example, Le Cri des nègres, 1 (August 1931): 1. Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Susan Pedersen, The

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League of Nations lay in its guarantee of the rights of “undeveloped” people under mandated trust and their development toward political selfdetermination.136 Two summers spent in Geneva studying the Mandates Commission papers had resulted in his report deeming the Commission’s actions inadequate. Although it had been commissioned by the New York Foreign Policy Association, the report ultimately had little outside impact. His research did, however, push him to think carefully about the relationship between imperialism and the race problem in the United States.137 In the document itself, he had maintained the difference between people of color in the United States and those under mandated territories but acknowledged “the similarity of some of the problems to those of race relations in the United States.”138 A young scholar in Locke’s department at Howard, one Ralph J. Bunche, would also move toward this thinking in his studies of French colonization, writing that the social structures of African American communities seemed to him to bear “a significant resemblance to the organization of society in a colony or a subject nation.”139 Unlike Locke, Bunche was persuaded that this resemblance was the product of capitalist structures. The solution, therefore, lay in the reconfiguration of political and social organizations. Disillusionment with the structures of capitalism and imperialism was not confined to academia, as had been demonstrated by the success of the Communist framing of the Scottsboro trial. Analogies between the African American experience in the United States and the French colonial situation seemed all the more poignant when the African American dancer Josephine Baker was crowned the Queen of the Colonies at the opening of the Universal Exposition. Baker had come to fame through her canny exploitation of the stereotypes of black women’s sexuality.140 While she eventually resigned her position in

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Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Alain Locke: Memorandum: Foreign Policy Association; Alain Locke re African Mandate Study Project May 26, 1927: accredited observer at the League of Nations, Geneva. Box 164–105: Folder 16: Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Centre, Howard University. Alain Locke: Memorandum: Foreign Policy Association. Alain Locke: Memorandum: Foreign Policy Association. Ralph Bunche, “Marxism and the Negro Question (1929)” in Charles P. Henry (ed.), Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 39. See Hannah Durkin, Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).

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the face of outrage from the black Parisian community, the decision to crown her Queen in the first place indicated the extent to which colonial (nonwhite) bodies were being utilized to consolidate hierarchies of culture and race at the Exposition. Unlike the previous five expositions universelles, this exposition was not primarily intended to impress colonial subjects with the might of la belle France. Far more important to the exposition organizers was the creation of “une conscience impériale” in the French populace. The colonial administration, led by the Minister of the Colonies Léon Perrier, was concerned that French citizens had no real conception of the importance of their colonial possessions or the value of the French mission civilisatrice.141 The Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing international economic crisis had compounded a cultural malaise that had existed in various forms since the end of the Great War. The 1931 Colonial Exposition was an attempt to counter this loss of faith. In the opening ceremony, various officials emphasized the “colonial vocation” and “genius for colonisation” of the French.142 The recent appointment of Blaise Diagne to the role of Under Secretary of Colonial Affairs underlined the potential of the mission civilisatrice. French ministers had long made much of the colorblindness and meritocratic nature of their Republic, and Diagne’s appointment to such a high position, much like his election, was celebrated as evidence of the realization of Republican principles. Although Diagne remained a controversial figure in black francophone circles for his involvement in wartime conscription, the international impact of his appointment underlined French rationale for empire. While the internal politics of hosting such an exposition should not be underestimated, the exposition was also intended to justify empire as a political form on the international landscape. The American pavilion was a case in point. A replica of George Washington’s house at Mount Vernon sat towering among a series of cottages that each emblemized an 141

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Sandrine Lemaire et Pascal Blanchard, Culture coloniale. La France conquise par son Empire, 1871–1931 (Paris: Editions Autrement, 2003). Paul Reynaud, L’Empire Français: Discours prononcé à l’inauguration de l’Exposition coloniale (Paris: Guillemot and Lamothe, n.d. [1931]), 16; Henri Labouret, A La Recherche D’Une Politique Indigène Dans L’Ouest Africain (Paris: Editions du Comité de l’Afrique française, 1931), 6. Of course, the exhibition often had the opposite effect too. Perhaps most famously, the philosopher Simone Weil wrote that it was at the Exhibition that she, for the first time, “felt and understood the tragedy of colonization.” Simone Weil , Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the Other, ed. J. P. Little (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 47.

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aspect of American empire.143 Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Samoa, the Virgin Islands and Samoa were all represented, and Native American dancers and musicians performed.144 Official exposition coverage emphasized the long-standing relationship between the two Republics, dwelling on Lafayette’s role in the revolution and casting contemporary America as a brother empire.145 The Americans seemed happy with this role, including a bedroom for Lafayette in the replica of Washington’s house. Neither the French nor the Americans seemed phased by the irony in exhibiting colonial power through the home of a man who had led a revolution against the colonial practices of the British. As one journalist put it in L’Illustration, at a moment of financial suffering when talk of “a failure or a decline of the west” was rampant, the exposition affirmed “that the great European nations (the United States with them) are not in the least disposed to acknowledge this failure or to renounce the civilising mission that they have undertaken.”146 More than eight million people attended the Exposition, a striking endorsement of empire. It was no coincidence that Albert Sarraut, about to be re-appointed Minister for the Colonies in 1932, published a second book on the colonial mission to coincide with the exposition. Entitled Grandeur et servitude coloniales, the book conceptualized the colonial relationship as a balance between the “le droit de conquête” and the debt to “la nature humaine” that it entailed. Lambasting those who saw colonial conquest as “selfish will to power” or “mercenary enterprise,” Sarraut insisted that France’s presence in its colonies was underpinned by “le gout de l’universel.”147 The forced labor, starvation and exploitation of the natives were explained away as being better than the experiences they would face under native rule.148 Referencing the Latin Quarter – where many of those involved in organizations such as the LDRN lived – specifically, Sarraut was at pains to

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“A l’Exposition coloniale la Maison de Washington,” Le Figaro, 27 Mai 1931, 4; “A l’Exposition colonial: M. Paul Reynaud inaugure le pavilion des états-unis,” Le Petit Parisien, 27 Mai 1931, 1; “A l’Exposition colonial: Mount-Vernon Et Hawai `A Vincennes,” Le Petit Parisien, 27 Mai 1931, 2. Robert Artus, “Le pavillon américain,” Le Journal de l’Exposition colonial, 3 (Juin 1931): 1. Robert Artus, “Le pavillon américain,” 1. Pierre Deloncle, L’Illustration, May, 1931, n.p. The fear that Western civilization had failed was reiterated frequently on both sides of the Atlantic: Evans Lewin’s article is representative of this position: “The Black Cloud in Africa,” Foreign Affairs, 4:4 (July 1926), 637–647. Grandeur et servitude coloniales (Paris, Saggitaire, 1931), 24; 25; 79. Grandeur et servitude coloniales, 135.

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dismiss those “noisy individuals” who utilized international congresses to demand “the total exercise of political rights,” “representation” and, for their country, a “Constitution.” These individuals, he confirmed, were in the minority and the people should pay them scant heed.149 Many of these “noisy individuals” saw the Exposition as the perfect opportunity to recruit new members to the cause and to distribute anticolonial pamphlets.150 Parisian police were on the lookout for such behavior and arrested several activists, including Kouyaté. They missed Narcisse Danaë, however, and he spent a great deal of time speaking to Malagasy people who had been brought to Paris for the event.151 In Marseilles, branches of the LDRN and the Association Indochinoise d’Enseignement Mutuel worked together to reach these colonial “imports” and attempted to stage an anti-imperial demonstration that was eventually thwarted by the Colonial service.152 The French branch of the League against imperialism, undoubtedly one of the groups Sarraut had in mind when he wrote of international congresses, also seized the moment. They, along with the Secours Rouge International, co-sponsored a Surrealist and Communist group that staged a counter-exhibition which lampooned French empire and emphasized Lenin’s anti-imperialism. An associated pamphlet urged readers to “reject the trend toward . . . exploitation in favour of the stance adopted by Lenin, who . . . was the first to recognise colonized peoples as the allies of the global proletariat.”153

2.8 disenchantment with institutional communism Despite the commitment of certain Communists to denouncing imperialism and the efforts being made on behalf of the Scottsboro boys, institutional Communism was beginning to lose traction among their most internationally minded black organizers. In 1931 financial problems split the LDRN.154 A moderate contingent retained rights to the Ligue’s name, whereas those with Communist sympathies became the Union des

149 151 152

153

154

150 Grandeur et servitude coloniales, 164–165. A.N., SLOTFOM 3/5, CAOM. Agent Joe, June 14, 1931; August 31, 1931, SLOTFOM 2/21, CAOM. CAI Marseille report to the Directeur d’Affaires Politiques of the Colonial Ministry, 13 Avril, 1931, SLOTFOM 3/5, CAOM. José Pierre, ed., Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives (1922–1939), vol. 1 (Paris: Losfield, 1980), 195. For more on the anticolonial exhibition, see André Thirion, Revolutionaries without Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 289–290. Agent Victor, March 29, 1932, SLOTFOM 3/24, CAOM.

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Travailleurs Nègres (UTN) in 1932.155 Nevertheless, these Communist sympathies are better expressed in terms of the instrumentalization of Marxist thinking than in particular adherence to either the PCF or the Comintern. The UTN’s official goals, outlined in their journal Le Cri des nègres, emphasized racial loyalty over PCF membership. They included “emancipation,” “cultural development” and aid – both “material and moral” of, and for, les nègres.156 Although they received PCF funding, Kouyaté was determined that Le Cri des nègres would remain independent in order to convey the ideas of the “nègre milieu.”157 The tension between black and PCF interests had caused problems for Kouyaté since 1930 when he was reprimanded for organizing black-only unions in Paris and Marseilles.158 He had also attempted to circumvent PCF national politics by appealing to Padmore to help him gain independence both for La Race nègre and his union. Not only did Padmore send a letter berating the PCF for their failure to “use the services of comrade Kouyaté as broadly as possible”; he also arranged for funds to be sent straight to Kouyaté for La Race nègre.159 For his part, it was Kouyaté rather than the Comintern who had given Padmore contacts with black groups such as the Liga zur Verteidigung der Negerrasse when he arrived in Berlin in 1930 to head up the ITUC-NW.160 He had also given editorial support to Padmore’s The Negro Worker.161 Tensions came to a head in 1933 when Kouyaté was expelled from the PCF over his attempts to keep the UTN independent.162 Within months, he was also expelled from the UTN for cultivating links with reformist 155 156 157 158 159

160

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162

Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouvements nègres en France, 1915–1939, 284–304. AN, PROM, F/7/13168, PROM, September 1932, 14. June 1933, SLOTFOM 3/79, CAOM. Le Reveil coloniale 3 (May 1930) SLOTFOM 3/74, CAOM. Letter from the Communist International ITUC-NW to the Confédération Générale de Travail Unitaire of the Parti Communiste francaise, July 21, 1931, “CGTU” FOLDER, SLOTFOM 3/31, CAOM. “Subfolder Janvier 1931,” SLOTFOM3/71, CAOM; Hakim Adi, West African in Britain: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 243. Brief mention of the Liga appears in Robbie Artken’s article on Joseph Bilé but it is an organization that remains understudied: “From Cameroon to Germany and Back via Moscow and Paris: The Political Career of Joseph Bilé (1892– 1959), Performer, ‘Negerarbeiter’ and Comintern Activist,” Journal of Contemporary History, 43:4 (2008): 597–616. George Padmore, “Comment vivent les fermiers nègres en Amérique,” La Race nègre, 4:1 (July 1930): 2. Kouyate’s willingness to collaborate with “organisations nationales bourgeoises” and his tendency toward race rather than class based solidarity were also significant reasons for his expulsion: “Note,” June 30, 1934, SLOTFOM 3/24, CAOM.

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thinkers such as Maurice Satineau and René Maran.163 The Sudanese Kouyaté also believed a motivating factor in his expulsion sprung from the old tensions between Antillean and Africans, lamenting that many of the issues plaguing the PCF were linked to the fact that “the African Negroes do not listen to the Antilleans.”164 Nevertheless, his experience reflected at the national level reflected international currents and George Padmore’s expulsion from the Comintern soon followed. Both men focused instead on black internationalism, living together with a Haitian LAI activist, Camille St-Jacques, in Paris for the rest of 1933. By mid-August of that year, Padmore was aware that the Comintern had abandoned the ITUC-NW and were side-lining efforts in the colonies to concentrate on the European crisis, aligning themselves with democratic countries in the struggle against fascism. The extent to which Padmore saw this as a betrayal is made clear in an article he published in the Amsterdam News after the split: “the international Negro work is being sacrificed at a time when we cannot afford to weaken the Negro liberation struggles, especially in the black colonies.”165 Padmore retreated from his critique of reformist groups such as the NAACP and began to build bridges with W. E. B. Du Bois. Emphasizing the possibilities of Pan-Africanism now that institutional Communism had disappointed him, Padmore was quick to reassure Du Bois that his brand of Pan-Africanism had failed only because of the underhand inveigling of Blaise Diagne and Gratien Candace.166 Both Kouyaté and Padmore 163

164 165 166

Notes sur la propagande révolutionnaire intéressant des pays d’outre mer, October 31, 1933, November 3, 1933; SLOTFOM 3/73, CAOM. Rapport d’agent Paul, September 8, 1933, 2SLOTFOM19, CAOM. George Padmore, “Expelled Red Scores Party,” Amsterdam News (June 17, 1934): 1. George Padmore to W. E. B. Du Bois, 17 February 1934, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. The scholarship on Padmore tends to position his break with the Comintern in terms of his move to Pan-African organizing within a particularly British context. Those that do mention his time in Paris and institutional ties place it within the larger context of Soviet organizing, rather than the particular political landscape of the Parisian colonial left. The one exception is Suzan D. Pennybacker, who gestures toward the idea that Padmore’s move to Pan-Africanism was less the abandonment of Communist politics than disillusionment with the men running the Party. As is clear in this chapter, I want to expand upon this idea to argue that his Pan-Africanism, like that of Kouyaté’s, was not an abandonment of Communism but a realization that no ideological grappling with imperialism or racism was complete without engaging with race as a crucial factor: Suzan D. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 76–86. For work on Padmore’s turn to Pan-Africanism, see Hakim Adi, West African in Britain: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 87–88; James R. Hooker, Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (New York: Frederick

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attempted to revive the project in the form of a World Negro Congress to be held in Paris in 1933.167 Although the Congress never eventuated, the very idea of it points to the ways that Communist Parties internationally and locally pushed black activists toward race-based organization. At times, it seemed that institutional Communism offered the most feasible way forward for all oppressed peoples. Communist groups in France certainly offered funding for African and Antillean concerns. In the United States, black radicals were less integrated into the national party but still received some support from the Comintern itself. However, from the PCF’s failure in 1925 to send Senghor and Bloncourt to the ANLC conference in Chicago to the 1933 Comintern decision to abandon the ITUC-NW and step back from black liberation struggles, the institutional politics of Communist organizations repelled black activists from interracial activism and attracted them toward black solidarity. By 1933–1934, disenchantment with Communism had certainly prompted men such as Padmore and Kouyaté to engage more sympathetically with the reformism of groups such as the NAACP. Their Communism had always been concomitant with race-based organization, but their disillusionment triggered shifts in their theoretical interventions into the place of race in their respective political systems. These changes were also the result of attempts to rehabilitate notions of African civilization and black modernity that were occurring simultaneously in both France and the United States. The literary and creative arts movement that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance and the French vogue nègre would intersect with the same concerns about the right to self-determination that had pushed thinkers such as Richard Moore, Lamine Senghor, Lovett Fort-Whiteman and George Padmore to explore the potential of Communist organizing. Chapter 3 will chart the intellectual contours of those movements.

167

A. Praeger, 1967); Bill Schwarz, “George Padmore” in Bill Schwarz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 137. “Untitled,” December 13, 1933, SLOTFOM 3/34, CAOM.

3 La vogue nègre: Racial Renaissance at the Intersection of Republic, Empire and Democracy

“I believe in a racial renaissance,” said the student, “but not in going back to savagery.” “Getting down to our native roots and building up from our own people,” said Ray, “is not savagery. It is culture.” Claude McKay We are, let us frankly confess, Americans and when we have thought about Africa we have for the most part thought about it as Americans. The circumstances of our coming into America through slavery have inevitably led to a complete adoption of the elements and background of American civilization. Alain Locke

Claude McKay’s Banjo burst onto the New York literary scene in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Reviews were mixed. Some, such as Dewey Jones in the Chicago Defender, lambasted it as “Dirt.”1 Others, including McKay’s friend and Harlem Renaissance poet laureate Langston Hughes, were more enthusiastic. Acknowledging that the black lives it portrayed would not be popular among black elites, Hughes nonetheless believed that Banjo had the potential to teach white folk some important lessons about “colored thought.”2 African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois was also cautiously impressed by the

1 2

Dewey R. Jones, “Dirt,” Chicago Defender (July 27, 1929): 12. Langston Hughes to Claude McKay, June 27, 1929, Box 3, Folder 98, 2, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter Claude McKay Collection).

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“sort of international philosophy of the Negro race” that McKay elaborated.3 In France, after it was translated into French in 1931, Banjo elicited a different kind of reaction, becoming a manifesto for black cultural radicalism. Paris itself was still enjoying a vogue nègre, and more generally, black francophone readers saw much of the familiar in his portrait of French imperial racism. Moreover, the translator had inflected the book with a black class consciousness that was not so evident in the English version that made it particularly appealing to black radicals.4 In part, this difference between the English and French versions came down to a “basic grammar of blackness” that mapped far more easily in French onto existing class divisions within the race than racialized terms necessarily did in the United States.5 In McKay’s hands, Marseille became a metaphor for the tensions between French Republican democratic potential and the racialized reality of imperial capitalism. Most significantly for francophone readers, it openly repudiated the idea that black people would ever be admitted as equals into the French state. Banjo reflected a disillusionment with the possibilities of nation-state organization that had been embedded into international law through the establishment of the League of Nations and specifically in the legislation that breathed life into the Mandates Commission. Through the character of Ray, McKay rejected the possibility that Western civilization would ever accept black culture as modern or black people as members of humanity. As far as he was concerned, a far better alternative was to use the rich cultural antecedents of the African diaspora to build a new and transnational black modernity. Given that many of the black elite, particularly those who had invested time and effort into supporting the contemporary Harlem Renaissance, believed in the potential of political assimilation into Western civilization regardless of race, it is not hard to see why Hughes was concerned about their reaction to Banjo. Literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards’s close study of Banjo has elaborated elegantly the “vagabond internationalism” of blackness that McKay

3 4

5

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Browsing Reader,” Crisis, 36 (July 1929): 324. The translation was the work of two communist writers and journalists, Ida Treat and Paul Vaillant-Couturier. Vaillant-Couturier had been involved with the Union Intercoloniale and was the editor of PCF journal L’Humanité: Banjo, trans. Ida Treat and Paul VaillantCouturier (Paris: Reider, 1931); Martin Steins, “Les Antécédents et la genèse de la négritude senghorienne” (Paris: Université Paris III, Thèse d’Etat, 1981), 588–589. Brent Hayes Edwards, “Three Ways to Translate the Harlem Renaissance” in Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith (eds.), Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 307.

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expressed in his novel.6 In this chapter, I build upon this literary analysis to use the novel as a way into understanding the conversations of black intellectuals across the French Empire and the United States as they grappled with the relationship between culture and political citizenship in the aftermath of the so-called Wilsonian moment. As Chapter 1 detailed, activists from both the United States and the French Third Empire had responded to the Wilsonian equation of the right to self-determination by attempting to demonstrate that race was neither a marker of civilization nor national belonging. The collaborations between black thinkers from these different national contexts were, however, often conflated by French colonial and United States governmental authorities with the desire for a geopolitically defined nation-state. In the case of France, it is only recently, with the work of historians such as Michael Goebel and Gary Wilder, that the historical literature on the interwar period has offered a counter-narrative to such beliefs. This chapter furthers this endeavor through the study of the dialogue between American and francophone black intellectuals. For most black intellectuals, the possibility of crafting forms of republicanism and citizenship that would allow self-determination without state sovereignty was not foreclosed. Attempts to achieve this possibility included recognizing a long-term relationship between the so-called minority groups existing in republican empire states and the state itself: through culture, through political loyalty, through physical and intellectual labor and through birthright. What follows is an effort to map out the different ways in which black activists from both the United States and France employed culture as a method of demonstrating their contributions to Western modernity and as a means of thinking through the relationship between republicanism and race. In so doing, I place the better-known work of thinkers such as Alain Locke and Claude McKay, alongside the oft-neglected writings of men and women like Louis T. Achille and Clara Shepard.

3.1 cultural nationalism and the dilemma of minority rights France’s vogue nègre of les années folles and the American “Negrophilia” of the roaring twenties framed thinking about race in this period. These 6

Brent Hayes Edwards, “Vagabond Internationalism: Claude McKay’s Banjo” in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 187–240.

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phenomena had in common a fetishized representation of black men and women in the literature and anthropology of each nation. The role of race, however differently it was understood in the particular language and national context, was enmeshed in a cross-Atlantic constellation of performance arts, literature, ethnographic studies and paintings. Many black thinkers responded to this phenomenon with enthusiasm, reasoning that attention to the race and opportunities for patronage would eventually lead to greater social equality, an evolution that would theoretically enforce equality before the law. The black cultural renaissance most commonly associated with Harlem certainly had institutional roots in the belief. NAACP activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke worked with National Urban League activist and editor of Opportunity Charles S. Johnson to create prizes and bursaries for upcoming black writers and artists who are now remembered as the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro was an effort to showcase the cultural achievements of the race. Black humanist thinkers in this period attempted to overcome these distinctions, articulating an understanding of sovereignty as residing in the state of being human. Self-governing polities such as the United States and France, they argued, should be understood as constituted by human beings whose humanity alone, rather than monolithic culture, should ensure them equal access to political as well as cultural rights. After all, it was on the basis of cultural difference and capacity that rights were granted or denied in both Republics. The nationalization of US economic and social structures, occurring in tandem with the assumption of a new role on the international stage in the three decades leading up to the 1920s had led Americans to adopt a more nationalist approach to citizenship and identity.7 As a result, American cultural nationalism gained a significant impetus in the 1920s. The movements of the population within the nation and the influx of immigrant groups from outside the United States had significantly galvanized these movements.8 At this time, the forms and meanings of American identity were hotly contested. At the heart of the struggle was the argument over the definition of nation as either social contract or as “blood community.”

7

8

Martin J. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the early 20th Century (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 39–40; George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 9–10. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance, 9–10.

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The latter relied upon an essentialist definition of nation that correlated with race while the former privileged individual choice over blood ties. American anthropologist Melville Herskovits framed the idea of the “New Negro” in exactly this context, pointing to the way it intersected with concurrent projects across racial groupings to define American nationalism.9 Both Herskovits and Franz Boas were pushing back against essentialist visions of race and its equivalence with nationality popularized in the work of Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant. Similar conversations were occurring in the French Republic. Government officials such as Albert Sarraut may have rejected explicitly the one-drop rule as an American characterization of race, but they were nonetheless drawn to the work of Stoddard and Grant.10 Sarraut conceived of national sovereignty in terms of the possession of a common civilization. In this framework, non-European members of a state possessed a different and inferior civilization that did not entitle them to the same political rights but which did confer socio-economic belonging. The responsibility of empire and of mandate trustees was simultaneously to modernize and yet preserve individual indigenous societies. This kind of reasoning allowed political writer Albert Duchène to quite comfortably say, in 1924, that “France . . . shows itself . . . to be respectful of everyone’s rights.”11 Given that the guarantee of individual human rights lay firmly in the hands of the nation-state, the association of difference with exclusion from political citizenship also meant the abnegation of political rights. The problems inherent in minority rights thinking were clearly expressed by Alain Locke in his famous anthology The New Negro. In Locke’s own introduction and conclusion to the anthology, he argued vehemently that the very idea of encysting “the Negro as a benign foreign body in the body politic” was neither desirable nor possible. Minority 9

10

11

Melville Herskovits, The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing (New York: Knopf, 1928); George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance, 8. In a 1925 speech to the Comité national d’études sociales et politiques entitled “The Possibility of Conflict between Europe and the Colored Races and the Conditions for Peace in the World,” Sarraut explicitly referenced Stoddard whose work had just been translated into French: Clifford Rosenberg, “Albert Sarraut and Republican Racial Thought,” French Politics, Culture & Society, 20:3 (Fall 2002), 99; Lothrop Stoddard, Le Flot montant des peoples de couleur: Contre la suprématie mondiale des blancs, trans. Abel Doysié (Paris: Payot, 1925); Albert Sarraut, Grandeur et Servitude (Paris: Editions du Saggitaire, 1931), 225. Albert Duchène, “Les principes généraux de notre organisation colonial, in Henri Brenier,” La Politique Coloniale de la France (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1924), 167–168.

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rights, envisaged as a protecting measure, were not, in Locke’s view, workable or democratic. Instead, he advocated thinking about state entities and, in particular, the republican United States, in cosmopolitan terms.12 The future lay in a choice, “not between one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the other.”13 Many of the authors of the essays within the anthology echoed Locke’s platform, often explicitly distancing the black community from separatist activism by reiterating their sense that they too were American.14 Melville Herskovits‘s contribution to Locke’s The New Negro, “The Negro’s Americanism” took this approach, stressing the similarity between black and white Americans and arguing that they shared a culture. Heavily influenced by Franz Boas’s theories of anthropology and cultural development, Herskovits’s argument was underpinned by the idea that African Americans had been shorn of their indigenous African cultures by the rupture of slavery. Their national identity, therefore, could not be anything but American, albeit a version of America national culture heavily influenced by racial discrimination. A longtime ally of the African American cause, Herskovits had published similar meditations in Charles S. Johnson’s Opportunity and in a book entitled The American Negro.15 In the latter in particular, Herskovits‘s findings painted African Americans as completely acculturated to the United States’ political norms despite the emergence of a distinctive black artistic expression.16 This aligned with W. E. B. Du Bois’s view of racial identity, and he praised Herskovits for being “a man who is more interested in arriving at the truth than proving a thesis of race superiority.”17 Both Du Bois and Locke agreed with Herskovits’s view of political assimilation as constituting the basis for black belonging and access to rights within the American nation-state. Their thinking was informed 12

13 14

15 16

17

The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. L. Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 23. Alain Locke, The New Negro, 11–13. The following essays particularly reflected this idea: Jessie Fauset, “The Gift of Laughter” in Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro, 161–167; J. A. Rogers, “Jazz at Home” in Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro, 216–221; Albert C. Barnes, “Negro Art and America” in Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro, 25. Melville Herskovits, “The Racial Hysteria,” Opportunity, 2:18 (June 1924): 166–167. Melville J. Herskovits, The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928). W. E. B. Du Bois, “Two Novels,” Crisis, 6 (June 1928): 22.

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deeply by their respective educations in German romantic traditions. In their contributions to the New Negro anthology as well as in work published contemporaneously, they constructed black artistic expression in terms of the meaning associated with the German idea of Kultur. Kultur refers to the intellectual, artistic and religious expressions in which the individuality of a people expresses itself. It is not, in contrast, a referent of the political or economic dimension of nation-state organization.18 Race figures then, as Locke argued, as a socio-historical construct, a “culture product” that does not, and should not, map onto political borders.19 In the context of such an argument, Locke applauded Du Bois’s Pan-African efforts because they drew from a “consciousness of acting as the advance guard of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilization.”20 Drawing parallels to the Jewish situation, Locke argued that Harlem was “the home of the Negro’s ‘Zionism.’” However, he was careful to distinguish this burgeoning international race consciousness from Garvey’s black nationalism or from the separatism embedded in the minority rights thinking of the League of Nations.21 For Locke as for Du Bois, cultural exchange and enlightenment throughout the African diaspora was important because it would improve the nature of Western civilization, not replace it. Such an understanding of the Harlem Renaissance was strongly connected to the responsibilities of citizenship within an American democratic framework. Locke made it clear that, alongside cultural production, the African American community was patently demonstrating fitness for US citizenship through material contributions of labor and social patience in the face of discrimination.22 Du Bois’s contribution to The New Negro anthology – “The Negro Mind Reaches Out” – reiterated Locke’s arguments and carefully distinguished between diasporic affiliations and the distinctly American character of the “New Negro.”23 18

19

20 21 22 23

This is very much in the vein of German philosopher of cultural nationalism Johann Gottfried Herder’s “Volksgeist” or “spirit of the people.” In making this argument, I owe much to the elaboration of the historical difference between the terms Kultur and Zivilisation in Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000): 5–44. Alain Locke, “The Concept of Race As Applied to Social Culture,” Howard Review, 1 (1924) in L. Harris (ed.), The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 193. Alain Locke, “The New Negro” inin Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro, 14. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” 14; “The Negro Youth Speaks,” 51. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” 15. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out” inin Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro, 392.

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3.2 art and political change Du Bois and Locke’s conception of the relationship between culture and state organization was only one element of the idea of the “New Negro.” It was also connected to the role that art could play in effecting political change. Many historians have characterized Alain Locke’s and, indeed, Du Bois’s faith in art as rooted in the desire to demonstrate the acculturation of black peoples into white America and European standards of culture.24 The New Negro was indubitably intended as propagandist but there is an important distinction between the idea that art should be used for political effect, as propaganda, and the pragmatist view of aesthetic experience that Locke was espousing. The latter sees art as having an effect upon the democratic ethos of the audience and thus shies away from too marked a delineation between culture and politics when thinking about citizenship. To quote the influential American philosopher and contemporary of Locke’s, John Dewey, the “arts . . . supply the meanings in terms of which life is judged, esteemed and criticised.”25 Locke was a firm believer in this ethos. Even the first outlet for the publication of The New Negro, the Survey Graphic, had sprung from a pragmatist belief in the necessity of the public being informed in order for democracy to function.26 The anthology that grew out of this special issue expanded upon this mission, allowing readers, as Locke put it, to “discover in the artistic self-expression of the Negro to-day a new figure on the national canvas and a new force in the foreground of affairs.”27 In an article entitled “Criteria for Negro Art,” Du Bois laid down similar views on the importance of including art and literature in the NAACP agenda when the organization’s goal was the achievement of social justice.28 Art, he declared, needed to be understood in the 24

25

26 27 28

Henry Louis Gates Jr., for example, reads The New Negro as an erasure of the racial selves of the writers involved in favor of assimilationism: “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations, 24 (Autumn 1988): 148. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925) in Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 1: 1925 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 159. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 57. Alain Locke, “Foreword” inin Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro, 1. Although I do not explore this here, Du Bois and Locke disagreed about the extent to which art was inherently valuable. In a review of The New Negro, Du Bois made it clear that he did not “care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda,” whereas Locke was more inclined to argue that in aiming for high-quality art for its own sake, “Negro” literature and art would provide tangible evidence of the race’s capacity: W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria for Negro Art,” 290–297.

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pragmatist and historicist sense as the practice of creating an ethos of truth and freedom necessary for democracy.29 This was a continuation of an earlier argument Du Bois had made in the Crisis where he had explained artistic expression as a fundamental tenet of freedom.30 Such expression was a means by which to create the world “we want for ourselves and for all America.”31 True art was a mechanism that had the potential to destabilize the artificial racial categories contemporaneously preventing non-black America from including African Americans and other people of color in their definition of what it meant to be American. Du Bois would later make this same argument about the relationship between democracy and art in his 1928 novel Dark Princess. The book tells the story of Matthew Towns, a young black man barred from fulfilling his dreams of working in medicine due to his race. Embittered by this experience, Towns attempts to leave America’s racism behind by moving to Germany. There he meets and falls in love with the Indian Princess Kautilya, who encourages him to overcome his American perspectives on race. Littering the book with references to modernist artists and writers such as Kandinsky, Picasso and Proust, Du Bois self-consciously constructed an international and cosmopolitan space. It is only within this context, as the immersion of the protagonist Matthew Towns in the Art Institute demonstrates, that Du Bois believes an individual can become “a unit of real democracy” and overcome the black-white binary of US society.32 Harold Cruse would recognize Du Bois’s thinking as such, writing in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that he was the first to relate African American art “in its functional relationship to the civil rights movement.”33 Thus, while Du Bois and Locke may have disagreed on the precise nature of art and its role, both believed that citizenship was more than political status. For them, it also encompassed participation in modernity and in the cultural identity of the state. 29

30 31 32 33

Here I wish to point to Du Bois’s pragmatist sensibilities rather than to claim that Du Bois was, in fact, a pragmatist. For further reading on this point, see Leonard Harris, “The Great Debate: W. E. B. Du Bois vs. Alain Locke on the Aesthetic,” Philosophia Africana, 7:1 (March 2014): 15–39; Ross Posnock, Color and Culture (London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 111–145; Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). W. E. B. Du Bois, “Negro Art,” Crisis, 22:2 (June 1921): 55–56, 292. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Negro Art,” 292. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess: A Romance (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928), 280. Harold Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From Its Origins to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1967), 42–43.

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Writer Zora Neale Hurston agreed. In her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” she wrote: “I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.”34 Hurston had a radical vision of American democracy as capable of being constituted by multiple racial and cultural identities. Moreover, she firmly cast race into the category of construct, an identity derived from difference and dislocation.35 Rather than hoping to demonstrate black capacity for civilization, Hurston believed that such movements should be redirected toward liberating African Americans from the sense of inferiority that racial discrimination had produced.36 Another Harlem Renaissance writer, Nella Larsen, portrayed the problems of racial essentialism in her 1929 novel Quicksand. Larsen’s protagonist Helga is the child of a black Caribbean man and a white Danish immigrant to the United States. A citizen of both Denmark and the United States, Helga never considers herself Danish or American or even a hybrid citizen.37 She feels excluded from both communities because she does not conform to an essentialist understanding of either race or nation. This sense of exclusion conveyed Larsen’s own conception of citizenship as constituting both a legal and cultural identity.38 Another anthology of Harlem Renaissance work would take this thinking one step further: V. F. Calverton’s 1929 An Anthology of American Negro Literature. In his introductory essay “The Growth of Negro Literature,” the white Calverton elaborated a specifically African American form of literature – constituted by genres such as “Spirituals,” “Labor Songs” and “Blues” – that comprised “America’s chief claim to originality in its cultural history,” the first to transcend inferior imitations of the European model that sought exterior approval.39 Framed thusly, the following collection of works was not only a catalog of black literary output but a defense of blackness as a valid cultural-political identity 34

35 36

37 38

39

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” in Zora Neale Hurston, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive, ed. Alice Walker (New York: The Feminist Press, 1979), 155. Delia Caparoso Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 85. David Headon, “‘Beginning to See Things Really’: The Politics of Zora Neale Hurston” in Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel (eds.), Zora in Florida (Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991), 29. Nella Larsen, Quicksand (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), 153, 163–165. See George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge: MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2007), 223–240. V. F. Calverton, “The Growth of Negro Literature” in V. F. Calverton (ed.), An Anthology of American Negro Literature (New York: The Modern Library, 1929): 3–5.

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within the United States’ national framework.40 Not only was Calverton arguing that African Americans had something to offer national culture; he was also establishing African American culture as the most authentic expression of American exceptionalism since independence.41 Writers such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay were often uncomfortable with attempts to cast black culture as a product of American rather than racial exceptionalism. Alongside Hurston, they were also quick to condemn Du Bois’s explicit expectation that African American writers use their artistic talent for the uplift of the race by promoting visions of black respectability.42 Hughes saw the use of art as propaganda as completely contrary to the authenticity required to create true art.43 This urge to demonstrate African American acculturation seemed to him to be a “desire to pour racial individuality into the mould of American standardization and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”44 Inherent in this formulation was the idea that nationality must equate to a homogenous culture that has no place for the difference threatened by the authentic expression of the black self. In fiery tones, Hughes accused the older generation of “nice Negroes” of rejecting anything that set them apart from whites, even if it was valuable. Such resort to respectability reflected the extent to which they had internalized the racism that they suffered.45 However, neither Locke nor Du Bois was arguing for the disappearance of African American culture into white America. They were instead formulating the possibility of the two cultures assimilating into a merged culture. It was about more than being recognized as “full-fledged Americans.” It was about creating a new, better America.46 Nevertheless, both Du Bois’s and Locke’s vision of a merged culture was characterized by the value they placed upon a bourgeois respectability that excluded the vast masses of black workers and poor.47 It was this elitism 40

41 42

43 44 45

46 47

Henry Louis Gates Jr. , “Canon Formation and Afro-American Tradition” in Dominic Lacapra (ed.), The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 24. Henry Louis Gates Jr. “Canon Formation and Afro-American Tradition,” 24. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” 290–297; Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artists and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation, June 23, 1926, in Christopher de Santis (ed.), The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. 9 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 36. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artists and the Racial Mountain,” 36. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” 290–297. Langston Hughes, “Those Bad New Negroes: A Critique on Critics,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 9, 1927; April 16, 1927. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” 293. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Browsing Reader,” Crisis, 35 (May 1928): 374.

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that particularly irritated thinkers such as Hughes and McKay.48 When Du Bois reviewed McKay’s Home to Harlem in a 1928 article, his reaction seemed to confirm Hughes’s accusations. Home to Harlem followed the experiences of Jake, a black World War I veteran, who returns from Europe to work first in Harlem and then on train lines in the Northeast. The portrait McKay painted of working-class black life explored the impact of racism and labor exploitation on the everyday lives of black people. Much of the book was drawn from McKay’s own experiences in Harlem, but the characters he brought to life certainly did not fit the mold of respectability that scholars such as Locke hoped to propagate as typical of the “New Negro.” As a result, Du Bois declared that McKay’s book made him “feel distinctly like taking a bath,” and he accused him of conceding to the (mainly white) “prurient demand” for fetishized representations of black life.49 In part, this reaction stemmed from Du Bois’s awareness of the association between black people and debased behavior that had long been used to shore up theories of racial hierarchy. Continuing to perpetuate these stereotypes seemed to him only to hamper the cause of racial advancement. McKay and other young writers who shared his perspective were not unaware of this tension, but they believed that it was important to expose the human impact of racism. McKay reproached Du Bois for mistaking “the art of life for nonsense” and trying to “pass off propaganda as life in art!” for his review.50 Langston Hughes was slightly more sympathetic to Du Bois’s perspective. In a letter to McKay, he complained that “anything that’s not high yellow angels is, you know!,” but he went on to say “You can’t blame the ‘nice’ Negroes much for yelling, in a way, even when some of us are sincere! We do get a lot of racial dirt shoved on the market.”51

3.3 an international philosophy of “the negro race” The relationship between the “racial dirt” generated by the la vogue nègre and the possibilities for “an international philosophy of the Negro race” 48

49 50

51

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Browsing Reader,” 374; Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artists and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation, June 23, 1926, reprinted in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. 9, 36. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Two Novels,” Crisis, 25:6 (June 1928): 22. Claude McKay to W. E. B. Du Bois, June 18, 1928, quoted in The Passion of Claude McKay, ed. Wayne Cooper (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 149–50. Langston Hughes to Claude McKay, June 27, 1929, Box 3, Folder 98, 2; 3, Claude McKay Papers.

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that Du Bois had seen in Banjo, was an issue that drew the attention of the Paris-based Antillean intellectual Jane Nardal. Nardal was a keen student of the work and activism of black writers in the US and France, but her work has too often been neglected by historians. Where she has been acknowledged it tends to be in terms of the genealogy of the négritude movement.52 In a 1928 article entitled “Internationalisme noir,” Nardal deftly painted World War I as a catalyst for diasporic formation because it pointed to the commonalities in black experience: wartime horrors, failed hopes of civic equality and the rediscovery of African culture in the form of the European vogue nègre.53 Locke had also pointed to the likelihood of this dynamic within the diaspora: “Because of our Europeanized conventions, the key to proper understanding and appreciation of [African art] will in all probability first come from an appreciation of its influence upon contemporary French art.”54 Nardal credited African Americans with turning negrophilia on its head by creating their own, authentic, art and literature. No further evidence than Alain Locke’s The New Negro – which she was laboring hard to have translated and published with the Parisian publishing house Payot – was needed for this assessment.55 She theorized that in order “to enter the human community” and be recognized as co-contributors to national cultures, the African person must be seen “from within,” not as an object of fetish à la the African American dancer Josephine Baker but as a human being. 52

53 54 55

Historians Philippe Dewitte and Michel Fabre have referred to the Nardals as predecessors to or midwives of the négritude movement but allowed them little agency as intellectuals in their own right. Literary scholars T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Brent Hayes Edwards have begun the work of recovering the significance of the Nardal sisters. More recently, historian Imoabong D. Umoren has done some crucial recovery work on Paulette Nardal in her excellent Race Woman Internationalists. I build upon their analyses in this chapter by locating both of the Nardals’ intellectual work within the wider constellation of conversations around race and rights in France and the United States. Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouvements nègres en France, 1915–1939 (Paris: L’Éditions Harmattan, 1985), 251–267; Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in Paris, 1840–1980 (Chicago: Illini Press, 1993); T. Denean SharpleyWhiting, Negritude Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 38–80; Brent Hayes Edwards, Practise of Diaspora, 119–186; Imaobong D. Umoren, Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). Jane Nardal, “Internationalisme noir,” La Dépêche africaine (February 15, 1928): 5. Alain Locke, “A Note on African Art,” Opportunity, 2 (1924): 138. J. Nardal to Alain Locke, December 27, 1927, Box 164–74: Folder 25: Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Centre, Howard University (hereafter Alain Locke Papers).

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Lambasting the stereotypes of black people that appeared in works by white authors in both French and English such as Paul Morand’s Magie noire or Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, Nardal argued that whatever perceived “prestige the literature of exoticism” conferred upon the African race it was of little tangible value.56 To the contrary, it undermined the humanist project of achieving personal sovereignty by refusing to engage with African people as human beings and instead treating the entire race as a source of entertainment.57 Her solution was the creation of literature that drew from authentic black experience in the modern world. Hubert Harrison, a conservative West Indian commentator, would have agreed with Nardal. His own review of Nigger Heaven, for example, hoped that the “brutal and bungling book” would prompt black writers to “leap over the wall of weakness . . . and write of the actual lives of actual Negroes.”58 When Magie noire was translated into English in 1929, it evoked similar criticisms from the Harlem elite.59 Although the book comprised multiple short stories set in different locations, one clear leitmotif remained: the black race was united by a primitive nature. Even those who seemed to possess all the markers of civilization and modernity – many of the characters were thinly disguised versions of celebrities such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Josephine Baker – would revert to their essential primitive natures in the right context.60 When NAACP official Walter White and Du Bois reviewed the book, they, like Nardal, were repulsed by Morand’s portrayal of black people in this fetishized way. In contrast to Nardal, however, their reviews carefully distanced African Americans from the black characters presented in Morand’s stories. Willing to accept that the stereotypes might hold true for certain indigenous African groups, they asserted the sophistication of African Americans in contrast to the so-called primitive nature of that group.61 56

57 58

59

60

61

Paul Morand was a wealthy French author and diplomat whose thinking about race had been heavily influenced by Arthur Joseph de Gobineau’s theories of white superiority. Jane Nardal, “Pantins exotiques,” La Dépêche africaine (October 15, 1928): 2. Hubert Harrison, “Homus Africanus Harlemi,” New York Amsterdam News, September 1, 1926, Hubert H. Harrison Papers, Box 4, Folder 71, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. Walter White, “The Road to Africa,” The Nation, June 26, 1929, 770–771; W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro in Literature,” Crisis, 36:11 (November 1929): 376; Aubrey Bowser, “Harlem Isn’t Africa,” New York Amsterdam News, June 12, 1929, 20. For a close reading of some of these stories, see Brent Hayes Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 163–171. Walter White, “The Road to Africa,” The Nation, 26 June 1929, 770–771; W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro in Literature,” Crisis, 36:11 (November 1929): 376; Aubrey Bowser, “Harlem Isn’t Africa,” New York Amsterdam News, June 12, 1929, 20.

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In part, this spoke to the very argument Nardal was making. From her position within the French imperial nation-state, she called for recognition that “africanité” had played a key role in shaping the “latinité” of the French. This ran counter to the French Republican formulation of white French culture as the zenith of universalism – an assumption that did not allow for difference or for outside influence upon existing understandings of French national identity.62 France’s “mission civilisatrice” was a case in point because it was predicated upon the idea that its performance of civic society, of liberty and fraternity, best allowed for each individual’s right to self-determination on a popular level. In this framework, assimilation into French cultural norms was the prerequisite to political assimilation as citizens. Politicians such as Blaise Diagne and Gratien Candace had been held up as outstanding examples of this kind of assimilation. Nardal, however, was suggesting something different. She envisaged a symbiosis of africanité with latinité, a process that was not a passive assimilation into French culture. Rather it was the choice of the “Afro” to select the fruits of Western civilization that might best complement and enrich African traditions. A year later, in an address to the West African Student’s Union, Alain Locke made a similar point: “We are no longer dazzled or awed by the white man’s culture, but wish to use its best elements towards fresh expressions of our own.”63 This focus on cultural renewal was more than an expression of Pan-African solidarity. It was a different way of conceptualizing national republican forms. In the thinking of Nardal and Locke, the problem of minority rights could be overcome if political universality was grounded in a multiracial cultural particularism. Political assimilation, in short, need not equate to cultural and racial homogeneity. Nardal’s “Internationalisme noir” was published in La Dépêche Africaine, a Parisian monthly produced by a reformist organization called the Comité de Défense des Intérêts de la Race Noire. Appearing between 1928 and 1932, La Dépêche Africaine was edited by the Guadeloupian Maurice Satineau and its content was primarily written by Antillean contributors. The cultural nationalism of Nardal’s article was atypical of the publication, which usually focused on critiquing colonial conditions in Africa. Advocates of a Republicanism grounded in “the immortal

62

63

Raoul Girardet, Le nationalisme francais: Anthologie, 1871–1914 (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 86. Alain Locke, “Afro-Americans and West Africans: A New Understanding,” Wāsù, 8 (January 1929): 24.

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principles of the glorious French Revolution,” contributors to the paper demanded political assimilation for all of France’s children without “distinction of race or color.”64 Both thematically and in terms of his own involvement, this platform continued the editorial practice the black author René Maran had brought to the 1924 journal Les Continents. This was defending the France of 1789; their vision of republican colonialism was that perpetuated by Victor Schoelcher in the 1840s. Satineau himself authored a column in La Dépêche Africaine, which propagated Schoelcher’s progressive thinking. The colonial future Schoelcher had imagined was one in which the colonies would become versions of Paris. Such a vision placed education, freedom of the press and universal suffrage at the heart of the achievement of civilization in the colonies.65 Essentially, writers such as Satineau and Maran were challenging the link between individual political rights and racial and cultural identity that underpinned French and US as well as international understandings of citizenship and national belonging. They sought the fulfillment of the promise of Western universalism: political equivalence regardless of socio-cultural difference.66 Married to this colonial reformism was a determination to establish links between “nègres of Africa, Madagascar, the Antilles and America” in order to consolidate a “natural brotherhood.”67 To this end, the journal dedicated a page in each issue to the “New Negro” movement of Harlem and to Garvey’s UNIA. The concerns of these Antilleans had some parallels with those of African Americans. Nominally citizens since abolition, the realities of colonial life meant that their citizenship was, like African Americans, proscribed by race. The brotherhood envisaged was an elite and educated cohort similar to the one advocated by Du Bois‘s Pan-African Association but not an expression of the black nationalism associated with Garveyism. The “schoelcherism” of Satineau was interlinked with the views being touted by colonial administrators such as Robert Wibaux. Wibaux saw the civilizing mission of France as contingent upon the creation of a cadre

64

65

66

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“Notre but, Notre programme,” La Dépêche africaine, Février 1928, 1, Service de liason avec les originaires des territoires français d’outre-mer (SLOTFOM) 5/2, Centre d’Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (CAOM). Maurice Satineau, “Le Schoelcherisme: Doctrine politique, économique et sociale,” La Dépêche africaine (February 15, 1932): 1. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation State: Négritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 172. “Notre but, Notre programme,” La Dépêche africaine (February 1928): 1.

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of “élites noires” whose assimilation into the Western, French culture would allow them to overcome the “primitive” cultures of native Africans. Primordial Africanity had to be overcome because it was irreconcilable with the economic development of the continent.68 This explains why, despite being subject to police surveillance and being banned from distribution in the colonies, the paper was funded by the Colonial administration.69 Its writers certainly defended colonialism as a “humane and necessary project,” even if the “methods of colonization by civilized nations” were not perfect.70 Moreover, their recourse to race solidarity was an attempt to repurpose la vogue nègre as an assertion of the modernity of black culture rather than evidence of a purported black primitivism. In so doing, they believed they would demonstrate their own capacity for entrance into Western civilization.71 Notably, aside from the publication of Nardal’s article, even dubious portraits of blackness such as Morand’s Magie noire were reviewed in La Dépêche Africaine with enthusiasm if it seemed that the author was “sincere” and a “négrophile.”72 Living in Paris for some of this time, Langston Hughes would later levy the kinds of critiques at this circle of Antillean thinkers that he had earlier fired at Du Bois and Locke, accusing them of bourgeois pretensions and of ignoring the fact that the republican systems they espoused were rooted in racism.73

3.4 awakening racial consciousness at the intersection of nation, class and gender The solidarity between the cultural nationalist movements in Harlem and those of the francophone world reached new heights with the creation of another Antillean journal in 1931, La Revue du Monde Noir. Officially bilingual, the paper grew out of weekly salons held at the Nardal sisters’ home in Clamart, at René Maran’s apartment or at Louis Achille’s apartment near the Jardin des Plantes. The Nardals and Achille, like Maran, were well-versed in Harlem Renaissance writing, having subscriptions to

68

69 71

72 73

Robert Wibaux, “Elites noires,” Le Journal de Roubaix, reprinted in La Dépêche africaine (April 15, 1929): 1. See dossiers in SLOTFOM, 5/2, CAOM. 70 “Notre But – Notre Programme,” 1. Martin Steins, “Brown France vs. Black Africa: The Tide Turned in 1932,” Research in African Literatures, 14:4, Special Issue on African Literary History (Winter 1983): 480. ‘La Dépêche Littéraire,” La Dépêche africaine (June 15, 1928): 3. Langston Hughes, “Le ‘blues’ d’Océola Jones,” Europe, 117 (September 1937): 60–61; Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An autobiography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1940).

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Opportunity as well as friendships with African American authors such as Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Du Bois and Gwendolyn Bennett.74 Attendees came together to discuss “Paris or world news . . . colonial and interracial problems, the growing place of men and women of color in French life . . . every manifestation of racism.”75 Writers, activists and musicians from the Antilles, Africa and the Americas converged in these salons. Léo Sajous, Louis Achille, Alain Locke, Clara Shephard, René Maran, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, LéonGontran Damas, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen regularly appeared.76 Léo Sajous, Paulette Nardal and Clara Shepard edited and translated the Revue, although Shepard’s work is little heeded in African American histories or, indeed, in French histories.77 The Revue was intended for “the intelligentsia of the black race and their partisans,” the elite vanguard who hoped to “awaken race consciousness.”78 Decidedly Pan-African in the Du Boisian sense, the group hoped “to create among Negroes of the entire world, regardless of nationality, an intellectual and moral tie, which will permit them to know one another better, to love one another, to defend their collective interests more effectively, and to glorify their race.”79Articles focused on black culture as well as news events pertaining to black communities across the world and were accompanied by reprints of work by artists such as Aaron Douglass.80 The purpose of glorifying the race lay in contributing “to the material, the moral, and the intellectual improvement

74

75

76

77

78 79

80

Jane Nardal to Alain Locke, December 27, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, Box 164–74, Folder 25, Moorland-Spingarn Manuscript Division, Howard University. Cf. Maran’s correspondence with Locke in the same collection; also with Du Bois in the Du Bois collection at Massachusetts-Amherst and Bennet’s diaries. Louis Achille, “Preface,” La Revue du Monde Noir/Review of the Black World (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1931), xv. Letter from Senghor, February 1960, quoted in Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Négritude (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), 56. Recent literary criticism by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting has gone some way in addressing this absence. Jennifer Boittin also references Shepard’s role in her book Colonial Metropolis. The first issue of the La Revue du monde noir, 1 (October 1931) lists the two women as translators. Eslanda Robeson later discussed their role in greater detail in “Black Paris,” Challenge (June 1936): 11. The Management, “Our Aim,” La Revue du monde noir, 1 (October 1931): 2. “Our Aim,” La Revue du Monde Noir, 1931, 2. “‘Awaken our race consciousness,’ Paulette Nardal, Eveil de la conscience de race,” La Revue du Monde Noir, 1932, 31. See, for example, A. Douglas, “Forge Foundry,” Revue du monde noir, 1 (October 1931): 7.

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of humanity.” The goal was noble in itself but significant primarily because it was a necessary step in the creation of “universal Democracy” that would not see racial or cultural differences as grounds for a hierarchy of political rights.81 The Ministry of Colonies, as part of its encouragement of “native culture,” allocated some funding to the Revue. This financial support was crucial, as were the translating efforts of Paulette and Jane Nardal. Paulette in particular brought a deep knowledge of American literary culture to the initiative: she had written a thesis on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At that time, Paulette Nardal worked as a secretary for the Martinique Deputy Joseph Lagrosilière and was deeply committed to the project her sister had outlined in “Internationalisme noir” and intended the Revue to bring “the Negro into the human community” without the psychological complexes that centuries of discrimination and exploitation had wrought.82 Both sisters advocated a humanism that disavowed passive assimilation for equal collaboration. Louis-Jean Finot, a French Jewish writer, brought this point home in the first issue of the review with his article “Égalité des Races.” He argued that to speak of the French race was folly because France had been shaped by a “mixture of races” and was the “living example” of a nation formed by the symbiosis of many cultures.83 Other contributors to the review developed this thinking to argue for the particularity of the output of black thinkers and creatives. Louis Achille, first an instructor and then a professor of French at the historically black Howard University between 1932 and 1943, contributed a piece titled “The Negroes and Their Art.” His argument foreshadowed the ideological conceptualization of négritude that Léopold Sédar Senghor would expound by arguing that the black race was particularly given to artistic talents. The Haitian ethnographer Jean Price-Mars had already insisted that rhythm was distinctive to those of African descent but Achille took this a step further, explaining the impact of art upon the psychology of black peoples. Blackness meant possessing an “aesthetic sense.”84 Clara Shepard contributed another article about the particularity of the black psyche. In Paris on sabbatical from Tuskegee in order to 81 82

83 84

The Management, “Our Aim,” Revue du monde noir, 1 (October 1931): 2. Paulette Nardal to Jacques Louis Hymans, November 17, 1963, cited in Jacques Louis Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 42. It should also be noted that Paulette was the first black woman to have been admitted to the Sorbonne. Jean-Louis Finot, “Égalité des Races,” La Revue du monde noir, 1 (October 1931): 5. Louis Achille, “The Negroes and Art,” La Revue du Monde noir, 1 (October 1931): 57.

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study second language acquisition, Shepard argued that African Americans picked up other languages quickly because they were inherently creative and adaptable.85 Underpinning this conception of blackness was the idea that each race has its gifts to contribute to the universal whole and it is in the production of these gifts that humanity is demonstrated. Recognizing cultural particularity was a refusal to allow European thinkers to continue to see black culture as premodern and static. In a 1932 article published in the last issue of La Revue du monde noir, Paulette Nardal addressed the difference in American and Antillean attitudes toward race. Drawing upon the arguments formulated by Friederich Sieburg’s Dieu, est-il francais?, she suggested that France’s seemingly liberal approach to race was in fact a dangerous racism because it was predicated upon the idea that white France represented the pinnacle of civilization and thus had the power to assimilate black peoples. As a result, Antilleans were less critical about their place in French society than African Americans were about the United States of America. The “racial problem plaguing the United States” had made race the core of black American intellectual concerns in ways that it had not for Antilleans.86 Linking the abandonment of “specifically Negro forms of expression” and the adoption of more “traditional” literary forms to the African American literary achievement of universal purport, Nardal believed African Americans had thrown off the inferiority complexes that still plagued Antilleans. In both the 1932 La Revue du monde noir article and in a 1936 interview with African American anthropologist Eslanda Goode Robeson, Nardal explained this inferiority complex in terms of a lack of racial solidarity. The examples of authors “père” and “fils” Dumas and José Maria de Heredia were a clear indication that Antilleans were more than capable of producing literature of high standard.87 Hitherto, however, this literature had only shown an affiliation for the Latin aspect of Antillean culture and ignored the rich potential of their African heritage. Much of this disdain could be traced to the disillusionment prompted by looking at the “backward brothers” of the race dwelling in Africa.88 If the cultural potential of the race was recognized, such disillusionment would no longer occur. 85

86

87 88

Clara Shepard, “Les noirs américains et les langues étrangères/The Utility of Foreign Languages for American Negroes,” La Revue du Monde Noir (February 1932): 30–31. Paulette Nardal, “L’Eveil de la conscience de race chez les etudiants noirs,” La Revue du monde noir, 6 (April 1932): 26. Paulette Nardal, “L’Eveil de la conscience de race chez les etudiants noirs,” 27. Paulette Nardal, “L’Eveil de la conscience de race chez les etudiants noirs,” 28.

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For Paulette Nardal, the Antillean reluctance to be associated with black Africans, came in part from the opportunities afforded Antillean men in the metropole. Educated black men in France could find a level of assimilation into the French juridical-political system if they chose and many of them, Nardal observed, seemed “content with a certain easy success.”89 Antillean women, on the other hand, stood at the vanguard of the drive for racial solidarity and consciousness because full assimilation was impossible for them by virtue of both their race and their gender.90 In many ways, this reflected the circumscribed nature of white women’s citizenship in the French political landscape: women could not vote nor could they run for parliament. On a social level, Antillean women could also never be “assimilé” because women of color were thought to lack of respectability. In a 1928 essay entitled “Exotic Puppets,” Jane Nardal had also pointed to the harmful nature of exoticized black womanhood in la vogue nègre. These stereotypes had “fallen out from literature and into the public sphere.”91The problem was not limited to France. African American author and teacher Jessie Fauset had shown a deep appreciation of the narrow path available to her as a black woman when she had turned down the opportunity to translate René Maran’s Batouala. Critics have mocked her sensitivity to the issue of respectability but the reality of a context that fetishized black women’s sexuality as exotic meant that the ground claimed by intellectuals such as Fauset and Paulette and Jane Nardal had to be zealously guarded. African American men had long marveled at French laxity in regard to mixed-race sexual relations: in the aftermath of World War I, prominent writer James Weldon Johnson had illustrated the color-blindness of the French by pointing to their willingness to allow black soldiers to frequent brothels with white women.92 Much had also been made in the African American press of Blaise Diagne and Gratien Candace’s marriages to 89 90

91

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Paulette Nardal, “L’Eveil de la conscience de race chez les etudiants noirs,” 29. Paulette Nardal, “L’Eveil de la conscience de race chez les etudiants noirs,” 28. In the African case, the exception was Senegal, where citizenship rights were granted to elites in the Four Communes. Jane Nardal, “Pantins exotiques,” La Dépêche africaine, 8 (October 1928): 2. The Nardals often attempted to combat such sexualized stereotypes by calling attention to examples of respectable and accomplished black women. One example is Paulette Nardal’s piece in La Revue du monde noir on the “modest” and “talented reader” Grace Walker, the first African American woman to deliver a lecture at Cambridge: Paulette Nardal, “Une noire parle à Cambridge et à Genève,” La Revue du monde noire, 1 (October 1931): 40–41. James Weldon Johnson, “Editorial Column,” New York Age, January 21, 1922, 4.

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white French women. For Paulette Nardal, however, this was a false freedom. Black men may have been free to marry white women, but their brides, Nardal felt, were often of a lower class of French women.93 While the sentiment is certainly inflected with class snobbery, the point she was making was that the assimilation would only provide the illusion of totality until black men joined with black women in pushing for a symbiosis of African and French culture. While black women remained caught in the double bind of gender and race, blackness would mean exclusion or otherness. Associating white women, even if they were of a lesser class, with greater respectability and prestige than black women spoke to a sense of inferiority about racial identity that Nardal believed needed to be overcome. The connections Nardal made between black Antillean desire to marry white French women rather than black women foreshadowed the argument that another Antillean, Frantz Fanon, would make in his first book, Peau noire, masques blancs, in 1952.94 In seeing white women of any class as a sort of prize, black men were accepting and perpetuating the European schema of “a kind of hierarchy” of race.95 Although prescient, Nardal’s sophisticated analysis of the nexus of race and gender and its relationship to political and social assimilation seemed to have little galvanizing effect. The Revue itself had only a brief lifespan. After six issues, it folded because the Ministry of Colonies withdrew their support. More likely than not this decision was a reaction to the content of Paulette Nardal’s final essay for the publication. In it, she described the Revue as heir to the black internationalism that had its origins in the PanAfricanism of the immediate postwar moment. Beginning with both Marcus Garvey’s and Du Bois‘s approaches to Pan-African organizing, Nardal traced a genealogy of thinkers and projects that included Maran’s Batouala; Maran and Houénou’s Les Continents and Maurice Satineau’s Dépêche. In so doing, she explicitly linked the Revue to the colonial reformism of Maran, Satineau and the black internationalism of Du Bois, as well as the revolutionary impulses of Garveyism. Nardal’s article pointed to a moment of missed opportunity. While she clearly conceived of the mission for cultural symbiosis embodied in the Revue as intrinsically linked to the colonial reformism and political assimilation advocated

93 94

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“Eslanda Good Robeson, “Black Paris, II,” Challenge (June 1936): 10. On the limits of the gender critique offered by Nardal, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 119–129. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952, reprint London: Pluto Classics, 2008): 59–60.

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by La Dépêche Africaine, the two projects were never brought together.96 It could have been the beginning of a new kind of activism but, at the end of 1932, La Revue du monde noire ceased publication.

3.5 resistance to assimilation A vehement critique of the Revue’s ideological framework came only a month after it folded, in the form of a new journal, Légitime Défense. Founded by a group of Martinican students who belonged to the Association des Étudiants Martiniquais en France, contributors included previous participants in the Clamart salons and writers for the Revue, Jules-Marcel Monnerot, Étienne Léro and René Ménil, as well as the Martinican surrealist intellectual Pierre Yoyotte. Also short-lived, the journal was nonetheless representative of a younger generation of Antillean writers moving away from the assimilative cultural tendencies of their elders, such as Gratien Candace, whom they accused of being complicit in colonial oppression.97 The opening manifesto of the journal declared a staunch adherence to “Marx’s dialectical materialism freed from all one-sided interpretation and successfully put to the test by Lenin.”98 It is no surprise that this revolutionary political position prompted Parisian police to ban the paper before a second issue could be printed. Nevertheless, the paper was emblematic of a growing dissatisfaction with the existing colonial situation and a belief in the symbiotic nature of culture and politics. Situating themselves within an intellectual constellation that ranged from movements and theories such as the Third International through Surrealism, Freudian Psychoanalysis, Hegelian dialectics and authors such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud and Donatien Alphonse François (the Marquis de Sade), the men behind the paper argued that the structures of imperial capitalism were at fault for dividing the colonies by race and class. It was only through the deployment of multiple modes of resistance – including print culture – that this system could be overcome.99

96 97

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Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation State, 173. Jules-Marcel Monnerot, “Note touchant la bourgeoisie de couleur francaise,” Légitime Défense, 1 (1932): 4. Etienne Léro, Thélus Léro, René Ménil, Jules-Marcel Monnerot, Michel Pilotin, MauriceSabas Quitman, August Thésée and Pierre Yoyotte, “Avertissement,” Légitime Défense, 1 (1932): 1. “Avertissement,” 1.-3.

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The premise of France’s mission civilisatrice and, indeed, of the League of Nation’s mandate system was that colonial governance would lead gently colonial peoples toward a level of civilization that made possible popular sovereignty. The articles in Légitime Défense directly attacked this idea. In a piece ironically entitled “Paradis Sur Terre,” Maurice Sabas-Quitman painted a grim picture of Martinican society. While the assimilés and the evolués occupied relatively elite positions of educational and economic privilege, the majority of the population of color on the island lived in poverty. Literacy levels were low, not because the schools did not exist but because children were forced to work from the age of six.100 The famed civilizing mission was predicated, Sabas-Quitman maintained, on the principle of educating and elevating a few while consigning the rest to a lifetime of exploitation.101 For those who did have the chance for educational and cultural assimilation, the opportunity was a poisoned chalice. Jules Monnerot described the predicament of the assimilés as being a “pale imitation” of the French colonizer.102 This observation was reiterated in Ménil’s contribution, where he argued that the acculturating process of colonialism forced the reproduction of colonial relationships rather than an opportunity for genuine participation in French culture. The French books read by Antilleans, “were written in another country and for other readers,” while those Antilleans who themselves had written work created only a “weak imitation of French literature” because they were performing a version of “Frenchness” that had no room for the indigenous or black experience.103 Antillean literature, in short, had failed because it was neither authentic nor engaged in a critique of the inequality inherent in Martiniquan and French society.104 More damning still was the way in which it reproduced the very myth of white racial superiority that it was supposed to be disproving. Ménil credited American nègres with forcing the realization that black writers should use their racial experiences and identities to build their culture rather than merely attempting to assimilate into a European one.105 Drawn to the work of Harlemite male writers such as the 100 101 102

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Maurice Sabas-Quitman, “Paradis Sur Terre,” Légitime Défense, 1 (1932): 6 Maurice Sabas-Quitman, “Paradis Sur Terre,” 6. Jules Monnerot, “Note touchant la bourgeoisie de couleur française,” Légitime Défense 1 (1932): 4. René Ménil, “Généralités sur l’écrivain de couleur antillais,” Légitime Défense 1 (1932): 6; 7. René Ménil, “Généralités sur l’écrivain de couleur antillais,” Légitime Défense 1 (1932): 8. René Ménil, “Généralités sur l’écrivain de couleur antillais,” Légitime Défense 1 (1932): 8.

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African American Langston Hughes and Jamaican Claude McKay – “poètes noirs révolutionnaires” – over what they saw as the Eurocentric and bourgeois thinking of writers such as Maran, Locke, Nardal and Satineau, Légitime Défense’s contributors sought to employ this kind of writing in the service of equality.106 Black identity was theorized as a useful mechanism of anti-imperial revolution that transcended race and located oppression at the nexus of race and class.107 Rather than being a rallying cry for organized Pan-Africanism, the men behind Légitime Défense were calling for a socio-cultural transformation that would overcome the irredeemable status quo.108 Racial particularity was an avenue for creating work about “things that would affect noirs, jaunes and blancs exactly as the poems of the American nègres affect the whole world.”109 The links to the “New Negro” were made obvious by all of the editors of Légitime Défense when they published an extract from McKay’s Banjo.110 The chosen passage meshed neatly with the group’s beliefs in the possible role diaspora could play in combatting class and race-based discrimination.111 In it, Ray, an educated Haitian character, advocated the return to the development of a racial consciousness that does not just replicate the inequality of white structures. The decision to incorporate the extract goes beyond the meaning of the specific passage. It implicitly sets Légitime Défense in conversation with the contentions established in Banjo and in the new French preface written for the book. Leftist sociologist and friend of McKay’s, George Friedmann, had written the preface and he saw in Banjo the politically militant “New Negro” that had arisen in the aftermath of the First World War.112 He believed that the “New Negro” was important because, unlike the Booker T. Washington politics of a former generation, it included the common people.113 More than that, the book established a binary between 106 107 108 109

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Etienne Léro, “Misère d’une poésie,” Légitime Défense, 1 (1932): 12. René Ménil, “Preface,” Légitime Défense, 1 (1932) (1978 reissue), n.p. See Légitime Défense, 1 (1932) (1978 reissue), 2. Etienne Léro, Thélus Léro, René Ménil, Jules-Marcel Monnerot, Michel Pilotin, Maurice-Sagas Quitman, August Thésée and Pierre Yoyotte, “Avertissement,” Légitime Défense 1 (1932): 1 Claude McKay, “L’étudiant antillais vu par un Noir américain,” Légitime Défense, 1 (1932) (1979 reissue), 13–14. For two excellent if differing analyses of the placement of this particular extract, cf. Brent Hayes Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 196–198; Martin Steins, Les Antécédents et la genèse de la négritude senghorienne (Paris: Université Paris III, Thèse d’Etat, 1981), 588–589. Georges Friedmann to Claude McKay, 24 Novembre 1927; Langston Hughes to Claude McKay, June 27, 1929, Box 3, Folder 83, Claude McKay Papers; Georges Friedmann to Claude McKay, May 5, 1930, Box 3, Folder 83, Claude McKay Papers. George Friedmann, “Preface to Banjo,” Banjo (Paris: Rieder, 1930).

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Western modernity and an essentialist African culture. The character of Ray ultimately chooses the latter and embraces a race-based nativism instead of seeking to reform understandings of Western modernity. His rationale for the decision is his sense that the inherent structures of contemporary nation-states and modern culture will never allow for his inclusion into citizenship or humanity. Thus, as far as Friedmann and the Légitime Défense contributors were concerned, McKay had crafted a novel that both entertained and analyzed the economic structures underpinning race relations.114 From this perspective, Banjo was exactly the kind of literature that Légitime Défense advocated for the Antilles. The men behind the journal addressed themselves to “the children of the Negro bourgeoisie,” urging them to throw off their parents’ shackles.115 Unlike the group behind Légitime Défense, however, McKay engaged with the grassroots black organization actually occurring both in Paris and throughout France. His descriptions of everyday life in Marseilles extended beyond the hustle and bustle of work in the docks to the incorporation of personalities such as Marcus Garvey, Prince Kojo Tovalou Houénou and Lamine Senghor.116 McKay knew of Garvey from New York and he had interviewed Houénou about his activism for the Crisis in 1924.117 Senghor was a more recent acquaintance, made during McKay’s time in Marseille, where Senghor had been organizing black workers into unions. Senghor’s brief appearance is particularly important in Banjo because he opens Ray’s eyes to the hypocrisy of French republicanism: “Senghor, the Senegalese, told me that the French were the most calculatingly cruel of all the Europeans in Africa.”118 Senghor’s critique of the French imperial system was inextricable from his commitment to communism. Lamine Senghor’s activism and grassroots organizing, for which he is best known, was explored in Chapter 2. For the purposes of this chapter, however, it is important to emphasize that anti-racist and anti-imperial movements in this period encompassed broad coalitions of political and cultural thinking. Maurice Satineau, for example, was an early participant in Senghor’s Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre (CDRN). Although the CDRN tends to be distinguished from groups such as those behind La Dépêche africaine and La Revue du Monde Noir on the basis of the latter groups’ cultural pan-Africanism and assimilative tendencies and the

114 116 117 118

“Preface to Banjo,” Banjo (Paris: Rieder, 1930). 115 “Avertissement,” 2. Claude McKay, Banjo, 73–74; 194; 73. Claude McKay, “What Is and What Isn’t,” The Crisis, 27:6 (April 1924): 260. Claude McKay, Banjo, 267.

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LDRN’s political pan-Africanism and left-wing radicalism, the differences between the two categories were not so clear cut. Far from being oppositional, forays into culture and politics were often mutually constitutive.119 For example, in tones not dissimilar to Jane Nardal’s in “Internationalisme noir,” Senghor had also criticized the Parisian vogue nègre, making it clear that he and his organization were against any who sought to “turn us into a group of dancers of the Charleston and other exotic dancers.”120 Moreover, La Race nègre indicated that the group believed in the power of race representation. From time to time, it included poetry by authors such as Jeanne Marquès and Marcus Garvey, as well as excerpts and reviews of books about the black experience such as those by Lucie Cousturier, André Gide, Philippe Soupault and Paul Morand.121 In a review of Paul Morand’s Magie Noire that intersected with the arguments Jane Nardal had articulated in her 1928 article “Internationalisme noir,” LDRN President Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté pointed to the political importance of asserting and expressing black culture.122 Attacking Morand for claiming that the black race does not possess a civilization, Kouyaté extolled the virtues of the African tradition of performance. The closing notes of his article are the most revealing of his beliefs: “Africa . . . encloses in its sad destiny the beginning, the goals and the end of human civilization.”123 Africa, in this imagining, stands in for a universal humanism that might be, if false associations between primitivism and African culture can be overcome. This professed faith in African culture extended to a belief in the need to create diasporic institutional ties across the Atlantic.

3.6 prologue to crisis In the period between the publication of The New Negro in 1925 and the translation and dissemination of Banjo into French in 1931, black 119

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This is not to suggest that there is no distinction between cultural and political panAfricanism. Lamine Senghor, “Debout les nègres,” La Race nègre (June 1927): 1. Jeanne Marquès, “À ma pauvre négresse,” La Race nègre, 1:5 (May 1928); Marcus Garvey, “L’Afrique aux Africains,” La Race nègre, 1:4 (November–December 1928): 2; Lucie Cousturier, “Un général sauvage,” La Race nègre, 1:1 (June 1927); André Gide, “L’œuvre de la colonisation,” La Race nègre, 1: 3; Kouyaté, “La Trahison du clerc Paul Morand,” La Race nègre, 1:6 (October 1928): 2–3. For a detailed reading of this article, refer to the analysis in Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 288–292. Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, “La Trahison du clerc Paul Morand,” La Race nègre, 1:6 (October 1928): 3.

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intellectuals fiercely debated the significance of race and culture and race to culture. The elitist tendencies of some Antillean and African American groups were often rooted in the exclusionary ways in which their civic status was proscribed against white nation-state norms. For those groups who sought greater participation within their existing national polities and believed in the possibilities of republicanism, the slippage between racial affiliation and national belonging simultaneously hindered and galvanized diasporic contact. Thinkers such as Alain Locke, Jane and Paulette Nardal and W. E. B. Du Bois sought self-consciously to realize a democratic ethos that would allow for multiple racial and cultural identities within a national republican sphere. In this context, reference to the cultural achievements of black men and women across both nations was useful for demonstrating black humanity and fitness for selfdetermination. Embedded into this thinking, however, was an exclusionary rhetoric that writers such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay found so offensive. Moreover, as was the case with Légitime Défense, the recourse to cultural nationalist identities to effect change was often disconnected from any kind of concrete organizing among those groups most affected by imperialism and racism, such as the workers on Martinique who could not afford to send their children to schools. By the early 1930s, priorities were beginning to shift as the impact of the Great Depression became clear. In France, many of the ideas circulated in the late and early twenties would coalesce in the movement that came to be known as négritude. American President Roosevelt would implement New Deal programs that embedded many of the thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance into federal projects. At the same moment, the Communist Party would provide unprecedented platforms for black thinkers to engage in the international landscape. These developments, rooted in the activism and thinking of the intellectuals studied in this chapter, will be explored in Chapter 4.

4 Civilization’s Gone to Hell? Revolutionary Poetry, Humanism and the Crisis of Sovereignty

And the Black peoples will not arrive empty-handed at the meeting of the political and the social, in a world split between democratic individualism and totalitarian gregariousness. Léopold Sédar Senghor Everywhere people of color show a marked devotion to poetry, the new form of the future war that civilized man has not foreseen. G. D. Périer

When Wall Street crashed in October 1929, it sparked an economic depression that shook the American people to the core. Between 1929 and 1932, thirteen million Americans lost their jobs. Market capitalism seemed irredeemable; systems of credit and banking had failed almost entirely.1 France fared little better: the full impact of the crash may not have been felt there until the end of 1932 but the Republic had already endured a decade of economic instability, due in part to the heavy burden of French war debts. When the Depression did hit, a period of political instability ensued: the conservative André Tardieu coalition government lost in a landslide in the 1932 elections. Their defeat was followed by a quick succession of moderate parties led by the Radical Party. In contrast, the American public voted to give liberal democracy one last chance by electing Democratic Party candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the basis of his to create “a New Deal for all.” Roosevelt’s election was not, 1

Zara Steiner, in The Lights That Failed, has described the period from 1929 to 1933 as “the hinge” period: The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 632–633; 800.

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however, a clear mandate for capitalist democracy. Fascism and Communism offered appealing alternatives and, as the decade wore on, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic worried that modern capitalism and the associated “liberal culture of modernity” was too frail to sustain democracy or the nation-state.2 These fears seemed particularly poignant from 1935 when the League of Nations, supposed guarantor of international peace and national sovereignty, crumbled in the face of Italian aggression in Ethiopia. The world, as African American intellectual and NAACP field secretary James Weldon Johnson declared, was “in a state of semi-chaos.”3 In this chapter, I will focus on the ways that African American and francophone black intellectuals responded to this so-called crisis of modernity during this period, in contrast to most of the literature on the Depression and the 1930s, which tends to concentrate on the actions of governments or to the inner workings of Communist and Fascist groups.4 It was no surprise to black activists and thinkers that there were serious fault lines in contemporary democracies. Black communities had, after all, faced political and social injustices for centuries. The question was, how could modernity’s crisis be met in such a way as to forge a more egalitarian world and overcome racism and oppression? As the Senegalese poet and teacher Léopold Sédar Senghor declared, the black peoples in both the 2

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Reinhold Neibuhr, Reflections on the End of an Era (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), ix. See also William Hocking, “The Future of Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy, 32:9 (April 25, 1935): 230–231; Lindsay Rogers, Crisis Government (New York: W. W. Norton, 1934); Arnold Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1931 (London: Oxford University Press, 1932); F. J. C. Hearnshaw, “Democracy or Dictatorship,” Contemporary Review, 146 (1934): 434–436; Thierry Maulnier, La Crise est dans l’homme (Paris: Libraire de la Revue Française, 1932); Thierry Maulnier, “Il faut réconquérir notre univers,” Combat (June 1936), 3–4; André Breton and Diego Rivera, “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” Partisan Review, 6:1 (Autumn 1938): 50. James Weldon Johnson, Negro Americans, what now? (New York: The Viking Press, 1935), 3. Scholars of the black experience have tended to frame the 1930s in terms of the interwar African diasporic landscape or in terms of domestic contexts such as the so-called tail end of the Harlem Renaissance in the United States or the beginning of the négritude movement in France, rather than in terms of a crisis of modernity. See, for example, Jennifer Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Clare Corbould, Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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United States and the French Empire had a unique perspective to offer in terms of confronting this crisis. What follows is an effort to chart the ways in which black intellectuals and activists such as Senghor developed sophisticated critiques of the structures of liberal modernity and fought for alternative configurations of their respective socio-political frameworks that would allow for universal access to political, social and economic rights, regardless of differences rooted in race or class. Through this approach, I will demonstrate how the “marked devotion to poetry” that G. D. Périer observed in La Revue du Monde Noir was a product of the particular political context of this period. As will become clear, the terrain of culture (and of poetry in particular) became an important battleground for struggle and activism. It provided a gateway to mainstream conversations hitherto inaccessible to black writers, in addition to offering a particularly powerful way to reconfigure the relationships between race and nation, culture and political status. Central to this project is the inclusion of under-acknowledged thinkers and activists such as the Martinican Nardal sisters Jane and Paulette, the Sudanese activist Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté and the US academic Kelly Miller. The intellectual work of Léon-Gontran Damas, although often cited as one the “trois pères of négritude,“ will also take on a new valence when positioned in terms of his Catholicism.

4.1 communist alternatives and the political power of poetry While the universalist rhetoric of Roosevelt’s New Deal policy promised hope and security to all members of the American nation-state, African Americans, alongside other minority groups, were offered financial security only indirectly.5 Black commentators in the Crisis such as John P. Davis pointed to this aspect of the New Deal, arguing that it only perpetuated older “deals” embedded with racism.6 In this context, particularly in the early 1930s, many blacks explored Communist alternatives, to the horror of more reformist activists. Charles S. Johnson’s Opportunity was awash with articles warning the journal’s readership

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Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 21. John P. Davis, “A Black Inventory of the New Deal,” Crisis, 42 (May 1935), 141–142, 154. See also George Edmund Haynes, “Lily-White Social Security,” Crisis, 42 (March 1935): 85–86.

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of the perils of communism. While commentators such as National Urban League leader Asbury C. Smith and Howard Professor Kelly Miller acknowledged the allure of Communism in the wake of the Scottsboro Trial, they warned that Communists did not have a great track record when it came to race.7 For Miller, the danger of communism lay specifically in the fact that it was neither “native to the American soil nor indigenous to American Spirit and genius.”8 Miller’s conflation of political action with national character gave the reader an insight into the way the two categories were often overlapped. This is particularly clear when Miller went on to state that Communism had been successful in the Soviet Union because the Soviets were “homogenous in color even though they lack the cohesive strength of tribal unity.”9 In contrast, America had been molded by “the tradition of self-government” and “grounded in the structure and genius of the Anglo-Saxon folk sense.” Democracy was incompatible with Communism. Any fears over capitalism were foolish as there could be no doubt that “the capitalistic motive will veer from selfish profit to social benefit.”10 As far as Miller was concerned, the “proletarian mob never reasons or investigates,” which is why the Ku Klux Klan was drawn from its white ranks and the African American radicals from its black ranks.11 Miller was no apologist for the Roosevelt New Deal and had critiqued the exclusion of African Americans from many of its recovery programs, but he, as with many of the contributors to Opportunity in this period, still believed in its potential. Miller, as an employed university professor and journalist, was, however, speaking from a position of relative privilege within the black community. His condescension regarding the “proletarian mob” indicates something of the appeal of the Communists at this moment. As the furore over the Scottsboro trial had made clear, class was a fault line in racial solidarity and only the Communists were making a conscious effort to fight along economic lines. For poor black communities disproportionately affected by the Depression, Communist organizing, particularly in the South, at least made some attempt to address their immediate problems. In contrast, black intellectuals were drawn increasingly to the conversations 7

8 9 10 11

Asbury Smith, “What Can the Negro Expect from Communism?,” Opportunity, 40:7 (July 1933): 211–212, 219; Kelly Miller, “Should the Black Turn Red?” Opportunity, 40:11 (November 1933): 328–332; 350. Kelly Miller, “Should the Black Turn Red?,” 328. Kelly Miller, “Should the Black Turn Red?,” 329. Kelly Miller, “Should the Black Turn Red?,” 329. Kelly Miller, “Should the Black Turn Red?,” 350.

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around the relationship between art and politics that were being generated within Communist circles both in the United States and internationally. One of the first indications that poetry would become a vital battleground in the clash of ideologies followed the publication of surrealist and anti-imperialist poet, Louis Aragon’s “Red Front.” The poem, published in the July 1931 edition of Literature of World Revolution, was a fiery indictment of capitalist democracy. Written while Aragon was attending the Second International Congress of Revolutionary Writers in the Soviet Union, the poem and the journal attracted the ire of the French state for including phrases that allegedly incited its readers to murder – “fire on Léon Blum . . . fire on the trained bears of social democracy,” “kill the cops” – and for attempting to provoke mutiny. This latter charge was the result of another poem, entitled “The Cavalry of Boudionny” and written by V. Vichnevsky, that had appeared in the same issue. As the editor of the journal, Aragon was held responsible. Three months after the edition first went on sale in the L’Humanité bookshop, police raided the store and confiscated the remaining 350 copies. Aragon himself was given a suspended sentence for attempting to foment mutiny among French soldiers with the end goal of anarchy.12 More than three hundred European artists and writers signed a petition defending Aragon’s right to write whatever the political implications of the poetry.13 The furore around Aragon’s poem prompted discussions among the French Left and the PCF about the power of poetry and the boundaries of artistic freedom. At the time, the Comintern and PCF were placing pressure on poets and political activists Louis Aragon and Georges Sadoual, leading lights of André Breton’s surrealist movement, to have their creative works supervised by the PCF.14 In the arguments that played out on the front pages of L’Humanité and in pamphlets such as André Breton’s Misère de la poèsie, writers across the Left debated the role of literature in politics and the responsibility of the intellectual in these times. The Martinican creators of Légitime Défense participated actively in this debate. Not only did Jules Monnerot, Etienne Lero and Rene Menil explicitly fashion the journal to speak to surrealist thinking, but these poets also attended surrealist debates on the links between politics, 12 13 14

André Thirion, Révolutionnaires sans révolution (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1972), 392. The signees included Walter Benjamin, Andre Breton, Bertolt Brecht, among others. For more detailed explanations of this affair, se Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 174–179; Carrie Noland, Voices of Négritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric Regime (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 189–192.

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aesthetics and anti-colonialism.15 André Breton engaged directly with the group too, offering advice and encouragement.16 Ménil implicitly referred to Breton’s pamphlet in choosing to entitle of his contribution to Légitime Défense: “Misère d’une poésie.” When he criticized fellow Martinican Gilbert Gratiant’s poetry for translating “neither the social inequality of his country nor the passions of his race,” he deplored the absence of calls for political action found in Aragon’s “Front Rouge.”17 In the preface to the journal, the authors also referred to the writings of Andre Bréton and Aragon.18 To do so in this particular moment was to answer the clarion call of Aragon and support the surrealist contention that revolutionary poetry could transcend its literary form to become political, even if the political act was the recovery of black dignity rather than revolution.19 As has been discussed in Chapter 3, McKay’s Banjo was offered as an example of revolutionary art. African American leftist poets were active participants in perpetuating these particular debates. The poet Langston Hughes, traveling in Russia in 1933, met Louis Aragon. Interested in his work, he translated sections of Aragon’s “Magnitogorsk” and published them later that year in International Literature, the journal of the cultural arm of the Comintern: the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. “Magnitogorsk” was decidedly pro-Bolshevik in tone, heralding the October 1917 revolution as the beginning of a larger global transformation that would rid the world of the inequalities: “Glory to the land and the earth/in the sun of the bolshevik days/and glory to the Bolsheviks.”20 Hughes’s decision to do the translation – his first from French – gestures to his belief in the necessity of change and the possibilities offered by the Soviet Union. In 1931, poet E. E. Cummings had translated into English another of Aragon’s poems, the similarly pro-Soviet “Red Front.” His translation was passed around American Marxist literary circles, reaching a young Richard Wright, who would later pen the famous Native Son, in 1934. Reading “Red Front” inspired Wright to write “Transcontinental,” a poem he dedicated to Aragon, which relied upon many of the same modernist themes and

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17 18 20

Régis Antoine, Les écrivains français et les Antilles: Des premiers pères blancs aux surréalistes noirs (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1978), 363. René Ménil discusses Breton’s engagement with the group in his “Response to questionaire” in Régis Antoine, Les écrivains noirs et les antilles. René Ménil, “Une Misère d’une poésie,” Légitime Défense, 1 (1932): 11. Légitime Défense, 1 (1932): 1. 19 Carrie Noland, Voices of Negritude, 195. Louis Aragon, “Magnitogorsk,” trans. Langston Hughes, International Literature, 4 (October 1933): 83.

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techniques.21 In the poem, Wright uses the metaphor of a road trip across America to paint the story of a proletarian revolt. The proletariat class in “Transcontinental” is comprised of the minority races of the United States, such as the African Americans and the indigenous peoples who have been oppressed by a rich white elite. The poem functions as both fiction and a call to arms to these groups, suggesting that the shared experience of economic oppression should be a unifying force: “Come on You Negroes Come On/ There’s room/Not in the back seat but in the front seat/We’re heading for the highway of Self-Determination.”22 “Transcontinental” was published in the inaugural issue of the communist journal International Literature in January 1936. Other contributors included Aragon himself, André Malraux, André Gide and Josef Stalin. This cross-Atlantic network only deepened as Aragon became increasingly committed to the possibilities of revolutionary literature. He was involved in the New York branch of the Communist John Reed Clubs, urging all American writers to join the revolutionary cause.23 In an April 1935 address, he named Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, alongside other writers such as John Dos Passos and Waldo Frank, as examples of writers who were making a difference in the struggle against fascism.24 Soon after, at the behest of the Comintern’s new Popular Front Strategy, the John Reed Clubs would be replaced in the United States by the League of American Writers. Intended as an anti-fascist organization, the League welcomed left-leaning non-party members, as well as CPUSA members, and thus scooped up a large number of black writers who were 21

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Michel Fabre points to this intellectual genealogy but he figures this in literary rather than activist terms. Hazel Rowley treats the poem as a “humorous, sarcastic song to America” that subverted the quintessentially American Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”: Michel Fabre, The World of Richard Wright (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985), 43; Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright, The Life and Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 112. Richard Wright, “Transcontinental,” International Literature, 1 (January 1936): 52–57. The John Reed Clubs emerged in the late 1920s as an attempt to combine the artistic efforts of the Left that had appeared in the Liberator and the Masses and the “Third Period” Communistic art movement of “Proletarian literature.” Designed to express the identities and concerns of the working class, the John Reed Clubs ran with the slogan that “Art is a Class Weapon.” The New York club was by far the biggest but the Chicago club was also sizeable. Langston Hughes was a member of the New York club and Richard Wright was involved in the Chicago Club: James Smethurst, “John Reed Clubs/League of American Writers” in Steven C. Tracy (ed.), Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 399. Louis Aragon, “Message au Congres des John Reed Clubs, New York, avril 1935” in Louis Aragon, L’Œuvre poétique d’Aragon en 15 vol. vol. 6 (Paris: Livre Club Diderot, 1974–1981), 251–260.

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otherwise slightly wary of the Communist project. They offered some financial support and the opportunity to publish in Communist journals.

4.2 revolutionary thought and racial belonging Similar kinds of institutional openings were not available to francophone black thinkers of the left, a point that has been remarked upon in French histories but not linked to its implications for conceptions of diasporic belonging. Légitime Défense had responded to the lack of available platforms to think through issues around the relationship between culture, politics and citizenship. Shortly after Légitime Défense came out, another group published L’Étudiant noir. Perhaps the most famous of the francophone interwar publications, it is generally credited with being one of the first forums in which Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor articulated their visions of nègritude.25 Only two issues survive, one published in March 1935, the other intended for May–June 1935. In an article in the second issue, Césaire directly addressed the question of Communist revolution for blacks, writing: “To be revolutionary, that’s fine: but for us nègres, it is insufficient; we must not be revolutionaries who are accidentally black, but revolutionaries who are nègres, and it is important to put the accent on the descriptor (nègre).”26 The accent on the descriptor was important, Césaire and Senghor believed, because it reflected the interdependence of culture and politics. Although Marxism was important to both men’s thinking through the issue of race, they sought, as Senghor would later state, to affirm “against the communist students, that cultural independence was the sine qua non condition of all other forms of independence.”27 In elaborating this theory, Césaire emphasized the 25

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This celebrity is partly due to the work of Lilyan Kesteloot, whose 1963 book was one of the first on négritude. Although she had never seen a copy of the journal, she cited a draft essay by Léon-Gontran Damas to argue that L’Étudiant noir ushered in a new way of thinking about race in interwar Paris that erased older divides between Antillean and African activists in Paris. As scholars such as Edward Ako, Brent Hayes Edwards and Martin Steins have subsequently demonstrated, this reading both overstates the journal’s importance and misrepresents its contents: Lilyan Kesteloot, Les Ecrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d’une littérature (Brussels: Institut de Sociologie de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1963), 91; Edward O. Ako, “L’Étudiant noir and the Myth of the Genesis of the Negritude Movement,” Research in African Literatures, 15:3 (Fall 1984): 341–353; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 177–178; Martin Steins, “Jeunesse noire,” Neohelicon, 4: 1–2 (1976): 91–121. Aimé Césaire, “Conscience raciale et révolution sociale,” L’Étudiant noir, 3:1 (May–June 1935): 1. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Comments,” 24–25.

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need to reject any form of cultural assimilation. He argued that cultural “alterity . . . is a law of Nature.”28 Only through self-realization would it be possible for black writers to “contribute to universal life” and racial differences to be encompassed within the universal. The poetic renaissance that the black surrealist students behind Légitime Défense had called for was placed in a firmer, racialized framework in Césaire’s thinking, but the same emphasis on literature as a tool remained. In his contributions to the journal, Senghor also argued that the project of universal humanism required the elaboration of distinct culture: “to be nègre is to recover what is human beneath the rust of what is artificial.”29 An interrogation of René Maran’s work framed Senghor’s argument. Maran, in Batouala, mastered European literary traditions, and this mastery was recognized by the achievement of the Prix Goncourt. It was only his racial sensibilities that allowed him convincingly to convey the African experience: “the genius of the bush . . . marked him with its tattoo.” Whereas Césaire argued that the experience of being black required interrogation and translation into culture, Senghor insisted upon a kind of racial essentialism that imbued black people with certain gifts (imagination and soul) as compared to the gifts of white men (reason and spirit). He did not argue that only blacks had those capacities but that the two kinds of being were equally significant and required the other for balance. In short, he was formulating the crisis of the Depression as a direct consequence of modernity’s over-reliance upon rational, scientific modes of being. The role of black cultural difference was to restore this balance. Certain scholars have argued that thinkers such as Césaire and Senghor emphasized the cultural because it was the only space in which they could engage safely with the politics and policies of the French colonial state.30 While this was indubitably a factor, it is important to emphasize the extent to which aesthetic mediums were being used as tools of engagement across the political spectrum in both France and the United States. As historian 28

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Aimé Césaire, “Nègreries: jeunesse noire et assimilation,” L’Étudiant noir 1:1 (March 1935): 3. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “L’Humanisme et nous: René Maran,” Etudiant noir, 1:1 (March 1935): 4. Jacques Chevrier first suggested that culture was an activist technique deployed in order to avoid the police apparatus. Gary Wilder expands upon this idea to note that colonial authorities could hardly forbid the exploration of an African cultural identity in light of their own apparent support for indigenous cultures: Jacques Chevrier, Littérature nègre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990): 53–56; 96–98; Gary Wilder, The French Imperial NationState: Négritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 205.

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Michael Denning has argued so persuasively, culture was the terrain of class warfare in the United States of the 1930s.31 I argue that a similar case can be made for France at this moment. The Communist and leftist arguments over political poetics have already been mentioned, but rightwing groups as the Jeune Droite (Young Right) were also exploring the possibilities of aesthetics as a political tool.32 Even in the pages of L’Étudiant noir, this theorization of culture did not, however, go unchallenged. Attempting to bridge the divisions between political radicals and cultural nationalists, Léonard Sainville contributed a piece beseeching both groups to think about the cultural, economic and political aspects of the black condition as being equally significant.33 In elaborating such a multifaceted strategy he refused to accept essentialist visions of racial belonging. Gratiant argued similarly, having in mind the process of creolization that he conceptualized as a historical process in Martinique. For him, the assertion that the fact of being nègre or black pointed to a racially authentic cultural identity was hugely problematic because it risked becoming a reflection of European racism. From slavery onward, the history of Martinique, Gratiant contended, could be characterized as a “super-métissage“ that transformed both the black and the European populations of the island. While Sainville believed that greater solidarity between Africans and Martinicans, for example, was desirable and necessary in order to achieve political assimilation, he asserted a difference between African cultures and creolized Martinican cultures.34 Blackness as a political identity was thus hugely problematic for Sainville and he was less eager than Césaire and Senghor would be, for example, to look across the Atlantic to the African American community as a means of political emancipation. 31

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Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1998), xvi. The idea that the right used “aesthetics as politics” comes from Sandrine Sanos, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), 11–12. David Caroll and Mark Antliff have written about the literary-aesthetic dimension of French fascism in this period too. Here I build upon their research to examine how this phenomenon played out across left and right political landscapes and intersected with the work of black intellectuals: David Caroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Mark Antliff, Avant-garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1919–1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Léonard Sainville, “Un livre sur la Martinique,” L’Étudiant noir, 1 (March 1935): 5. Gilbert Gratiant, “Mulâtres . . . pour le bien et le mal,” L’Étudiant noir, 1 (March 1935): 5–6.

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Notably, Gratiant was talking about black men, referring to women only in their “corporeal” sense as objects of desire or vehicles for reproduction.35 Senghor also spoke in explicitly gendered terms, writing that “the black man remains a man.” For Césaire’s part, he spoke of “men” and “brothers,” constructing his rationale of racial identity in masculine terms. This elision of black women’s experiences also extended to the intellectual genealogies that Damas, Senghor and Césaire would trace for themselves. Although their thinking about race and national belonging owed an intellectual debt to the writing of Paulette and Jane Nardal as well as to the conversations that had occurred in the Nardal salons in the early thirties, the three men never acknowledged it.36 Instead, Damas and Césaire argued that Senghor had awakened them to an African identity while they had introduced him to the potential of thinking in diasporic terms.37 Césaire was particularly scathing about the feminine space of the salons, making a point of stating that he had never enjoyed attending a single one.38 In a letter to her sister, Paulette Nardal later deplored his behavior. As far as she was concerned, Césaire and Senghor had “taken up the ideas that we have raised and expressed them with far more sparkle, we were only women! We spelled it out for the men!”39 Her anger is understandable, particularly from a contemporary perspective, where, until very recently, scholars have neglected her thinking in the genesis of négritude – this despite the fact that the famed first issue of L’Étudiant noir included one of her articles.40 Césaire, Senghor and Damas were far more interested in locating their thinking in terms of writers they had met through the salons or been introduced to in the pages of the Crisis and Opportunity. At times each of the three writers referenced the anthropological work of Haitians Antènor Firmin and Jean Price-Mars as well as the Cuban Nicolás Guillen’s conception of Pan-Nègrism. More often and more explicitly, they grounded their

35 36

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Jennifer Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 158–159. There are also striking parallels between their early thinking and the work of Lamine Senghor and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté. Janet G. Vailliant, Black, French and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 90. Aimé Césaire, Nègre je suis, Nègre je resterai, Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2005), 25. “Extrait d’une lettre de Paulette Nardal envoyée en 1960 à Jacques Louis Hymans,” cited in T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Négritude Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 17. Paulette Nardal, “Guignol Oulouf,” L’Étudiant noir, 1 (March 1935): 4. For recent work on the Nardals see literary scholars, see T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 147–186.

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thinking in the male writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance – Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Sterling Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke – and with publications such as Opportunity and Crisis. Senghor said explicitly that “the general meaning of the word [négritude]– the discovery of black values and recognition for the Negro of his situation – was born in the United States of America.”41 Indeed, poetry by Richard Wright and Sterling Brown also appeared in L’Étudiant noir. Aimé Césaire translated Wright’s “I have seen black hands” into “Mains noires,” and Aristide Maugée – believed to be a penname for Césaire – translated Brown’s “Strong Men” into “Hommes forts.”42 An article on Paul Dunbar by Louis T. Achille appeared in the same issue.43 Poetry, then, became the means through which men such as Césaire, Senghor and Damas situated the experience of diaspora, finding common cause with African Americans on the terrain of culture rather than shared political goals. While L’Étudiant noir was concerned with articulating the black experiences, the contributors’ concerns were also specific to the contemporary political moment in which fascism, communism and liberalism struggled for ascendancy. It would not be long before the group’s efforts dispersed among more interracial Popular Front movements but even at this stage, fascism was the target of their criticism. Sainville, for example, explicitly warned his readers of “the rise of fascism” which posed dangers “to their life and liberties.”44 Of particular concern to him was the influential fascist group behind the virulently right-wing journal, Je Suis Partout. A defining feature of Je Suis Partout was the sense that colonial subjects, alongside Jews, contaminated the French nation and should remain ineligible for citizenship. Insofar as the contributors to Je Suis Partout were concerned, juridico-political rights were entailed in being white and male.45 People of color, those of Jewish descent and all women 41

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Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Problématique de la négritude,” Présence Africaine, 78 (1971): 11. Richard Wright, “Mains noires,” L’étudiant noir, 3 (May–June 1935): 6; Sterling Brown, “Hommes forts,” L’Étudiant noir, 3 (May–June 1935): 6. Thomas A. Hale has argued convincingly that the translation of Brown was actually done by Césaire, under a pseudonym: “Césaire and the Challenge of Translation: The Example of ‘Strong Men’ by Sterling Brown,” Comparative Literature Studies, 50: 3 (2013): 445–457. Louis T. Achille, “Paul Laurence Dunbar: poète nègre,” L’étudiant noir, 3 (May– June 1935): 4. Léonard Sainville, “Simple questions à Je Suis Partout,” Étudiant noir, 1 (March 1935): 8. Sandrine Sanos, The Aesthetics of Hate, 10.

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were thus excluded from this vision of citizenship. Sainville’s warnings took on added urgency in the context of the growing Italian presence on the Ethiopian border. Within months of the publication of the first issue of L’Étudiant noir, Italian forces would attack Ethiopia, in an act of aggression against a sovereign nation that contravened the covenants of the League of Nations.

4.3 the threat of fascist world order When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in October of 1935, the act proved the death blow to the system of liberal internationalism that had structured the political and socioeconomic world order since the end of World War I. The establishment of the League of Nations may have legitimized colonial empire, but it also set guidelines for colonial rule. Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia could not be justified under these standards because Ethiopia had previously been a sovereign, self-governing (if economically unstable) state. Inaction by the League confirmed the suspicions of many: that sovereign equivalence was nothing more than a fiction.46 Instead, it constituted a hierarchy that mapped closely on to racial groupings. The League of Nations offered only weak trade sanctions and the United States, not bound by League decisions, continued to trade with Italy. France was heavily implicated in the entire venture, having just ceded territory on the Ethiopian border to Mussolini in the hope that Italy would act as a bulwark against the National Socialism imperialism emanating from Germany. In a world still reeling from the Great Depression and lacking faith in the viability of democratic capitalism, the stakes of the conflict between Communism and Fascism grew larger. Without the guarantee of equivalent sovereignty and the associated grounding of rights within the category of citizen, a crisis of faith in the universality of human nature and rights exploded, challenging the idea that white men embodied the universal.47 A series of fascist riots including the February 1934 Stavisky Affair riots in Paris as well as those later in 1935, presaged the rise of the Right in French politics. The Laval-Mussolini accord of January 1935 was part of a broader French diplomatic offensive intended to curb the ambitions of

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Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 458. Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in American, 1933–1973 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 4–5.

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Germany’s Adolf Hitler and his new Nationalist Party.48 The accords arose out of disputes following World War I in which the Italians felt they had been poorly compensated for their sacrifices by the British and the French. The British had handed over some land from Kenya to Italian Somalia in 1925, but the French had remained reluctant to give up any imperial influence. In the 1935 agreement, Laval ceded some territories in eastern Africa to the Italians. A crucial element of the accords was the promise of turning a blind eye to Italian designs on Ethiopia. The decision divided France and the empire. Conversations around the invasion prompted conflicts between fascist and anti-fascist forces. Certain French intellectuals believed that the primarily Roman Catholic Laval government was pandering to the Church’s unofficial alliance with Mussolini. Some, such as philosopher Julien Benda, declared that hierarchies of civilization and culture did not confer a right to exploit or attack those lower on the cultural ladder. The Manifesto of the Sixty-Four Intellectuals accused those who opposed the Italian invasion of “un grossier universalisme” that placed Ethiopia on the same level as Italy. Procolonial and right-wing in orientation, the sixty-four signees included Robert Brasillach, Pierre Eugène Drieu La Rochelle and Charles Maurras. In retaliation, thinkers such as Benda asserted that every nation, regardless of its backwardness, “has the right not to be despoiled by a stronger nation.”49 The Laval accord, as far as Benda was concerned, violated the spirit of the “the France of the Revolution of 1789, the France of Voltaire, Diderot, Renan, the France which rose up against the feudal classes.” When the Laval Cabinet fell in 1935, the event was framed in terms of the restoration of the True France after a period of usurpation.50 Historically Ethiopia had occupied an important place in the black diasporic imaginary because it was the sole African state to have retained independence in the face of nineteenth-century European imperialism. The French colonial population in Paris increasingly linked imperialism to fascism, locating racism and discrimination at the nexus of the two.51 Anti-imperialist groups across the political and racial spectrum in Paris coalesced around the issue of Ethiopia on this basis. For example, the 48

49 50 51

Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven: Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1995). Julien Benda, “France Divided,” Foreign Affairs, 14 (April 1936): 398. Julien Benda, “France Divided,” 406. Centre des Affaires Indigènes (CAI), Anonymous report, Avril 1936, 1935, Service de liaison avec les originaires des territoires français d’outre-mer (SLOTFOM) 3/53, Centre d’Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (CAOM).

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UTN, which had so recently expelled Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté for his reformist alliances, met with the ex-communist LDRN and Kouyaté’s newly formed Le Comité de Défense de l’Independence Nationale d’Ethiopie as well as Le Comité Permanent Victor Schoelcher (a socialist group) to organize a 1935 protest march.52 The French government moved quickly to ban such a protest march but approximately five thousand colonial subjects and citizens marched from the Esplanade des Invalides through the Place de la République up to the Place de la Concorde where speeches denouncing imperialism were delivered.53 In a meeting the following day, Kouyaté characterized the conflict in terms of the need for France to choose between an alliance with fascist Italy or fidelity to its republican principles, the latter of which would guarantee the loyalty of all of its colonized people.54 The PCF remained silent on the issue, a fact that Kouyaté found particularly galling.55 Partly as a reaction to the lack of PCF engagement with the Ethiopian crisis, Kouyaté established Africa at the end of 1935. In the journal he made clear that his dream was “to establish normal relations between races, peoples and nations, to abolish the hatred that endangers the future of Humanity, to restore Justice, Right and Liberty.”56 This new platform certainly seems to have given Kouyaté increased traction as this very first issue of the journal sold so well that Parisian police were prompted to seize the inventories of the vendors.57 While La Race Nègre and Le Cri des nègres never achieved greater circulation than 3,000, Africa, regularly printed 5,000, in some cases 10,000, copies.58 Nevertheless, it did not prompt any French or Communist intervention against Mussolini. The United States, too, officially declared neutrality in regard to Ethiopia. Outlets such as the New Republic published supportive articles about Mussolini and advocated the continued export of American oil to Italy despite the League of Nations pressure upon America to comply with its oil embargo.59 African American journalist J. A. Rogers had worked as a foreign correspondent in Ethiopia in 1930, and he returned there to 52

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CAI, Anonymous report, Juin 1935, on plans for an August 1935 march, SLOTFOM 3/ 43, CAOM. CAI, “Manifestation de 21 Août 1935,” SLOTFOM 3/43, CAOM. CAI, Report on meeting August 22, 1935, SLOTFOM 3/43, CAOM. “Les critiques de Kouyaté,” Juillet 2, 1935, SLOTFOM 3/53, CAOM. Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, “À nos lecteurs!,” Africa, 1:1 (1 December 1935): 1. Note de L.S., December 18, 1935, SLOTFOM 3/73, CAOM. Martin Steins, “Black Migrants in Paris” in Albert S. Gérard, European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, vol. 6 (Budapest: Akadamia Kiadó, 1986), 372. William O. Scroggs, “Oil for Italy,” Foreign Affairs, 14 (April 1936): 523–525.

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cover the conflict in 1935. He published a pamphlet entitled The Real Facts about Ethiopia based on his experience.60 For Rogers, like many of his francophone contemporaries, the Ethiopian question was emblematic of the clash of fascism (represented by Mussolini) and democracy (embodied by Hailie Selassie).61 For the African American community and United States foreign policy makers, Ethiopia also represented something far more difficult to disentangle: the complex relationship between race and the right to national sovereignty. Successive chargés d’affaires in Addis Abbaba had refused to acknowledge Ethiopians as black Africans and therefore Ethiopia as a sovereign black African nation.62 Commentators in newspapers and journals such as the Atlantic Monthly and Foreign Affairs questioned the racial belonging of Ethiopians.63 African Americans themselves were conflicted about the relationship between Ethiopians and the African diaspora. Ethiopia had never participated in Pan-African projects nor made any particular efforts to engage with the African American community. As Claude McKay observed, African Americans were “not generally aware that many other Africans beside Ethiopians” also objected to being identified as “Negroes . . . because they regard it as a name fit for black slaves.”64 J. A. Rogers also pointed out that the Ethiopians did not consider themselves “Negroes.” His pamphlet devoted some space to the question of the racial character of Ethiopians. As far as he was concerned, there were two possible understandings of the word “Negro”: “the American and the universal.”65 In the United States, the term was “sometimes caste, sometimes race, sometimes both.”66 Elsewhere, culture and socioeconomic status was far more important. For his part, W. E. B. Du Bois declared that Ethiopians “are as Negroid as American Negroes.”67 Italy’s aggression in Ethiopia only confirmed that race prejudice was but an excuse for economic exploitation

60

61 62

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64 65 66 67

Joel Augustus Rogers, The Real Facts about Ethiopia (1936; rpt., Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1982). Joel Augustus Rogers, The Real Facts about Ethiopia, 31. Cedric J. Robinson, “The African Diaspora and the Italo-Ethiopian War,” Race and Class, 27:2 (Autumn 1985): 53. Carlton S. Coon, “A Realist Looks at Ethiopia,” Atlantic Monthly (September 1935): 310–315; Robert Gale Woodruff, “The Peoples of Ethiopia,” Foreign Affairs (January 1936): 340–344. Claude McKay, Harlem, Negro Metropolis¸(New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1940): 175. Joel Augustus Rogers, The Real Facts about Ethiopia, 3. Joel Augustus Rogers, The Real Facts about Ethiopia, 4. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Inter-racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis: A Negro View,” Foreign Affairs, 14 (October 1935): 82.

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of races of color by the white race. In this, George Padmore and Du Bois were in agreement. Writing for the Crisis, Padmore charged the League of Nations with ignoring Italy’s blatant flouting of Ethiopian national sovereignty because Ethiopia was a black nation.68 Despite these conflicts over racial identity, many African Americans felt a sense of racial solidarity with the Ethiopians.69 As Roi Ottley would comment in his 1943 book, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia “permeated every phase of Negro life.”70 The NAACP appealed directly to the League of Nations to restrain the Italians in Ethiopia.71 They also hoped to pressure the Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Roosevelt into supporting Ethiopia.72 Multiple groups sprung up in black communities in support of Ethiopia, from Ralph J. Bunche’s Howard-based Ethiopian Research Council to the International African Progressive Association, the Detroit Committee for the Aid of Ethiopia to the Association for Ethiopian Independence. Petitions from volunteers who hoped to fight against Mussolini’s forces on behalf of the Ethiopians flooded the State Department.73 For black actor and activist Paul Robeson, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia was the moment that internationalized the African American. In an address delivered a few years later, he argued that “since then, the parallel between his own interests and those of oppressed peoples abroad has been impressed upon him daily as he struggles against 68 69

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George Padmore, “Ethiopia and World Politics,” Crisis, 42 (May 5, 1935):138–139. For a more detailed study see James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 27–56. Meriwether also makes the interesting point that the King James Bible used the term “Ethiopia” as a more general designator of Africa and the state’s modern incarnation was viewed by many in the Black American Christian community as being of great import (p. 30). Roi Ottley, “New World a-Coming”: Inside Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 104. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 26th Annual Report for 1935 (New York, 1935), 40–41. Walter White to W. E. B. Du Bois, July 10, 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries (hereafter W. E. B. Du Bois Papers). Robert Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, seeking information on citizenship restrictions, 16 July 1935, File 884.2221/7, 1930–39 RG 59, US National Archives at College Park (hereafter NACP); Pan-African Reconstruction Association sent a copy of its recruitment letter, 19 July 1935, file 884.2221/8, 1930–39, RG 59, NACP; International African Progressive Association, enlisting of Blacks and protesting of US policy, 24 July 1935, file 884.2221/12, 1930–39, RG 59, NACP; Detroit Committee for the Aid of Ethiopia, file 884.2221/23, RG59, NACP; Association for Ethiopian Independence, requesting information of passport restrictions, 30 December 1935, file 884.2221/46, 1930–39, RG 59, NACP.

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the forces which bar him from full citizenship.”74 This solidarity was, however, almost inextricable from the feeling that the system of liberal internationalism could still function if only the participant nations could be brought to believe in the equivalent sovereignty of every nation, regardless of race. Paulette Nardal certainly believed this to be the case. In an article entitled “Levée des Races,” she sought to outline the reasons for international alliances against the Italian invasion. In response to fears that the reaction of the African diaspora to the Ethiopian conflict presaged a coming “race war,” she explained that their reaction was rooted in a horror of the Italian violation of Ethiopia’s right to sovereignty. Even if colonized or oppressed blacks were linked to their race by a mysterious “sensitivity” and “passionate thoughts,” they were nonetheless also imbued with the “intellectual currents that traverse modern nations” and thus opposed to such violations of justice from a humanist perspective rather than a racial one.75 This analysis bears out in the wave of American volunteers – black and white – who would soon flock to Spain to take arms against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Solidarity with other oppressed peoples was the galvanizing factor, not a shared sense of black identity. Nardal was certainly living the interracial nature of the fight against Mussolini’s fascism in her role as the secretary of the Comité Mondial contre la Guerre et le Fascisme. A pacifist organization with international reach, the Comité had dedicated itself to protesting the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. At the same time, Nardal had joined the UTN and was helping with the administration of Le Cri des Nègres, which, by April 1935, had also begun critiquing Italian actions along the Ethiopian borders.76 Participating in the UTN was a radical turn for the reformist Nardal, not just because of her Antillean citizenship. Few black women appear on the records for any of the militant anti-imperial organization in the early 1930s (none at all in the 1920s, where only the white wives of black activists are mentioned). She swiftly became a target for criticism and her name was mentioned alongside Kouyaté’s in colonial surveillance files

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Paul Robeson, “American Negroes in the War,” Reel 7, Box 10, Folder 3, Paul Robeson Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library (hereafter Paul Robeson Papers). Paulette Nardal, “Levée des races,” extrait de Métromer,” Le Périscope Africain, 7:318 (October 19, 1935). Ligue Anti-Impérialiste, Octobre 11, 1935, Dossier SRI, SLOTFOM 3/73, CAOM.

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as a troublemaker.77 She was not alone in her militancy. French women across the color line had organized a 1934 Congrès Mondial des Femmes contre la Guerre et le Fascisme. Encompassing myriad French suffragette organizations, the convention had welcomed Ada Smith, a mother of two of the Scottsboro victims, to speak because they saw a direct connection between the lynching prevalent in the American South and the fascist governments in Europe.78 In 1935, the feminist journal La Française also published “A call from the women of the black race,” which asked white women to join with black in upholding the principles of international cooperation embedded in the League of Nations. Key to doing so was protesting the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.79

4.4 blueprints for imperial reform A year after the Laval-Mussolini accords, the Radical Party, the PCF and the SFIO formed the Popular Front alliance. The alliance was effectively launched on the Popular Front Bastille Day of 1935, which drew L’Étudiant noir contributors, the UTN, the Algerian Étoile NordAfricaine, as well as colonial ethnographers such as Paul Rivet.80 By the May 1936 legislative elections, the Popular Front had received enough support to form a government. From the end of World War I, France’s elected governments had been primarily right or center-right in orientation.81 Insofar as empire was concerned, the hallmark of imperial policy making had been the influence of the parti colonial or colonial lobby. With the election of the Popular Front, the Third Republic saw its first left-wing government, the transferal or replacement of eighteen of the thirty colonial governors and the rise to prominence of politicians who had long criticized existing colonial practices. Among them was the new

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“AG de l’UTN,” Octobre 5, 1935, SLOTFOM 3/73, CAOM. For more on Nardal’s antifascism, see also Imoabong Umoren, “Anti-Fascism and the Development of Global Race Women, 1928–1945,” Callalloo, 39:1 (2016): 151–165. Jennifer Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 207. “Un appel des femmes de race noire,” La Française (September 21, 1935): 1. Nancy Cunard, “July 14, Tricolour with International” n.d. [1936], SLOTFOM, 3/73, CAOM. The 1924 elections had seen the rise to power of the Cartel des gauches, a coalition of the Radical Socialists and the SFIO, but their term was politically unstable and a fiscal crisis led to its dissolution in 1926 and the appointment of a new government under the rightwing Raymond Poincaré. A second cartel won in 1932 but there was no clear left-wing majority, and the period between 1932 and the election of the Popular Front in 1936 saw a series of governments fall in quick succession.

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Colonial Minister Marius Moutet. One of Moutet’s first acts was to convene a meeting of imperial Governor-Generals in France in November 1936. This convention called for the indigenization of the colonial administration, a hitherto unprecedented concession to self-determination. Initiatives for paid labor and investment in agricultural development were also on the agenda. In French West Africa, 1936 brought with it an extension of metropolitan French rights to this colony in the form of the legalization of trade unions. Moreover, Moutet set up a reform commission that included colonial delegates such as the Madagascan Emile Fauré and Léopold Sédar Senghor and genuinely engaged with their perspectives. Chaired by the former Radical minister and President of the Human Rights League, Henri Guernut, the commission set itself up in reference to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Kouyaté praised Moutet specifically as a champion of the social laws being introduced to the colonies.82 Aside from running the influential Africa, Kouyaté was at the forefront of the leadership of another group important in the political landscape of Popular Front France: the Rassemblement Coloniale, formed in April of 1937. An anti-imperial project, the group’s founders comprised representatives of North and West Africa, Madagascar, the Antilles and Indochina, among others. It included the UTN, the LDRN, the Association des Étudiants Martiniquais en France and the Parti Nationaliste d’Algérie (previously called Étoile Nord-Africaine). Apart from Kouyaté, the group’s leadership included such personalities as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Nguyen The Truyen and Messali Hadj. As Michael Goebel has noted so incisively, aside from its non-alignment with the PCF, the RC was essentially the Union Intercoloniale reincarnated.83 While this broad coalition certainly had agendas particular to their own colonial contexts, they saw a great deal of common ground in their interests and were persuaded of the need to support each other.84 Belonging to the French imperial state seemed to offer more potential at this time to these particular activists than any kind of diasporic solidarity. As Martin Steins has argued, the disastrous results of the Italo-Ethiopian war served as a dark warning of the dangers of separatism.85 Greater freedom under the umbrella of French Republican 82

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Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, “Bilan d’un action colonial,” Africa (1937), 1. For more on colonial reactions to Moutet see Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 171–173. Michael Goebel, Anti-imperial Metropolis, 171. “Statuts,” n.d. (March 1937), SLOTOFM, 8/1, CAOM. Martin Steins, “Black Migrants in Paris,” 372.

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protection seemed a safer route than any strand of Pan-African nationalism. This group saw the potential for colonial reform in the anti-fascist and anticapitalist elements of the French Popular Front coalition.86 One of the first acts of the Rassemblement Coloniale was to send the Popular Front Kouyaté’s plans for federation.87 Perhaps a practical decision, Kouyaté nonetheless married these declarations to the elaboration of potential reform. Envisaging France as a lead or guide-nation, he proposed the transformation of the current republican empire into a federated greater France. In this new order, all subjects would automatically be granted French citizenship and nationality but would live within autonomous states or dominions. The end goal of such a formation was an eventual world federation which would comprise an egalitarian League of Nations.88 Two years later, Senghor would meditate upon a similarly federalist future for the French Empire, although his emphasis was upon the commercial and cultural imbalances. His essay, entitled “La Culture et “l’empire,” emphasized the ways in which the French colonial policies utilized the excuse of developing the cultures of colonial populations in order to contain them.89 He also warned that French culture was in danger of calcification without the injection of the indigenous cultures of the colonies. As an alternative, he proposed an egalitarian commerce of exchange (as opposed to exploitation) between the colonies and the provinces and the metropole: one in which technological expertise was given in fair exchange for raw materials and “new modes of feeling and living and self-expression.”90 These blueprints for a different kind of empire had some impact. Before the collapse of the Popular Front in 1938, the Colonial Ministry had committed itself in principle to increased autonomy for the colonies and had designed several federative proposals. Whether these would ever have been enacted is another question. By the time the Popular Front fell, it had introduced little legislative change to the relationship between metropole and 86

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“Statuts de la Rassemblement Coloniale,” Avril 11, 1937, SLOTFOM 13/1, CAOM; “Projet du Charte du Centre,” Mars 22, 1939, SLOTFOM 13/1, CAOM. Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, “Principes Directeurs d’Une Transformation de l’Outre-Mer,” May 27, 1937, SLOTFOM 3/78, CAOM. “Alliance France-Outremer” in Note L.S. November 27, 1925, SLOTFOM 3/73, CAOM; Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, “Programme du rassemblement colonial Francais: Principe directeurs d’une transformation de l’Outre-Mer,” Africa, 2:11 (June 1937): 3. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “La Culture et l’empire,” Charpentes, 2 (July–August 1939): 62. For a more detailed analysis of Senghor’s thinking at this moment, see Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation State, 234–252. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “La Culture et l’empire,” 62.

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colony.91 Moreover, the devaluation of the franc in 1937 not only shook popular faith in the government; it also made the French economy more dependent upon the imperial project. Nevertheless, these proposals crafted a blueprint for the postwar agenda that saw federative organization as not only possible but desirable.92 It also gave many anti-imperial thinkers the hope that with the right government reform within empire was possible.

4.5 toward a universalist western modernity For certain intellectuals such as Damas, Césaire and Senghor, this sense of possibility was reinforced by the increased openness to some black participation of French cultural-political movements. Both Damas and Senghor were engaged, for example, with Catholic and modernist intellectual movements. Senghor had, at one time, considered becoming a Catholic priest, while Damas had been raised a Catholic.93 All three were aware of the nonconformist movement of personalism espoused by some French Catholic intellectuals as a solution to the crisis they faced. The founder of the magazine Esprit, Émmanuel Mounier, and his more conservative colleague Jacques Maritain, repudiated the materialist individualism that they believed underpinned contemporary capitalist Republicanism yet also rejected the doctrines of Marxism.94 Personalism, in their vision, involved the fulfillment of the individual person through a return to the “spiritual.” This, in turn, led to the “coherent progress of humanity,” the overturn of individualist liberalism

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Tony Chafur and Amanda Sackur, “Introduction” in Tony Chafur and Amanda Sackur (eds.), French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front: Hope and Disillusion (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 1. Jean-Pierre Biondi and Gilles Morin have argued that this reformism was half-hearted at best: Les Anticolonialistes, 1881–1962 (Paris: R. Laffont, 1992), 207–221. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch has suggested that this needs to be read in terms of longer-term impact upon attitudes to the colonies: “The Popular Front and the Colonial Question. French West Africa: An Example of Reformist Colonialism” in Tony Chafur and Amanda Sackur (eds.), French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front: Hope and Disillusion (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 155–167. Frederick Cooper has made a similar argument in Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 75, 407–431. See also Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Tony Chafur and Amanda Sackur, “Introduction,” 13. He would later reject the faith. On Catholic intellectuals in the French political scene and the significance of Jacques Maritain: Hervé Serry, Naissance de l’intellectuel catholique (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2004).

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and the “spiritual enlargement of the community.”95 The present crisis, for personalists, had stemmed from the reliance on the rationale that had formed the bourgeois republicanism of contemporary France and, to a greater extent, the United States.96 In this configuration, the United States embodied an irredeemable form of capitalism while France, perhaps because of its strong Catholic history, still had the potential to transcend capitalist individualism. Furthermore, Esprit adopted an anti-racist platform in the journal, and while its writers tended to condone a humanist imperial project, much of the anti-American feeling in the journal was explicitly connected to the racism of the American South.97 Indeed, the journal was both an expression of personalist thinking and representative of a broader French reaction against the alienation of modernity – an alienation that black intellectuals knew all too well.98 As early as 1934, Damas was publishing poetry in Mounier’s Esprit. From the first edition of Esprit in 1932, its editor, Emmanuel Mounier, had argued that every man had “the right and the duty to develop his entire personality.”99 The decision to publish Damas seems to have been part of this project and a reflection of the colonial administration’s contemporary emphasis upon the importance of cultivating indigenous cultures. Marcel Moré, who introduced the five poems, certainly framed Damas within an ethnographic network.100 Moré began by explaining the context of his first meeting with Damas. Having just finished reading Michel Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme, he had gone with friends to watch a documentary on “la Magie Vaudoo.” The film’s scenes of sorcery and possession reminded him of Leiris‘s experiences among “the less civilized tribes” and their obfuscation of pagan rites and Christianity. When the lights went on again in the theater, as if, out of nowhere appeared “le

95

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Emmanuel Mounier, A Personalist Manifesto, trans. Monks of St. John’s Abbey (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1938), 6–7. Jean Dariège, “Les vacances du capitalisme aux États-Unis,” Esprit, 7 (April 1933): 136. Léon Gontran-Damas also published an excoriating piece on French racism and the immense impact of the black American cultural output: “Misère noire,” Esprit, 81 (June 1939): 347. Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années trente: Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1969); Jean Touchard, “Lésprit des années 30: Une tentatrice de renouvellement de la pensée politique française” in Pierre Andreu, Raoul Girardet and Jean Touchard (eds.), Revoltés de l’esprit: Les revues des années 30 (Paris: Edition Kimé, 1991), 210. Emmanuel Mounier, Esprit, 1932, cited in Serge Berstein, La France de années trente (Paris: Armand Colin, 2002), 96. Carrie Noland, Voices of Negritude, 288.

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nègre Léon Damas.”101 The two men went for a walk, Moré still immersed in the troubling world of magical ceremonies.102 As they strolled, he learned that Damas was a student of the Institut d’Ethnologie and an heir to the black colonial administrator turned writer, René Maran. Moré explained their meeting like this in order to paint Damas‘s thinking as apolitical. Damas, Moré argued, wanted only to be a “nègre.” Europe had influenced him solely in the extent to which it had re-introduced him to his own culture through the collections at the Museum of Ethnography and the discovery of nègre writers such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Alain Locke. These discoveries had finally allowed Damas to understand the role and mission of his race.103 What this might be was unclear, at least in Moré’s introduction. Of the five poems that followed, none elaborated a particular racial mission, but by the same token, none were particularly apolitical. To the contrary, Damas’ poetry comprised a fierce critique of the imperial project and emphasized the dire human impact of oppressing people’s culture. Blackness was conjured as the state of being dehumanized by Western civilization; of being subjected to bloody violence that truncated personal capacity and being.104 Four of the poems Damas published in Esprit were republished in his 1937 anthology Pigments. Exemplary of the earlier L’Étudiant noir and Légitime Défense calls for revolutionary poetry, Damas offered a scathing analysis of the production of race. In Pigments, blackness was further elaborated as a category created by the experience of colonialism. Diaspora, in this configuration, was a shared historical consciousness of slavery and oppression. Various dedications within the book confirmed the significance of this transnational experience. Both Césaire and Senghor were referred to but so too were Claude McKay and the black Catholic American scholar Mercer Cook and his wife Vashti. An excerpt from Claude McKay’s work comprised the book’s epigraph: “Be not deceived, for every deed you do I could match. Am I not Africa’s son. Black of that Black land where black deeds are done.”105 Pigments

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Marcel Moré, “Poèmes de Léon Damas,” Esprit, 23–24 (September 1934): 704. Marcel Moré, “Poèmes de Léon Damas,” 705. Marcel Moré, “Poèmes de Léon Damas,” 705. Léon-Gontran Damas, “Solde”; “Realité”; “La Complainte du Nègre”; “Un clochard m’a demandé dix sous”; “Cayenne 1927,” Esprit, 23–24 (September 1934): 705; 706; 707; 708; 709. Claude McKay, cited in Léon-Gontran Damas, Pigments (Paris: Guy Lévis Mano, 1937), n.p.

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obviously resonated: it had an original print run of 500 and was translated quickly into several African languages. The revolutionary potential of the anthology became apparent to the French government in 1939 and the government ordered the seizure of all existing copies of the book on the basis that it comprised an “attack on the domestic security of the State.”106 The nature of this “attack” was not confined to Damas’ articulation of blackness. Part of its significance lay in its explicit positioning as part of broader French anti-fascist intellectual circles. Robert Desnos, an influential surrealist poet and critic, had given the book his stamp of approval by writing its preface. Introduced to Damas by his Institut d’Ethnologie classmate Michel Leiris in the early 1930s, Desnos had also already facilitated the publication of several of Damas‘s poems in the journal Cahiers du Sud in 1936. A Marseilles-based publication with a commitment to a self-styled Mediterranean humanism, Cahiers du Sud published many surrealist and modernist writers living in France, such as Paul Eluard, Walter Benjamin and Simone Weil, as well as British and US modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner and Henry Miller.107 In keeping with the kind of humanism that Senghor had put forward in L’Étudiant noir, the journal’s ethos revolved around the idea of regional autonomy and cultural particularity. In this light, the Mediterranean was propagated as a melting pot of cultures that allowed for métissage rather than emphasizing the universality of Latin or Greekinspired Westernity. Damas was not the only black writer published in Cahiers du Sud: translations of some of James Weldon Johnson’s sermons had appeared in a special issue in 1930; Claude McKay’s Banjo had been excerpted in 1932 and Senghor had several poems published there in 1938.108 Cahiers du Sud’s humanist platform and emphasis upon provincial cultures were shared by many of the journals begun in this period, including the short-lived Charpentes, in which Césaire’s translation of Sterling Brown’s “Les Hommes Fortes” appeared. Charpentes was

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Daniel Racine, “Léon Gontran Damas and Africa” in Keith Q. Warner (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Léon-Gontran Damas (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1988), 6. Michèle Coulet, “Jean Ballard, les Cahiers du Sud et Marselle: une exposition” in Michèle Coulet (ed.), Jean Ballard et les Cahiers du Sud (Marseille: Ville de Marseille, 1993), 70. The October 1930 issue had eight of James Weldon Johnson’s sermons translated by Jean Roux-Delimal; “Claude McKay: Banjo,” Cahiers du Sud, 141 (June 1932): 397; Cahiers du Sud also published “À la mort” and “Nuit dans Sine” in 1938.

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a journal that sought “to recover the true face of man” by collating literature and culture from throughout the regions of France and its colonies.109 The inclusion of black colonial work in these journals offered the hope that the cultural symbiosis first the Nardals and then Césaire had suggested could come into being. From an international perspective, this integration was achieved readily on a political level because of the inclusion in the French political sphere of elected officials from the Antilles and Senegal. By 1939 Gratien Candace, for example, had become the Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies. Alcide Delmost was a member of the Conseil d’Ordre and a delegate to the Conseil Supérieur des Colonies de la population européene de la Côte d’Ivoire. Four more black members of the Chamber of Deputies – Victor Sévère, Maurice Satineau, Ngalandou Diouf and Elié Bloncourt – represented Martinique, Guadeloupe, Senegal, and L’Aisne respectively.110 This is certainly how African Americans read the situation. It is important to note here that the Associated Negro Press, run by Claude Barnett, received much of its copy on race in France from men such as Gratien Candace.111 In his correspondence with Barnett, Candace maintained that “les noirs” of the Antilles and of the Guyane had the same status as “les Citoyens blancs” of France.112 African American scholar and journalist Mercer Cook would affirm the significance of Candace’s achievements in his own writings for the black press. In Paris on a Rosenwald scholarship in 1938, Cook was permitted to sit in on a session of the Chamber of Deputies presided over by Candace. Writing about this experience, Cook made much of the achievement of Candace, supporting Candace’s own contention that his election to this position “was a symbolic gesture whereby France gave 109

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Sterling Brown, “Les Hommes forts,” trans. Aimé Césaire, Charpentes, 1 (June 1939): 52–53; “Colonies,” Charpentes, 2 (July–August 1939): 60. Elié Bloncourt was the brother of Max Clainville-Bloncourt. Others contacted by Barnett include Léo Sajous and Prince Kojo Tovalou Houénou, but I was not able to find evidence of their responses. Houénou, at least, spent much of the mid-1930s in Senegal and was killed in a political riot within a year of Barnett’s letter to him: ANP to Gratien Candace, May 18, 1936; Gratien Candace to Claude A. Barnett, 30 Mars, 1935; ANP to Léo Sajous, March 5, 1935; ANP to Prince Kojo Tovalou Houénou, March 5, 1935, ANP Folder 10, 1934–1963, in Claude A. Barnett Papers: The Associated Negro Press, 1918–1967, Part 1: Associated Negro Press News Releases, 1928–1964, Series A: 1928–1944, University Publications of America, 1984. Gratien Candace to Claude A. Barnett, 30 Mars, 1935, ANP Folder 10, 1934–63, Claude A. Barnett Papers: The Associated Negro Press, 1918–1967, Part 1: Associated Negro Press News Releases, 1928–1964, Series A: 1928–1944, University Publications of America, 1984.

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concrete proof of her belief in the brotherhood of man and races.”113 Underpinning this praise of France was an implicit critique of the fallaciousness of the American democratic promise whereby an African American, even one such as Cook believed Candace to be, could never rise to such heights. The symbolic achievements of an elite cadre, however, did not necessarily mean the elevation of living conditions for the majority of black men and women in the French Empire. Reacting to conversations with Cook, who was his friend, Léon-Gontran Damas pushed back against the assumptions of African Americans in an article he published in Esprit in 1939. As far as he was concerned, individuals such as Candace had achieved their authority on the back of their communities, becoming “bourgeois French of the eleventh hour, composing a colonial freemasonry with sentiments more racist than the white bourgeois themselves.”114 Noting that these achievements had occurred when less than 5 percent of nègres throughout the empire had the right even to elect local representatives, he made it very clear how much further there was to go before political rights such as voting would be granted. This task, he believed came down to the social duty of the élite; a duty that men such as Gratien Candace were failing to perform.115 Candace was the particular focus of Damas’ ire in the article. Not only had he taken the French position against the Ethiopians in the recent Italian conflict, but he had been complicit in initiatives that Damas felt curbed the educational opportunities of the black French.116 He had, in short, become completely assimilated into what Damas conceived as a white French bourgeois modernity that was premised upon exclusion. While Damas believed that black elites should learn all that they could from the French and “absorb the values, the science, the technology of the conquerors,” he refused to accept that doing so meant rejecting their own cultural values and practices. For Damas, the most powerful example of how to do this successfully lay in Harlem. Indubitably, the white race oppressed the black race in America, but it was “impossible not to acknowledge the weighty and powerful colonisation of America by Harlem,” a colonization carried out by force of culture.117 Damas pointed 113

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Mercer Cook, “Gratien Candace, negro” (1938) Box 2 Folder 65, 4, James Weldon Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Léon-Gontran Damas, “Misère noire,” 347. Léon-Gontran Damas, “Misère noire,” 350. Léon-Gontran Damas, “Misère noire,” 342. Léon-Gontran Damas, “Misère noire,” 352.

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to the material wealth of the American nègre relative to the rest of the world as further proof of the difference between American blacks and the rest of the diaspora.118 It seemed to him that the United States was the only place on earth where the white race was systematically held accountable for their conduct toward les nègres by the court of international opinion. It horrified him that the potential lynching of nine men in Scottsboro had triggered such consternation when the “methodical extermination of the population of the AEF” of between 7,000 and 3,500,000 in the course of a railroad construction had not even caused the public to bat an eye.119 In an article in the Crisis written around the same time, George Padmore pointed to similar examples of brutality within the French Empire and drew attention to the subject status of French Africans. Like Damas, he was less than impressed with the token conferral of rights upon a small number of the older colonies in the Antilles.120 By this time working in the United States, Louis T. Achille, cousin of the Nardals and contributor to La Revue du Monde Noir and L’Étudiant noir, took umbrage at Padmore’s article. The hour was far too late now to undo the imperialism that had underpinned the very civilization of which, Achille said, “Mr. Padmore, and I, and the Crisis, are a part.”121 Freedom from the French, in the revolutionary sense that Padmore advocated, only meant to Achille the transformation of Africa into a series of “Ethiopias and Polands.” Achille believed that the principle of colonization and the distinction between subjects and citizens were valuable ones.122 While Padmore read this latter distinction as a policy of “divide and rule,” Achille believed that it represented a judicious decision on the part of French empire. The French people had paid the high price for “the benefits of modern democracy” through “centuries of struggle, suffering and sacrifice.” It was to France’s credit that she bestowed the rights of citizenship only to those “colonials born in territories that have been associated with France long enough to have imbibed the principles and ways of her present form of government.”123 “Latecomers” to the modern world, on the other hand, must gain this right through apprenticeship. “French colonization has done much more than exploit,” the Catholic Achille declared. “[I]t has awakened in their consciences the dignity of the 118 119 120 121 122 123

Léon-Gontran Damas, “Misère noire,” 341. Léon-Gontran Damas, “Misère noire,” 341. George Padmore, “Subjects and Citizens in French Africa,” Crisis, 47 (March 1940): 76 Louis T. Achille, “Upwards to Citizenship in the French Empire,” 173. Louis T. Achille, “Upwards to Citizenship in the French Empire,” 172. Louis T. Achille, “Upwards to Citizenship in the French Empire,” 172.

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human personality. . . . [I]t has invited them, originally by force, to enter into the modern civilized world.”124

4.6 black humanism and the catholic political moment Achille’s reference to the “dignity of the human personality” resonated for the Catholic political moment, of which Achille, a devout Catholic, was a participant. As has already been discussed, certain intellectuals in 1930s France had repurposed the idea of the human personality to suggest an alternative to both capitalism and communism. By 1937, Pope Pius XI had committed the Catholic Church to a personalism that rooted rights in the human person – with regard to that person’s belonging to a community – as an alternative to totalitarianism.125 Men such as Maritain and Mounier had published on the importance of the person in the mid-1930s and many other commentators such as Louis T. Achille followed suit. Although Léopold Sédar Senghor had been critical of the Catholic Church itself since at least 1930, he found in Jacques Maritain and personalism a way of reconciling his belief in the emotional sensibilities of the African with the rationalism of the Western system that had educated him.126 A member of the Parti socialiste from 1930, Senghor’s Catholic faith had prevented him from adopting fully either the materialism of the Marxist cultural front or the atheism of the surrealist movement that had so attracted Etienne Lero, Rene Ménil and Jules Monnerot. Senghor had begun to engage with the work of the Maritain as early as 1932, but it was not until the publication of the essay “What the Black Man Contributes” in 1939 that Maritain’s influence became apparent.127 In an analysis of the conflict between Marxism and Fascism, Senghor built upon Maritain’s insistence upon the “primacy of the spiritual” to advocate an African “spiritualistic materialism” and to declare the centrality of the spiritual in African collective communities.128 He quoted

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Louis T. Achille, “Upwards to Citizenship in the French Empire,” 173. For a more detailed explication of this transition, see Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 65–77. Jacques Louis Hyman, Léopold Sédar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1971), 51. Léopold Sédar Senghor to Jacques Louis Hyman, October 22, 1963, reprinted in Jacques Louis Hyman, Léopold Sédar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography, 263–264. “The Primacy of the Spiritual” is a chapter in Jacques Maritain’s Art et Scolastique (Paris: L.Rouart et fils, 1920).

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from Maritain’s Humanisme Intégrale and his earlier Art et Scolastique, both of which emphasized the importance of the spiritual person in overcoming the political degeneracy of political modernity. Art et Scolastique, in particular, had emphasized the potential of the aesthetic to critique the “spiritual brainlessness” Enlightenment rationalist philosophy that he believed underpinned the French Third Republic.129 Senghor believed that religiosity, of whatever creed, was the cornerstone of being African and that it lent itself to a particular kind of collectivism that allowed for greater equality. Recasting the racial essentialism of Arthur Comte de Gobineau, Senghor wrote, “Emotion is Negro as reason is Hellenic.”130 In so doing, he acknowledged the importance of Enlightenment rationality and the associated industrial innovations while simultaneously rooting the contemporary crisis of capitalist democracies in the failure to embrace more than this rationality. It seemed to Senghor that “a specifically black way of being in the world” that offered a way out of the current crisis.131 He formulated black aesthetic modernism in a redemptive light, offering a humanizing counterpart to the dehumanizing European industrialization. The current crisis was, therefore, implicitly, the result of a failure of Western civilization to receive the gifts of the black race. Underlining the potentiality of this theory was Senghor’s repeated references to and inclusion of extracts from African American poets – Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and Lewis Alexander – men who had combined the best of Western modernity with their racial sensibility. As far as Senghor was concerned, African humanism was the realization of the kind of humanism required to solve the crisis of man. Evidently, this theorizing relied upon an essentialist vision of race that his readers had criticized regularly as racist, conservative or fascist. More recently, Gary Wilder has made the claim that his thinking was less entwined with scientific racism and fascism than with “the primitivism practiced by colonial humanists and ethnologists.”132 Senghor certainly had studied at the Institut d’Ethnologie in 1936 and worked with Paul Rivet and Marcel Mauss while there. It was in 1936 that he had also first encountered Leo Frobenius‘s work on African civilization, and he credited him with giving him the foundations for thinking through the connection

129 130

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Jacques Maritain, Art et Scolastique, 65–66. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Ce que l’homme noir apporte” in Cardinal Verdier (ed.), L’Homme de Couleur (Paris: Plon 1939), 295. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Ce que l’homme noir apporte,” 294. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation State, 246.

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between art, myth and Africa, and for opening the way through to his conception of “Eurafrica.”133 “What the Black Man Contributes” also explicitly referenced Frobenius‘s work, and it was published in the Catholic milieu of an anthology edited by Cardinal Jean Verdier. For Verdier, the anthology was an effort to create a “new humanism” that espoused Christian universalism but that allowed “each nation and each race” had its own contributions to make to this broader universal collective.134 At the intersection of race, ethnography and religion, then, Senghor was articulating a vision of society that could overcome many of the problems of what he saw as “a world split between democratic individualism and totalitarian gregariousness.”135 African Americans had never had the same institutional relationship with Catholicism as black peoples within the French Empire. The black press and non-Catholic communities tended to conflate European imperialism in Africa with Catholic missionaries: the Pope’s refusal to condemn Mussolini’s actions in Ethiopia in 1935 was frequently connected to the imperial mission. Moreover, even by the late 1930s – of a population of thirteen million black people, only five million self-identified as belonging to a church community and only 250,000 of these were Catholic in orientation. Nationwide organizations such as the NAACP held themselves apart from even non-Catholic and historically black churches in the interwar period: Crisis editor and NAACP leader Roy Wilkins would go so far as to admit in 1940 that the organization had long had a (wellfounded) reputation “of being anti-church.”136 From 1937, however, African American attitudes to the Roman Catholic Church began to soften. Historian Samuel Moyn has argued that Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical built upon earlier personalist thinking to locate rights talk in human dignity.137 In the United States, this dictum began to emerge in a firmer – if still shaky – Catholic approach to race. Catholic schools, 133

134 135 136

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Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Les leçons de Leo Frobenius” in Liberté 1: Nègritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 398–399. Cardinal Verdier, L’Homme de Couleur (Paris: Plon, 1939), ii, x. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Ce que l’homme noire apporte,” reprinted in Liberté 1, 217. Roy Wilkins, “Discussions and Questions,” Business Session, Wednesday, June 19, 1940, Part I Roy Wilkins, “Discussions and Questions,” Business Session, Wednesday, June 19, 1940, Part I, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 65–77. On Catholic efforts to intervene in international law and cultural diplomacy in European states in this period, see Giuliana Chamedes, A Twentieth Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

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including the American Catholic University, openly proclaimed that they would accept black and white students, a desegregation goal close to the hearts of NAACP activists. In grounding access to rights in a quality that transcended race, Pius was offering a rights claim-making formulation that was difficult to combat. Black newspapers such as the New York Age and the Pittsburgh Courier noted every instance of Catholic efforts against racism, linking these changes of heart to the Pope’s encyclical.138 While white Catholics such as the New York–based Father LaFarge Jr. were undeniably paternalistic in their dealings with the black community, they paired this with a genuine commitment to interracial organizing on a large scale. Charged with co-preparing a brief on race for Pius XI, LaFarge Jr., in particular, sought to convince his audiences of the correlation between American democratic values and Catholic universalism. For the first time, the Catholic Church was offering the black community a path forward that included participation in the American democratic nation-state. As Howard Professor and journalist Kelly Miller stated succinctly, if cynically, this was a much more plausible opportunity for African Americans than Communism: “The only restraining force between Negroes and Communism is the lack of power, present and potential, among American communists. The Negro knows that the group that helps him must have power, spiritual, political, financial. The Great Catholic Church has this power.”139 By this point in the late 1930s, the trickle-down effects of the New Deal were beginning to be felt by the African American Community. As black sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton remarked in their landmark 1940 study of city living, Black Metropolis, the indirect benefits flowing on from New Deal works eventually meant “even the bare subsistence level permitted by relief allowances and Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) wages constituted a definitely higher material standard of living for the lowest income group than did the

138

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Floyd J. Calvin, “Catholics Again,” New York Age, December 4, 1937, 6; “Catholic Writer Asks Anti-lynching Bill,” New York Age, April 3, 1937, 7; “Kelly Miller Writes about the Catholic Door Ajar to the Negro,” New York Age, July 31, 1937, 6; Floyd J. Calvin, “Catholics Mean Business,” New York Age, September 25, 1937, 6; “Explains Why Catholic Ban Was Lifted at Catholic College,” New York Age, September 3, 1938, 2; “Catholics Condemn Racism,” New York Age, November 11, 1939, 12; “Catholic Press Praised for Helping to Lift Color Bars at Universities,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 8, 1939, 1. “Let’s Smash the Color Line!” Pittsburgh Courier, April 4, 1936, 1, 4.

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wages earned in private industry.”140 One estimate suggests that in 1939 one million black families were being supported by WPA wages.141 Furthermore, the Roosevelt administration was the first to engage explicitly and officially with the opinions of the African American community: from the mid-1930s, Roosevelt had a “Black Cabinet” of advisors. It included Rayford W. Logan, Ralph Bunche and Mary McLeod Bethune and went a long way in inspiring black faith in the potential of federal intervention as a resolution to the problem of racism. In part, this explains why black communities as a whole and intellectuals in particular – in regard to the WPA – were orienting themselves politically toward federal government and federal government intervention.142 By 1936, 71 percent of those African Americans who could vote cast their vote for Roosevelt and the vision of America his administration proffered. This was a radical shift in black electoral trends. Previously, African Americans had voted almost exclusively for the party of Lincoln, the Republicans. Insofar as this impacted thinking on a diasporic level, it encouraged many black thinkers to aim for the realization of American democratic potential rather than to concentrate on collaboration within the diaspora.

4.7 descent into war For black thinkers and activists (and the black community at large), the period from 1932 through 1940 was simultaneously one of great crisis and great hope. The perceived failure of capitalist democracy and the rise of authoritarian regimes opened a space for conversations around social and economic justice. Ultimately neither Roosevelt’s administration nor the Popular Front government in France made significant legislative reforms to improve the conditions of their so-called minority peoples, but they opened the door to imagining what a reconfigured version of capitalist democracy and Republic might look like. For the first time, official platforms for airing concerns were made available to key black intellectuals. In the United States, this occurred in tandem with increased support from the CPUSA for the black intellectual community. In France, the PCF alienated most French colonial subjects through their decision to 140

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St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 386. Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 70. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 261–268.

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subsume their anti-imperial and anti-racist platforms in favor of concentrating on the fight against fascism. Inadvertently, this pushed French colonial subjects toward interracial organization and away from extraempire organizing. Nevertheless, thinkers such as those behind Légitime Défense and L’Étudiant noir drew heavily on the work of African American poets such as Sterling Brown, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes to formulate their own poetic interventions into the contemporary political environment. These interventions transcended an African diasporic sphere to intersect with conversations occurring across the political spectrum about the relationship between culture and politics, capitalism and human personality. Many of these conversations were suspended in 1939 as Hitler’s forces swept through Belgium and into France. Then civilization really went to hell, as France fell to German occupation in June 1940. Europe, as Césaire would point out from the vantage point of Martinique, was about to suffer a form of fascist colonization. The possibilities of Popular Front France seemed a distant memory to the metropole. In contrast, the French colonies became sites for resistance in the struggle to regain a democratic and free French Republic. The United States was drawn into the fray eighteen months after France fell, when Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia may have struck the first blow at the edifices of liberal internationalism in 1936, but by 1941 it was very clear that steps needed to be taken to forge a new international order. Civilization may have descended into chaos, but in the aftermath of World War II, the opportunity to remake it would have transformative ramifications for the French and American Republics. As the following chapters will show, many of the possibilities dreamt up by black thinkers and poets in the period between 1934 and 1940 made their way into the blueprints for this new international order: from the Constitution of the French Fourth Republic through to the foundation of a new international organization, the United Nations.

5 Give Me Liberty! Black Intellectual Struggles against Fascism in the Fight for Democracy

You tell me that Hitler is a mighty bad man. I guess he took lessons from the ku klux klan. Langston Hughes I only know a single France. That of the Revolution. That of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Too bad for the Gothic Cathedral. Aimé Césaire

Hitler may not have taken lessons from the Ku Klux Klan, but he was no stranger to the organization’s racialized worldview. His political manifesto, Mein Kampf, explicitly referred to the United States’ segregationist policies as the reason for “a quality of mankind and a civilization” that dominated the American continent.1 From the other side of the Atlantic, African Americans such as Langston Hughes certainly saw many parallels between the racism of Hitler’s National Socialism and the discrimination they endured every day.2 As one Chicago Defender editorial phrased it in 1938, the “age of hate” had begun “with the slave trade and the intensification of prejudice which followed the liberation of the slaves” many centuries before “the triumphal entry of Herr Fuehrer into Vienna.”3 This narrative held some sway in France too. Writing from there two 1

2 3

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925), trans. James Murphy (Camarillo: Elite Minds Publishing, 2010): 238. For an elaboration of the influence of the United States upon the National Socialist Race law, see James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Langston Hughes, “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943,” Common Ground (Fall 1943): 104. “The Result of Hate,” Chicago Defender, March 26, 1938, 16.

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years before the German invasion, the Guyanese poet Leon-Gontran Damas reacted to reports of tirailleurs senegalais, offering to fight the German menace with the lines “To Veteran Senegalese Combatants/to Future Senegalese Combatants . . . Me I ask them/to begin by invading Senegal/Me I ask them to fucking make peace with the ‘Germans’.”4 It seemed to Damas that Senegalese independence might be worth more than the continued existence of French imperial control. Black intellectuals from the French Empire and the United States saw World War II as a continuation of the crises of the New Deal era, another manifestation of the struggle between supporters of fascism, democracy and communism, respectively. So too did they understand race and the failure of existing republican democratic structures to combat racism as fundamental strands of the contemporary world order that needed to be overcome in order for any of these crises to be resolved. The men and women who form the focus of this chapter sought to reveal the economic, cultural and political mechanisms of oppression underpinning the Republican democracies of France and the United States. In so doing, they wrought a vision of victory that entailed not only the defeat of Hitler’s world view but the corollary manifestations of racism and inequality that had historically undercut promises of equality and access to citizenship rights in their domestic political situations. Both francophone and American-based intellectuals drew from each other’s work and experiences to assert nonwhite cultures and experiences as not only valuable but integral to these Western civilizational frameworks. This chapter charts out their thinking during the war and its immediate aftermath, paying particular attention to the way these intellectuals understand the achievement of liberty in terms of the intersection of poetic, political and economic mechanisms. Historians of black America have tended to characterize the activist experience at this time in terms of human rights, arguing that the period is one of unprecedented African American engagement with issues of inequality on the international stage.5 Narratives of black French intellectuals are subsumed in the broader paradigm of the French wartime 4

5

Damas’s original poem uses the term “Boches,” which can mean enemy but which was used in a derogatory fashion to refer to the Germans during the Second World War. Insofar as an English equivalent is concerned, the most direct equivalent seems to be Germans. Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955

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experience or treated in terms of specific intellectual movements such as surrealism. Insofar as collaborations between these two parts of the African diaspora are concerned, it is accepted wisdom that the constraints of the war ruptured the relationships that had been formed during the interwar period.6 From a geographical perspective, this was certainly the case: Paris ceased to be such an international locus for intellectual, musical and artistic exchange for the duration of the war. Instead, these relationships relocated to the peripheries of French Empire – such as in the Antilles – and to sites in America – such as New York. Francophone activists including Aimé Césaire, René Ménil and Suzanne Roussy Césaire still drew upon the work of black Americans such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes as both poetic inspiration and mode of political action. In turn, thinkers like Mercer Cook, Richard Wright and Alain Locke engaged with French intellectual movements and the examples of key intellectuals like Léopold Sédar Senghor as the inspiration for understanding the postwar moment. In so doing, they inflected European intellectual and artistic movements such as Marxism, Surrealism and Existentialism with new vigor.7 The tendency of scholars

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). On the dynamics of the francophone and African American relationship specifically, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Intellectual movements such as surrealism and existentialism have been considered primarily in terms of their European origins. I will explore their entanglement with African American and black francophone criticisms of Western civilization and their struggle for freedom. Literary scholars such as Michel Fabre, for example, have sought to locate Richard Wright’s work within a genealogy of existentialism, coming primarily to the conclusion that his thinking was more influenced by German and Russian strands of the movement than French. Here, I am concerned instead with charting how such relationships formed part of a larger black engagement with the relationship between blackness and humanity, a relationship necessary to assert in order to claim access to rights. Michel Fabre, “Richard Wright and the French Existentialists,” MELUS, 5:2 Interfaces (Summer 1978): 39–51. Much of the literature on surrealism has focused on André Breton’s influence upon Aimé Césaire. More recently, Brent Hayes Edwards has suggested we conceptualize his work as a departure from surrealism. In contrast, Robin Kelley prefers to think of it “as a transformation” of surrealism. I seek to build upon both these scholars by positioning Tropiques at the interstices of multiple intellectual constellations. In so doing, I contribute to the growing literature that refuses to see movements such as surrealism as distinct from non-European thought: Brent Hayes Edwards, “Ethnics of Surrealism,” Transition, 78 (1999): 132–134; Robin D. G. Kelley, “A Poetics of Anti-Colonialism” in Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Robin D. G. Kelley, “Freedom Now: Sweet Surrealism and the Black World” in Ron Sakolsky (ed.), Surrealist Subversions: Rants. Writings and Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2001), 134–150;

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to think in terms of interwar and postwar periods obscures this significance of the war itself as part of the ongoing struggle for freedom. In this story, often neglected figures in the historiography – such as the African American scholar and diplomat Mercer Cook, the journalist Elmer Carter and the Martinican intellectual Suzanne Roussy Césaire – move to the forefront.8 Here, I recover their stories and perspectives to argue that doing so not only reveals how black intellectuals in this moment were engaged in complex and contested conversation with Western thought but were also equal, if asymmetrically positioned, contributors to it.

5.1 the stakes of world war ii From at least November 1939 key black American newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, the Crisis and Opportunity echoed the sentiments of Hughes by carrying articles arguing against US entry into the war.9 Lawrence Reddick, director of the Schomburg Library in New York City, made it clear in a Crisis article that he felt the so-called democracies of Britain, Holland and Belgium had brought the war upon themselves with their imperialist greed and their horrendous treatment of the other races. For France, he “shed one tear”

8

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Franklin Rosement and Robin D. G. Kelley, Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Michel Hausser, “Tropiques: Une tardive centrale surréaliste? in Occulte occultation,” Cahier du Centre de Recherches sur le Surréalisme, Mélusine Lausanne, 2 (1981): 248–249; esp. 238–259. Mercer Cook’s work in this period remains mostly unacknowledged. Félix Germain’s article on Cook’s role in the Black French Studies is the notable exception. I intend here to flesh out our understanding of Cook’s role beyond the academic sphere by placing his work in the broader context of black discussions about race, rights and nation: Félix Germain, “Mercer Cook and the Origins of Black French Studies,” French Politics, Culture & Society, 34:1 (Spring 2016): 66–85. The work of Suzanne Roussy Césaire has been, to a certain extent, “recovered” by literary scholars seeking to place her within genealogies of surrealism, créolité and négritude. Maryse Condé gestures toward the potential of seeing Césaire outside of this frame when she refers to her as the theoretician of the Tropiques group. My reading of her work takes this as a starting point, from which I seek to place her in the broader context of discussions around civilization, nation and race: Maryse Condé, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: Analyse critique (Paris: Hatier, 1978), 20. Marie-Agnès Sourieau places her in the context of créolité: “Suzanne Césaire et Tropiques: De la poésie cannibale à une poétique créole,”The French Review, 68:1 (1994): 69–78; Georgiana Collvile sees Roussy as a surrealist thinker: Georgiana Collvile, Scandaleusement d’elles: 34 Femmes surréalistes (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1999). George S. Schuyler, “Views and Reviews,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 7, 1939, 10; Roy Wilkins, “Watchtower,” New York Amsterdam News, September 16, 1939, 7; “Defending Democracy,” Crisis, 46:11 (October 1939): 305; “For the Right to Exploit Dark Peoples,” Crisis, 46:11 (November 1939): 337.

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for despite its exploitation of labor, “she . . . never did preach that men be brutes or insist upon it.”10 In an interview for the CPUSA’s Sunday Worker, Richard Wright declared, “That the Negro has no stake in this war is borne out by the fact that England and France oppress more Negroes and colonial peoples than all the Empires of the world combined.”11 The two countries were protecting their imperial possessions, not upholding democratic values. Wright traveled the country on behalf of the CPUSA, broadcasting his views and encouraging black audiences to reject intervention in the war. In Harlem, black CPUSA leader James Ford decried any intervention in the “imperialist war.”12 This stance adhered to CPUSA policy at the time. In the aftermath of the French defeat in 1940, attitudes began to change. A September edition of the Pittsburgh Courier carried a front-page article from George Padmore with the news that Germans were shooting captured black soldiers. Padmore declared that Hitler himself had ordered the expulsion of people of color from Paris.13 The contrast between this new Paris and the France that had so captured the imagination of African Americans since World War I was stark. As the political scientist Ralph Bunche observed, “French Negroes, who formerly were able to walk as men in France, who knew nothing of Jim Crow in Paris,” were now in a situation where Nazi-dictated signs were “barring them from cafes, hotels, and even prohibiting them from buying railroad tickets.”14 The editor of Opportunity, Elmer Carter, began to portray Britain and France favorably in contrast to Germany, arguing that while the evils of British and French imperialism have been “inexcusable,” at least these governments “made some pretence of recognition of the dignity of the Negro as a man.”15 The pretense may have been minimal at best but the legal status afforded some blacks the occasional representation and the access, however limited, to education and provided the black diaspora with some hope for the future of democracy. Any such hope would be extinguished completely if the Nazis, and thus their philosophies of race, were allowed to win.16 10

11

12

13 14

15 16

L. D. Reddick, “Meditations Upon the War and Democracy in America,” Crisis, 47:8 (August 1940): 263. Richard Wright in Angelo Herndon, “Negroes Have No Stake in This War, Wright Says,” Sunday Worker (February 11, 1940): 7. “Ford Urges Negroes to Keep Out of War,” New York Amsterdam News, October 21, 1939, 1. George Padmore, “Get Out of Paris, Hitler Edict,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 14, 1940, 1. Ralph Bunche, “Africa and the Current World Conflict,” Negro History Bulletin, 4.1:11 (1940): 11. ElmerAnderson Carter, “The Editor Says,” Opportunity, 18:7 (July 1940): 194. Elmer Anderson Carter, “The Editor Says,” 195.

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Black men and women living in German-occupied France would certainly have agreed with these sentiments. When France had signed an armistice with Germany on June 22, 1940, the agreement had divided mainland France into three zones. The first, in the North, remained in German hands while a small southern zone was given to Italy. The third zone, also in the South, was to be controlled by the Vichy government under Marshal Philippe Pétain. Antillean colonial administrators, led by Admiral Georges Robert, chose to stand by the Vichy government. General Charles De Gaulle refused to accept Vichy acquiescence to the German occupation and established an exiled French government in London. He pinned a great deal of hope on the colonies, as is clear in the oft-quoted speech he delivered on June 18, 1940: “France is not alone! She has a great empire behind her . . . and continues the struggle!”17 Felix Eboué, the Guadeloupean Governor General of French Central Africa, confirmed the viability of this vision by refusing famously to swear fealty to the Vichy regime and instead aligning with De Gaulle’s Resistance.18 Eboué was able to rally all of French Equatorial Africa to De Gaulle’s cause. Léopold Sédar Senghor underscored the extent to which Éboué’s actions were part of a larger African faith and participation the possibilities of French Republicanism in a poem written in 1940 but not published until 1948: “A thousand peoples and a thousand languages have claimed their voices through your red faith/ . . . /Look, Africa rises up . . . /So that human hope can live.”19 Senghor’s poem also speaks to the significance of the idea of Republican France in the black intellectual landscape. After the fall of France in June 1940, the French Third Republic may have ceased to exist as a political entity but the idea of Republican France that had so enlivened anti-colonial and anti-racist activists throughout the French Empire and in the United States lived on, an imagined political and cultural entity that was only temporarily displaced by the Nazi occupation. For writers such as Aimé Césaire, this was a France that had never existed but which could become a reality in the future: “I only know a single France. That of the Revolution. That of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Too bad for the Gothic Cathedral.”20 This vision of French republicanism was the France that those like Senghor were fighting to protect.

17 18

19 20

Charles De Gaulle, Discours et messages, vol. 1 (Paris: Plon, 1970), 3. Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Au gouverneur Éboué,” Hosties noires (Paris: Seuil, 1948), 74. Aimé Césaire, “Panama,” Tropiques, 10 (February 1944): 10.

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Nevertheless, by March 1941, occupying German forces held some 126,635 POWs in camps across France. A staggering 86, 000 of these were colonial subjects from across the French Empire, including Senghor.21 Colonial soldiers suffered badly in the camps. There is evidence of German use of black POWs as guinea pigs for medical experiments developing drugs to combat tropical diseases and for anthropological studies of racial physiology.22 Outside of the camps, and after the German occupation of the Southern part of France on November 8, 1942, the German Armistice Commission routinely used black troops from West Africa and Madagascar for forced labor. The work assigned was often dangerous: it included long hours in chemical factories and mines and rebuilding bombed structures.23 In the Antilles, the Vichy regime meant a debilitating return to authoritarian and racist colonial administration without a great deal of economic support.24 Thus, while Jim Crow segregation and the racism of European imperialism had appeared directly analogous to the Nazi race policies, it quickly became clear that Nazism and totalitarian regimes were much worse because they snuffed out even the hope of improvement. As reports such as Padmore’s article filtered back to US shores, the black press there increasingly defended democratic republicanism as the best way to guarantee individual freedoms and rights.25 Often, as in the case of William Pickens’s article for Opportunity, this was inextricable from the right to

21

22

23

24

25

For a detailed discussion of how this number was calculated, see Raffael Scheck, French Colonial Soldiers in German Captivity During World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 28–29. R. W. Kesting, “Blacks under the Swastika: A Research Note,” Journal of Negro History 83 (1998): 93. R. W. Kesting, “Blacks under the Swastika,” 93; R. W. Kesting, “Forgotten Victims: Blacks in the Holocaust,” Journal of Negro History, 77 (1992): 31. Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina, 1940–1944 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Martin Thomas, “The Vichy Government and French Colonial Prisoners of War, 1940–1944,” French Historical Studies, 25:4 (2002); Martin Thomas, “Le Gouvernement de Vichy et les prisonniers de guerre coloniaux français (1940–1944)” in Jacques Cantier and Eric Jennings (eds.), L’empire colonial sous Vichy (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 2004), 305–330; Armelle Mabon, “La singulière captivité des prisonniers de guerre coloniaux durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” French Colonial History, 7 (2006): 181–197; Armelle Mabon, Prisonniers de guerre “indigènes”: Visages oubliés de la France occupée (Paris: La Découverte, 2010); Raffael Scheck, French Colonial Soldiers, 31. ElmerAnderson Carter, “The Editor Says: Where Democracy Fails,” Opportunity, 19:1 (January 1941): 3; Ralph Ingersoll, “A Guest Editorial,” Opportunity, 20:3 (March 1942): 67.

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vote: “a Republic and its laws are constructed for the protection of minorities, and there is no way to take utter economic advantage of any minority as long as it can vote, and so play the role, once in a while, of the ‘balance of power’ in elections.”26 Ralph Bunche made a similar argument. The exercise of “freedom of speech, press, assembly and religion” were “the foundation upon which . . . hopes for the future are erected,” he argued, because they gave the black community the ability to “let the American public and world public know the abuses which we suffer.”27 In another article, he ridiculed those who thought it made no difference whether “this country maintains its pseudo-democratic institutions or becomes nationalistic and totalitarian.”28Actor and activist Paul Robeson agreed. He called the fight against fascism “the most sacred human task” because its destruction would usher in “a new epoch in our civilized life.”29 This did not mean, however, that he considered World War II an excuse to halt black struggles for rights within America. To the contrary, he believed that the war was one part of a multipronged battle for democratic freedoms for all peoples. Fascism as well as imperialism were among “the forces of oppression, intolerance, insecurity and injustice which have impeded the forward march of civilization.”30 Robeson’s thinking reflected a broader sentiment in the African American community. Much as Senghor and Césaire framed their war efforts in terms of the fight for an imagined, future French Republic, black Americans fought for the realization of a truly democratic America. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Pittsburgh Courier’s “Double V for Victory” campaign of 1942. The campaign was premised upon the idea that African Americans needed to fight for democracy at home and abroad. In the letter to the paper that kick started the campaign, James G. Campbell wrote, “I love America and I am willing to die for the America I know will someday become a reality.”31 Victory for these activists involved not just the defeat of German forces but also the achievement of democratic, 26 27

28

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30 31

William Pickens, “Economics and Race Problems,” Opportunity, 19:5 (May 1941): 147. Ralph Bunche, “Africa and the Current World Conflict,” Negro History Bulletin, 4.4:11 (1940): 13. Ralph Bunche, “The Negro in the Political Life of the United States,” Journal of Negro Education, 10:3 (1941): 584. Paul Robeson, “American Negroes in the War,” November 16, 1943, Sc Micro R5956, Reel 7: Box 10, Folder 3, Paul Robeson Papers. Paul Robeson, “American Negroes in the War.” James G. Thompson, letter to the editor, Pittsburgh Courier, originally printed January 31, 1942; reprinted April 11, 1942, 5.

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Republican forms that uncoupled race from understandings of culture and civilization. Fighting the war on two fronts was not a position open to black members of the CPUSA. When the Hitler-Stalin pact crumbled in June 1941 with Germany’s invasion of the USSR, the CPUSA urged all of its members to focus their efforts on the war against fascism. Arguing that national unity was important to win the war, the organization refused to participate in protests against army segregation or to criticize Red Cross decisions to segregate blood donations. Black writer and journalist Chester Himes was highly critical of those institutions such as the CPUSA who had “long been in the front ranks of the Negro Americans’ slow march towards equality” for neglecting the question of black freedom in favor of the war effort.32 For Himes, an ardent advocate of the Double V campaign, the litmus test of an organization’s commitment to “the ideals of Americanism” was their participation in the fight for black American freedom: “Democracy is the Negroes.”33 Black Americans were fighting for “true Americanism,” the Americanism of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the foundations of American Democracy.34 Richard Wright, who unlike Himes had been a member of the CPUSA rather than a “fellow traveler,” was similarly critical and, in 1942, quit the party. By then, the CPUSA was glad to see him leave. Wright had come to national attention with the publication of Native Son in 1940. Through the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, Wright questioned the degree to which individuals existing within a collective retain their own agency or whether their context – here racism – structurally determined their decisions. The book was an excoriating portrait of the effects of American racism upon the black psyche – Bigger Thomas commits two horrible crimes as a result of situations created by white supremacy – and it reached a far larger audience than any other book by a black author due to Wright’s unprecedented contract with the Book-of-the-Month Club. Within three weeks of its publication, he had sold a quarter of a million hardcover copies. White CPUSA members felt that the novel threatened the unity of the US in the war effort. Responding to one such criticism, Wright said, “Are we not confronted here with the attitude of ‘moral dodgers’ . . . who, wanting to

32

33 34

Chester Himes, “Now Is The Time! Here Is The Place!,” Opportunity, 20:9 (September 1942): 272. Chester Himes, “Now Is The Time! Here Is The Place!,” 272. Chester Himes, “Now Is The Time! Here Is the Place!,” 273. Similar criticisms had been levied at the PCF by anti-imperial activists such as Léon-Gontran Damas in the 1930s.

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conquer the fascist enemy do not want to rid their lives of the fascist-like practices of which they have grown so profitably fond?”35

5.2 integrating human experience and the political fight against racism While most of the black community lauded Wright’s achievement, black communists were often more critical than their white counterparts. According to Wright’s friend Ralph Ellison, Native Son “shook the Harlem section to its foundation” and spurred a series of discussions that showed a violently divided reaction.36 In portraying the psychological impact of racism upon the black psyche, Wright had suggested, Ellison felt, that Marxism as it was currently elaborated paid little attention to the personal, human experience.37 Many of those Marxist readers who rejected Native Son did so on the basis of its humanist implications and Ellison queried whether the ideology could hold up to the fact of personal experience in an economic world.38 Referring to the Soviet socialist-realist writer Maxim Gorki and the French novelist André Malraux as examples of those who had attempted this and then been ostracized by their respective Communist parties, Ellison asked Wright, “When will the Marxist-psychologists explain the material-dialectical meaning of the mystical experience?”39 For Ellison, Wright had taken a further step down this path in the creation of a new terminology that could “state in terms of human values certain ideas, concepts, implicit in Marxist philosophy but that, since Marx, and later Lenin, were so occupied with economics and politics, have not been stated in humanist terms of Marxist coloring.”40 Wright agreed. In short, the failure of MarxistLeninism to treat “human personality” was the current crux of its problem. He had long seen the need to supplement Marxist thinking and Communist politics with the creative work of the writer: “For the Negro writer, Marxism is but the starting point. No theory can take the place of

35

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37 38 39 40

Richard Wright, “Richard Wright to Antonio Frasconi – An Exchange of Letters,” Twice a Year, 12:13 (Fall–Winter, 1945): 258. Ralph Ellison to Richard Wright, April 14, 1940, Part I: 76, Ralph Ellison Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter Ralph Ellison Papers). Ralph Ellison to Richard Wright, April 14, 1940, Part I: 76, Ralph Ellison Papers. Ralph Ellison to Richard Wright, April 14, 1940, Part I: 76, Ralph Ellison Papers. Ralph Ellison to Richard Wright, December 5, 1940, Part I: 76, Ralph Ellison Papers. Ralph Ellison to Richard Wright, April 14, 1940, Part I: 76, Ralph Ellison Papers.

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life. After Marxism has laid bare the skeleton of society, there remains the task of the writer to plant flesh upon those bones.”41 Wright’s interpretation of Marxism was reminiscent of the thinking of Claude McKay and the work that had been done on the impact of racism and colonialism upon the black psyche by the groups behind the Parisian based Légitime Défense and L’Étudiant noir in the mid-1930s. Many of the intellectuals associated with those two journals – including Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Roussy Césaire, René Ménil and Gilbert Gratiant – spent the war years expanding upon their interwar work and grappling with these questions about the relationship between lived experience and the fight for liberty from the vantage point of Vichy-governed Martinique. Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Roussy had married and returned there to teach in 1937 after Césaire completed his thesis on African American writers living in the southern United States. Their intellectual community in Fort-de-France included Léopold Bissol, one of the co-founders of the PCF in 1920, and Thélus Léro, a PCF member who had also contributed to the radical paper Légitime Défense. Together, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Roussy Césaire, René Ménil and Gilbert Gratiant launched Tropiques, the first black radical intellectual and cultural journal in Fort-De-France.42 The rationale for the journal was very similar to Ellison and Wright’s belief in the importance of combining economic and political solutions to the contemporary crises with the elaboration of the “human personality.” Racism and, in the case of Martinique, colonialism had meant the suppression of the latter so writers and artists had a responsibility to resurrect this aspect of the lived experience. The launch of Tropiques was a significant sally in this struggle. During the interwar years, metropolitan France, and Paris in particular, had controlled the publication of French language books. Few of the print journals examined in the earlier chapters had been widely circulated in the colonies: most were confiscated by the colonial administration for their revolutionary potential. Independent publishing in the colonies and territories themselves was particularly unusual.43 In Martinique, access to books of any kind, never mind by local authors, had been very limited. The War changed this dynamic. Through Tropiques, Martinican audiences were introduced,

41

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Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” The Richard Wright Reader (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 44. One of the Césaire’s students in Martinique would go on to form one of the most influential critiques of colonialism: Frantz Fanon. Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, “Poetic Productions of Cultural Combat in Tropiques,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 115:3 (July 2016): 497.

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often for the first time, to European and American political and cultural works. The first issue of Tropiques announced the decline of Western civilization, so aptly demonstrated by World War II, and offered instead a new path: cultural autonomy for the Caribbean and black culture. The intention behind Tropiques was the revalorization and re-creation of non-(white) European cultures. Aimé Césaire argued that Martinique had become a “Dumb and fallow land. . . . No city. No art. No poetry. No civilization, the true one, I mean that projection of Man onto the world; the modelling of the world by Man; the stamp of Man’s figure on the universe.”44 In an essay on Frobenius, Suzanne Roussy Césaire grounded this need for regeneration in a specific understanding of the nature of civilization that rejected Eurocentric norms: “Man does not create civilization . . . man is to the contrary an instrument of civilization.”45 It was the responsibility of every person to know themselves and express themselves as part of this greater civilization.46 As part of this regeneration, Aimé Césaire introduced Martinican audiences to black poets writing in America for the first time. In the second issue of Tropiques, he prefaced translations of poems by James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer and Claude McKay with an overview of the Harlem Renaissance.47 Césaire’s introduction cast their work in terms of an essentialist vision of race, calling it the outpouring of an “unconsciously artistic people” whose skill lay in “breaking down our resistance on the lowest level of humanity that is the nervous system.”48 The Christian motifs he found in their work were evidence of “the ancestral, fundamental paganism of the negro that embraces him . . . [and] indirectly . . . reveals the Divine.”49 By writing like this Césaire simultaneously praised the racial sensibilities of African Americans and distanced himself, as a French intellectual, from them. Aristide Maugée, Césaire’s brother-in-law and colleague, also emphasized this difference in a later issue. Contrasting the poetry of Césaire with that of Harlem Renaissance poets, Maugée argued that while Césaire shared the racial sensibilities of Toomer, Hughes and Johnson, his poetry spoke to “a greater formal richness” which offered 44 45

46 47 48

Aimé Césaire, “Présentation,” Tropiques, 1 (April 1941): 5. Suzanne Roussy Césaire, “Lèo Frobenius et le problème des civilisations,” Tropiques, 1 (April 1941): 27–36. Suzanne Roussy Césaire, “Lèo Frobenius,” 36. Aimé Césaire, “Introduction à la poésie nègre américaine,” Tropiques, 2 (1941): 37–42. 49 Aimé Césaire, “Introduction,” 38, 41. Aimé Césaire, “Introduction,” 39.

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“more variety in his rhythm.”50 Other contributors to Tropiques read the black American poetry somewhat differently. René Hibran, a sculptor, was more inclined to think of the African Americans in aspirational terms. Their work and culture had “evolved within an ethnic framework . . . assimilated a civilization . . . not been assimilated by that civilization.”51 In contrast, Hibran believed that Martinican identity was so sterile because they had yet to incorporate their blackness into their artistic expression: “Most of the time, the aesthetic of the Martinican man of colour is not ethnic, it is European.”52

5.3 weapons of liberation Despite these differences, the contributors to Tropiques agreed upon the importance of culture and poetry as foundations of political activism and the necessary mechanisms of successful state forms.53 In his articles, Ménil continued the surrealist critique of the Antillean bourgeois culture that he had begun in Légitime Défense. By this stage, he had begun to subscribe to the humanist thinking of Senghor and Césaire – in the sense of understanding particular cultures as comprising a universal humanity – and he advocated the expression of an authentic Antillean identity.54 Doing so, he argued, would reflect the extent that the Martinican people shared “the fortune of its imperial culture with France.” More than that, it would allow them to take control of their futures in a “time when Western civilization is revolutionising itself” because it had been allowed to become too sterile. He wrote, “If we strive to be more than mere spectators of the human adventure . . . we must make a personal offering simply to participate in a true humanity.”55 Aimé Césaire agreed. The great crisis the world currently faced had come about because scientific rationalism had been

50 51

52 53

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Aristide Maugée, “Aimé Césaire, poéte,” Tropiques, 5 (April 1942): 17; 18. René Hibran, “Le problème de l’art à la Martinique: une opinion,” Tropiques, 6–7 (February 1943): 40. René Hibran, “Le problème,” 40. Recent scholarship on Aimé Césaire has sought to recover the connection between his political and artistic work. This chapter will follow in the footsteps of this trajectory: Thomas A. Hale and Kora Véron, “Is there Unity in the Writings of Aimé Césaire?” Research in African Literatures, 41:1 (Spring 2010): 46–70; Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Négritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 8–11. René Ménil, “Naissance de notre art,” Tropiques, 1 (April 1941): 60. René Ménil, “Naissance de notre art,” Tropiques, 1 (April 1941): 60.

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uncoupled from emotional sensibility: “Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.”56 Ménil believed that poetry was a significant weapon in the struggle for freedom because it released the mind from “the dictatorship of things,” making it free to “conceive of an ideal of life and truth” that can transcend the trappings of imperialism and racism. Poetry was a site to imagine alternatives, which was the first step toward achieving freedom.57 For Martinique specifically, he believed that colonization had made Martinicans consumers rather than producers of culture and he wanted to overcome this problem: “We have read the culture of others . . . Culture is elsewhere.”58 The significance of culture and, specifically, of surrealist thinking was also a recurrent theme in Suzanne Roussy Césaire’s work. Surrealist poetry was synonymous with the idea of liberty, each being both a tool and a medium of the other. The particular historical moment in which Tropiques was operating meant that these cultural tools were particularly important.59 She wrote: “But in 1943, when liberty itself is threatened throughout the world, surrealism (which has not ceased for a moment to remain resolutely in the service of the greatest emancipation of mankind) can be summed up with a single magical word: liberty.”60 Just as ideologies of division and exclusion used notions and artefacts of culture to construct hierarchies of race and to differentiate between the socalled “civilized world” and the “savage,” the means to undoing these divisions lay in culture. When Césaire, Roussy Césaire, Ménil and Gratiant launched Tropiques, the Vichy government controlled Martinique and the challenge of keeping such a project afloat was large. At a quotidian level, the sudden influx of thousands of white French sailors to the island ruptured any pretense that Martinique was anything other than a colony. The racism of these sailors was overt and direct, unlike the façade more common in the interwar period.61 Under Vichy, colonial policies reverted 56 57 58

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Aimé Césaire, “Poésie et Connaissance,” Tropiques, 12 (January 1945): 157. René Ménil, “Orientation de la poésie,” Tropiques, 2 (July 1941): 13–21. René Ménil, “Naissance de notre art,” Tropiques, 1 (April 1941): 53–64; René Ménil, “Situation de la poésie aux Antilles,” Tropiques, 11 (May 1944): 124–125. Seligmann argues that, taken as a whole, the contributions to Tropiques “build a theory . . . of the medium of poetry as freedom.” She neglects, however, to acknowledge the extent to which this was informed by a sense of racial belonging: Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, “Poetic Productions of Cultural Combat in Tropiques,” 501. Suzanne Césaire, “1943: Le surréalisme et nous,” Tropiques, 8–9 (October 1943): 15. A. James Arnold, Modernism and Négritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 12–13.

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from “assimilationist” to “associationist,” a shift that entailed the rigid separation of “indigenous” or non-French traditions from those of the metropolitan and French forms. Republican institutions lapsed in favor of an authoritarian administration that was particularly harsh in its treatment of black and communist residents.62 Circulation of Marxist thought let alone the explicit criticism of the regime was forbidden. However, following the ideology of Vichy’s Marshal Phillippe Pétain, colonial officers encouraged the development of regional cultural identities (in contrast to the centralized Third Republic, which Pétain believed had drained the vitality of French local cultures).63 It was as a journal of Antillean folklore that Tropiques could circulate in Vichy-administrated Martinique. By juxtaposing articles celebrating black intellectual work and the Antillean cultural and natural environments with extracts from European poets and philosophers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, André Breton and Charles Péguy, Tropiques editors were suggesting implicitly a cultural equivalence. It took almost two years for the administration to realize that Tropiques had far more radical implications than it seemed. Martinique’s Chief of Information Services, Captain Bayle, banned it, rationalizing his action on the basis that the journal was not, as he had originally assumed, promoting a “vigorous desirable regionalism” but was “revolutionary” and “both racial and sectarian.”64 In response, both Césaires, Ménil, Maugée, Gratiant, and the Guadeloupean writer Lucie Thésée published Bayle’s letter alongside their retort.65 These writers considered themselves champions of a revolutionary republican France that was yet to exist. They positioned themselves within the particularly French literary and intellectual tradition of 62

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See F. A. Baptiste, “Le régime de Vichy à la Martinique (juin 1940 à juin 1943),” Revue d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale, 111 (July 1978): 1–24. Eric T. Jennings makes this point in Vichy in the Tropiques. Although his study does not include Martinique, I argue here that these factors hold true to there as well, in part because of later observations about the context of Tropiques made by René Ménil and in part because Martinique and Guadeloupe can be considered somewhat analogous in regard to the success of prior republican and assimilationist policies: Vichy in the Tropiques: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001): esp. 3–30; René Ménil, “Pour une lecture critique de Tropiques” in Aimé Césaire (ed.), Tropiques, 1941–1945: Collection complète, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1978), xxv–xxxv. “Lettre du Lieutenant de vaisseau Bayle, chef du service d’information, au directeur de la revue Tropiques, Fort-de-France, May 10, 1943” in Aimé Césaire (ed.), Tropiques, 1941– 1945, Documents Annexes, xxxvi–xxxvi. Despite her involvement in Tropiques, Thésée is almost entirely neglected in the scholarship and very little is known about her.

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the dramatist Jean Racine, the radical novelist Émile Zola, the poets Comte de Lautréamont and Arthur Rimbaud.66 This intellectual inheritance, they believed, was twinned with the black revolutionary legacy of Toussaint L’Ouverture, of Claude McKay and Langston Hughes’s resistance to the racism of the anti-Semitic Édouard Drumont and Adolf Hitler. The claim to this dual legacy also sprang from a belief in the revolutionary and political possibilities of poetry. Significantly, Césaire situated this recourse to poetry both in its nature and in the specific moment of Vichy repression: “Here poetry equals insurrection.”67 Many of Césaire’s articles reinforced this framing by continually referring back to thinkers such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and André Breton as well as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes as examples of poets manifesting revolutionary intent in their work.68 Surrealist writer André Breton certainly agreed with this framing. Breton discovered copies of Tropiques in 1941 when he disembarked in Fort-de-France en route to New York.69 For those fleeing France for the United States, the ship route was a common one.70 While in Martinique, Breton had visited a haberdashery shop to buy a ribbon for his daughter. The shop happened to be owned by René Ménil’s sister and she had several copies of Tropiques on display. Browsing through them, Breton was immediately impressed by the content and felt that “what was being said was exactly what needed to be said, not just in the best way but with the greatest force!”71 Learning of his interest, the haberdasher arranged for Breton to meet with Ménil and the Césaires. This was the beginning of a much longer friendship between the Césaires and Breton. Breton took copies of the journal with him to New York, where he did his best to distribute Aimé Césaire’s work through his network of surrealist 66

67 68

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“Réponse de Tropiques à M. le Lieutenant de vaisseau Bayle, Fort-de-France, May 12, 1943” in Tropiques, vol. 1, ed. by Aimé Césaire, Documents Annexes, xxxvii–xxviii. Aimé Césaire, “Maintenir la poésie,” Tropiques, 8–9 (October 1943): 7. Aimé Césaire, “Maintenir la poésie,” 7–8; Aimé Césaire, “Introduction à la poésie nègre américaine,” 37–42. Surrealism was a cultural and political movement that had emerged in reaction to the horrors of World War I. André Breton had been the movement’s de facto leader since the publication of his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto. This leadership was not unchallenged. For further information, see Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986). For more on the escape route, see Eric T. Jennings, “‘The Best Avenue of Escape’: The French Caribbean Route as Expulsion, Rescue, Trial, and Encounter,” French Politics, Culture & Society, 30:2 (Summer 2012): 33–52. André Breton, “A Great Black Poet,” reprinted in Michael Richardson (ed.), Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Carribbean (New York: Verso, 1996): 191–192.

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friends.72 VVV, a New York–based surrealist publication run by European refugees, included an advertisement for Tropiques as well as poems of Césaire’s which Breton had procured.73 The Greek intellectual and friend of Breton, Nicolas Calas, praised Tropiques highly in the American literary surrealist magazine View: “It is difficult to imagine that conditions anywhere outside Nazi dominated Europe could be worse than they are in the Vichy colony of Martinique; as to the cultural conditions of a colony France has always neglected, from all one hears, they are abominable” and yet, out of this tyranny, had emerged Tropiques: “I know of no review which can boast of the high quality of this small quarterly French review of Martinique.”74 In Yvan Goll’s New York–based Hemisphéres, Breton published “A Great Black Poet,” a tribute to Césaire, followed by four of Césaire’s poems.75 “A Great Black Poet” would become the introduction for the first book edition of the long-form poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, which Césaire had given Breton during his time in Martinique. Cahier had first appeared in 1939 in the French high modernist journal Volontés, and scholars have since considered it one of the négritude movement’s seminal texts because it expressed a black humanist philosophy rooted in PanAfricanism. Breton saw the realization of surrealism’s aims in the poem. Brentano published an English translation at his behest in 1947.76 A few months later, also as a result of Breton’s advocacy, a French language copy of the poem appeared in Paris.77 Although slightly different, both 1947 versions explored the black experience in terms of colonization and prophesied the regeneration of blackness.78 In his introduction, Breton wrote that it was “a sign of the times that the greatest impulses toward 72

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It seems that both Aimé and Suzanne Césaire also made a trip to New York in 1945. They appear in a group photograph with Breton, Yves Tanguy and Marcel Duchamp, among others: Annie Cohen-Solal, “Une jour, ils auront des peintres,” L’avènement des peintres amèricains (Paris 1867–New York 1948) (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 175. Maryse Condé uses this as the basis for an interview with Aimé Césaire: “Aimé Césaire and America,” trans. Richard Philcox, Black Renaissance/Renaissance noire, 5:3 (2004): 152–161. Franklin Rosement and Robin D. G. Kelley, Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 202–203. Nicholas Calas, “Lettres francaises,” View, 1:7–8 (October–November 1941): 4. The piece was also published as “Martinique charmeuse de serpents, Un Grand poète noir,” Tropiques, 9 (May 1944): 119–126. A. James Arnold, “Beyond Postcolonial Césaire: Reading Cahier d’un retour au pays natal Historically,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 44:3 (June 2008): 263. A. James Arnold, “Beyond Postcolonial Césaire,” 258–275. The 1947 text was quite different to the 1939 version and different again to the “definitive version” Césaire published with Presence Africaine in 1956. For a detailed differentiation:

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new paths for surrealism have been furnished . . . by my greatest ‘coloured’ friends – Aimé Césaire in poetry.”79 The way forward out of the contemporary crisis of Western civilization was to strike “a fatal blow” to a world in which one of the “constituent parts [Europeans] has managed to allow itself every liberty at the expense of the other.”80 In his 1942 anthology When Peoples Meet, Alain Locke offered a similar perspective about the relationship between European civilization and hierarchies of race. Comprised of a collection of historical, sociological and anthropological texts framed by Locke’s commentary, the book stood as testimony to the fallibility of thinking about cultures in terms of racial hierarchies. Instead, Locke argued that “[c]ulture is not related functionally to definite ethnic groups or races” and that “[r]aces change their culture on many historic occasions.”81 Civilization, in this figuring of culture, is “the accumulative product and residue of this everwidening process of culture contact, interchange and fusion.”82 Like Suzanne Roussy Césaire and André Breton, Locke believed that the idea that one kind of culture, namely European culture, was representative of civilization was entirely false. Drawing upon the work of Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas – both of whom contributed to the anthology – Locke argued that the current “identification of the nation with ‘culture and civilization’” and the “false identification of culture with race” had led to the “unscientific” deduction of “racial superiority from cultural superiority, or even mere cultural complexity or political dominance.”83 Two years later, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, put forward a similar argument in the Carnegie-sponsored inquiry into America’s race problem, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Myrdal also defined race as a socio-cultural phenomenon.84 As far as he was concerned, the heart of the American dilemma was the conflict between the universalist underpinnings of the American Constitution and the particularist ideologies – such as white supremacy – that defined local and

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82 83 84

Almeida, “Les versions successives,” 35–90; Hale, “Two Decades, Four Versions.” See also Chapter 6 of this book. André Breton, “Speech to Young Haitian Poets” (December 1945) in Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley (eds.), Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 203. André Breton, “A Great Black Poet,” 196. Alain Locke, “In the Setting of World Culture” in Charles Molesworth (ed.), The Works of Alain Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 345. Alain Locke, “In the Setting of World Culture,” 346. Alain Locke, “In the Setting of World Culture,” 347. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Bros, 1944), 115, 149.

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regional institutions. In this context, the “American Negro culture . . . is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture.”85 The solution to this “condition” was assimilation into an amended (or nonracist) American (read white) culture. When it was published, black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier praised Myrdal for not being afraid to describe “the Negro community for what it was – a pathological phenomenon in American life.”86 He nevertheless questioned Myrdal’s belief in the internal conflict between the American creed and the particular beliefs generated in the minds of white Americans in general. Such a conflict would only occur, Frazier suggested gently, “when the Negro emerges as a human being and a part of the moral order that discrimination against him is on the conscience of the white man.”87

5.4 combining the poetic with the political The intellectuals behind Tropiques and American thinkers such as Richard Wright and Alain Locke all believed that this could be achieved through a combination of creative work and political action. In Vichy-occupied Martinique, the artistic endeavors inherent in Tropiques were a radical political act. For Wright, Native Son had been putting praxis into practice. Commenting on this in a 1945 interview, he said, “The artist is a revolutionary figure. . . . The serious artist grapples with his environment, passes judgment on it. He helps to deepen people’s perceptions. . . . He makes them conscious of the possibility of historical change – and in that way he facilitates change.”88 During the 1930s, the figure of the revolutionary artist in the United States had been primarily associated with the CPUSA and its affiliated organizations, such as the John Reed Clubs. By June 1944, the CPUSA had become significantly less radical, transitioning from a political party into the Communist Political Association on the grounds that unity was necessary for victory in the war.89 This reflected international communist organization. Stalin had disbanded the Comintern in

85 86 87

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Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Bros, 1944), 928. E. Franklin Frazier, “Race: An American Dilemma,” Crisis, 51 (April 1944): 105–106. E. Franklin Frazier, “Review of an American Dilemma,” American Journal of Sociology, 50:6 (May 1945): 556. Richard Wright, in interview with Charles J. Rolo, “This, Too, Is America,” Tomorrow, 4 (May 1945): 63. Earl Browder, “A Great Ordeal . . . A Great Opportunity,” People’s Voice (July 8, 1944,) 14. The CPUSA would be resurrected in 1945 after directions from Moscow indicated displeasure with this transition. Browder was ousted from the Party that same year.

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1943 on the grounds that the internal as well as the international situation of individual countries was too complicated to sustain a centralized, international leadership. In contrast to what happened in the United States, the war reinvigorated French Communism, particularly in the colonies. Almost all of the intellectuals associated with Tropiques had combined their radical literary activism with a political involvement with the Communists. When the Vichy regime was overthrown in Martinique in 1943, for the first time a primarily black and Communist political group, the Martinican Federation of the PCF – founded by Jules Monnerot – became a prominent force in local government. At the urging of René Ménil and Gilbert Gratiant, Aimé Césaire had also entered local politics, winning the May 27 municipal elections in Fort-de-France on a communist platform. As with Wright and Ellison, however, Césaire’s sympathy for Communism sprung mainly from the inspiration he found in Marxism and the political utility of Communist organizing at that time.90 He thought of himself as a “fellow traveler” rather than a party man. Moreover, his local electoral success as a black man was part of a broader shift occurring throughout the French Empire. There was a sense among the Resistance leaders and colonial subjects that France had been liberated by its empire. The war had certainly offered many colonial subjects the opportunity for the kind of political organization that the colonial administration of the French Third Republic had strictly curtailed. From 1943 the PCF had established Groupes d’Études Communistes or Communist Study Groups (CEGs) in French West Africa. These groups offered some of the first real opportunities for Africans to access Marxist-Leninist texts outside of the French mainland.91 Moreover, for fighting with the De Gaullist forces, Africans had been offered the kinds of colonial reforms they had been seeking before the war and that were implicit within the Atlantic Charter. This reinforced the connection between patriotic sacrifice and juridicalpolitical citizenship. It should not, however, be read as De Gaulle’s recognition of the individual right to citizenship of African peoples. It sprang from the practical reality that in resisting Vichy, colonial elites such as Félix Éboué had taken effective control of their local government. They

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Aimé Césaire, Pourquoi je suis communiste, quoted in and trans. A. James Arnold, Modernism and Négritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 174. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 159.

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had thus become political forces that needed to be engaged not dismissed as had been the case with the tirailleurs sénégalais of World War I. Eboué, for example, coordinated the 1944 Brazzaville Conference as a means of prompting De Gaulle to reconfigure the relationship between France and the African colonies. Held in the then-capital of French Equatorial Africa, the conference was a means of pushing through a decree drafted by Eboué that created a third category between citizen and subject – “notable evolués“ – and ensured evolués a greater degree of autonomy in local governance as well as a larger number of civil liberties.92 It aligned relatively neatly with De Gaulle’s commitment to restructuring the empire into a form that would allow colonized peoples to “integrate themselves into the French community” without creating sovereign states.93 He signed it into law in 1944.94 Eboué, among multiple others, considered this a significant advancement in winning the rights of the French Republic for its colonized peoples. He was far from a radical political figure and still subscribed to the relationship between citizenship rights and demonstrated attainment of French civilizational norms (hence the continued adherence to the concept of the “évolués”). Eboué also made sure that the preamble to the minutes of the Brazzaville Conference openly repudiated any question of independence from the French Empire.95 The potential of a “federated form” held much allure. De Gaulle and Éboué were not alone in contemplating the transformation of empire into a federation. Léopold Sédar Senghor was also envisaging a federated vision of the future, although his ideas were more radical.96 In a multiauthored book entitled La Communauté francaise, Senghor characterized French Africa and French Europe as two “civilizations” and, as Paulette Nardal had done before him, stressed the way in which Africa was essential to modern French civilization. Implicitly 92

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“Décret 377,” signed by Charles de Gaulle, July 29, 1942, Affaires Politiques (AP), 1/873, Centre d’Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (CAOM); Resolutions of the Brazzaville Conference concerning the “statut de notables évolués,” 8 Février 1944, AP, 1/2288, CAOM. Charles De Gaulle, “Discours prononcé par le General de Gaulle” in La Conférence africaine française, Brazzaville, 30 janvier 1944–8 février 1944 (Paris: Ministère des Colonies, 1945), 31. “Décret 377,” signed by Charles de Gaulle, July 29, 1942, AP 1/873, CAOM; Résolutions of the Brazzaville Conference concerning the “statut de notables évolués,” 8 Février 1944, AP, 1/2288, CAOM. Jean Dresch, “Des recommandations de Brazzaville à la Constitution de l’union française,” Politique Etrangère, 11:2 (1946): 167–178. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Vues sur l’Afrique noire, ou assimiler on être assimilé” in La Communauté impériale francaise (Paris, Editions Alsatia, 1945), 57–98.

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addressing the culture of “evolués” and “assimilés,” Senghor urged French Africans to retain their civilizational modes of being. For all French Europe had to offer, the future lay in integrating the best of Western civilization into African civilization and not rejecting outright everything African. The proposal of citizenship suggested by Senghor allocated equal rights to all peoples in the French Empire. Nevertheless, this “citizenship of Empire” did not mean one citizen, one vote.97 Sensitive to prevalent metropolitan anxieties about the Chamber of Deputies being overrun by the votes of people of color, he proposed instead a federal structure in which each colony would elect representatives who would then elect representatives of larger territories such as French West Africa. These representatives, led by a metropolitan-appointed Governor General, would have legislative authority in regard to the particular territory. The Paris-based “imperial Parliament” would thus have jurisdiction only over matters that affected the Empire as a whole, most obviously foreign relations.98 Senghor’s attention to political transformation was more than intellectual: he was involved in drafting the blueprint for the French Fourth Republic: the new constitution. Between the fall of the Nazi regime in 1944 and August 1945, mainland France was governed in an ad hoc manner by De Gaulle and his inner circle and the Assemblée Consultative Provisoire or Provisional Consultative Assembly (ACP). The ACP was established in order to choose the delegates to the Assemblée Nationale Constituante or National Constituent Assembly (ANC), the body writing the constitution. The Monnerville Commission was appointed to study the question of colonial representation in the ANC in March 1945.This time, the colonies had far greater representation. Gaston Monnerville, a deputy to Guyana from 1932 until 1939 and a hero of the Resistance as well as a recipient of the Croix de Guerre and Rosette de Résistance, was appointed chair. Senghor agreed to serve on the Commission under Monnerville. When the Commission reported its suggestions in July 1945, it became clear that the main concern was suffrage and equal representation. The Commission wanted the vote and a vote within a single electoral college for both citizens and subjects. Acknowledging the technical difficulties in achieving this, members of the Commission suggested that non-citizens elected electors who would in turn vote alongside citizens. Some white French committee members 97 98

Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Vues sur l’Afrique noire, ou assimiler on être assimilé,” 59. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Vues sur l’Afrique noire, ou assimiler on être assimilé,” 84–86.

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were reluctant to grant even these concessions as they felt they would endanger European minorities in the colonies. A possible solution to this anxiety was the creation of two separate electoral colleges – one for Europeans and one for colonials. In the end, out of the ANC’s 586 seats, 64 represented France’s overseas empire.99 Among them were Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Bissol. For politicians such as Senghor, this was a real opportunity to realize French Republican traditions. He hoped the Constitutional Assembly would echo the “Assembly of 1848 where the cause of antislavery brought together men of all parties.”100 This was the France, as Césaire had remarked a few years earlier, that he believed could exist but had not yet been realized. His optimism was misplaced. Several incidents in the aftermath of French Liberation underlined that there was still a long way to go before the Republic overcame the racism of German policy. On January 15, 1945, for example, the Director of the Emissions Coloniales of the French Radio fired all nonwhite employees in positions of responsibility in the organization. Every replacement was a white Frenchman. He had taken these steps on the orders of the Ministry of the Colonies. This incident prompted the Martinican novelist and public intellectual René Maran to remark: “The mania for grandeur and racism led Hitler into abysmal disaster. Racist policy and false grandeur will lead colonial France to her ruin.”101 Early achievements of the Constitutional Assembly, however, seemed promising. While colonial representatives were in the minority, the great majority of delegates to the Assembly were left-wing in orientation and belonged to either the PCF or the SFIO.102 Many had been involved in the Front Populaire of the 1930s and were invested in creating real change.103 The PCF held the most power and they were hoping to craft a multinational state structure wherein national difference sat comfortably alongside socio-economic equality.104 This vision of a federal French Union in which the colonies became equal participants within the larger 99

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Jules De Benoist, L’Afrique occidentale française, de la conférence de Brazzaville (1944) à l’indépendence (1960) (Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1982), 42. Journal officiel, Annales de l’Assemblée Nationale Constituante élue le 21 octobre 1945, Débats, 11 Avril 1946, 1715. René Maran, Europe, 5 (May–April, 1946): 135. The political landscape in France at this moment also included a third party, the Christian Democratic Mouvement républicain populaire. D. Bruce Marshall, The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-Making in the Fourth French Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 218–227. Amin Samir, A Life Looking Forward: Memoires of an Independent Marxist (London: Zed Books, 2006), 71.

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French State was shared by Senghor.105 Key laws were passed by April 1946 that indicated that the promise of liberty and equality would indeed be carried out. From the perspective of economic equality, the Houphouët-Boigny law ended the indigènat and abolished forced labor.106 A fund was also established for the economic development of the colonies, a move intended to create parity with mainland France. Two further laws, one proposed by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Bissol and the other proposed by the Senegalese Lamine Guèye, transformed the juridico-legal rights of colonial subjects. The former was a law that changed the legal status of France’s “vieilles colonies” – Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana and Réunion – from colonies to departments of the French Union. Significantly, this meant that the laws from the metropole replaced the system of colonial decrees that had hitherto existed in the Antilles. In short, it meant that the same Republican structures that defined French democracy now had to operate in the Antilles as well. Proposed by the Senegalese deputy and SFIO member, Lamine Guèye, the law bearing his name conferred, as of June 1, 1946, “the status of citizen, with the same title as French nationals in the metropole of the overseas territories” to all overseas residents.107 Sixty million colonial residents became eligible to vote in the second constituent assembly – twenty million more than were eligible in metropolitan France.

5.5 the realities of “victory” These changes to the French Constitution captured the imagination of black Americans. Once again, France became emblematic of the possibilities of “color-blind” democracy. In Phylon, the peer-reviewed social science journal founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1940, Gaston Monnerville’s role was singled out as a particular “challenge to America” to integrate black men of his caliber into the political machinery of the state. His many achievements – Croix de Guerre recipient, Resistance fighter and now President of the Council of the French Republic – were listed as evidence of black capacity for involvement.108 When Senghor published his first work of poetry, 105 106

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Gary Wilder, Freedom Time, 136; D. Bruce Marshall, French Colonial Myth, 208–227. Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 68. First Constituent Assembly, “Proposition de loi tendant proclamer citoyens tous les ressortissants de la métropole et des territoires d’outre-mer,” 7 Mai 1946, AP 1/2146, CAOM. John H. Morrow, “M. Monnerville, Citizen of the French Republic,” Phylon, 9:2 (2nd Qtr. 1948): 163–165.

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Chants d’Ombre, in 1945, Mercer Cook’s review focused primarily upon his political achievement. He enthused that Senghor’s “career would be amazing even if he were not Senegalese.” Cook located Senghor at the center of a cluster of intellectual and artistic talents such as René Maran, Aimé Césaire, Pablo Picasso and André Gide, noting his contributions to French periodicals such as Cahiers du Sud.109 The poems, Cook argued, were beautiful not just for their “style,” “superb imagery, and remarkable vocabulary,” but for their “attack on social and economic injustice.” Poetry was a necessary and important instrument in effecting political change. This guaranteed that the new French constitution would “be in safe hands.”110 Not everyone was so optimistic, nor did they think necessarily in such purely national terms. Reflecting upon the wartime atrocities in The World and Africa, Du Bois wrote that slavery and colonialism had done so much to “degrade the position of labor and the respect for humanity” that the theory of “race” these two practices had engendered created such “contradictions in European civilization and . . . illogic in modern thought [that] the collapse of human culture” had become inevitable.111 There was nothing new in the Nazi practices “which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.”112 Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire drew similar conclusions. In a poem written after France’s liberation in 1944, Senghor lamented a France that “speaks of the right way and then follows a crooked path/ . . . /who hates the occupiers yet poses such a severe occupation on me.”113 At the war’s end, Césaire said: When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I turn on my radio, when I learn that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead. When I turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labour has been inaugurated and legalized, I say that we have certainly been lied to: Hitler is not dead.

Du Bois would have agreed. But Césaire was far more hopeful than Du Bois about the possibilities a shared experience of occupation and atrocity 109

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Mercer Cook, “Review: Chants d’Ombre. By Léopold Sédar Senghor,” Journal of Negro History, 31:2 (April 1946): 237. Mercer Cook, “Review,” 238. W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 18–19. W. E. B. DuBois, The World and Africa, 23. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Prière de paix,” Poèmes, 92.

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might mean for the future. It seemed unthinkable that, knowing the pains of occupation and the ramifications of racialized thinking, the French would continue their practices in the colonies and in the social order. Senghor emphasized this perspective in a 1946 interview by warning the white French that Africans had an “unshakeable will to . . . conquer freedom by all means, not excluding violence.” By freedom, Senghor meant liberation from the “regime of occupation” that comprised French imperialism. In the context of a “France, which has just eliminated Hitlerian racism” Senghor felt that this had to mean equal political citizenship.114 By 1946, however, Césaire, Senghor and their colonial colleagues were already facing serious obstacles to the implementation of the departmentalization and Lamine Guèye laws. Colonial officials had been quick to question the ramifications of these radical changes and to protest the prospect of a metropolitan French minority.115 Charles De Gaulle, by this time a private citizen, publicly criticized any kind of federation that might jeopardize French mainland sovereignty. More dramatically, Third Republic Prime Minister Edouard Herriot warned that France was at risk of becoming “the colony of its former colonies.”116 The process of drafting the second version of the Fourth Republic’s constitution revolved around these conflicting visions of French citizenship and state sovereignty.117 MRP delegates heavily favored a two-tiered citizenship with two separate electoral colleges. They feared that universal suffrage would otherwise lead to a white French minority in the legislative chambers. Léopold Senghor was fiercely critical of these attempts to create “a metropolitan assembly” that undermined the principle of popular sovereignty. In a speech to the assembly on September 18, he reminded the delegates that the very principle of republican sovereignty upon which the First and Second Republics of France had been founded demanded the equal representation of all state citizens in the governing body of that state. Suffrage had to be universal for it to be truly democratic. Aimé Césaire echoed his friend’s sentiments, asking how the delegates could possibly reconcile the goal of constructing “a social and democratic 114

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“Léopold Sédar Senghor, Interview with Gavroche, August 8, 1946” in Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté 2: Nation et voie africaine du socialisme (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 17–18. See letters in AP, 1/2146, CAOM. Edouard Herriot, cited in D. Bruce Marshall, French Colonial Myth, 253. Gary Wilder, Freedom Time, 144.

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republic that will not acknowledge any distinctions of race or colour” with the implicit retention of the colonial system through a two-tiered structure of citizenship.118 Ultimately, the French people assented to the Constitution on October 13, 1946, although it more closely resembled a federated empire than the multination democratic state Senghor and the PCF had hoped for initially. While the formal citizenship extended by the Lamine Guèye law was included in the form of Article 80 of the constitution, Article 81 distinguished between “citizenship of the French Union” and “French nationality.” While this might have appeared a mere linguistic sleight of hand, the reality was that it opened up the possibility of a two-tiered citizenship that might limit rights to specific territories rather than to the French Union as a whole. It would not be until the loi cadre of 1956 (discussed in Chapter 7) that this question was resolved to any extent.119 Concerns over these issues were, in part why the first draft constitution failed to pass the May 5 national referendum in 1946. Elections for a Second Constitutional Assembly soon followed in June and the composition of this new assembly was markedly more conservative. The PCF lost the balance of power to the more conservative MRP. Nevertheless, from 1946 the peoples of French Africa and the Antilles were juridically French citizens under the Fourth Republic’s constitution. Power remained rooted in the Paris assembly where colonial deputies were in the minority. The assembly was delegated the responsibility of deciding the powers of the assemblies in each territory where the African deputies would have a majority and thus the real ability to effect change. In this new Fourth Republic, African colonies were granted the right to representation in the French National Assembly for the first time. In the hope that they would vote as a bloc, a Pan-African movement emerged from the Bamako Conference (October 18–21, 1946) under the leadership of Felix Houphouet-Boigny from the Ivory Coast. The resulting organization was called the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). All of its members were from French West Africa (AOF) and French Equatorial Africa (AEF). The extension of citizenship and suffrage, however, did not necessarily equate to the equivalent rights. This was a lesson that African Americans had learned all too well and was part of the rationale behind

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Aimé Césaire, Assemblée nationale constituante, September 18, 1946, JORF, 94 (September 19, 1946), 3791. Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 214–237.

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their concerted efforts to influence the United Nations, the nascent international institution being founded in 1945.

5.6 recourse to international institution building Unlike the old League of Nations, the United Nations promised a more egalitarian and less racist international order. Its newly minted Charter theoretically posed a serious challenge to the scope of French and British imperial power and offered an implicit rebuke to the human rights and civic rights violations of fascist regimes. The main restraint on Empire was the establishment of a Trusteeship Council under Article 73 of the United Nations Charter. This article expounded the “sacred trust” of the member nations of the UN “to promote to the utmost . . . the wellbeing of the inhabitants” of territories not yet capable of self-government. The responsibility for League of Nations mandates would now be delivered to the Allied Powers in the form of the Council. In contrast to the mandates commission, this new Council could accept individual petitions from inhabitants of these territories and had the power to conduct local investigations. The Trusteeship powers had a responsibility to keep themselves accountable through regular reports to the Secretary-General of the Trusteeship Council.120 These measures directly challenged the imperial sovereignty of Britain and France and demarcated the scope of the trusteeship in terms of improving economic, social and political conditions while simultaneously advocating for the respect of indigenous cultures. Robert Delavignette, director of the École Nationale de la France d’OutreMer until 1946 when he became the High Commissioner of the UN trusteeship territory of French Cameroon, believed that the UN Charter signaled “the end of the colonial era, when problems stemming from colonization were internal ones that each mother country could solve according to its own spirit.”121 However, the sacred trust was a duty of colonial powers, not a guarantee of the rights of the “colonized.” The general endorsement of selfdetermination in Article 73 did not negate the significance of Article 2(7) that recognized the need for non-interference in colonial affairs. Selfdetermination, then, remained a blurred concept with imprecise mechanisms

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Charter of the United Nations, Chapter XI: Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories, Article 73. Robert Delavignette, Robert Delavignette on the French Empire: Selected Writings, ed. William B. Cohen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 94.

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of implementation. Discourses of civilization paralleled discourses of human rights at this moment. Civilized nations had their status encoded into international law.122 Sovereignty remained dependent upon civilization. Moreover, Article 11(20), Articles 14 and Article 35 (2) emphasized the priority of international peace and security. The goal of international peace theoretically should not come into tension with the guarantee of rights. In reality, any motion that went before the General Assembly could only be passed with a two-thirds majority and the lines were clearly cut between nascent, weaker states and those who retained – or wished to retain – colonial holdings. Moreover, the United Nations Charter was predicated upon the sovereign equality of each individual state, an equality that explicitly clashed with the implicit hierarchy of sovereign states embedded in the Security Council.123 Rather than seeking to guarantee the group or individual rights of colonial subjects (or any individuals, for that matter), the UN was intended to reduce violent conflict on the scale of the two catastrophic world wars.124 US President Harry S. Truman, who had replaced Roosevelt upon his death in April 1945, was acutely conscious that the success of the UN – and thus of the peace – hinged upon continued US involvement. For this to occur, the US Senate had to vote to ratify the Charter. Truman did not want a repeat of the US refusal to join the League of Nations which he and his administration believed had doomed the world to World War II. The drafting of the Charter had already been a fraught domestic issue. The passage of the Charter through the Senate was reliant upon persuading segregationist Southern senators such as the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Texan Tom Connally. Connally was in the US delegation and would be steering the UN charter through the Senate. For this to occur successfully – and for Connally to be acquiescent to the treaty in the first place – any UN charter had to walk a fine line between promising human rights and preventing any infringement upon state sovereignty that might, for example, allow interference with the white South’s practice of segregation.125 Even the most general rights provisions 122

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Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Adam Roberts and Benedict Kingsbury, eds., United Nations, Divided World. The UN’s Roles in International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 44–45. Stephen Schlesinger, “Has the UN Lived Up to Its Charter?” in Ian Shapiro and Joseph Lampert (eds.), Charter of the United Nations: Together with Scholarly Commentaries and Essential Historical Documents (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 110. Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 44.

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had to be so vague as to circumvent the direct possibility of exterior intervention on this matter. In stark contrast to the Wilson-led delegation to the Paris peace treaties in 1919, the State Department had chosen forty-two US-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to consult with the US delegation on the Charter.126 The NAACP was one of them. Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune and W. E. B. Du Bois, who had rejoined the organization as the director of research after a decade of absence due to political differences, were the three nominated delegates. They represented not just the NAACP but, unlike Du Bois in 1919, had consulted with the other key black American activist groups in the US and were acting as their representatives too.127 More than this, they had held multiple meetings with delegations from countries such as France, Haiti, Liberia, the Philippines and South America in order to attempt to take a stand for race equality against imperialism.128 Such coalition building had proved impossible in 1919. So too had been the opportunity to co-operate with NGOs whose concerns were not specifically racebound. This time around, however, the forty-two NGOs were in broad agreement about the need for the UN Charter to elaborate explicitly key human rights. In their joint letter to the Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinus Jr., the NGOs demanded that each respective member state’s inhabitants be guaranteed “such fundamental rights as freedom of religion, speech, assembly and communication and fair trial and under just laws” without discrimination on the basis of “the dignity and inviolability of the individual.”129 The letter was mostly ignored. The State Department had only ever envisioned these NGOs as consultative and, as with Truman, their priority was the passage of the bill through the Senate for the purposes of security and peace.130

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Elizabeth Borgwardt, “Race, Rights and Non-governmental Organisations” in Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck (eds.), Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 188. “Hit U.S. Stand on Colonies,” Chicago Defender, May 19, 1945, 1. White to NAACP Board, June 9, 1945; Roy Wilkins to Walter White, May 27, 1945, NAACP Papers, Group II, Box 639, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. “Letter Submitted to Secretary Stettinius by Consultants Regarding Human Rights,” May 2, 1945, reprinted in appendix to Dorothy B. Robins, Experiment in Democracy: The Story of U.S. Citizen Organizations in Forging the Charter of the United Nations (New York: Parkside Press, 1971), 218–220. Carol Anderson, “From Hope to Disillusionment: African Americans, the United Nations, and the Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1947,” Diplomatic History, 20:4 (1997): 531–563.

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The final document reflected little of the NGO’s suggestions. To the contrary, the UN Charter’s emphasis upon national sovereignty effectively curtailed any sweeping provisions pertaining to individual human rights. W. E. B. Du Bois saw this clearly and offered a damning critique of it in Senate testimony in July 1945: “What was true of the United States in the past is true of world civilization today – we cannot exist half slave and half free.”131 Du Bois was not alone in taking this position. Walter White also spoke with President Truman to make the case for the staunch elaboration of “America’s position for freedom and independence by calling another world conference dealing with dependent peoples, trusteeship and human rights.”132 Truman did not do so. Prominent African American Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. urged the Secretary of State to take a stance on the colonial issue and chairman of the Chicago Defender’s board, James B. Cashin, called his own press conference to condemn the “abominable” nature of the colonial system, criticizing it for denying “the opportunity for free and unhampered self-government and cultural growth.”133 Black press opinions of the UN charter reflected the disappointment of their activist leadership. The New York Age bitterly editorialized “There is no compulsion to act upon noble ideals,” while the Pittsburgh Courier called it “Just words, words, words. There is no real power in the Charter to apply the enunciated principles.”134 The Crisis made it clear that the NAACP read this weakness of the Charter as a particularly American failing and condemned US recalcitrance as a “bald compromise of basic American principle.”135 The disappointment in the black community was palpable, understandably, but the contrast between these peace negotiations and those held in 1919 was significant. The US State Department’s decision to consult domestic NGOs rather than to rely upon the executive power of the President and his small advisory team reflected US commitment to a more representative foreign affairs policy. Moreover, while these NGOs were hardly representative of the 131

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Statement of W. E. B. Du Bois, July 11, 1945, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, The Charter of the United Nations: Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., July 1945, 218. Secretary’s Report to the NAACP Committee Administration, May 28, 1945, NAACP Papers, Group II, Box 639, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Edward R. Stettinius to Adam Clayton Powell Jr., June 7, 1945, Reel 1208, NNC Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library; James B. Cashin, “Cashin Tells Need For African Self-Government,” Chicago Defender, May 12, 1945. New York Age, June 20, 1945; Pittsburgh Courier, May 26, 1945; June 2, 1945. Editorial, “San Francisco,” Crisis, 52 (June 1945): 161.

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diverse make-up of the US citizenry, the NAACP’S inclusion represented the continued, if nominal, engagement of the black community by the Democratled administration. Du Bois’s testimony to the Senate, for example, would never have been solicited in 1919. Nor would an African American such as Ralph Bunche ever have been appointed Director of the UN Trusteeship Division, as he was in 1946. This is important to acknowledge, not in order to convey a triumphal vision of US race relations in this moment, but to indicate that key black intellectuals were slowly becoming involved in influential ways in the machinery of the US state as their francophone counterparts had been since a much earlier date. It is significant, too, that those black Americans seeking to represent their community organized their consultancy by collaborating with other people of color attempting to influence proceedings. This broader anti-colonialism and solidarity with other oppressed peoples differed from the diasporic feeling that had prompted much black American international collaboration in the interwar period. Blackness, here, was less an identity than a consequence of white supremacy.136

5.7 postwar pan-africanism Nowhere is this more evident than in NAACP deliberations over a postwar Pan-African Congress. April of 1945 saw the executive board tentatively endorse holding a congress that coming December in Paris. Unsurprisingly, Du Bois was at the forefront of these deliberations. He warned that if the NAACP did not take the lead quickly, then others would assume the Pan-African mantle and organize a movement “without the participation and guidance of American Negroes.”137 An organizing committee was formed, including previous Pan-African Congress delegates such as Rayford W. Logan as well as Roy Wilkins, Channing Tobias, Ralph Bunche and, of course, Du Bois himself. Logan and Bunche were uncomfortable with continuing in the Pan-African vein and attempted to change the Congress’s name – and thus its ambit – to the Dependent People’s Conference.138 Du Bois was furious about these conversations

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James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: African Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 67. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Pan-African Movement,” n.d. [April–May 1945], Box 30, folder “Pan-African Movement,” 1920–1949, Spingarn Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Rayford W. Logan to Walter White and W. E. B. Du Bois, June 30, 1945, Box 181–8, Folder 3, Rayford W. Logan Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Centre, Howard University; Minutes of the Pan-African Congress Meeting, July 12, 1945, NAACP

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because while he believed that African Americans had a “pretty clear right to speak for Africa,” he was certain that activists from Asia would feel differently.139 As deliberations continued, several divergent schools of thought emerged. Some espoused a humanist sense that all those who were dispossessed shared common goals that required solidarity; others believed the socio-historical experience of race necessitated organization along diasporic lines. There were also those who wanted to transcend the issue of race, instead identifying class as the determining force in creating systematic oppression. Further complicating these differences was the issue that many black American intellectuals were simultaneously antiimperialist in stance and of the belief that Africans were not yet ready for complete self-governance. Their quibbles were with the racism and exploitation embedded in current “trusteeship” policies rather than with the notion of trusteeship itself. These divisions prompted the NAACP to step back quietly when George Padmore pre-empted Du Bois by putting together a Fourth Congress in Manchester. In part, this also reflected the changing dynamic of black internationalist organization: Du Bois’s claim that black Americans had a “pretty clear right” to speak for Africa may have held sway in 1919, but by 1945 few Africans would have found this permissible. As Du Bois’s 1919 Pan-African Congress had intended, this Fourth Congress aimed to present a petition to the Allied powers. At the PanAfrican Congresses which became the main transnational platform for anticolonialism, African and Afro-diasporic leaders drew the world’s attention to a wide range of individual and collective human rights violations by colonial regimes.37 This Congress also concluded with the demand for the realization of the “rights of all people to govern themselves.”140 Allied Powers paid very little heed to the resulting manifesto but it did consolidate a coalition of black activists such as Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore who would lead independence movements in British Africa. While the Congress demands were broadly anti-imperial, they were also very much framed by the British imperial context. It was the product of an

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Papers 14, 3/616–19, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. On Bunche, see Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: African Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 156. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 512. “Declaration to the Colonial Peoples of the World” in Kwame Nkrumah, Revolutionary Path (New York: International Publishers, 1973).

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anglophone rather than francophone Pan-Africanism. Most attendees also came originally from the British Empire.141 On a practical level, those francophone black men and women who had passed the war in the Caribbean, in Africa or in France would have found it difficult to make their way to Manchester in 1945.142 Ideologically speaking, imperial citizenship seemed to potentially offer francophone activists a better guarantee of rights than any diasporic activism. The continued desire of thinkers such as Senghor and Césaire to be part of the French political sphere was linked to their genuine belief in the possibilities of a French republicanism that could include an understanding of blackness as a civilizational identity equal to European civilizations. Senghor made this very clear in his speeches to the National Assembly and in his creative work. In one speech delivered in September 1946, he prophesied “a new civilization, whose heart will be in Paris . . . on the scale of . . . humanity.”143 Achieving this vision would require “cooperation between” and the “active assimilation” of the various civilizations – including Africa’s civilization – within the newly created French Union.144 As his political work played out in the French framework of the National Assembly, his poetic work continued to validate an essentialist and international understanding of blackness. In 1948, he published a compilation of poetry he had written while a POW, Hosties noires. In one poem dedicated to Mercer Cook, Senghor described his reaction to the African American soldiers he had met in France. At first, they seemed alien to him: “I did not recognise in your prison of uniforms the colour of sadness.”145

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Thus far there seems to be little evidence of any UN-directed activism in either the British or French Caribbean in the moment of the Charter’s drafting. The same holds true of French Africa during these years. In the case of the French, this is potentially because imperial citizenship seemed to offer a better potential guarantee of rights than any international configuration. Kwame Nkrumah did travel to Paris immediately after the Manchester Conference to talk with Senghor, Lamine Guèye (both from Senegal), Félix Houphouët-Boigny (from the Ivory Coast) and Sourou Apathy (of Benin). All four men were delegates to the National Assembly at this time. Nkrumah claims that they discussed the possibility of a “Union of West African Socialist Republics”: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson 1957): 57. What this meant in the context of these men’s efforts toward federation with the French Union is not clear. Léopold Sédar Senghor, September 18, 1946, Assemblée national constituante, JORF, 94 (September 19, 1946), 3791. Léopold Sédar Senghor, September 18, 1946, Assemblée national constituante, JORF, 94 (September 19, 1946), 3791, 3792. Leopold Sédar Senghor, “Aux soldats négro-américains” in Hosties noires (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1948; reprint 1964), 81–82.

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Very quickly, however, the bonds of race asserted themselves and “I had only to touch the warmth of your brown hand, I knew myself: ‘Africa!’”146 In his review of the poem, Cook read this not as a call for African diasporic unity but as part of a broader humanist vision of a better future. Hosties noires, Cook believed, “broadens his [Senghor’s] vision and his prayer, asking God to grant that all the peoples of the earth, black, white brown, and yellow” encircle the earth linked under the rainbow of God’s peace.147 While this reading may not have aligned precisely with Senghor’s essentialist understanding of race, it did correlate with the perspectives offered in the 1947 anthology of poetry published by another member of the negritude circle: Léon-Gontran Damas In 1947 Damas published his manifesto to the négritude movement, an anthology entitled Poètes d’expression française 1900–1945. Unlike Senghor, Damas was reluctant to restrict his racial self-identification to the African diaspora. Proclaiming that his theme was “Poverty, illiteracy, exploitation of man by man, social and political racism suffered by the black or the yellow, forced labor, inequalities, lies, resignation, swindles, prejudices, complacencies, cowardice, failures, crimes committed in the name of liberty, of equality, of fraternity,” the poets he included extended beyond “blacks” to Indochinese and Madagascan contributors.148 The uniting force of solidarity and group identity for Damas lay in the experiences of colonialism and in the particular historical moment. To black Americans, he accorded a special role: “the wind rising from Black America” had made him conscious again of the power of his ancestral culture. In the poetry of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown and the like, he had found “the African love for life, the African joy in love, the African dream of death.”149 He saw the postwar as “another age: that in which the colonized man becomes aware of his rights and of his duties as a writer, as a novelist or a story-teller, an essayist or a poet.” Solidarity, in this sense, came from a shared experience of oppression and from the deliberate choice to revalorize black or indigenous cultures in the face of European imperialism. 146 147

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Leopold Sédar Senghor, Hosties noires, 82. Mercer Cook, “Review: Hosties noires by Léopold Sédar Senghor,” Books Abroad, 24:4 (Autumn 1950): 380. Léon Gontran-Damas, Poètes d’expression française 1900–1945 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1947), 10. Léon Gontran-Damas, Poètes d’expression française 1900–1945, 13.

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5.8 the intellectual as political witness In the French postwar moment, the idea that the writer and intellectual had political responsibilities certainly did take on a new impetus. Left-wing journals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Temps modernes and Albert Camus’s Combat stressed the importance of intellectuals engaging with the political landscape in order to effect change.150 Gradually they included black intellectuals – both francophone and American – in this endeavor. Combat’s editorial committee, for example, included the French-Congolese journalist and politician, Jane Vialle.151 One of the first issues of Les Temps modernes published extracts from Richard Wright’s work and a 1946 special issue focusing on the United States included work from Wright and James Weldon Johnson, as well as essays from black sociologists Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake.152 Wright in particular developed a strong relationship with Sartre and a large presence in Les Temps modernes. Many of his works appeared in French translation for the first time in the review, and when, in March 1947, Sartre published his celebrated manifesto on the political dimension of writing, “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?,” he argued that Richard Wright’s work was the perfect example of the writer as “witness for his times and country.”153 Sartre was particularly interested in the American race problem, having witnessed it himself during his time as the official American correspondent for Combat in June 1945. His experiences in the United States enamored him neither of America nor its vision of freedom. Upon his return to 150 151

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Combat had been founded in 1943 as a journal of the French resistance. A recipient of the Medal of the Resistance, Vialle had fought against the Germans in France before being interned at a concentration camp from 1943 through 1944. Upon her release, she worked as a journalist for Agence France Presse as well as several West African publications and travelled through the Ivory Coast, Ubangi-Shari and Chad reporting on the educational, cultural and economic needs of Africans. When the draft constitution of the First Constituent Assembly was rejected at referendum, she abandoned her role in the press to run for the constituency of Ubang-Shari-Chad. At first unsuccessful, she was eventually elected in January 1947 Vialle to the Council of the Republic (senate) in Paris as a delegate from the Ubangi-Shari. She was one of 17 women in the 320-member Council. Chapter 6 will discuss her role as a delegate to the United Nations. For more on Vialle, see Sarah C. Dunstan, “‘Une Nègre de drame’: Jane Vialle and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Reform, 1945–1953,” Journal of Contemporary History (February 2020):645–665. Richard Wright, “La feu dans la nuée,” Revue les Temps modernes, 2 (November 1, 1945); Revue Les Temps Modernes, 11–12 (August–September 1946). Jean-Paul Sartre, “Qu’est-ce que c’est la littérature?,” Revue les Temps modernes (March 1947): 967–969.

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France, he wrote “The Respectful Prostitute,” a play dramatizing the Scottsboro Trial of the 1930s.154 The play was published in the US in 1948 at the behest of Richard Wright in a special edition of Dorothy Norman’s Twice A Year, a review dedicated to “a clarification of those problems relating to man’s struggle to attain a balance between the good of the individual and that of a society.”155 In his capacity as the associate editor of this special edition, Wright wrote an introduction to the play. He praised Sartre’s work for seeing that “the so-called Negro problem in America is not really a Negro problem at all but a white problem, a phase of the general American problem.”156 It was difficult for Americans to “see race issues objectively,” but Sartre had offered this representation of the Scottsboro trial from his position as both artist – “the artist is, in the last analysis, a judge” – and as a foreigner.157 In personal terms, Wright felt intellectually close to Sartre at this time, believing that he was one of the few Frenchmen to see the parallels between the German occupation of France and oppressed groups such as black Americans.158 The two men shared a Leftist political bent without, in that moment, being Communist.159 Mercer Cook was similarly enthusiastic about Sartre, labeling him “a worthy descendant of de Tocqueville” in his own review of the play.160 This thinking was not dissimilar to the perspectives Myrdal had offered in his American Dilemma. In fact, Myrdal also contributed an essay to the special edition of Twice a Year edited by Wright. Updating his prognosis of the “American dilemma,” Myrdal argued that America’s emergence as a world leader made change imperative. No longer could America live “an exuberant and carefree life without having to bother much about its international reputation.”161 In his new capacity as Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, Myrdal had seen suffering 154 156 157 158 159

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155 See Chapter 2 of this book. “Introductory Note,” Twice a Year (1948): 11. Richard Wright, “Introduction to The Respectful Prostitute,” Twice a Year (1948): 14. Richard Wright, “Introduction,” 16. Richard Wright, Journal 1947, Box 117, Richard Wright Papers. In fact, the white French Communist Left, cognizant of Wright’s break with the CPUSA in 1942, tended to be highly critical of Wright. Nevertheless Wright’s work was generally popular in France at this moment. As the owner of the celebrated bookstore Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach wrote to Wright that his stories, in particular, “interested French readers tremendously.” Sylvia Beach to Richard Wright, May 26, 1947, Richard Wright Papers; Jean Kanapa, “Petite Anthologie des revues américaines,” Poésie, 47 (November 1947): 123–129. Mercer Cook, “Review: La Putain respectueuse by Jean-Paul Sartre,” Journal of Negro History, 33:1 (January 1948): 103. Gunnar Myrdal, “Of American Democracy,” Twice a Year, 572.

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and division across Europe. His experiences there reminded him of “race relations in America” because the “problem of human tragedy in all its variations is, in essence, very much the same.”162 Making this comment, Myrdal would have been thinking of the terrible suffering of the Jews in the concentration camps. He was not the only one to make this comparison between the suffering of blacks in America and that of Jews under Hitler. When Langston Hughes first heard the news that Hitler was dead, his reaction indicated that he was thinking about the Jewish experience in Europe in terms of American Jim Crowism. In his Chicago Defender column, he reflected upon the man who had “lynched thousands of Jews” and “believed in Jim Crow for the world.”163 War correspondents for the Baltimore Afro-American, Vincent Tubbs and Chatwood Hall, reported in detail upon the atrocities they saw at Dachau and Auschwitz. The centuries of racial violence African Americans had endured in the US echoed in the horrors that the Jews had suffered under the fascist German regime.164 The question facing both Jews and African Americans in this moment was how to build a new world in which racism could be overcome.165 In 1946, Sartre published a short book – Reflections on the Jewish Question – which he believed offered potential avenues for addressing this question. Racism, for Sartre, was rooted in unequal power relations between the subject of racism and the racist. Such a dynamic meant that the subject became object, less than human and thus incapable of freedom. The solution to overcoming this situation lay in a transformation back into a subject. This was a process of both being recognized as equally deserving of rights by the anti-Semite but also of throwing off the neuroses inspired by hatred and oppression. In this framework, the Jew had two choices: the establishment of a sovereign nation or the assimilation into a political entity – here France – on the basis of a shared political affiliation. Access to rights in this argument was predicated not in “the possession of a problematical and abstract “human nature” but in a group’s

162 163 164

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Gunnar Myrdal, “Of American Democracy,” 574. Langston Hughes, “Here to Yonder,” Chicago Defender, May 12, 1945, 12. Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2008), 402–405. On the actual relationship between the black and Jewish experiences in postwar America, see Jack Salzman, Cornel West, eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews and PostHolocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

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active participation in the life of a society. . . . But they have these rights as Jews, Negroes, Arabs – that is, as concrete persons.”166 While Sartre’s thinking here focused on the problem of anti-Semitism, it was also applicable to the racism in the United States and the colonial framework of the French Republic. He cited Richard Wright as inspiration for his reflections: “Richard Wright, the Negro writer, said recently: ‘There is no Negro problem in the United States, there is only a White Problem. In the same way we must say that anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem; it is our problem.’”167 Two years later, around the time that The Jewish Question was serialized in the April, May and June 1948 issues of the Jewish-American journal Commentary, he reiterated this thought: “Replace the Jew with the Black, the anti-Semite with the supporter of slavery, and there would be nothing essential to be cut from my book.”168 Anatole Broyard, an African American journalist then successfully passing as white, was unconvinced by Sartre’s suggestion that the Jewish and African American experiences were analogous.169 The black American, he commented somewhat ironically given his own situation, “usually cannot conceal his identity” due to the tell-tale feature of skin color.170 In contrast, Jews who were willing to forgo their national identity could hide behind their whiteness yet still take secret succor in their cultural and religious communities. The same kind of opportunity was not open to the African American because he (or she) was defined primarily “as a member of an embattled minority,” a defensive position rather than a positive one.171 Broyard wrote: “Until the Negro defines himself, he’s not going to get very far in formulating a program for living.” For him, this lack of cultural definition was at the root of what differentiated the Jewish experience from the African American experience. In many ways, his analysis fitted into the canon of assertions from Frazier, Wright and Myrdal that black solidarity needed something stronger than the 166

167 168

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Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and the Jew: An Exploration of the Etymology of Hate (New York: Shocken, 1995), 146. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and the Jew, 152. Cited in M. Watteau, “Situations raciales et condition de l’homme dans l’oeuvre de JeanPaul Sartre,” Présence Africaine, 2 (January 1948): 228. On Broyard, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Passing of Anatole Broyard” in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1998), 180–214. Anatole Broyard, “Portrait of an Inauthentic Negro,” Commentary (January 1, 1950): 10; 57. Anatole Broyard, “Portrait of an Inauthentic Negro,” 57.

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common bond of “not being something else.”172 Sartre had made the same argument in his preface to Senghor’s 1948 Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (An Anthology of the New Negro and Malagasy Poetry). A collection of sixteen poems, the anthology was framed by a short introduction by Senghor and Sartre’s piece which was entitled Orphèe noir. It is hard to know whether Broyard had read Sartre’s work before publishing his article. Orphée noir was not translated into English until 1951, but it is possible that Broyard had read it in French. In Orphée noir, Sartre expanded upon some of the observations he had made about race in Reflections on the Jewish Question. For him, the Western world maintained its power structures through mechanisms of objective and subjective oppression. Objective oppression involved economic and class-based exploitation and could only be combatted through Marxist revolutionary means. Subjective oppression, in contrast, meant racial discrimination (among other things) and manifested culturally and politically. Sartre theorized that racial oppression could be overcome through intellectual self-affirmation. He saw négritude as a reaction to subjective oppression because it constructed blackness as the antithesis of white supremacy, thereby repudiating all cultural and political norms associated with Western imperialism. As such, Sartre argued, négritude was a self-conscious stepping stone toward the “realisation of the human society without races.”173 In taking this step, poets such as Césaire had realized the dream of “the great surrealist tradition” and combined artistic brilliance with “militant” Marxism. Despite this, Sartre felt that négritude was not an end in itself because it was impossible to define a sustainable political and cultural identity along lines of negative affirmation.174 Sartre was calling for a version of Senghor’s universalist understanding of what it meant to be human, one that did not iron out the differences in racial experience but which allowed for all of them to be considered equally valid global concerns. In so doing, however, he reduced négritude to a reification of the black skin color rather a concrete historical situation – the shared experience of the slave trade and colonialism – which the earlier work of Ménil, Damas, Senghor and Césaire had posited as the basis for a shared black identity.175

172 173 175

Anatole Broyard, “Portrait of an Inauthentic Negro,” 10; 63. 174 Jean-Paul Sartre, Orphée noir, xii. Jean-Paul Sartre, Orphée noir, xii. On this perspective of Sartre’s thinking, see René Ménil, Tracées (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981), 65.

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Reviewing Senghor’s anthology, Mercer Cook was pleased with Sartre’s contention that “French Negro poetry is, in our time, the only revolutionary poetry.”176 He was less pleased with Sartre’s neglect of the black American influence upon the poets selected: “The almost mystic unity which extends from ‘Haiti to Cayenne’ first found expression in the works of poets like Langston Hughes, Countée [sic] Cullen, Richard Wright, and Sterling Brown.”177 Nevertheless, the fact remained that Sartre’s preface catapulted Senghor’s anthology to literary fame and placed négritude and the American “race question” at the forefront of the Parisian intellectual landscape. Compounding this phenomenon was the emergence of a revolutionary new journal and publishing house: Présence Africaine. Dedicated to exploring the relationship between race, culture and civilization, Présence Africaine would provide a new forum wherein black American and francophone intellectuals struggled for freedom. The mechanisms for achieving this freedom and the rights it entailed were theoretically in place for the citizens of the US and French Republics through their constitutions. Moreover, the United Nations Charter, for all its ambiguity, in 1947 still offered the possibility of freedom and rights for all peoples. Nevertheless, the burgeoning conflict between the United States and the USSR would put these ideas to the test and Présence Africaine would emerge as a bastion against the forces of communism, imperialism and racism.

5.9 a new space World War II fundamentally altered the balance of power within the French Empire by creating an unprecedented space for black thinkers to disseminate their ideas and participate in local government. As a result, they were able to push for a reconfiguration of empire under the Constitution of the Fourth Republic that had the potential to offer greater equality before the law. African Americans, too, continued their struggles of the New Deal era to engage with the context of World War II and postwar institution building. As black sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton remarked in their landmark study of race in Chicago – Black Metropolis – World War II “changed the course of race relations

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Mercer Cook, “Review: Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française; précédée de Orphee Noir par Jean-Paul Sartre by L. Sédar-Senghor,” Journal of Negro History, 34:2 (April 1949): 239. Mercer Cook, “Review,” 239.

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and brought America face to face with the contradictions in our culture in a manner and to an extent which made it impossible for either Negroes or whites to evade them any longer.”178 Both groups drew inspiration from each other’s experiences – as in the black American focus upon the similarities between Jim Crowism and life under German occupation and the Vichy regime – and their intellectual work – as in the engagement of key Antillean intellectuals with McKay and Hughes. Thinkers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison also engaged both personally and intellectually with the work of non-black French thinkers such as André Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre to elaborate their own understandings of the relationship between race and civilizational values. Motivated by similar desires in a particular historical moment, these intellectuals sought to reconfigure their existing polities to create a world that would allow them access to equal citizenship and human rights. The changes they sought to implement and the reflections they made illuminate not only the dynamics of the African diaspora or of a specific French imperial or US domestic contexts, but the broader sweep of the postwar moment.

178

Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), 760.

6 “A New Fascism, the American Brand”: Anti-communism, Anti-imperialism and the Struggle for the West

Europe and Asia, Africa await A new Fascism, the American brand And new worlds will be built upon race and hate And the Eagle and the Dollar will command. Claude McKay A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a sick civilization. A civilization that compromises its principles is a dying civilization. Aimé Césaire

Between 1945 and 1947, the atrocities of the Nazi death camps and the tragic repercussions of racism received significant public attention in the United States and in France. Very quickly, however, that horror was assimilated into a narrative of a particular Nazi identity, rooted in Germany’s flawed domestic politics.1 Thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, who had compared Nazism and US Jim Crowism or European colonization during the war, were quick to point to the hollowness of a victory rhetoric while there were no universally guaranteed rights. As far as they were concerned, the end of World War II, far from vanquishing fascism once and for all, had merely shifted the battle lines. An Allied victory had meant the victory of “the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth 1

Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015): 63–64, 351; Peter Novick argues that it is not until the 1960s, with Jewish activism, that the Holocaust takes on the ideological significance in the United States that we would associate it with today: Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 12–18.

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century” in Europe and America, groups without being aware of it, as Césaire put it in his 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, that had “a Hitler inside.”2 By refusing to admit that the problems of Nazism and the racism at the heart of fascist ideologies had arisen from fault lines that cut through the entire Western world, these intellectuals warned that contemporary civilization would fall prey to “a new fascism, the American brand.”3 A new urgency was added to the struggle by the threat of mutually assured destruction from the atomic bomb. Science and technology, hitherto the symbols of humanity’s enlightened progress, had become the harbinger of a kind of barbarism and destruction, a sign of a “dying civilization.” Historians such as Carol Anderson, Mary Dudziak and Thomas Borstelmann, finely attuned to the trajectory of African American engagement with ideas around human rights in this Cold War period, have traced the transition in African American activism from a human rights to a civic rights focus.4 Similarly, Samuel Moyn has been at the forefront of scholarship refuting the linkage between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and universal rejection of the atrocities committed by the Nazis.5 My argument here is that something important has been forgotten in this scholarship: namely, that the discourse around rights and race in this period portrayed the violence of National Socialism as if it was the particular peculiarity of Germany’s Third Reich rather than a flaw at the heart of Western civilization. Thinkers such as Césaire, McKay, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois consistently criticized this perspective. Moreover, they understood civil rights, and the ongoing struggle to maintain or achieve them in a domestic context, as a dynamic inherent within Western modernity that transcended national affiliation. They continued to grapple with, as Wright phrased it in 1953 when commenting on his novel, The Outsider, 2

3

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5

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36. Claude McKay, “Tiger,” version in undated notebook, Cycles, M.S., Claude McKay Papers. See Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).

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“the big problem – the problem and meaning of Western civilization as a whole and the relation of other groups to it.”6 For these intellectuals of the African diaspora, resolving this problem was linked, almost always, to the need to assert their humanity vis-à-vis the dehumanizing impact of racism and colonialism in all their various forms. By looking at the interactions between black thinkers living in the United States and those within the French Empire, it is possible to locate histories of African American civil rights activism and francophone antiimperialism at this moment within a larger constellation of conversations about the relationship between racial belonging, national citizenship and access to rights. The men and women who people this chapter sought to make racism intelligible not just in terms of World War II or their contemporary Cold War context but a much longer European and American history of political, economic and cultural domination. The question at the heart of their work was: how can the dynamics of Western civilization, and the promises of Republican democracies, be harnessed to guarantee equality in the face of racial, political and national difference? This chapter will chart their answers, explicating the contested nature of what it meant to be human and how this meaning related to political organization and access to rights at the national and international levels. In so doing, I will show how Franco-American diplomatic relations in this period were shaped significantly both by these discourses on race and by the activity of key black intellectuals such as Rayford W. Logan, W. E. B. Du Bois and Leopold Sédar Senghor.7 Studies of the Cold War that explicitly engage with the 6

7

Richard Wright, interview, William Gardner Smith, “Black Boy in France,” Ebony, 8 (July 1953): 40. While covert US cultural diplomacy in France in this moment has received some attention in the literature, the focus has been upon metropolitan spaces such as Paris or upon sites of conflict such as Algeria. Some recent work has tentatively begun to include the American engagement with French West Africa. For work on the Cold War that engages with the issue with race, see Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line; Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire. On Algeria, see Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). On cultural diplomacy, see Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). For work that has looked at the US involvement in French West Africa, see Martin C. Thomas, “Innocent Abroad?

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issue of race have hitherto tended to exclude the French Fourth Republic in their analyses, and this chapter makes some headway to rectify this neglect.

6.1 remaking the world in the american image When World War II ended, the United States was the most powerful nation in the world. Compared to other participants in the War such as France and Britain, the United States had suffered relatively minor human and economic losses. Many in Washington, DC, saw an opportunity to remake the world in the American image. The Truman doctrine, the European Recovery Plan (Marshall Plan) and then the Northern Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949) were geared toward this goal and, more specifically, toward preventing the only potential rival to US power, the Soviet Union and its brand of communism, from challenging this mission.8 The question of the treatment of African Americans was an embarrassing obstacle to these ambitions. Writing in early 1946, the poet and journalist Langston Hughes put it plainly when he said that America may be criticizing Russia for “suppressing personal liberties and individual freedoms but the U.S. cannot even show human kindness and decentness to its black citizens.”9 He was not alone in making the observation. That same year, Secretary of State Dean Acheson remarked that “[t]he existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. We are reminded over and over by some foreign newspapers and

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Decolonisation and the US Engagement with the French West Africa, 1945–1956,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36:1 (March 2008): 47–73; Louisa Rice, “Communists and Cowboys: Cultural Diplomacy, Decolonization and the Cold War in French West Africa,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 11:3 (Winter 2010) https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed October 14, 2017). For works on government level diplomacy between the US and France in the early Cold War that do not contend with race, see Michael Cresswell’s A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2006); William Hitchcock’s France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944–1954 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Irwin M. Wall’s L’Influence américaine sur la politique francaise 1945–1954 (Paris: Balland, 1989). Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 24. Langston Hughes, “Encounter at the Counter,” March 30, 1946, in C. DeSantis (ed.), Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics and Culture, 1942–1962 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 58.

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spokesmen, that our treatment of various minorities leaves much to be desired.”10 It was difficult to sell the United States as the harbinger of freedom and democracy when a significant number of its citizens were directly denied access to the rights those ideals entailed. Still hopeful about the potential of the United Nations and the commission working on the drafts for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the African American leadership did their best to exploit these fears. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) petitioned the United Nations: “An Appeal to the World: A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress,” a document written by W. E. B. Du Bois. He asked the UN “to redress human rights violations the United States committed against its African American citizens.”11 Du Bois submitted this petition on behalf of the NAACP to the UN Human Rights Commission in October 1947. The leadership of the commission refused to pass the petition on to the General Assembly on the grounds that it might harm the United States’ international reputation.12 Like the League of Nations before it, the United Nations Organisation did not accept individual petitioners. Du Bois leaked the “Appeal” to the press and the NAACP printed it as a pamphlet. The “Appeal” had little impact at the UN. In the United States, however, the document had wide circulation and some historians have credited it with galvanizing the domestic civil rights movement.13 The State Department was well aware of the Appeal and its potential to frustrate efforts to portray American

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Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson to the Chair of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, May 8, 1946, quoted in Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae at 19–20, Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948). For government concern about the impact of race relations on foreign affairs, see President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights (Washington, 1947); Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae, Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948); Brief for the United States, Henderson v. United States, 339 U.S. 815 (1950); Memorandum for the United States as Amicus Curiae, McLaurin v. Oklahoma, 339 U.S. 637 (1950); and Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). “An Appeal to the World A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of the United States of American and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress, 1947,” reprinted in W. E. B. Du Bois, “Three Centuries of Discrimination,” Crisis, 54 (December 1947): 380. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 44–45. Elizabeth Borgwardt, “Race Rights and Nongovernmental Organizations” in Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck (eds.), Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 203.

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democracy favorably. At the UN, the Soviet Union had proposed an investigation into the NAACP’s accusations.14 US President Truman commissioned a report into American civil rights in 1947. Titled To Secure These Rights, the investigation was designed to address concerns that the domestic “race problem” was hampering US foreign policy as tensions increased with the Soviet Union. He declared: “We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics. The world’s press and radio are full of it.”15 While the language of the finished report emphasized the continuity between the Republican democratic principles of the US founding documents and racial equality, it also left no doubt that the timeliness of the question lay in large part in international concerns.16 While the United States floundered to resolve its race problem, France, at least on the surface, seemed to be making better progress with its disenfranchised populations. The African American press followed the French political situation closely, praising the achievements of politicians such as the Guyanese Gaston Monnerville, the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor, and the Congolese Jane Vialle. Vialle attracted particular attention. In January 1947 she had been elected to the Council of the Republic in Paris as a delegate from the Ubangi-Shari region (now known as the Central African Republic). She was one of seventeen women in the 320-member Council and the second woman of African origin. (The first was the French Guyanese Senator, Eugénie Eboué-Tell.)17 When Vialle was also named as the French Delegate to the UN Commission on Slavery in 1949, the African American press made much of the appointment. Reports emphasized her role in the French Resistance and her dedication to reorganizing the French Union “based upon equality of rights and privileges without distinction as to race or religion.”18 When interviewed Vialle expressed “inexorable faith in the ultimate brotherhood of the nations of the world” and in the potential of the French Union to offer political equality and

14 15 16

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Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 45. To Secure These Rights (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1947), 147. Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-colonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 109–114. Ambassade de France Press Release, “French Negro Woman Senator in New York to serve on the United Nations Slavery Committee,” March 2, 1950, 2, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries (hereafter W. E. B. Du Bois Papers). “French Woman Senator in UN Group Meet,” Indianapolis Recorder, April 28, 1951, 9.

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“brotherhood in her native Congo.”19 Most commonly, journalists wrote of Vialle in the same breathe as wartime black hero Gaston Monnerville and other black politicians in France.20 Such reports implicitly positioned the French Republic as racially progressive in comparison to the United States. Citizenship of a nation, they emphasized, should be defined in terms of fealty to particular republican democratic traditions rather than to race. State Department officials and US diplomatic representatives were all too aware of the pervasiveness of the myth of a colorblind France. One Consul based in Dakar, Senegal, Robert F. Corrigan, bemoaned the common notion held even “among white people . . . [that] the French are the least guilty of racialism.” Moreover, when accused of colonialism and the exploitation of the indigenous people, the French would “rather tartly point to discrimination against the Negro in the United States.” In fact, “even without direct provocation,” he went on, the French “are wont to point the finger of scorn at the many evidences of racism in the great democracy across the sea.”21 It was difficult to persuade either the French or the French African peoples that the United States was leading the charge for democracy. The Rassemblement Démocratique Africaine or African Democratic Assembly’s (RDA’s) attitudes toward America was a case in point. By 1948, the RDA had active parties in six colonies: the Ivory Coast, Middle Congo, the Sudan, Ubang-Shari, Guinea and Chad. Leaders of the RDA were suspicious about the United States and their diplomatic forays into French concerns. From the late 1940s at least, the RDA party journals, Réveil (in French West Africa) and A.E.F. Nouvelle (in Equatorial Africa) were pro-Communist in tone and, at turns, critical of US imperialism. Réveil in particular featured articles criticizing the Marshall Plan and the associated Military Assistance Plan.22

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“Slavery Still Surges, Says Afro Leaders,” New York Age, May 5, 1951, 5; James L. Hicks, “Millions in French Congo Unhindered By Color Bars,” Afro-American, May 5, 1951, 32. For more on Vialle and the politics of representation, see Sarah C. Dunstan, “‘Une Nègre de drame’: Jane Vialle and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Reform, 1945–1953,” Journal of Contemporary History (February 2020):645–665. The Consul at Dakar (Corrigan) to the Department of State, “Some Observations Concerning Racism and Politics in FWA,” Dakar, September 16, 1953, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1952–1954, vol. 11, part 1, Africa and South Asia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), Document 96. American Consul General, Dakar, to Department of State, “Criticism of the US by the ‘Rassemblement Démocratique Africain,’” April 6, 1948, File 851T.00, Box 6326/3, RG 59, U.S. National Archives at College Park (NACP); Jester to Department of State,

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Such criticisms of the United States were not unjustified. When Charles de Gaulle and his foreign minister Georges Bidault signed the FrancoSoviet pact in December 1944, they were ostensibly keeping France independent from both the Soviet Union and the United States.23 By 1947, the French government had turned dramatically to the right. In May, those PCF politicians who remained in the National Assembly were ousted and the decision was made to accept American economic aid in the form of the Marshall Plan. It seemed clear that France was inclining toward the United States. The PCF’s loss of power meant the removal of those politicians who had been most sympathetic to the anti-imperialist cause and who had been allied with the RDA. Richard Wright explained this moment in France in terms of the peculiar brand of French Communism, observing that French communists had always believed in “a French Revolution, that their Communist Party was a French Communist Party.”24 Now afraid of Moscow’s party, their love of France had proved more affecting than their ideological allegiances. France was torn between America and Moscow.

6.2 building a political framework for modernity For Richard Wright, these political divisions were manifestations of bigger, existential struggles. It was, he wrote, “the battle of the Left and the Right, of the individual versus the mass, of industrialism vs freedom. Win or lose, what happens in France will say something important about human life on this earth.”25 A few months later, Wright had reached a more sobering conclusion. The Left and the Right had more and more in common and “the results in the end are the same, that is, the suppression of the individual, the devaluation of personality.” More and more, what was happening in Europe was “not only a contest between Left and Right, but a total extinction of the very conception of what it has meant to be a human being for 2,000 years.”26 In contemporary terms, the clash between American Capitalism and Soviet Communism meant a war

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“Communist line for FWA,” December 1, 1949, File 851T.00, Box 6326/3, RG 59, NACP. J.-B. Duroselle, France and the United States from the Beginnings to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 697. Richard Wright, “Two Letters to Dorothy Norman,” Twice a Year (February 28, 1948): 68. Richard Wright, “Two Letters to Dorothy Norman,” 71. Richard Wright, “Two Letters to Dorothy Norman,” 72–73.

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between two different visions of modernity.27 This tallied with the way that Wright understood his own break from the CPUSA. He explained his earlier commitment to the CPUSA in terms of the African American experience of discrimination and exclusion. The CPUSA’s illusory appeal had been that it represented “an organized search for the truth of the lives of the oppressed and the isolated.”28 He broke with the Party when he realized that the illusion depended on categories of “good and evil” rather than nuanced thought. Wright was not the only one thinking through the issues of this moment in terms of the question of humanity rather than a Left and Right binary. Léopold Sédar Senghor found himself in the same position. Senghor had refused to be involved in the RDA from its inception, choosing instead to pursue an alliance with the Overseas Minister, Marius Moutet’s, socialist party, the Section Francaise de l’international Ouvriere (SFIO). He was not alone in this decision. Fellow Senegalese Lamine Guèye also eschewed the RDA platform, in part because of the close links to the communists but also because its entirely African composition hinted at a potentially separatist mentality.29 Senghor made it clear that he wanted “less to rid ourselves of the tutelage of the metropole than of the tyranny of international capitalism.”30 Instead, taking “inspiration from European socialism and the old African collectivism,” he sought to “build a new world where . . . men will be equal and fraternal ‘without distinction of race or religion.’”31As a deputy for Senegal and thus a representative of an African population that was primarily Islamic but had a significant Catholic minority, the need for a political system that left room for these differences was pressing. It was not long, however, before Senghor broke with the Socialists as well as the PCF and formed a splinter group Bloc Démocratique Sénégalais with fellow SFIO Senegalese deputy Mamadou Dia and the political activist and army veteran Ibrahima Seydou Ndaw.32 The group’s 27 28

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Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War, 25. Richard Wright in Arthur Koestler (ed.), The God That Failed (New York: Harper & Row, 1949), 118. Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 167. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Les Négro-Africains et l’Union française,” Revue politique et parlementaire (June 1947): 208. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Les Négro-Africains et l’Union française,” 208. On the politics of this split, see Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 186–191; Jane G. Vaillant, Léopold Sédar Senghor: Black, French and African (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 224–267.

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journal, La Condition Humaine, opened with an editorial that made Senghor’s politics quite clear by demanding “the liberation of Africa in the framework of the French Union.”33Autonomy did not, for Senghor, equate to independence. On the contrary, he saw the world’s peoples as interdependent and as individual personalities which made up a universal whole. The connection between the French Empire and the African people he called “vertical solidarity,” a phrase that captured the unequal power dynamic. “Vertical solidarity” needed to occur in tandem with a “horizontal solidarity” between African peoples. “Horizontal solidarity,” for Senghor, meant a federation that would take place within the larger “confederation” of the French Union.34 In such a formulation individual difference – racial or religious – would comprise a natural part of a larger political whole. Gabrielle d’Arboussier, the SecretaryGeneral of the RDA, was very suspicious of Senghor’s articulation of blackness and vision for the future. In an article published in the PCF funded La Nouvelle Critique, he warned that “any revolution, black or white” was endangered by “the false prophets of reactionary existentialism” such as Senghor.35 D’Arboussier was critical of Senghor’s refusal to combine his socialist political beliefs with solidarity with the PCF and others who supported the proletariat. Nevertheless, Senghor’s belief in the need for integrated political frameworks that allowed for difference had much in common with the thinking of the African American diplomat Ralph Bunche. Bunche had risen from acting chief of the Division of Dependent Area Affairs in the US State Department to the chair of the Department of Trusteeship at the United Nations in 1946. He is credited with drafting the section of the UN Charter on “Non-Self-Governing Trust Territories.”36 Bunche was committed to anti-colonialism and saw the potential of international institutions to champion that reform. In part, this was because he had, since at least 1936, understood fascism, “with its extreme jingoism, its exaggerated exaltation of the state and its comic-opera glorification of race,” as 33

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Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Pourquoi ce nouveau journal?,” La Condition Humaine (February 11, 1948): 1. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Rapport Sur le méthode au premier congrès du BDS, 15.16. 17 avril, 1949 à Thiès,” La Condition Humaine (April 26, 1949), reprinted in Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté 2: Nation et voie africaine du socialisme (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 57. Gabriel d’Arboussier, “Une dangereuse mystification: la théorie de la Négritude,” La Nouvelle Critique (1949): 47. Brian Urquhart, Ralph Bunche: An American Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 118; Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 93.

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a variation of the “policy of world imperialism which had . . . subjected to systematic exploitation virtually all of the darker populations of the earth.”37 The antidote to imperialist thinking and to fascism itself, for Bunche, lay in the disassociation of political rights and citizenship from racial or cultural identifications. One of Bunche’s first appointments to the UN was the Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal, a friend from his studies in Paris during the interwar period.38 For eighteen months between 1945 and 1947, Nardal advised the Division for Non-Self-Governing territories as a specialist on the French West Indies. She was the first woman of color to hold an official post in this United Nations division.39 Bunche’s choice of Nardal epitomized the way he thought about the potential of the international institution. Like Bunche, Nardal believed that it was only through international alliance that “each individual, no matter their race or religion, would be able to live in material and moral conditions that conform to human dignity.”40 In much the same way as many francophone intellectuals and activists of her generation, Nardal also understood national belonging in terms of fidelity to and receipt of social, economic and political rights and duties rather than racial affiliation. Ralph Bunche agreed. For him, the right to self-determination did not necessitate, as it had done for many groups in the Wilsonian moment, the right of a people to independent nationhood. Instead, he defined selfdetermination in terms of individual citizenship and believed that all “the peoples of colonies and overseas territories” had a right to “freely chosen representatives.”41

37

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40 41

Ralph Bunche, “French and British Imperialism in West Africa,” Journal of Negro History 21:1 (January 1936): 31. “Paulette Nardal: L’Ame de la perfection,” Carib-Hebdo, 119 (May 16–23, 1979): 1. Gladys P. Graham, “Know Your United Nations,” New York Age, January 4, 1947, 7; “U. N. Personality,” New York Age (New York City, New York), January 11, 1947, 7. Much of the scholarship has ignored this connection or dismissed it. The following are among the few works that make brief reference to Nardal’s work at the UN: Emily Musil Church, “In Search of Seven Sisters: A Biography of the Nardal Sisters of Martinique,” Callaloo, 36:2 (Spring 2013): 375–390; Shireen K. Lewis, Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité (New York: Lexington Books, 2006), 67–69; Imoabong Umoren, Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 83–84. Paulette Nardal, “Nations Unies,” La Femme dans la Cité, 26 (January 1947): 4. UCLA, Papers of Ralph Bunche, Box 100, Folder 14: 16th Plenary Session of the West Indian Conference, March 12, 1946, as quoted in Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 94.

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The notion of a contract between each individual and the state formed a key part of Bunche and Nardal’s conception of citizenship. Upon receiving the Spingarn medal in 1949 for his contributions to diplomacy, Bunche delivered a speech arguing that “the American Negro seeks only his birthright as an American citizen – full integration, full opportunity in the democratic life of the nation.”42 Enjoyment of the rights that citizenship status afforded entailed, for Bunche, corollary “obligations and duties.”43 It was this transaction of rights for duties and obligations that Bunche saw as key to citizenship. He rejected explicitly any kind of hyphenated identity that emphasized difference, such as “Afro-American,” on the basis that ethnic identity did not correlate to political belonging. African American sociologist, and one of Bunche’s colleagues from his time at Howard University, E. Franklin Frazier, agreed. In a 1950 report to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Frazier argued that it was “principally the work of the Communists among the urbanized masses that was responsible for the idea that the Negroes were a racial minority seeking national independence.”44 How could this be true, he asked, when African Americans “have no cultural roots outside of the United States”?45 Citizenship to any nation, for Frazier, was about political affiliation rather than cultural or racial belonging. He understood his work at UNESCO in terms of a campaign to spread this message worldwide.

6.3 unesco, scientific knowledge and postwar definitions of race Frazier had become involved originally with UNESCO as an invitee to the committee working on the organization’s first Statement on Race.46 This transformed quickly into a job offer, and he was employed in Paris until 42

43

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45 46

Ralph Bunche, “The Alternatives: Peace or Ruin; Justice or Degeneracy,” Remarks made on acceptance of the 34th Spingarn Medal Award at NAACP 40th Annual Convention, Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, California, July 17, 1949, reprinted in “Ralph Bunche Speaks,” Crisis, 79:1 (January 1972): 14–15. Ralph Bunche, “The Alternatives,” 14–15. For Nardal’s perspective, which had a particularly gendered cast, see “Rassemblement Féminin,” La Femme dans la Cité (January 15, 1945): 1; “Optique électorale,” La Femme dans la cité, 5 (March 1, 1945): 3. E. Franklin Frazier, “Preliminary Report on the Influence of a Country’s Ethnic Structure Upon its Foreign Policy: The Negro in the United States,” June 30, 1950, 2, UNESCO//SS/ TAIU/EG.3, File 323. 12 A 102 “Statement on Race,” UNESCO Archives, Paris, France. E. Franklin Frazier, “Preliminary Report,” 2. E. Franklin Frazier to the Social Sciences Department, UNESCO, November 21, 1949, Box 131–54: Folder 18, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Centre, Howard University.

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the end of 1953, first as a program specialist, then Head of Applied Sciences and, finally, as head of his Division.47 To understand Frazier’s appointment, it is necessary to explain the origins of UNESCO. Established as the corollary cultural arm of the United Nations the organization was intended to perpetuate the humanist thinking that would underpin the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. From its inception, the struggle against racism was embedded in UNESCO. The organization’s founding constitution blamed the origins of World War II on “the denial of democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place . . . of the doctrine of men and races.”48 Integral to this understanding of the War was the idea that racism was the product of inadequate domestic policies rather than embedded civilizational structures resulting from imperialism.49 UNESCO, rather than any national government, its supporters asserted, was “best equipped to lead the campaign against race prejudice and to extirpate this most dangerous of doctrines,” racism.50 Racism, in this context, meant primarily anti-Semitism, particularly German antiSemitism, not colonialism nor the American Jim Crow system. UNESCO’s leaders believed scientific knowledge was the way to defeat racism. The key to overcoming racism that had flourished under Nazism lay in combatting “scientifically false ideas.”51 To this end, more than one hundred scholars were invited to work on a Statement on Race, under the direction of the French Anthropologist Alfred Métraux. E. Franklin Frazier chaired the proceedings. Ashley Montagu, an anthropologist trained under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, served as rapporteur, responsible for reporting conference deliberations to the UNESCO secretariat and completing the final draft of the statement.52 His appointment, alongside Frazier, symbolized the triumph of Boasian views of race and 47

48

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50 51 52

Solomon V. Arnaldo to E. Franklin Frazier, October 5, 1951; H.R. Wilmot (Head, Personnel Administration Section) to Frazier, October 26, 1951, Box 131–54: Folder 18; E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Centre, Howard University; “Notice of Personal Action,” Franklin Frazier Dossier, Bureau of Personnel and Management Central Records, WS/111.86, UNESCO Archives, Paris, France. “Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization” in Basic Texts, 2004 Edition (Paris: UNESCO, 2004), 7. Todd Shepard, “Algeria, France, Mexico, UNESCO: A Transnational History of Antiracism and Decolonization, 1932–1962,” Journal of Global History, 6:2 (2011): 287, 296. UNESCO, The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry (Paris: Unesco, 1952), 5. UNESCO, UNESCO and Its Programme: The Race Question (Paris: Unesco, 1950), 2–3. Montagu to Ramos, November 1, 1949, SS File 323. 12 A 102 “Statement on Race,” UNESCO Archives, Paris, France.

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culture as distinct. In his 1942 bestselling treatise, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, Montagu had defined race as historically contingent and argued that the racist connotations of the word required the reconceptualization of terminology around genetic and cultural difference.53 When the first statement was published in 1950 it bore the traces of this view of race. The opening declaration read that “scientists have reached general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species, Homo sapiens.”54The document stressed the lack of scientific “proof that the groups of mankind differ in their innate mental characteristics, whether in respect of intelligence or temperament.”55 The meaning was clear: there was no justification for racial hierarchies which mapped on to access to political rights. Race and culture were de-coupled. The UNESCO Courier ran with the title “Fallacies of Racism Exposed: UNESCO Publishes Declaration by World’s Scientists” and Time with the humanist: “All Human Beings.”56 The New York Times reported that “race was less a biological fact than a social myth.”57 African American newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender were similarly jubilant. Articles in each paper emphasized the document’s consistent resistance to any idea of biological justification for racial hierarchy.58 Immediately, these papers connected the statement to the present American context. In the Chicago Defender, one journalist declared his intention to “SOS that fleet of race-baiters in the United States Congress” who had refused to countenance “interracial marriage” ostensibly on the grounds of racial inferiority.59 The Baltimore Afro-American linked it immediately to the segregation of African American soldiers who had served during the war.60

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55 56

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Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), 5. Other members of the multinational committee included Ernest Beaglehole (New Zealand), Juan Comas (Mexico), L. A. Costa Pinto (Brazil), Morris Ginsberg (United Kingdom), Humayun Kabir (India) and Claude Levi-Strauss (France). “Statement on Race, Paris, July 1950” in UNESCO, Four Statements on the Race Question (Paris: UNESCO, 1969), 30. “Statement on Race, Paris, July 1950,” 34. “Fallacies of Racism Exposed: UNESCO Publishes Declaration by World’s Scientists,” UNESCO Courier, 3, 6/7 (July/August 1950): 1; “All Human Beings,” Time, 56 (July 31, 1950): 34. “No Scientific Basis for Race Bias Found by World Panel of Experts,” New York Times, July 18, 1950, 1. “Brothers under the Racial Skin,” Chicago Defender, July 29, 1950, 6; “UNESCO Raps All Race Myths,” Chicago Defender, July 29, 1950, 3; “UNESCO Report Blasts ‘Race’ Differences,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 29, 1950, 3. “UNESCO Raps All Race Myths,” Chicago Defender, July 28, 1950, 3. “UN Explodes Race Myth,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 29, 1950, 17.

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White commentators, however, did not make the same links. A New York Times journalist applauded the 1950 statement on the basis that “to eliminate ‘race’ as a scientific term is a step towards ending it as a myth that dictators and movements use as political instruments to gain and exercise power.”61 The dictators and movements he had in mind were from “the Nazi era” and those lurking “behind the Iron Curtain.”62 Racism was a feature of totalitarian regimes, not American democracy. It was not long before the Statement became embroiled in the same debates around racial difference which had confronted earlier social scientific attempts involving W. E. B. Du Bois, Franz Boas, James Weldon Johnson, Melville Herskovits and, indeed, Ashley Montagu, to construct race in cultural and historical terms.63 Physical anthropologists and geneticists from all over the world reviewed the statement unfavorably and wrote letters of complaint.64 Under increasing pressure, Alfred Métraux attempted to resolve the problem by convening a second committee to revise the statement. In an attempt to evade charges of “empty idealism,” the committee included a much larger number of physical anthropologists and geneticists.65 A draft version of the revised statement was circulated to an even broader international community in the hope that receiving early peer review would circumvent further public controversy. One thing became evident from the criticisms the draft received: scholarly consensus on the issue of race was unlikely. An overwhelmed Métraux consequently published the 1951 draft alongside its critiques. The prefatory statement emphasized that they took no issue with the general spirit of the initial statement but felt the need to clarify the scientific possibility of differences between the race. Many reviewers were perfectly willing to accept that there was no current scientific evidence to prove the innate differences of intelligence between racial groups (defined along sociocultural lines). They refused, however, to endorse a statement that implied that this lack of difference 61 62 63

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“The Myth of Race,” New York Times, July 19, 1950, 30. “The Myth of Race,” New York Times, July 19, 1950, 30. Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, had attracted a great deal of criticism for continuing the Boasian argument about race: Michelle Brattain, “Race, Racism and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public,” American Historical Review, 112:5 (December 2007): 1395. T. Dale Stewart, “Scientific Responsibility,” n.d., typescript of article for American Journal of Physical Anthropology; Alfred Métraux to Ashley Montagu, March 2, 1951, SS File 323. 12 A 102 “Statement on Race,” UNESCO Archives, Paris, France. Alfred Métraux to Ernest Beaglehole, April 23, 1951, UNESCO//SS/TAIU/EG.3, File 323. 12 A 102 “Statement on Race,” Unesco Archives, Paris, France.

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was an established scientific fact. Some of the commentators, such as the British geneticists Kenneth Maher, C. D. Darlington and Ronald Fisher and Italian anthropologist Giuseppe E. Genna, believed that it was important to avoid “the danger that any statement about Race issued by people who disagree with the Nazi views on races expressed 20 years ago by Hitler, Rosenberg and Streicher will be designed as a reply to those views.”66 The Nazi views were “emotional in expression and political in purpose” and very different to the “expression of scientific opinions.”67 The first UNESCO Statement on Race had, these men argued, fallen into this trap. In short, these scientists were attempting to make a distinction between race and racism in much the same way as the New York Times articles had done. While thinkers such as Césaire and Du Bois and commentators in the black press saw a very clear connection between the crimes of Hitler, Rosenberg and Streicher and “Europe’s colonialist procedures,” these scientists saw the former as an aberration in the history of Western civilization. Racial prejudice, rather than racism, was the problem at hand. Despite these revisions to the Statement on Race, UNESCO continued to publish material in the UNESCO Courier and in stand-alone pamphlets that argued for the understanding of race elaborated in the 1950 version.68 Anthropologists Alfred Métraux, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Leiris were central to this agenda. All three advocated cultural pluralism and repudiated the idea that race could be used as a determinant for civilization.69 Leiris, in particular, was invested in this message. He had been involved with André Breton’s surrealist group in the early 1920s before turning toward the study of ethnography under Marcel Mauss in the late 1920s and 1930s.70 Under the auspices of UNESCO, he published a pamphlet entitled Race and Civilisation, as well as a report on the 66 67 68

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The Race Concept: The Result of an Enquiry (UNESCO: Paris, 1952), 20–21. The Race Concept, 21. Often the UNESCO Statements on Race are cited as examples of the humanist and universalist veins in postwar approaches to race. As Michelle Brattain has observed, however, the moment is perhaps best characterized in terms of “a stalemate over what had become the default assumption, or null hypothesis, about racial differences.” Michelle Brattain, “Race, Racism and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public,” American Historical Review, 112:5 (December 2007): 1390. Michel Leiris, Race and Culture (Paris: UNESCO, 1951); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952). Sally Price and Jean Jamin, “A Conversation with Michel Leiris,” Current Anthropology 29:1 (February 1988): 157–174; Fernande Bing and Alfred Métraux, “Entretiens Avec Alfred Métraux,” L’Homme, 4:2 (1964): 20–32.

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relationship between African culture and Sculpture.71 The latter examined moments of convergence between African and European art with the idea that this could show the kind of contributions that “African cultures could . . . bring to a universal civilization.”72 For Leiris, this kind of cultural exchange was important because it allowed for the “elaboration of a truly human civilization,” the kind of civilization required for global peace.73 Such an argument echoed those made by the Nardal sisters, Jane and Paulette, two decades earlier and then by thinkers such as Césaire, Roussy Césaire and Ménil in their journal Tropiques. The French thinkers associated with UNESCO had not, however, entirely shed interwar notions of racial difference. Leiris’s report, as with the work of Métraux and LéviStrauss, suggested that the best way to facilitate the process of a universal civilization was to ensure the dissemination of modern Western techniques. That way, in each of the non-self-governing territories, “the voices of the inhabitants will be able to make themselves heard at the earliest possible opportunity.”74 This emphasis upon cultural self-determination and the adoption of Western technology had much in common with interwar colonial humanism.75 Anti-racism seemed to imply not the revalorization of oppressed cultures but their destruction.76 Exposure to the right culture, namely Western culture, would bring less-advanced civilizations up to speed.77 71

72 74

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Michel Leiris, Race et Civilisation, La Question raciale devant la science moderne (Paris: UNESCO-Paris, 1951); Michel Leiris, “Enquête sur les relations entre les cultures les nègres d’Afrique et les arts sculpturaux,” August 18, 1949, UNESCO/PHS/CE/9, Unesco Archives, Paris, France. 73 M. Leiris, “Enquête,” 4. M. Leiris, “Enquête,” Annexe, 3. M. Leiris, “Enquête,” Annexe, 3; Mauss had been a pioneer of French cultural anthropology. He had argued that the scientific rigor of ethnography could allow for more effective and humane methods of colonial administration: Alice L. Conklin, “Civil Society, Science and Empire in Late Republican France: The Foundation of Paris’s Museum of Man,” Osiris, 17:1 (2002): 288; Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013): 58–99; Vincent Debaene, L’adieu Au Voyage: L’ethnologie Française Entre Science et Littérature, Bibliothèque Des Sciences Humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 2010); Christine Laurière, Paul Rivet, Le Savant & Le Politique (Paris: Publications scientifiques du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 2008), 342. On interwar colonial humanism in the case of the French Empire, see Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation State, and N. Cooper, France in Indochina (Oxford: Bergson, 2001). Wilder coins the phrase colonial humanism to explain the interwar period of French colonialism in terms of this shift to ethnographically inflected administration. See Alfred Métraux, “Race and Civilisation,” UNESCO Courier, 3:6 (July–August, 1950): 8. See Alfred Métraux, “An Indian Girl: A Lesson for Humanity,” UNESCO Courier, 3:8 (September 1950): 8.

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6.4 asserting an african presence in western civilization The perspectives of humanist thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss and Leiris intersected directly with the work of a network of intellectual luminaries who sought to challenge contemporary understandings of Western civilization – those associated with the journal and publishing house Présence Africaine. Présence Africaine was the project of a group of students and intellectuals led by the Senegalese SFIO senator to the French parliament, Alioune Diop. The journal had been launched in 1947 and, by 1948, had expanded to include a publishing house.78 In his statement of the journal’s aims, Diop explicitly indicated that the journal was “open to . . . all men (white, yellow or black) who can help define African originality and hasten its insertion into the modern world.”79 Diop believed that literature was a mechanism of modernity, “as essential as Parliament.”80 To a certain extent, Diop agreed with Lévi-Strauss and Leiris that oppressed peoples (déhérités) in the colonies could benefit greatly by adopting European – specifically French – cultural mechanisms.81 This was not intended as a facile mimicry of European ways. Diop warned that a Europe that did not in turn incorporate the perspectives and cultures of those who had been oppressed for so long “risked disintegrating into a kind of sterile narcissism.”82 It was important that black peoples signified their “presence by contributing to the recreation of a humanism to the true measure of man” because the “world of tomorrow will be built by all men.”83 The timing was important because World War II had created an opening for a conscious rebuilding of civilization. As Madagascan poet and politician and a regular contributor to Présence Africaine Jacques Rabemananjara later put it, for the students from French overseas territories, the

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Diop resigned from his senatorial seat in 1948 to dedicate himself to Présence Africaine. Alioune Diop, “Niam N’goura ou les raisons d’être de Présence Africaine,” Présence Africaine, 1 (November–December 1947): 7. Alioune Diop, “Niam n’goura,” 12. Brent Hayes Edwards argues that the journal was “expressly conceived as an African incursion into modernity”: “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text, 66 (Spring 2001): 47. Christopher Miller offers an alternate reading of Diop’s “Niam N’goura.” To Miller, it seems that Diop’s framing of European modernity “analysed its weakness and anticipated its collapse”: “Alioune Diop and the Unfinished Temple of Knowledge” in V. Y. Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 431. 82 Alioune Diop, “Niam n’goura,” 13. Alioune Diop, “Niam n’goura,” 13. Alioune Diop, “Niam N’goura,” 13.

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German occupation had meant “the defeat of all the Western values that we had learnt under colonization.”84 These shattered values had to be reconstituted in such a way that they applied to all peoples equally. Originally Diop had planned to launch Présence Africaine in Dakar, Senegal. Instead, he located the journal in Paris, hoping for a diaspora-wide publication. Even more pertinent, however, was Diop’s desire to reach white audiences too. While the postwar climate allowed a greater print culture in the French overseas territories than had been possible in the interwar period, Paris remained the seat of federal power. Here, the journal could include thinkers from throughout the African diaspora as well as French intellectual luminaries.85 It was a wise move. The Comité du patronage encompassed many key intellectual figures and movements of the contemporary Parisian landscape. Other than Leiris and Lévi-Strauss, these included existentialist thinkers such as Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright; ethnographer Paul Rivet; French humanist author André Gide; Beninese ethnologist and politician Paul Hazoumé; Dominican Director of La Vie Intellectuelle Father Maydieu; the Catholic personalist thinker Emmanuel Mounier; and negritude thinkers and politicians Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Initially, the journal relied on the intellectual clout of these thinkers and their willingness to advertise and review Présence Africaine in their own publications, such as Mounier’s Esprit.86 Being at the intersection of these French movements and powerful individuals allowed the journal to escape the repression that several other black newspapers such as L’Étudiant d’Afrique noire contemporaneously

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Jacques Rabemananjara, “Alioune Diop, le cenobite de la culture noire” in Hommage à Alioune Diop, Fondateur de Présence Africaine (Rome: Éditions des amis italiens de présence africaine, 1977), 17. Bernard Mouralis, “Présence Africaine: Geography of an Ideology” in V. Y. Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech, 3. For a study of African publishing in French more broadly, see Ruth Bush, Publishing African in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization, 1945–1967 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). See, for example, J. H. “Revues: Présence Africaine numéro 6,” Esprit (1940–), 157:7 (1949): 1120–1121. Although many studies of Présence Africaine’s founding or of the intellectuals involved make brief reference to this network of thinkers, none examine the interplay of attitudes around race, rights and civilization that occurred in the founding issues: see, for example, Sylvia Washington Bâ, The Concept of Négritude in the Poetry of Leopold Sédar Senghor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973); V. Y. Mudimbe (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech; Cedric Tolliver, “Making Culture Capital: Présence Africaine and Diasporic Modernity in Post-World War II Paris” in Jeremy Braddock and Jonathon P. Eburne (eds.), Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013): 200–222.

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suffered at the hands of the French Ministry of Overseas Territories.87 In a later interview, Cameroonian Christiane Yandé Diop, a key collaborator in the journal and Alioune Diop’s wife, argued that “we needed the protection of great names – Gabriel Marcel, André Gide. They didn’t dare touch us under the protection of these people.”88 The protection of these intellectuals did not extend beyond Paris. Jacques Rabemananjara is a case in point. At the very moment the journal was officially launched in Paris, he was imprisoned in a French jail in Madagascar, charged with inciting revolution. He had survived a revolt that had led to the French Colonial Administration killing 80,000 people.89 Years later Rabemananjara claimed that the French Chief of Security in Madagascar had told him that one of the reasons he was under suspicion was his connections to Alioune Diop and the anti-colonialism of the Présence Africaine circle.90 As this incident illustrates, the form of the French Union and the freedoms it permitted and forbade were in flux in these final years of the 1940s. While the War had opened up greater space for political and print-based activism in certain of the French colonies and territories, there were still distinct limitations. Paris remained the most liberal forum for anti-imperialist agitation. As Secretary of State Marshall observed in relation to anticommunist efforts in France in 1949, “[W]hen we reached the problem of increasing security in Europe, I found all the French troops of any quality were out in Indochina . . . and the only place they were not was in Western Europe.”91 Writing in the first issue of Présence Africaine, André Gide viewed postwar Paris as a place where mutual enrichment was finally possible: “So rich and so beautiful is our civilization, our culture we have finally admitted that it is not the only one; that our ways of living, our standards, our icons, our credos are not the only ones and that if they appear to us to be superior it is because we have been formed by them.”92 Jean-Paul 87

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See François Maspero, Les abeilles & la guêpe (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002); Pap Ndiaye, La Condition noire: Essai sur un minorité francaise (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2008), 327. Christiane Diop to Benetta Jules-Rosette (1988) in Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writer’s Landscape (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 39. For an account of the Madagascan uprising and the subsequent reactions of the Colonial administration, see Jacques Tronchon, L’insurrection malgache de 1947: essai d’interprétation historique (Paris: Maspero, 1974). Jacques Rabemananjara, “Alioune Diop,” 27. Marshall quoted in Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972): 558. André Gide, “Avant-propos,” Présence Africaine, 1 (November–December, 1947): 3.

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Sartre, too, sketched a path forward that resembled the notions of a Eurafrican civilization that Paulette Nardal, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and, to a certain extent, Alain Locke, had advocated in the 1930s in journals such as the Revue du monde noir. As with these black thinkers, Sartre warned his readers against tokenistic inclusions. Rather than permitting only a select few to participate in the intellectual scene, a phenomenon he had recently witnessed during his time in New York, he argued that the French needed to welcome all those who wished to contribute.93 A true presence noire was the sine qua non of a truly egalitarian Republic.94 While Sartre did not explain how this could be achieved, Gide explicitly addressed his contribution to white French audiences. He urged them to “aid them [les noirs] to inventory their consciousness of self and that this confidence in self that they are still lacking; this assurance of their very specific virtues without the worry of our approbation.”95 There had been an “absence africaine,” but now there was a “présence africaine” on the French intellectual landscape. Not all of the contributors to the journal were so open-minded about the possibilities of equal black contributions to French civilization. Emmanuel Mounier, both a friend to Diop and his colleague at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, offered a more paternal view of the future in his contribution to the fledgling journal. Mounier had just spent months in 1946 in West Africa on a cultural mission funded by the Ministry of Overseas France, the new name for the old Ministry for the Colonies. His writing retained the colonial attitudes of the interwar period. Mounier identified Diop’s aim as being the construction of a “Eurafrican” civilization.96 While he certainly believed that Africa had great potential and he strongly believed that the threat of mutually assured destruction necessitated peaceful cultural exchange, Mounier counseled Diop and his collaborators to be patient. They should remember, he urged, that Africa was a civilization in an early stage of development, still growing and maturing. This was not, Mounier made clear, a matter of race but of “social, economic and moral struggle.”97 In resolving this struggle, 93

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Jean-Paul Sartre, “Présence noire,” Présence Africaine, 1 (November–December, 1947): 28–29. For an evaluation of Sartre’s work on race in this period, see Benetta Jules-Rosette, “JeanPaul Sartre and the philosophy of négritude,” Theory and Society, 36:3 (June 2007): 265–285. André Gide, “Avant-propos,” Présence Africaine, 1 (November–December, 1947): 6. Emmanuel Mounier, “Lettre à un ami africain,” 1 (November–December, 1947): 33. Emanuel Mounier, “Lettre à un ami africain,” 39.

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Mounier advised Africans to look to France and Europe for guidance rather than to other colonies such as those in the Antilles.98 Nevertheless, Alioune Diop’s vision for Présence Africaine had always extended farther than Africa and, indeed, beyond the francophone world. From the beginning, the journal appeared in both English and French and Diop clearly envisaged blackness in diasporic terms. Richard Wright and Thomas Diop were responsible for most of the translations into English and Wright facilitated the publication of African American writers in the journal. The journal included excerpts from Wright’s own work as well as material from the poet Gwendolyn Brooks and essays by E. Franklin Frazier and Horace Cayton.99 Wright himself was a touchstone for many of the articles that appeared in the Présence Africaine. Alongside Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, he was lauded as part of an important black intellectual tradition of cultural authenticity.100 Such authenticity was necessary to reinvigorate contemporary civilizations. In a footnote to the journal’s prospectus, Diop linked the genesis of Présence Africaine to the example set by “the Africans ‘expatrié’ in America” who “amply demonstrate that the spiritual vitality of the nègre and their creative powers are now necessary to the world.”101 As an aside, he noted that despite this vanguard role, “for the most part” African Americans had “completely forgotten their African values,” presumably as a result of their experiences in the New World. Notably, Diop’s comment was missing from Wright and Thomas Diop’s English translation of the piece.102 Given the unitary aims of the journal, it was probably a wise omission. Nonetheless, in the early years of the journal, Americans occupied a curious place in the Présence Africaine imaginary. Contributors often wrote articles about African American culture.103 Most of the francophone 98 99

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Emmanuel Mounier, “Lettre à un ami africain,” 42. Richard Wright’s “Claire étoile du matin,” trans. Boris Vian, Présence Africaine, 1 (November–December, 1947): 120–135; Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Ballad of Pearl May Lee/La complainte de Pearl May Lee,” trans. Madeleine Gautier, Présence Africaine, 1 (November–December, 1947): 111–119. For example, see Madeleine Gautier, “Une romancier de la race noire, Richard Wright,” Présence Africaine, 1 (November–December, 1947): 163–165; P.M., “Langston Hughes ou ≪Le Train de la liberté≫” Présence Africaine, 2 (January 1948): 340–342. Alioune Diop, “Niam n’goura,” 12. I owe this observation to Cedric Tolliver, “Making Culture Capital,” 220. See for example Madeleine Gautier, “Une romancier de la race noire, Richard Wright,” 163–165; Jean Caillens, “Blues. – Poésies de l’Amérique noire,” Présence Africaine, 1 (November–December, 1947): 167–168; Henri-Jacques Dupuy, “Hugues Pannassie – Louis Armstrong cinq mois à New York,” Présence Africaine, 2 (January 1948):

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contributors to the journal were quick to emphasize that all blacks were united by a shared socio-historical experience of dislocation. One author publishing under the initials P.M. took the view that “the life of blacks in our colonies is very similar to that of blacks in the USA.”104 Insofar as P.M. was concerned, the question of equality in both the USA and the French colonies “will be resolved . . . when economic justice is established” and the voices of “the colored brothers” of French citizens were recognized on equal footing.105 Martinican writer and teacher Louis T. Achille emphasized this economic identity too, defining the race as “a people almost exclusively comprised of workers.”106 African Americans thus had common cause with “all workers and all men deprived of liberty.”107 Not all Americans saw things this way. While internationalist thinkers such as Alain Locke championed the journal and Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Horace Cayton and Langston Hughes were happy to contribute their work, few African American activists were convinced of the compatibility of diasporic aims.108 In 1951 St. Clair Drake, the pioneering sociologist, spoke for many when he castigated the editorial committee behind Présence Africaine for perpetuating “a kind of racial mysticism suffused with pan-African sentiments.”109 Of course, there was a significant reason for Drake’s, and others’, discomfort with the journal. Stuart Hall captured it neatly when he declared that the founding of Présence Africaine was “a key moment not only in the makings of Paris noir, but in the recasting of phenomenological or existential philosophical traditions along the axes of

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346–347; E. Bornemans, “Les racines de la musique de l’Américaine noire,” Présence Africaine, 4 (1948): 576–589; Jacques Howlett, “Notes sur Chester Himes et l’aliénation noire,” Présence Africaine, 4 (1948): 697–704. P.M., “Langston Hughes ou ≪Le Train de la liberté≫” Présence Africaine, 2 (Janvier 1948): 341. P.M., “Langston Hughes ou ≪Le Train de la liberté≫” Présence Africaine, 2 (Janvier 1948): 341, 342. Louis T. Achille, “Amérique du nord,” Présence Africaine, 8/9 Le Monde Noir (1950): 368. Louis T. Achille, “Amérique du nord,” 370. Richard Wright, “Claire étoile du matin: Deuxième partie,” Présence Africaine, 2 (January 1948): 299–316; Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Ballad of Pearl May Lee/La complainte de Pearl May Lee,” 111–119; Horace R. Cayton, “A Psychological Approach to Race Relations,” Présence Africaine, 3 (1948): 418–431; Horace R. Cayton, “A Psychological Approach to Race Relations,” Présence Africaine, 4 (1948): 549–563; Langston Hughes and Margalit Martin, “Témoignages: Simple, noir d’Amèrique,” Présence Africaine, trans. Margalit Martin, 12 (1951): 208–224. St. Clair Drake, “The International Implications of Race and Race Relations,” 272.

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blackness.”110 Many of the articulations of race published in the journal were underpinned by a deep engagement with the currents of existentialism and Marxism running through the Parisian intellectual landscape. The achievements of politicians such as Jane Vialle and Gaston Monnerville were far preferable to a thinker such as Drake because they demonstrated the potential of black political integration. By the early 1950s, the specter of communism had been used by the US government, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, to persecute political differences and criticisms of US democracy.

6.5 anti-communist backlash and diasporic identification Fears around Bolshevik and Communist invasions of the United States had existed since the Russian Revolution of 1917. During the Popular Front era of the 1930s, the State Department and the FBI had been deeply suspicious of Communist groups, and in 1938 a Special House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities had been established. In 1945 the Committee became the permanent House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and members of the Committee worked closely with the FBI to identify potential subversive influences in the United States. The Smith Act was a particularly important instrument of this anti-communist agenda. Passed in 1940 as the Alien Registration Act, the federal law made it a criminal offense to advocate the overthrow of the government. It was used primarily against the Socialist Worker’s Party and members of the CPUSA but no group was immune to scrutiny.111 In 1947, President Truman set up the federal employee loyalty program in response to accusations of communism within his own administration.112 Minority communities found themselves the subject of particular focus precisely because belonging to a minority racial group tended to correlate to curtailed or second-class status. FBI surveillance records indicate that the Bureau certainly equated blacks with communism in this period.113 As a result,

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Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 153. Paul Finkelman, Encyclopaedia of American Civil Liberties, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 338. Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 2–3. Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups, Committee on UnAmerican Activities, US House of Representatives, 81st Congress, 1st Session, July 13,

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some African American thinkers chose to define their national identities in terms of fidelity to democratic rather than community political norms. One important example of this can be found in the conservative journalist George Schuyler’s characterization of Jane Vialle in his Pittsburgh Courier columns. Schuyler and Vialle had met during her time in New York as a delegate to the United Nations. When Schuyler visited France in 1950, he renewed their friendship.114 His reiteration of their meetings reads like a spy novel. Vialle, he reported, had exposed a Parisian Communist conspiracy wherein Soviet agents were indoctrinating vulnerable young African students into Communist circles. They did this by first offering subsidies to help support the students’ studies and then unobtrusively introducing “one or two Red Africans” into their social circles. To fight this insidious indoctrination, Vialle had set up placements for African students with “non-Red French families” who could ensure that the students were surrounded by more appropriate political sensibilities. This, Schuyler declared, was further evidence of patriotism from “journalist-sociologist-politician who proudly wears the decoration of the French Resistance for her services for France during the dark days of the occupation.”115 Vialle was certainly dedicated to the principles of the French Fourth Republic. Moreover, she had long championed and run programs for students from the French overseas territories studying in the metropole. It seems far more likely, however, that she understood these efforts not as part of a struggle against Communism but as a means of consolidating links between the French overseas territories and mainland France. Politically speaking, she embraced an agenda that inclined far further to the left than Schuyler’s portrait allowed. Although she had initially run for Senate in 1947 as an independent, she had, by 1948, joined the SFIO.116 By characterizing her actions as a strike against the Soviets, however, Schuyler could make the argument that blacks were loyal and invaluable citizens, unlikely to be tempted by communist rhetoric. His emphasis on her Resistance pedigree and Senatorial position underlines this agenda. Such characterization also appealed directly to the State Department

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14, 17, 1949 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1949–1950); Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 3. George S. Schuyler, “Views and Reviews: How the Communists Take Over African Students,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 29, 1950, 15. George S. Schuyler, “Views and Reviews: How the Communists Take Over African Students,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 29, 1950, 15. For more on Vialle and her politics, see Sarah C. Dunstan, “‘Une Nègre de drame.’”

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where officials were preoccupied with winning the “minds and loyalties of the French and of the indigenous peoples” over to the American way of life.117 By the time Schuyler was writing about Vialle in 1950, two very prominent African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, had stirred up a great deal of controversy through their engagement with international Communist movements.118 Their stories help explain why George Schuyler attempted to position Jane Vialle in this fashion. The Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) launched the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroclaw, Poland in August 1948. Although organized by the Cominform, the Congress was originally seen as a bipartisan attempt to overcome Cold War tensions. To this end, Julian Huxley agreed to act as chair in his official UNESCO capacity. He was disenchanted quickly. Believing the Congress to be nothing but a front for Communist propaganda, he washed his hands of the initiative after the first Warsaw meeting. The withdrawal of UNESCO sanction did little to curb the movement’s appeal. When a second meeting occurred in Paris in April 1949 under the ambit of the newly formed Congrès Mondiale des Partisans de la Paix or the World Congress of Partisans for the Peace, the conference attracted more than 2,000 delegates from 75 countries. Among the attendees were those who had been active in the American and French Popular Front cultural and political movements of the 1930s, including intellectuals and artists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, Louis Aragon, Paul Robeson, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera and Jean-Paul Sartre. At the Congress, Robeson spoke at length about the inequity of drawing African Americans into war with the Soviet Union. He was misquoted in the Associated Negro Press as having declared: “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation had raised our people to the full 117

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American Consul General, Dakar to Department of State, “USIE Country Paper on French West Africa: Suggested Revisions,” April 26, 1950 (original dated April 5), File 511.51T/4–2650, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, US National Archives. For a detailed account of how the political activity of each man was curtailed by the State Department in the 1950s, see their respective biographies: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 496–553; Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: New Press, 1989), 341–350; 409–428; Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 114–136.

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dignity of mankind.”119 This statement caused an uproar. Robeson maintained that he had only “said it was unthinkable that the colored people of America or elsewhere in the world could be drawn into war with the Soviet Union. I repeat it with hundredfold emphasis. They will not.”120 Communist thinker (and soon to be the wife of Du Bois) Shirley Graham also had spoken at the Conference. She was no less insistent that African Americans did not want to be “fed to another war” for the purposes of US imperialism.121 The African American press howled its disagreement. Reporters at the New York Age thundered that Robeson was a “martyr to the unholy cause of totalitarianism” who had utterly misrepresented the black community.122 The Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender and Crisis ran similar commentaries.123 Again and again, reporters and key black leaders such as the NAACP’s Walter White linked their criticism of Robeson’s words with a commitment to the principles of US democracy.124 George Schuyler was particularly excoriating in his Pittsburgh Courier column. As far as he was concerned, “Robeson’s smearing of 14,000,000 Negroes as potential traitors played right into the hands of our worst enemies, the Negrophobes of this country.”125

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P. L. Prattis, “Robeson, Du Bois Cause Uproar at Paris Meet,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 30, 1949, 3; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963, 544–545. “Robeson Tells What He Said,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 25, 1949. There are different versions of Robeson’s speech, which was delivered in French and only later translated. According to Robeson’s biographer Martin Duberman, “The only full and unimpeachable record of what Robeson said in Paris is on a film of the event that is known to exist but has so far resisted all efforts at recovery.” Other attendees at the Congress, including a British delegate Ivor Montagu, thought the Associated Press version was almost entirely false: Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson, 687. P. L. Prattis, “Robeson, Du Bois Cause Uproar at Paris Meet,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 30, 1949, 3; “Mr Robeson Goes To Town . . . An Editorial,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 30, 1949, 14. “Count Us Out,” New York Age, May 7, 1949, 14. See, for example, P. L. Prattis, “Robeson, Du Bois Cause Uproar at Paris Meet,” 3; “Our Opinions: Nuts to Mr. Robeson,” Chicago Defender, April 30, 1949, 6; Robert Alan, “Paul Robeson – The Lost Shepherd,” Crisis, 58:9 (November 1951): 569–573. “Paul Robeson: Right or Wrong. Right Says W. E. B. Du Bois. Wrong Says Walter White,” Negro Digest (March 1950): 14. George S. Schuyler, “Views and Reviews: So, Along Comes Paul Robeson with The Clincher!,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 7, 1949, 15. Notably, on the same page as Schuyler’s column, J. A. Rogers offered a more qualified opinion: “Robeson may be wrong but his speech offers food for thought.” J. A. Rogers, “Rogers Says,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 7, 1949, 15. See also Nikhil Pal Singh, who suggests that for some black men, “Robeson’s resistance at the price of fame and fortune made him a figure of assertive black manhood to be admired, if not emulated.” Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is

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Robeson’s unpopular reception in the United States did not deter Du Bois from involvement in the Peace Movement. Neither man was necessarily blind to the flaws of the communist state but the Soviet Union remained the sole country that refused to define itself and self-determination in terms of whiteness.126 Both were also committed to peace and all too aware of the hypocrisy of US democracy. As Du Bois himself put it in 1949, the Soviet Union “may be criticized . . . but as compared with the anarchy and license of America . . . Russia has the right to be proud of the work of a single generation.”127 Attacks of the USSR on the grounds of faulty democratic processes seemed particularly galling to Du Bois, who observed “this criticism . . . must first be examined in the light of what the Western world has accomplished in this same democracy. It is nothing less than idiotic for the United States to pose as a Pattern of Democracy.”128 After the Paris Congress, Du Bois traveled to Moscow with the Gabon-Congo deputy Gabriel d’Arboussier for the August 1949 All-Soviet Peace Conference.129 D’Arboussier was the Vice-President of the World Peace Congress Committee, in addition to being Secretary General of the RDA. His own speech at the Paris Congress had attracted the attention of the African American press: the Pittsburgh Courier reported that d’Arboussier believed the only route to peace was the “deliverance of Africa from all forms of colonialism,” including that of US cultural and economic imperialism.130 Du Bois was the only American in attendance and he observed approvingly that most of the talks “emphasized the theme that “Anglo-American imperialism” was intent on fomenting war.”131 In his speech to an audience of six thousand, he declared himself the representative “of that large group of fourteen million Americans . . . who in a sense explain America’s pressing problems.”132 He took pains to elaborate that the claim that the

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a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 179. Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 149–201. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Russia: An Interpretation,” ca. October 1949, 8, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Russia: An Interpretation,” 9. Gabriel d’Arboussier to W. E. B. Du Bois, September 25, 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. It seems that D’Arboussier had urged many of the attendees at the Paris Congress to come to Moscow: “World Peace Congress. In Defence of Peace, August 1949,” 11, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. P. L. Prattis, “Robeson, Du Bois Cause Uproar at Paris Meet,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 30, 1949, 3. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Peace Congress at Moscow, 1949,” 2, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Peace Congress at Moscow, 1949,” 1.

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United States “represents democracy in contrast to fascism or communism is patently false.” Fascism was “oligarchy in control of a socialized state which is run for the benefit of the oligarchs and their friends.” Communism was a “socialized state conducted by a group of workers for the mass of the people.”133 The United States fell into the former category. The only “cure,” therefore, was to change the United States into “a welfare state” by virtue of the American people taking “over the control of the nation in industry as well as government.”134 For Du Bois, this future was not only possible but was also probable because it was a movement already “proceeding gradually.”135 After Moscow, Du Bois went back to the United States to set up a US affiliate of the Peace Partisan Movements while d’Arboussier remained in Europe and, alongside Louis Aragon, traveled to Stockholm for another Peace Congress in 1950. That same year, Du Bois founded and chaired the Peace Information Center (PIC). Members of the PIC comprised an array of Leftist activists from the CPUSA’s Abbott Simon to the educator and activist Elizabeth Moos and activist Sylvia Soloff. One of the first steps the group took was to campaign to disseminate information about the Peace Appeal for Nuclear Disarmament that had come out of the Stockholm World Congress. The text of the Appeal demanded “the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and the mass murder of peoples.”136 Signatories included Louis Aragon, Edouard Herriot – the old French Prime Minister – and many of the Cardinals and Archbishops of France as well as Du Bois himself. Du Bois urged the State Department to promise that the United States would not rush into another war, but Secretary of State Dean Acheson was quick to issue the warning that the petition was “a propaganda trick in the spurious peace offensive of the Soviet Union.”137 Part of the insidious appeal of the Partisans of the Peace Movement, insofar as the US administration was concerned, was that peace itself was an admirable goal. Fear of nuclear deployment was an issue that attracted many non-Communists. Julian Huxley and UNESCO’s official 133

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W. E. B. Du Bois, “Conditions in the United States, August 25, 1949,” 3, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. David Levering Lewis called the speech an “unimpeachingly Marxist analysis of the United States’ role in current world affairs.” See David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 545. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Conditions in the United States,” 4. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Conditions in the United States,” 4. Stockholm Peace Appeal, March 1950, 1. Dean Acheson in “Dr. Du Bois Calls on Acheson to Promise ‘U.S. Will Never Be the First to Use Bomb,’” New York Times, July 17, 1950, 5; Du Bois to Acheson, July 14, 1950, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers.

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involvement in the early meetings of the group make this clear. Emmanuel Mounier had also raised this point in the first issue of Présence Africaine in 1947 when he wrote that the desire for peace in the face of the threat of atomic warfare was a “hope common to men of all colours.”138 Nevertheless, Acheson’s view won the day in the United States. Concerns over the domestic political climate and the threat of prosecution of members led to the dissolution of the PIC mere months after its formation. As a pre-emptive move, it was too late. The Justice Department took all of the participants, including Du Bois, to trial as unregistered “agents of foreign principal with the United States.”139 Due to a combination of public pressure and political interest, Du Bois and his compatriots were acquitted eventually but their passports were confiscated. Du Bois was unable to leave the United States for another eight years. Robeson, too, lost his passport and was unable to leave the United States for most of the 1950s.140 This certainly did not stop either man from continuing to fight against fascism and repression. Du Bois, for example, continued to agitate against political repression, reaching out to old friends and contacts such as d’Arboussier as part of his campaign to free the victims of the Smith Act.141 While Du Bois went on trial for his involvement in the Partisans for the Peace movement, d’Arboussier himself was also facing the repercussions of his commitment to Communism. On October 18, 1950, Ivory Coast politician and RDA President Félix Houphouët-Boigny confirmed the RDA split from the PCF. Over the winter of 1950–1951, the realities of greater African representation played out in a political alliance of sorts between the RDA and Premier René Pleven’s Union Démocratique et Socialiste de la Résistance (UDSR). A center-left group, the UDSR planned reform and economic development in West Africa under the leadership of the youthful Minister for Overseas France, François Mitterand.142 In return for this support, Houphouët-Boigny renounced Communism 138 139

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Emmanuel Mounier, “Lettre à un ami africain,” 42. For more on this trial, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 545–553. For work placing the trial in the context of African American reactions to the bomb, see Vincent J. Intondi, African Americans against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 33–54. Robeson and Du Bois were not the only radical black activists to suffer at the hands of US “red-fever” in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Langston Hughes appeared before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); C. L. R. James and Claudia Jones were deported. W. E. B. Du Bois to Gabriel D’Arboussier, March 4, 1954, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Danièle Doumergue-Cloarec, “Le soutien de l’UDSR et de l’SFIO aux parties politiques d’AOF (1951–1958)” in Charles Robert Ageron and Marc Michel (eds.), L’Afrique

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entirely. D’Arboussier, the most openly militant communist of the RDA leadership, was forced to resign in June 1950.143 This action caused turmoil within many of the territorial branches of the RDA, such as Houphouët-Boigny’s own Guinea, where communist organizing had become embedded in local politics.144

6.6 franco-american battles for influence in africa American observers in Africa watched anxiously as these tensions played out. Acerbic memos from United States consuls in Dakar observed that the French belief in the continued integrity of the Union was “predicated on the development and cultivation of relatively few African leaders such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Houphouët-Boigny” and relied unrealistically upon a continued pro-French attitude on the part of the colonial electorate.145 Neither US diplomatic staff nor independent observers such as the African American sociologist Horace Cayton – in Africa on an extended fieldwork trip in 1952 – were persuaded that there ever had been a pro-French attitude, as such, among the indigenous populations. After all, they had borne the brunt of French racism and exploitation. In a letter to his friend and colleague St. Clair Drake, Cayton wrote, “French policy is to produce Frenchmen; and the upper class African will tell you with an absolute straight face that he has no thought of being a black Frenchman; he is a Frenchman. What the masses may think is another matter.”146 From Dakar, Robert F. Corrigan sent similar observations back to the State Department, illustrating his arguments by quoting Rayford W. Logan’s meeting with Jane Vialle, repeating her confidence to Logan that “I became exceedingly anti-French only when I return

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noire française: l’heure des indépendances (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1992), 115–116. Ruth Schachter Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 98; Elizabeth Schmidt, “Cold War in Guinea: The Rassemblement Démocratique Africain and the Struggle over Communism, 1950–1958,” Journal of African History, 48(1) (2007): 105. Sidiki Kobélé Kéïta, Le PDG: artisan de l’indépendance nationale en Guinée (1947– 1958), vol. 1 (Conakry, 1978), 237–238. Horace Cayton to St. Clair Drake, December 1952, St. Clair Drake Papers. The Consul at Dakar (Corrigan) to the Department of State, “Some Observations Concerning Racism and Politics in FWA,” Dakar, September 16, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 11, part 1, Africa and South Asia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), Document 96.

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home.” Corrigan’s use of an African American academic as a source was not unusual in this moment. The same report also drew on statements from “the well-known American Negro educator, Dr. Horace Mann Bond, President of Lincoln University.”147 African Americans such as Logan were seen increasingly by US State Department officials as invaluable sources on contemporary events in the black portions of the French Empire.148 In 1951–1952 in Paris, as both a Fulbright-funded researcher and an NAACP delegate to the United Nations, Logan was well positioned to gather information on the French Colonial Administration and the attitudes of the colonial populations. The State Department was not alone in finding his research useful. French governmental officials were quick to see the potential of researchers such as Logan to further their own ends. In 1951, Logan was given the opportunity to interview two representatives from the Ministry of Overseas France, M. Merlo-Soup and his assistant M. Gabriel. Both men were at pains to persuade him of the efficacy of the French system. Gabriel argued that there was “little difference between the British ‘indirect’ rule and the French ‘direct’ rule.”149 Merlo-Soup insisted that the “French Constitution and colonial philosophy are sufficiently elastic to permit the Natives to achieve the end that they wish for themselves, even complete independence.”150 References to Logan in memos from Dakar show that this research filtered through to Department officials, whether directly or indirectly, but no one was inclined to take the interviews on face value. A common observation in these documents was one such as that made by Corrigan in 1953: “France is in for many sad disappointments with respect to its future influence in French West Africa.”151 US officials found French 147

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The Consul at Dakar (Corrigan) to the Department of State, “Some Observations Concerning Racism and Politics in FWA,” FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 11, part 1, Africa and South Asia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), Bond had also been cited in previous dispatches. The footnote in this source cites Blake, dispatch 186, December 18, 1952. African Americans were not, of course, the only source from whom the State Department or Consul officials drew. The British Foreign Office often provided information too, in part because they shared US concerns about the communist infiltration of French territories: Martin C. Thomas, “Innocent Abroad?,” 59–61. Rayford W. Logan Diaries 1950–1953, November 17, 57, Rayford Whittingham Logan Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter Rayford Whittingham Logan Papers). Rayford W. Logan Diaries 1950–1953, November 17, 57–58. “Some Observations Concerning Racism and Politics in FWA,” Dakar, September 16, 1953, FRUS, vol. 11, part 1, Africa and South Asia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), Document 96.

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authorities completely unreliable on the subject of territories such as the Ivory Coast and Togoland. A concern repeated over and over in memoranda on French Africa from this time was that the “United States has no facilities for obtaining accurate and timely information.”152 State Department interest in obtaining this information was, by 1951, almost entirely defined in terms of its utility to Cold War efforts: “We are interested in how this [West African] Federation would be able to contribute to a war effort of the U.S. and its allies now or in the near future – not five or seven years from now.”153 Early hopes that the Economic Recovery Plans of the late 1940s would generate pro-American sentiment had faltered.154 This was frustrating for the United States not only in terms of the ongoing tensions with the Soviet Union but also because they felt that the United States’ diplomatic presence needed to be carefully calibrated so as to indicate to the French that the United States did “not seek to impose any patterns of culture or thought upon any inhabitants of these territories.”155 French officials were watching with an eagle eye the US interest in their colonial territories.156 Internal memorandum and reports circulated in the Colonial Ministry musing that some of the American strategies in African territories were “analogous to that which we pursue in our Overseas Territories.”157 Insofar as the French Foreign Ministry was concerned, Africa was the sole remaining source of prestige and wealth in the French Empire.158 As the French Ambassador to the United States put it in a confidential memo, it was imperative that the French conserve their “authority in Africa, without having to share it . . . with the United 152

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“Desirability of an American Consulate at Abidjan, Ivory Coast, French West Africa,” Dakar, July 27, 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 11, part 1, Africa and South Asia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), Document 100. American Consul General, Dakar to Department of State, “Economic War Potential of French West Africa,” May 24, 1951, File 851T.00, Box 5008/ 2, RG 59, NACP. Martin C. Thomas, “Innocents Abroad?,” 66. American Consul General, Dakar to State Department, August 5, 1950, File 511.51t/8–550, RG 59, NACP. See, for example, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Africa-Levant section) from the French Ambassador to the United States: “Evolution des esprits à l’égard du problème colonial,” July 27, 1956, Archives des Postes (ADP) 2183/6, Centre d’Archives d’OutreMer (CAOM); ADP 2183/5, CAOM; “Note interne, Ministère de la F.O.M.,” March 1, 1954, “La Néo-Colonisation Américaine,” ADP 2183/5, CAOM; Secret note for the Director of Political Affairs at the Ministry of Overseas France, May 6, 1950, ADP 2224/ 3, CAOM. Note interne, Ministère de la F.O.M., March 1, 1954, “La Néo-Colonisation Américaine,” ADP 2183/5, CAOM. Ministère de la Défense au Ministère des Affaires étrangères, May 22, 1953, ADP 2224/ 3, CAOM.

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States.”159 American cultural imperialism was all the more dangerous because it refused to admit openly to being imperial.160 For their part, US officials believed the French to be so blinded by their greed that they were willing to overlook mainland domestic security in favor of colonial aspirations. They continued to keep track of suspected and known PCF sympathizers among the African elite.161 This kind of surveillance and the repression of communism within the French Union and the United States was hard to distinguish from the methods of a totalitarian state. Langston Hughes, for his part, saw a clear link between the decision to prosecute Du Bois and the nature of totalitarianism.162 In his Chicago Defender column, he wrote, “Somebody in Washington wants to put Dr Du Bois in jail. Somebody in France wanted to put Voltaire in jail. . . . Somebody in Germany under Hitler burned the books . . . led their leading Jewish scholars to the gas chamber.”163 The condition of democracy in the United States was, in short, comparable to the National Socialism that the Allies had done their best to disassociate from Western modernity. A year earlier, Aimé Césaire had made a similar observation in Discourse on Colonialism: “[T]he barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed – far surpassed it is true – by the barbarism of the United 159

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Ambassador of France to the United States, confidential note in preparation for a conference on Africa with the United States, n.a., n.d., ADP 2224/3, CAOM. Philippe Roger, “Cassandra’s Policies: French Prophecies of an American Empire from the Civil War to the Cold War,”Journal of European Studies 38:2 (2008), 101–120. See, for example, “The World Peace Movement: A Compilation of Available Basic Reference Data,” October 1, 1956, Central Intelligence Agency General Records, The World Factbook, October 18, 2017. In March 1953, Hughes himself was called before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Hughes ultimately evaded legal consequence for his earlier activism, but the fact of his trial cost him dearly in terms of the lecture fees he relied on for income. In the historiography, attention to Langston Hughes’s engagement with black radicalism and internationalism is largely confined to his interwar work. Consensus tends to suggest that his experiences with the McCarthy trials led him to veer toward a more conservative public commentary. Some attempts have been made to reconfigure understandings of Hughes in the 1950s. This chapter hopes to further this trajectory by positioning his journalism in the broader constellation of this struggle against fascism: Daniel Won-gu Kim, “‘We Too Rise with You’: Recovering Langston Hughes’s African (Re)Turn 1954–1960 in An African Treasury, the Chicago Defender and Black Orpheus,” African American Review, 41:3 (Fall 2007): 419–441; James Smetherst, “The Adventures of a Social Poet: Langston Hughes from the Popular Front to Black Power” in Steven Tracy (ed.), A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes (London: Oxford University Press, 2004): 141–168. Langston Hughes, “The Accusers’ Names Nobody Will Remember, but History Records Du Bois,” Chicago Defender, October 6, 1951.

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States.”164 For those “disgusted with Europe” and tempted to turn “toward America . . . as a possible liberator” because the “European racism in the colonies has inured us” to the “American racism,” Césaire urged that they “Be careful!” America was heir to the same colonial and racist legacy as Europe and, unlike Europe, had lost the possibility to be open to humanist reconfiguration. He begged his readers to “see the prodigious mechanization, the mechanization of man; the giant rape of everything intimate, undamaged, undefiled that, despoiled as we are, our human spirit has still managed to preserve.”165 Europe still had one “last chance” through the universal mission of the proletariat, a chance that America had already squandered, presumably through its anti-communist orientation.166 Richard Wright’s 1953 novel The Outsider offered a complementary understanding of the United States.167 Through the speeches made by the anti-hero Damon Cross, Wright offered a vision of Western modernity that jarred badly with the narratives of racial assimilation into American republican democracy espoused by NAACP executives such as Walter White. Modernity was the stage on which science and industry uprooted “man from his ancestral, ritualized existence” and instead cast “him into racial schemes of living in vast, impersonal cities.”168 Race, and racism, then, were products of Western civilization, of modernity. The implication was that American attempts to expand their brand of capitalist democracy would not overcome racism because the praxis of racism was inherent in this system. Blackness, by extension, was a socio-historical phenomenon created by the transition of Western society into modernity.

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Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 47. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 77. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 78. Richard Wright, The Outsider (New York: Harper & Row, 1953). The Outsider and, indeed, much of Wright’s work from the 1950s have oft been read in terms of his engagement with European thinking and particularly in terms of his engagement with existentialism and his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Here, I hope to position The Outsider in terms of the broader grappling with “the problem and meaning of Western civilization as a whole.” See, for example, Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (New York: William Morrow, 1973); Michel Fabre, “Richard Wright, French Existentialism, and The Outsider” in Critical Essays on Richard Wright, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 182–198; MichaelLynch, “Haunted by Innocence: The Debate with Dostoevsky in Wright’s ‘Other Novel,’ The Outsider,” African American Review 30:2 (Summer 1996): 255–266; Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001), 400–415. Richard Wright, The Outsider, 480.

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Damon Cross’s forays into different political possibilities had led him to the following conclusion: “What makes one man a Fascist and another a Communist might be found in the degree to which they are integrated into their culture. The more alienated a man is, the more he might lean towards Communism.”169 Neither program, he believed, offered real hope of change. In many ways, Senghor’s analysis and proposed solution to overcoming racial inequality within the French Union aligned with Wright’s articulation of the relationship between alienation and political affiliation. Senghor called for the transformation of the French Union into an integrated federative or confederative structure. Although he had initially been optimistic about the possibilities entailed in the Constitution of the French Fourth Republic, he was, at least as early as 1953, calling for a new constitution. As it stood, the existing constitution simultaneously promised political equivalence but denied it on the grounds of particular civilizational identities.170 In so doing, Senghor contended, it led agitators for equality to think in terms of the binary of assimilation or independence.171 In the context of the Cold War, independence would be economically and politically foolhardy for both the colonial territory in question and the metropole. The way of the future was through federation, “a political system wherein States are united, on the basis of equality, by juridical relations that freely negotiated.”172 Such a political entity would be united by shared principle rather than by particular regional or civilizational identity. That is to say, political citizenship would be contingent upon allegiance to the republican principle rather than to a nebulous sense of national identity.173 Senghor acknowledged the improbability that such a constitution could be agreed upon in the contemporary French political landscape. Nevertheless, he 169

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Richard Wright, The Outsider, 364. Notably, by 1954 this had become accepted wisdom. In a report into the appeals of Communism, Princeton University Professor Gabriel Almond noted that the Communist Party in the United States attracted a disproportionate number of minorities and recent immigrants: Gabriel A. Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 7. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Rapport sur la méthode, Ve congrès de BDS, 3,4,5, juillet 1953,” reprinted as “Socialisme, Fédération, Religion” in Liberté 2, 104–5; “Pour une solution fédéraliste,” La Nef, Special Issue “Où va l’union française” (June 1955): 151–155. For a detailed discussion of Senghor’s position, see Gary Wilder, Freedom Time, 152–155. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Union française et fédéralisme,” Université des Annales, November 21, 1956, in Liberté 2, 197. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “L’avenir de la France dans l’Outre-Mer,” Politique étrangère, 19:4 (1954): 419–426.

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urged French politicians and policy makers to implement smaller reforms toward this end. The consequences of inaction were too serious to overlook. French colonies would be swayed by US rhetoric and move toward violent revolution and independence, a worst-case scenario that would mean the end of France and, with it, “the victory of a capitalism and a racism that will lead us inevitably to war. to the destruction of the planet.”174

6.7 nonalignment and the search for a third way For some, this inevitable war could only be overcome through solidarity outside the West. In a piece for Présence Africaine, the secretary of the Belgian Communist Party, Albert de Coninck, wrote that American and European civilization had arrived “at the point of menacing mankind with mass extermination.”175 The only way forward was through a position he had witnessed at the Bandung Conference: the anticolonial repudiation of both the United States and the Soviet Union.176 Bringing together delegates from twenty-nine Asian and African countries, the Bandung Conference held in Indonesia in 1955 was designed to unravel the conundrum of decolonization and peace.177 Présence Africaine translator and writer David Diop called Bandung a decisive step toward “a definitive triumph of the peace” because it ignored the artificial race barriers imposed by Europeans and focused on a common hatred of colonialism and war.178 Another commentator, writing under the initials J.K.S., noted the danger posed by “amer-europeans,” whose

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Léopold Sédar Senghor, “L’avenir,” 426. A De Conninck, “Après Bandoeng,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle Série: 4 (October– November, 1955): 83. A De Conninck, “Après Bandoeng,” 83. As Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher have noted in the introduction to their sourcebook on Bandung, much of the scholarship concerning the conference revolves around Richard Wright’s commentary in his book The Colour Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. This is particularly true in histories of the African American participation. While the Conference itself is not my focus here, I nonetheless seek to add to the literature by pointing to some of the ways that francophone Africans and their colleagues understood the significance of Bandung in light of their own activism: Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher, “Introduction: Richard Wright on the Bandung Conference, Indonesia on Richard Wright” in Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher (eds.), Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 2–8. David Diop in Moustapha Wade, A. Wade, David Diop, J.K.S., Sylla Assane, “Temoignages des africaines sur Bandoeng,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série: 3 (August–September, 1955):41.

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ideological and financial influence had permeated the Bandung meeting.179 J.K.S. may well have been thinking of the Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. who had attended the conference in an attempt to demonstrate African American loyalty to the United States.180 Bargaining upon the equation between national loyalty and the achievement of rights, Powell took pains to try and persuade his audience at Bandung that “racism in the United States is on the way out.”181 Powell had evidence to support his claim: the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education had declared that state laws segregating schools were unconstitutional. It was a triumph for African American civil rights activists and widely touted as evidence of the perfectibility of US democratic institutions. But for Powell’s audience in Bandung, this effort on the part of the United States was too little, too late. They had no intention of falling prey to US imperialism so soon after throwing off the yoke of European powers. Nor, however, were they necessarily interested in the Soviet alternative. Instead, they sought a nonaligned third way. At Bandung, Richard Wright became convinced increasingly of the value of escaping the binary of Cold War politics. He maintained that the secular humanism of a Western-educated elite was the best way to modernize these cultures and peoples.182 This elite had to find a third way – one that overthrew colonialism but which eschewed the Soviet Union. For Wright, this third way could not be forged along purely diasporic lines. He considered himself Western, openly declaring in a speech in 1956 that “I could not feel anything African about myself.”183 Frantz Fanon thought in similar terms. In 1951, in Black Skins, White Masks, Fanon had asked, “What is all this talk of a black people, of a Negro nationality? I am a Frenchman. . . . I am personally interested in the future of France, in French values, in the

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J.K.S. in Moustapha Wade, A. Wade, David Diop, J.K.S., Sylla Assane, “Temoignages des africaines sur Bandoeng,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série: 3 (August–September, 1955): 42. Memorandum of Conversation: Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Deputy Under Secretary Robert Murphy, May 11, 1955, File 670.901/5–1155, Box 2670, RG 59, NACP. Powell is quoted in Charles Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell Jr (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 243. Richard Wright, The Colour Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (London: Dennis Dobson, 1956), 132–133. Richard Wright, “Tradition and Industrialization: The Plight of the Tragic Elite in Africa,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle Série, 8 10, Le Ier Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs (June–November, 1956): 383.

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French nation.”184 In 1955 in Esprit, he elaborated upon this thinking, observing that “the object of lumping all Negroes together under the designation of ‘Negro people’ is to deprive them of any possibility of individual expression.”185 Using Martinique as an example, Fanon described the lack of hardened racial positions; there, class status was what united individuals of color, not their color. Writing in the same year, in an article published in Présence Africaine, Du Bois offered a variation of this argument about the intersection between race and class. He lamented African American ignorance “of the history and present situation in Africa” and their indifference “to the fate of African Negroes.”186 The black community in the United States had lost interest in Africa because of the lamentable state of African American leadership. From the end of World War II, “American Negro Leadership was in the hands of a new Negro bourgeoisie and had left the hands of teachers, writers and social workers. Professional men joined this black bourgeoisie and the Negro began to follow white American display and conspicuous expenditure.”187 Any recent advances in the fight for black civil liberties in America was due to the capitalist efforts to sway black communities to their fight against communism, going so far as to persuade African Americans to fight against their natural allies, the Koreans and the Chinese. Du Bois believed that capitalist exploitation not only impoverished blacks in Africa but indirectly encouraged “the color line in America.”188 Oliver Cox, a Professor of Sociology at Lincoln University, had reached similar conclusions about the nature of capitalist democracy. In an article in the Journal of Negro Education, he mused that the “struggle for civil rights is inherent in the social order of Western society.”189 Proletarianism, for Cox, was the best solution to this problem because it operated “upon the assumption that the problem of achieving civil rights is a problem of a class of people 184

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Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Chalres Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 203. Frantz Fanon, “West Indians and Africans,” Esprit, February 1955, reprinted in Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 17. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Africa and the American Negro Intelligentsia,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle Série, 5 (December 1955–January 1956): 34. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Africa and the American Negro Intelligentsia,” 50. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Africa and the American Negro Intelligentsia,” 50. Oliver C. Cox, “The Programs of Negro Civil Rights Organizations,” Journal of Negro Education, 20:3 Special Issue: The American Negro and Civil Rights in 1950 (Summer 1951): 359.

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which very largely includes Negroes.”190 Cox was scathing about those – such as the NAACP field secretary Walter White – who sought to manipulate anti-communist fervor to improve racial conditions because this approach did not guarantee civil rights for all.191 Writing that same year for the Atlantabased review Phylon, Antillean thinker Edward Jones (then studying in the United States) declared, “Of necessity, French Negro literature is proletarian, since the French Negro, like the Negro everywhere-and like the white proletariat, for that matter-is and has traditionally been the victim of our socioeconomic system.”192 Jones contended that all the contemporary French black poets – such as Lèon Gontran Damas, Césaire, and Senghor – were formulating the same kind of racial consciousness through the concept of négritude, a concept predicated upon a shared socio-historical experience of capitalist exploitation. For Jones, this was a means of advancing “toward the realization of a better society,” regardless of particular national affiliation.193 Deploying a group identity allowed cultural or national differences to sit alongside a sense of a shared political agenda. Language scholar and journalist Mercer Cook agreed. Négritude was important because, “for the first time in French history, a group of Negro intellectuals decided to be Negroes first and Frenchmen afterwards.”194 Cook focused on the unitary message he saw in Césaire, Damas and Senghor’s poetry.195 He also admired them for developing “an artistic presentation of their vibrant messages.”196 That is not to say that Cook was uncritical: “One or two of these poets need to be cautioned against the over-glorification of the Negro; against blind faith in Communism as a panacea for all social ills; against indifference or hostility toward Christianity which may sometimes have erred in practice but whose principles constantly point the way to universal brotherhood.”197 Before his death in 1948, Claude McKay had reached a similar conclusion about Christianity and, in particular, Catholicism of the kind Cook practiced. After decades spent exploring the possibilities of socialist and communist thought, McKay had concluded that Communism was a form of 190 191 192

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Oliver C. Cox, “The Programs of Negro Civil Rights Organizations,” 363. Oliver C. Cox, “The Programs of Negro Civil Rights Organizations,” 360; 365. Edward Allen Jones, “Contemporary French Negro Poets,” Phylon (1940–1956) 12:1 (1st Quarter, 1951): 20. Edward Allen Jones, “Contemporary French Negro Poets,” 28. Mercer Cook, “The Negro in French Literature: An Appraisal,” The French Review, 23:5 (March 1950): 383. Mercer Cook, “The Negro in French Literature,” 387. Mercer Cook, “The Negro in French Literature,” 387. Mercer Cook, “The Negro in French Literature,” 388.

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totalitarianism that would ultimately mean the forfeiture of all people’s rights. From his perspective, the Catholic faith was the only one “through which all of humanity may be united in brotherly love” to stand “as a bulwark against all the wild and purely materialistic ‘isms’ that are sweeping the world.”198 McKay was not alone in this perspective. Many black students and intellectuals living in Paris and associated with Présence Africaine in the early 1950s were not only Catholic but also believed that the Catholic faith had the power to redeem European civilization.199 Alioune Diop himself had converted from Islam to Catholicism in 1944.200 He acted as a mentor to Catholic student groups such as the Antillean-Guyanese Federation of Catholic Students (FAGEC) and the Union of African Catholic Students (UECA). Both FAGEC and UECA blended their Catholic faith with a commitment to French Republicanism – as declared in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Much like the movements of the mid-1920s (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3), these groups believed that racism and inequality could be overcome with the realization of the principles of French Republicanism. Their perspectives can be seen in their respective journals – Alizés and Tam-Tam – and in the conferences they organized. Madeleine Lastel, a Guyanese student studying in Paris, was involved in both Alizés and Tam-Tam. She, as with her fellow contributor, Louis T. Achille, believed that “colonialism had its magnificent achievements” – like the spread of Catholicism – but that the way forward lay in a greater fidelity to the principles of Catholicism and Republicanism.201 In this way, the “inhumane exploitation” that had undercut the mission civilisatrice could be eradicated.202 198

199

200

201

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Claude McKay to Max Eastman, August 16, 1944, in Wayne F. Cooper (ed.), The Passion of Claude McKay (New York: Schocken, 1973), 304–305. See also Claude McKay, “Why I Became a Catholic,” Ebony, 1 (March 1946): 32. Over half of the African students studying in France were Catholic in this period: G. Cholvy and Y.-M. Hilaire, eds., La France religieuse: Reconstruction et crises, 1945–1975 (Toulouse, 2002), 73; Elizabeth Foster, “‘Entirely Christian and Entirely African’: Catholic African Students in the Era of Independence,” Journal of African History, 56 (March 2015): 239–259. Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris, 35; Fréderic Grah Mel, Alioune Diop, le bâtisseur inconnu du monde noir (Presses universitaires de Côte d’Ivoire, Abidjan, ACCT, Paris, 1995): 11–14. Madeleine Lastel, “Liminaires,” Alizés (October 1952): 3–6; Louis Achille, “Lettre de Lyon,” Alizés (December 1951): 3. Madeleine Lastel, “Réflexions sur le problème social,” Alizés (November 1952): 5–7; Madeleine Lastel, “L’étudiant et la politique,” Alizés (January 1953): 13–16; Madeleine Lastel, “La problème religieux a la Martinique,” Alizés (April–May, 1953): 22–30.

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Catholicism also offered a potential avenue for solidarity within the black diaspora. The relationship between Antillean and francophone African peoples had often been fraught by class tensions and a belief in Antillean civilizational superiority over Africa. The community of religion was one way of overcoming these tensions. Conferences organized by FAGEC and UECA certainly bore out this assertion. African, Antillean and Madagascan students attended to hear speakers across the political and religious spectrum such as Mercer Cook, Ralph Bunche, Michel Leiris and Léopold Sédar Senghor.203 Several pieces published in a 1956 Présence Africaine anthology dedicated to the question of religion, Des prêtres noirs s’interrogent, also emphasized the unitary potential of Catholicism.204 In two essays, the Beninese priest and intellectual Robert Sasre and his Togolese colleague Robert Dosseh argued that Christ was “incarnate in all civilizations” and that Catholicism, properly understood, was a unifying force for peace and equality.205 The anthology was prefaced by Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, a senior prelate and the papal delegate to France’s Sub-Saharan Africa from 1948 through 1959. Lefebvre also saw Catholicism as the solution to “the problem of mutual cooperation between metropole and colonies.”206

6.8 toward an anti-racist anti-imperialism For all those who believed that Catholicism was the solution to the imperial problem, there were others who believed that no religion had a place in the struggles against racism and inequality. Thinkers such as Richard Wright and Aimé Césaire did not believe faith had any potential for redemption. In his account of the Bandung Conference, Wright acknowledged that Islam had played a galvanizing role in struggles against imperialism in the Afro-Asian world. He worried, however, that these newly freed countries would collapse “in irrational tides of religious and 203

204

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“Conferences,” Alizés (December 1954): 27–29; “Conference du Dr. Cook,” Alizés (January–February 1952): 14–16; “Visite au Musée de l’Homme,” Alizés (January– February 1952): 26–27; “Chansons de mer et complaintes outre-mer,” Alizés (March 1953): 33; “Nos conférences,” Alizés (November 1953): n.p. The anthology was a joint initiative between Présence Africaine and the Dominican publishing house Cerf. R. Sastre, “Liturgie romaine” in Des prêtres noir s’interrogent (Paris: CERF/Présence Africaine, 1956), 154; R. Dosseh and R. Sastre, “Propagande et vérité” in Des prêtres noirs, 140–141, 147. Marcel Lefebvre, “Où va l’Afrique?,” Ecclésia, lectures chrétiennes, 46 (January 1953): 78.

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racial passion” that undermined the potential of these intellectuals to take the fruits of the West and discard the fascist, racist tendencies that had proved Europe and America’s undoing.207 For Césaire, religion – and particularly French Catholicism – was a tool of the colonizer. This was clear in both Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and his long-form poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. He argued that “Christian pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equations Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist and racist consequences, whose victims were to be the Indians, the Yellow peoples, and the Negroes.”208 Too often, brutal colonial administrators had justified the imperial project by “repeating that the spirit of the Lord was in its acts.”209 Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal had been published for a third time in 1956 in Présence Africaine. He had revised significantly the poem since its first publication in 1939 in Volontés and its second in English and French in 1947 (see Chapters 4 and 5, respectively). Whole stanzas were omitted, replaced with new ones which reflected Césaire’s changing attitudes toward the relationship between race and the process of decolonization.210 In the 1939 version, Césaire portrayed the journey of the speaker from oppressed ignorance to racial self-discovery. This awakening allowed the speaker to become a leader of his race. Heavily influenced by the thinking of the German ethnologist and archaeologist Leo Frobenius, many of the 1939 stanzas refracted Césaire’s own journey toward racial identification. The 1947 versions of the poem expressed a surrealist belief in the revolutionary power of becoming, of knowing oneself. The black reader was called upon to journey from alienation to authenticity, the only salvation from oppression.211 Black civilizations were rejuvenated through the acceptance of their true racial identity, an 207 208 209

210

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Richard Wright, The Color Curtain, 185–187. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 33. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to The Native Land, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 61. My analysis of the differences between the three iterations of Cahier owes a debt to the close readings of the versions of these poems done by A. James Arnold and Alex Gil Fuentes. The connections I make to the broader conversations around diasporic belonging and civilization are my own: “Beyond Postcolonial Césaire: Reading Cahier d’un retour au pays natal historically,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 44:3 (June 2008): 269. For a close reading of the poem, see A. James Arnold, Modernism and Négritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 133–168.

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identity which implied a greater identification with the natural world. Césaire deployed Breton’s theory of free-associative metaphor (metaphor filée) to emphasize the connection between the black race and the “surreal” and mystical.212 Crucially, the journey to authenticity that Césaire called for in Cahier was linked to the recovery of an African past: No, we’ve never been Amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor wise-men in Timbuktu under Askia the Great. . . . I may as well confess that we were at all times pretty mediocre dishwashers, shoeblacks without ambition, at best conscientious sorcerers and the only unquestionable record that we broke was that of endurance under the chicote.213

Césaire advocated the acknowledgment of a history in which blackness was a socio-historical construct that white colonizers had projected both physically and psychically onto a group of otherwise diverse peoples: “And this land screamed for centuries that we are bestial brutes; . . . and we would sleep in our excrement, and they would sell us on the town square.”214 Césaire argued that black people needed to acknowledge how much this image had become a self-image. Freedom, true freedom, entailed using this tortured past to build something authentic. It was also linked to a specific geopolitical region that was quite separate from the African experience. In his 1952 Peau noire, masques blancs, Frantz Fanon mounted a similar argument. Fanon rejected adamantly “a mythical past” and warned against any project of négritude that sought to revive “an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization.”215 Instead, it was important to acknowledge the shared suffering that united descendants of Africa while simultaneously nurturing individual and authentic cultural expression. In the Présence Africaine version of Cahier, much of the ethnographically and surrealism-inflected content was omitted in favor of socialistrealist stanzas. These new additions reflected Césaire’s frustration with the failure of the French Union to have changed since 1946. As Mayor of Fort-de-France, he had implemented local reforms but the political assimilation he had hoped departmentalization could bring had not occurred. For all the promises of the Fourth Republic’s Constitution, Martinicans

212 213

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A. James Arnold, “Beyond Postcolonial Césaire,” 268. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to The Native Land, 61. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to The Native Land, 61. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 226.

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remained second class citizens. Some stanzas, for example, described the conditions of Créole sugarcane workers who had met horrible fates: “Grandvorka – of him I only know that he died, crushed one harvest evening, it was his job, apparently, to throw sand under the wheels of the running locomotive, to help it across bad spots.” Others described those who had petitioned him for help: “Michel who used to write me . . . Lucky Michel, address Condemned District.”216 Gone was the mystical identification of blackness with a surreal and mystical sensibility. Instead, the reader’s attention was drawn to the contemporary suffering of black workers. Their misery was linked to past colonial conditions and, implicitly, to contemporary failures of the departmentalization to offer true political citizenship to Antilleans. The narrative voice Césaire employed was no longer the prophetic leader and representative of his race. Instead, he was merely “a socialist deputy” deeply embedded in the political community he represented.217 Despite his elevated political position within the French Unions, Césaire’s self-characterization had a biographical authenticity. As a black Antillean, he was the direct descendant of an African slave, but more than that, his childhood had been marked by great poverty.218 While Césaire evidently still thought about race and racial inequality in a Marxist framework, by 1956 the limitations of institutional Communism were frustrating him. In a famous open letter to the head of the PCF, the Letter to Maurice Thorez, Césaire resigned his membership on October 24, 1956. His criticisms of the PCF echoed those levied by George Padmore and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté in the mid-1930s and that of Richard Wright against the CPUSA in the 1940s: he wanted a “Marxism and Communism . . . placed in the service of black peoples” rather than a Marxism and Communism that exploited them.219 As far as he could see, Communism had served only to “cut us off from Black Africa whose evolution henceforth takes shape in a direction contrary to 216

217 218

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Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to The Native Land, 75. A. James Arnold “Beyond Postcolonial Césaire,” 269. Maryse Condé has argued that Césaire’s formulation of négritude is deeply connected to his class background and thus very different to the more essentialist understanding of race expressed by Léopold Sédar Senghor: “one is the child of labourers whereas the other is the son of wealthy landowners . . . and he therefore belongs to that segment of African society that saw its privileges relatively respected by the colonizers,” “Négritude césairienne, négritude senghorienne,” Revue de littérature comparé (July– December 1974): 414–415. Aimé Césaire, Lettre à Maurice Thorez (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956): 12.

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ours.”220 In so doing, he was not necessarily advocating a black-only movement but encouraging an anti-imperialism that went beyond classcentric ideologies to engage with race and national cultures.221 Excerpts from the letter first appeared in Franc-Observateur, and Alioune Diop was quick to publish it in full in Présence Africaine. Every politically minded black thinker in French Africa read it. The impact of the Letter was far larger than any of Césaire’s previous works.222 Diop also had the piece translated into English for publication the following year. The message was clear: black thinkers had to throw off the racist legacies of the West and determine their own path.

6.9 throwing off “thingification” In 1949, African American sociologist Charles S. Johnson credited the establishment of the United Nations and UNESCO with transforming “segmented minority struggles to the realm of universal concern.”223 The oversight of these international institutions meant, he believed, that it was no longer possible to justify racial discrimination and inequality under the protective blanket of claims to national sovereignty. The reality, as this chapter shows, was a little different. The universal values explicit in documents like the 1945 United Nations Charter, the French Fourth Republic Constitution (1946) and the first UNESCO Statement on Race (1950) had to be mediated among already existing (and resistant) cultures and political structures. As intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Claude McKay and Alioune Diop argued, by failing to accept that the crimes of Hitler were the crimes of Western civilization at large, the United States, the French Union and the United Nations were set upon a path that would do little to eradicate racism or enfranchise minority and colonial populations. The discussions over the UNESCO Statement on Race, for example, make evident that there was still a long way to go before racist ideologies could be overcome. Césaire encapsulated this idea in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, when he wrote that

220 221 222

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Aimé Césaire, Lettre à Maurice Thorez, 15. Aimé Césaire, Lettre à Maurice Thorez, 9. A. James Arnold, Modernism and Négritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 172. Charles S. Johnson, “A New Frame of Reference for Race Relations” in Implementing Civil Rights, the summary report of the Sixth Annual Institute of Race Relations, Race Relations Department of the American Missionary Association, Je 27–Jl 9, 1949, at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, 1–6.

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“colonisation = thingification.”224 The oppression of peoples on the basis of race and culture could only occur when human beings were reduced to the status of “things.” By the measure of the constitutions of the United States and the French Union, the negation of equal political, social and economic rights could implicitly only occur if a member of those polities was considered less than human, a “thing” rather than a “person.” Greater equality for people of the African diaspora required activists such as Césaire and Wright to reverse this “thingification.” The next chapter will discuss attempts by the African American and francophone black intellectuals associated with Présence Africaine to do just that.

224

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 42.

7 “The Sword of Damocles”: Présence Africaine and Decolonization in the Face of the Cold War

Racism is never a super-added element discovered by chance in the course of the investigation of the cultural data of a group. The social constellation, the cultural whole, are deeply modified by the existence of racism. Frantz Fanon I am an American [but] I would die for my country rather than lie for my country. . . . I am an American but I am trying to keep my heart from freezing in a Cold War I never made. Richard Wright

Both the Martinican psychologist Frantz Fanon and the American writer Richard Wright sought to dismantle the racism embedded in the sociopolitical realities of France and America while simultaneously embracing the democratic potential of the two Republics. The lines above from Frantz Fanon are taken from the speech he delivered at the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris at the bastion of French erudition, the Sorbonne. Wright also spoke at that Congress – it is believed to be the only time the two men met – but the words reprinted here were delivered a few years later to a different Parisian audience. His tone revealed the tension that defined not only his personal relationship with the United States but also the political and personal difficulties inherent in criticizing a nation increasingly carving the world up into the camps of “us” and “them.” The Cold War defined what it meant to be an American and created a binary that did not allow for a third way. This position collided head on with the contemporaneous efforts of thinkers 237

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such as Fanon and Wright to reconfigure notions of France, America and Western civilization so as to expel racism and achieve self-determination for oppressed peoples. Even by the mid-1950s, with the formation of independent states in formerly colonial territories, visions of what might comprise a de-colonized and de-racialized world varied from national independence to full citizenship rights within existing state polities.1 For many, independence from the conflict between the two world superpowers was as important as freedom from colonization under France or Britain. In this chapter, I will chart the possibilities that key African American and francophone black intellectuals such as Wright and Fanon explored in tandem through their connections to the journal and publishing house Présence Africaine in the years from 1956 through 1960. Doing so will illuminate further the work of understudied figures such as Alioune Diop, Christiane Yandé Diop, Mercer Cook and James Ivy. Their work directly shaped the relationship between the Republics of the United States and France and formed contemporary notions of the relationship between politics and culture in staking civic rights claims in the Western framework.

7.1 contours of the franco-american cold war landscape By the mid-1950s Africa, specifically French-controlled North Africa, was an area of great concern for the American government. State Department officials feared that the French desire to maintain empire would poison Western interests in the area. American knowledge of Africa was patchy: few career Foreign Service officers had expertise in, let alone experience of, Africa.2 Until 1958, “Africa” came under the purview of the overworked and inexperienced Bureau of Near Eastern, South Asian and 1

2

Frederick Cooper, Gregory Mann and Gary Wilder have recently argued that national independence was not necessarily the desired outcome for many subjects and citizens occupying French and African spheres: Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Gregory Mann, From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Non-governmentality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). David N. Gibbs, “Political Parties and International Relations: The United States and the Decolonization of Sub-Saharan Africa,” The International History Review, 17:2 (May 1995): 312–313; Steven Metz, “American Attitudes Toward Decolonization in Africa,” Political Science Quarterly, 99:3 (Autumn 1984): 528.

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African Affairs. State Department officials were forced to turn to Universities for expertise and those at the forefront of African Studies were primarily African American.3 Moreover, African Americans, with their diasporic ties, potentially offered a covert method of promoting US interests in North Africa in a way that would not alienate France. The historiography rarely allows for the idea that African American thinkers might have had a serious impact on US foreign policy during these years, not just as instruments of the State Department but as serious and independent thinkers in their own right. Recent work by historians Hugh Wilford and Penny Von Eschen, in particular, has begun to remedy this oversight by pointing to the complex ways in which the relationship between the State Department and African American activists was in no way a one-way patronage. In many cases, the initiatives of the Department of State and the CIA to influence groups and individuals through cultural diplomacy via bodies such as the United States Information Agency (USIA) often ended up reinforcing the very impressions they sought to overcome. Furthermore, the vehicles of this kind of propaganda were never unwitting or powerless, and many, particularly the African American intellectuals focused on here, utilized these programs to their own ends. Their goals sometimes dovetailed with American anti-communism and yet diverged widely when it came to ideas of the social contract between the citizen and government. The prism of the Cold War became a frame through which to enact the possible futures of American democracy, futures that key intellectuals such as Richard Wright, scholars Rayford W. Logan and John Davis among others were fighting to develop. On the other side of the Atlantic, by 1956, the specter of the Algerian War (1954–1962) and the questions it posed about national belonging and access to rights loomed large on France’s domestic landscape. Determined to cling on not only to Algeria but also to the remainder of those territories and mandates still in its possession, the French government engaged in new ways with its black citizens and subjects.4 The desire to maintain empire played a significant role in shaping relations with the 3

4

For an elucidation of the history of African Americans and political science, see Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). Frederick Cooper, Between Empire and Citizenship; Gary Wilder, Freedom Time; JeanPierre Dozon, “The Illusion of Decolonization, 1956–2006” in Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Blancel and Dominic Thomas (eds.), Colonial Culture in France Since the Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 433.

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United States, whose financial backing allowed the maintenance of French empire and economic stability. Relying upon the United States created a great deal of anti-American feeling among French leaders across the political spectrum and bled into the ways that francophone thinkers thought about the ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. French black intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Alioune and Christiane Yandé Diop attempted to renegotiate French legislative and cultural identity in ways that they hoped would extend full citizenship rights to the people they represented and to reconfigure understandings of the French Republic in ways that acknowledged black contributions. These men and women were struggling with many of the same issues that African Americans faced in their fight to be recognized as equal participants in the American democracy. By examining the ways that these two struggles converged, it is possible to understand not only how these thinkers influenced each other but also the extent to which this engagement was shaped by contemporary understandings of the connection between race, republican citizenship and the West. The idea of reconfiguring what it meant to be part of the West was a central intellectual preoccupation in this period of political and cultural reorganization, although it is most commonly discussed in terms of the ideological clash between the US and the USSR rather than in regard to the African diaspora and the French Fourth and Fifth Republics.5

7.2 fighting imperialism from bandung to paris Partially inspired by the 1955 Bandung Conference but also in continuity with the journal’s founding aims, the committee behind Présence Africaine decided to organize the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in order to establish a cultural inventory of black African experience and life. The hope was that such an inventory would provide a necessary ideological framework for the movements against racism and imperialism that were contemporaneously gaining momentum. Some of these, such as the Algerian War, were manifesting in cries for political independence; others, in an attempt to change the system from within. Many of the francophone black and African American intellectuals who attended the Congress were reformers. Shared desires to create 5

Marc Grief draws attention to this in terms of “a crisis of man”: Marc Grief, The Age of the Crisis of Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 4–5.

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change from within, however, did not necessarily translate to shared understandings of what this change could or even should look like. As with the 1955 Bandung Conference, the architects of the 1956 Congress did not frame it as an exercise in Communist or AntiCommunist politics, although perceptions of it were shaped by the ideological clash between United States and Soviet Union imperialism.6 On the contrary, the explicit intention from the beginning was to avoid alignment with either side, as neither had provided a way to more successfully overcome issues of inequality and racism. Richard Wright, who had attended the Bandung Conference and praised the avoidance of Cold War politics at the meeting, was one of the initiative’s most fervent

6

The Présence Africaine congresses are mostly omitted from histories of African American contact with the wider African diaspora: Tyler Stovall frames the Congress as “the single most important example of” Richard Wright’s engagement with French writers rather than in terms of diasporic efforts to reconfigure understandings of rights. Wright’s biographer Michel Fabre quite naturally does likewise. For her part, Penny Von Eschen makes only brief mention of the Congress: Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996), 196–197; Michel Fabre, The World of Richard Wright (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985), 199; Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 174–175. The two exceptions are Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer and Nikhil Pal Singh’s Black Is a Country. Wilford’s discussion of the 1956 Congress proceedings and the resulting associations, the Société Africaine de Culture (SAC) and the American Society for African Culture (AMSAC), is focused on the American experience and tends to cast the francophone Africans as the poorer, less effective cousins. Here I hope to give more context: Hugh Wilford, The Might Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 200–224. Singh’s commentary is more balanced, and this chapter will expand upon Singh’s commentary with a closer study of the content and impact of the African American contributions at the Congress: Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 174–177. African intellectual histories pay the Congresses and these years of Présence Africaine more heed, pointing to involvement of francophone luminaries and political leaders such as Alioune Diop, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. In these retellings, the Congresses take on significance primarily as brief interludes in these figures’ lives and are, again, oft dismissed: Lilyan Kestloot, Césaire et Senghor: un pont sur l’atlantique (Éditions l’Harmattan, 2006); Phillippe Verdin, Alioune Diop, le socrate noir (Paris: Lethielleux, 2010); Robert W. July, The Origins of Modern African Thought: Its Development in West Africa during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Africa World Press, 2004), 476. Benetta Jules-Rosette, in her excellent study of African writers in Paris, does touch on the American delegation and the dynamic between the Africans and the African Americans, but she does not refer to AMSAC nor does she tease out the implications of these dialogues for black intellectual thinking on citizenship and rights. She also casts SAC as primarily a research commission, a characterization that contradicts that organization’s founding statutes and intentions: Black Paris: The African Writers Landscape (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 51–57.

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champions.7 Wright’s friend, Présence Africaine’s founder and editor-inchief Alioune Diop, hoped that the Congress would be a forum for discussing the possibilities of using culture as a weapon for combatting notions of black servility embedded in the framework of French civilization.8 The objective, as he saw it, was to reconstitute understandings of Western civilization that allowed for black participation and contributions to be understood as equally important as those of Europeans.9 In short, the Congress was intended to reassert the humanity of those who had been relegated to a position of inferiority by the racist structures of imperialism and racism. Consequently, blacks from around the globe were asked by the Congress organizers to engage with and debate the meaning of their cultural identity so that black contributions to modern Western civilization could be best advertised. Despite initial intentions to avoid Cold War ideological alignment, at one of the first organizational meetings for the 1956 Congress, the state of affairs looked slightly different. Alioune Diop suggested to Wright that now might be the time to leverage the Cold War climate to their advantage. The two men decided that Wright should warn the US embassy that “unless the United States took a more active interest in the Congress, the Congress would develop into a sounding board for Communist propaganda.”10 Wright did so, simultaneously writing to Roy Wilkins, 7

8

9

10

See Richard Wright, The Colour Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (London: Dennis Dobson, 1956). Alioune Diop, “Séance d’ouverture,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June– November 1956): 11. The intellectuals who were part of the Présence Africaine network were operating in an international context that primarily conceived of modernization in assimilative terms. It was the process of becoming more Western by shedding the markers of “African” or black culture. Officials within the American and French governments were highly suspicious of the emerging “Third World” stance of “non-alignment” or “neutrality” and concepts such as Kwame Nkrumah’s “African Personality.” In the case of the United States, this suspicion stemmed from a fear that non-alignment was synonymous with a move toward communism. See Michael A. Guhin, John Foster Dulles: A Statesman and His Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 252–264; Richard Goold-Adams argues in The Time of Power: A Reappraisal of John Foster Dulles (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1962) that Dulles’s inability to adjust to neutralism sometimes leaned him toward support for the continuation of colonialism. The French, in part, shared this fear but they also saw it as a threat to their continued hold on their territories and influence in North Africa: Alexander Keese, “A Culture of Panic: ‘Communist’ Scapegoats and Decolonisation in French West Africa and French Polynesia (1945– 1957),” French Colonial History, 9 (2008): 131–145. Alioune Diop to Richard Wright, Box 104, Folder 1557, Richard Wright Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter Richard Wright Papers); Amembassy Paris to the Department of State, re:

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Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to solicit African American delegates. The reasons for Wright’s actions were twofold: First, he was afraid that the Leftist reputation of many of the invited francophone delegates would prohibit American involvement – the McCarthy investigations had made clear the costs of associating with anyone tainted with Communism. Second, Présence Africaine ran on a tight budget, particularly after French Governmental funding had dried up in the early fifties due to what the French government perceived as “the leftist anti-colonial and generally irresponsible nature of its editorial policy.”11 There was thus very little funding available to pay for travel. Both Wright and Diop hoped that the NAACP or State Department might provide funds.12 The Minorities Affairs Advisor for Office of Policy and Programme at United States Intelligence Agency (USIA), one Francis Hammond, happened to be in Paris when Wright dropped in to air his concerns. He drew up an initial list of potential attendees, one that Wright added to. Mike Josselsson, the Executive Secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in France was also certain that the Congress was a site ripe for combatting Communism.13 These memoranda were circulated to the American embassies in Dakar, Leopoldville, Martinique and London. The American Embassy in Paris strongly recommended that Francis Hammond be charged with approaching these individuals privately and unofficially. The memo also stated that Josselson had indicated that the CCF would be willing to shoulder some of the costs in order to ensure effective anti-communist participation.14 Prompted by Wright’s warning and before taking any steps toward intervening in the Congress, the State Department solicited French opinion. The response from the French Ministry of Overseas Territories was blunt: “the importance of the Congress should not be underestimated and that every attempt should be made to preserve the orientation of the Présence Africaine to the West.”15 Author of the communiqué and

11 12

13

14

15

Communist Orientation of Presence Africaine, May 8, 1956, 1, Box 3645, RG 59, U.S National Archives at College Park (hereafter NACP). FBI, Wright File, 54. Amembassy Paris to the Department of State, re: Communist Orientation of Presence Africaine, May 8, 1956, 1. The CCF was a leftist anti-communist advocacy group founded in West Berlin in 1950. In 1966 it was revealed by the New York Times to have been the brainchild of the CIA. Amembassy Paris to the Department of State, re: Communist Orientation of Presence Africaine, May 8, 1956, 2. Amembassy Paris to the Department of State re: First Congress of Présence Africaine, May 8, 1956, 3.

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Director of Political Affairs for the Ministry Léon Pignon also feared that a second Congress would be held the following year in Prague. As far as he was concerned, such a gathering of West African intellectuals and politicians would result in allegiance to Moscow. Pignon was a staunch imperialist and anti-communist whose experiences as French High Commissioner in Indochina had left him very aware of the potential power of colonial resistance. In this particular instance, he was concerned by the prospect of USSR funded independence movements in North Africa. The State Department was left to resolve this issue.16 A memorandum on Présence Africaine was circulated by the Department of State. It singled out Alioune Diop, Aimé Césaire and René Dépestre for particular attention because of their known leftleaning inclinations.17 While the Department of State deliberated, Wright’s fears about the NAACP proved warranted. Wilkins did not even respond to Wright’s letters, instead passing on the proposed list to James Ivy, the editor of the NAACP journal, the Crisis. Ivy, in turn, passed the list and Wright’s concerns on to John Davis, a black professor of political science at the City College of New York. From 1954, Davis had also been the director of the CIA funded American Information Committee on Race and Caste. The Committee’s aim was to investigate foreign attitudes to domestic race issues and to facilitate cultural exchange between post-colonial states and the United States. Its origins lay in an increasing awareness that emerging African states viewed American race relations with a horror that jeopardized US interests in the region.18 Attendance at the 1956 Congress fell perfectly within the organization’s ambit and Davis was able to procure sufficient funding to send himself and a select number of African American intellectuals to the Paris Congress. The source of this funding was not the suggested Congress for Cultural Freedom but the American Committee on Race and Caste.19 The former instead

16

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18 19

Alexander Keese, “A Culture of Panic: ‘Communist’ Scapegoats and Decolonization in French West Africa and French Polynesia (1945–1957),” French Colonial History, 9 (2008): (131–145), especially 144–5; Georges-Henri Soutou, “France and the Cold War,” 44; Maurice Vaïsse, ed., La France et l’opération de Suez de 1956 (Paris: ADDIM, 1997). Amembassy Paris to the Department of State re: First Congress of Présence Africaine, May 8, 1956, 1. Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, 198–199. Amembassy Paris to the Department of State, re: Communist Orientation of Presence Africaine, May 8, 2.

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commissioned a young James Baldwin to cover the proceedings for their journal, Encounters.20 The final list of American delegates included John Davis himself, James Ivy, Mercer Cook (a professor of romance languages at Howard University) and Horace Mann Bond (a historian and the first black President of Lincoln University) and William Fontaine (a philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania). All five men were engaged actively in the fight to improve the black condition in America, and all five shared a strong faith in the perfectibility of the American democratic system. Horace Mann Bond was also the President of the Institute of African-American Relations, another institution with CIA links.21 It is difficult to ascertain if any of the men, other than Davis, knew of their CIA funding. Given the State Department’s involvement in preparing them for their trip, they must have at least suspected its origins. Before leaving America, they were all provided with detailed policy statements on colonialism.22 The day before the Congress, they were again briefed at the American Embassy on the official United States position on the intricacies of the French colonial situation.23 The three areas of chief concern were US policy on colonial and racial issues with specific regard to North Africa, US adherence to the principle of self-determination, and the US record in granting or encouraging the independence of subject peoples.24 The briefing focused primarily on North African concerns and resulted in the delegation focusing on the African element of the francophone diaspora. Richard Wright – perhaps because of his history with Communism and his tendency to criticize American race relations on the international stage – was excluded from the briefing. The Department did telegraph, however, assuring him that “an acceptable delegation of American Negro intellectuals” had been formed to attend the Congress.25 Their confidence 20

21

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23 24

25

James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers” in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (London: Michael Joseph, 1964), 27. First published in Encounters 3 (1957), 52–60. Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, 302; Wayne J. Urban, Black Scholar: Horace Mann Bond, 1904–1972 (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1992), 158–159. Department of State Instruction to the Amembassy Paris, re: Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, Paris, September 19–22, 1956, August 29, 1956, 1, Box 3645, NACP. Paris to Secretary of State, September 7, 1956, RG59, Box 3645, RG59, NACP. Department of State Instruction to the Amembassy Paris, re: Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, Paris, September 19–22, 1956, August 29, 1956, 2, RG59, NACP. The same instructions were given to Department official inquiring on the best way to respond to African American press inquiries about the Department’s position on the

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stemmed from the fact that the State Department had denied the so-called “father of pan-Africanism” and, by this time, militant Marxist W. E. B. Du Bois a passport to attend. Nevertheless, the American embassy remained concerned that the French were not giving the Congress enough attention. Mere days before the Congress, a memorandum to the Department of State despaired that the French government did not even know the exact date of the Congress. The French Ministry of Overseas Territories had certainly changed its tune in the months since Pignon’s first communication on the subject. While still certain that the Congress would be overrun by Communists, the Ministry had decided this was of little political significance because key African leaders such as the Côte d’Ivoire’s Félix Houphouët-Boigny and the Sudanese Hamadoun Dicko could not attend. Moreover, while Alioune Diop’s brand of Catholic socialism seemed suspicious to the Americans, to the French it was a perfectly acceptable manifestation of Diop’s assimilation into the French Union. Such a blasé approach concerned the Americans who saw the majority of African participants as leftists although “primarily intellectual rather than political.”26 The distinction was important because it meant that they could be swayed still to an American rather than Soviet alignment. Perhaps more presciently than the French, the general US position was not to underestimate the influence of men such as Diop, Césaire and Senghor. In part, these divergent governmental perspectives stemmed from the very different approaches of the United States and France to the claims to equality being made by the Francophone Africans. The 1946 loi de départmentalisation had definitively established the Antillean population as legal citizens, and although this had not guaranteed Antillean social and cultural acceptance as “French,” it did demonstrate the potential for the Fourth Republic to reconfigure itself along more egalitarian lines.27 Moreover, Prime Minister Guy Mollet’s center-left coalition – the Republican Front – had just come to power on an anti-colonial platform and promised peace with Algeria. Gaston Deferre’s subsequent loi-cadre of June 23, 1956, appeared to deliver on this promise, granting universal

26

27

Congress: Department of State, “Memorandum for Mr Maxwell M. Rabb, The Whitehouse, Through Colonel A. J. Goodpaster, Subject: “First Congress of the ‘Presence Africaine,’” July 31, 1956, Box 3645, RG59, NACP. Dillon, Amembassy Paris to Secretary of State, August 29, 1956, Box 3645, RG59, NACP. Jacques Dumont, L’amère patrie: Histoire des Antilles francaises au xxe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 158–163.

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suffrage, a single electoral college and territory-based assemblies to all the territoires d’outre-mer. Federation or Confederation within a French Union thus remained a possibility for men such as Senghor, Césaire and, indeed, the Mollet Cabinet.28 The State Department, in contrast, gave more weight to the fact that France had been forced to relinquish the colonial protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco earlier in the year. In tandem with the ongoing struggles for independence in Algeria, these events indicated to the State Department that the disintegration of the French Union would not be long in coming. This only exacerbated State Department feelings that now was the time to cultivate those leftist African participants. Their methods would prove clumsy and ineffective. Despite being detained in America, Du Bois managed to exercise his influence over the Congress by casting a pall over the African American contingent. His letter of apology, read as follows: “Any Negro-American who travels abroad must either not discuss race conditions in the United States, or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe.”29 As James Baldwin noted bitterly, this bold statement was met with riotous applause on the part of the Africans present.30 Du Bois’s message appeared to undermine the positions of the American delegates by questioning their allegiance to the black cause and linking them to US foreign policy initiatives of cultural imperialism. Those historians of the African American experience who have commented upon this suggest that Du Bois’s letter doomed any fruitful collaboration between the Americans and the Africans present.31 The suggestion has merit, but it overestimates Du Bois’s influence. A broader French wariness and resentment of America’s economic and cultural imperialism, as I have shown in the preceding chapters, already tainted many of the francophone delegates’ thinking about the United States. Their suspicion of American imperialism was more of a critique of the United States and its race relations than a position on those African 28

29

30 31

It is important to note that this comment in no way suggests that there was a monolithic understanding of how this might play out. It is intended only to indicate that the future forms of the French Union were open in a way that the US State Department in the 1950s, and the subsequent historiography, has seldom allowed for: Frederick Cooper, Between Citizenship and Empire; Frederick Cooper, Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 91; Gary Wilder, Freedom Time. W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the Congress of Écrivains et Artistes Noires,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June–November 1956): 383. James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” Encounters (January 1957): 53. See for example Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir, 197, and Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, 202–203.

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Americans delegates actually present at the Congress. Nevertheless, the applause was taken personally by many African Americans present and cannot be underestimated in any analysis of the Congress.32

7.3 the potential for black humanism to remake the world Alioune Diop’s opening remarks give context to Du Bois’s letter. As far as Diop was concerned, the audience in the Ampithéâtre Descartes at the Sorbonne shared the lived experience of European oppression, or at least of subjugation to the European vision of humanity. Western or European civilization had caused the problems facing the world, and it was unlikely that European civilization alone would be adequate to solve them.33 The question at hand was how best to reconstitute the Western framework so that it allowed for the universal enjoyment of human rights. For Diop, this process of reconstitution required recognizing the problems inherent in treating culture and politics as if they belonged to “two radically distinct worlds.”34 Quoting the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, he pointed to the ways in which cultural understandings of what it meant to be human were “inscribed in capital letters the structure of the state.”35 He believed that those at the Congress had the responsibility and the potential to refashion existing understandings of what it meant to be human so that they included blackness as a positive and equal way of being. Doing so effectively would transform the existing structures of Western civilization that had given rise to colonialism and racism. Such a black humanism envisaged a special role for intellectuals and the elite – those who produced art, philosophy and other forms of knowledge – and those who labored with their hands and often bore the brunt of racism, colonialism and exploitation.36 It was to this end that Diop had structured the Congress program into three sections: a celebration of black culture, an

32

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34 36

Horace Mann Bond, “Report on the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, Held in Paris, France, The Sorbonne, September 19–22, 1956,” n.d. [1956], 36.111B, Horace Mann Bond Papers, MS 411, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Libraries (hereafter, Horace Mann Bond Papers); Anon., “Report on Congress,” n.d. [1956], 36.111C, Horace Mann Bond Papers. Alioune Diop, “La culture moderne et notre destin,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June–November 1956): 5; “Discours d’ouverture,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June–November 1956): 10. 35 “Discours d’ouverture,” 14. “Discours d’ouverture,” 13. “Discours d’ouverture,” 14.

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examination of the crisis and oppression of black culture and the prospects of utilizing this culture in the struggle for self-determination. Faith in the potential of this humanism to reconfigure the contemporary world echoed throughout the Congress, from the letters of apology read out by invitees unable to attend through to the presentations of the delegates. Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, sent in a letter framing the aim of the Congress and of the Présence Africaine project as part of the fight for the survival of mankind: “[N]o human knowledge is possible if the entirety of mankind is not recognised as innately worthy of being known . . . the survival of mankind is only possible if each constituent group within mankind is recognised in their historic and concrete capacity as composing it.”37 Lévi-Strauss conceived of the Congress as a part of the final stage of humanism; “a democratic humanism” and a “true humanism” because it would leave no part of the world out. Malagasy poet and politician Jacques Rabemananjara advanced a similar idea in his presentation “L’Europe et Nous.” As far as he was concerned, centuries of European colonization had silenced the voices of colonized peoples. Now, “the striking of the gong of Bandung had sounded the spectacular end of a [European] monologue that had lasted many centuries.”38 The moment had come for the “African note” to be added to the conversation so that all of humanity engaged in the creation of the postwar world.39 Aimé Césaire agreed, arguing that the over-riding result of all forms of colonization had been to leave “entire peoples . . . emptied of their culture” and unsure of their contribution to the modern world.40 As far as he was concerned, the existence of a vibrant and diverse black culture in spite of this Western oppression was valuable evidence of a self-determining capacity. The imperative of the Congress, he felt, was to martial this evidence into a coherent philosophy of blackness. Such a step was necessary because it showed the black cultural capacity necessary for, and entailed in the exercise of, fundamental human rights and citizenship obligations. In articulating his understanding of colonialism in terms of its cultural repercussions, Césaire also sought to emphasize the commonalities between those members of the African diaspora who had 37

38

39 40

Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Messages,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June– November 1956): 385–387. Jacques Rabemananjara, “L’Europe et nous,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June–November 1956): 20. Jacques Rabemananjara, “L’Europe et nous,” 20–28. Aimé Césaire, “Culture et Colonisation,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June–November 1956): 190.

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experienced colonization under French and British imperial rule and African Americans whose experience of racism had manifested in structurally different ways.41 In his contribution to the Congress, Léopold Sédar Senghor, took the notion of black culture and its connection to stakes of political emancipation, even further. He argued that “cultural liberation is an essential condition of political liberation.”42 Evidence could be found, according to Senghor, in the incremental progress being made in the United States: “If white America is granting the claims of Nègres, it is because the writers and artists have given the race back its dignity.”43 It followed that if the black world desired to overcome the racism inherent in imperialism, then its writers and artists too must reinvigorate black culture and restore the race’s dignity.44 This vision of a black universal culture had its roots in Africa but was anchored to contemporary French dialogue. Senghor engaged explicitly with André Malraux and André Breton and their theories of the relationship between art and lived experience.45 Achieving equal rights for Africans and those of African descent required the recognition that all cultures, no matter their differences, are equal. Political liberation, then, would come not from a state-based independence that demarcated difference but from an acceptance that the universal was made up of multiple particularities. For Senghor, the particular issue in this case was the African sensibility to emotion – as contrasted with European rationality – that he saw manifested throughout the black diaspora. Recrafting Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau’s definition of “le nègre” as inferior to whites because the race was controlled by artistic emotion, Senghor used ontological reasoning to establish “le Nègre” as human precisely by virtue of this sensibility.46 Establishing this “existential ontology” demonstrated that peace in the present would be dependent

41

42

43 44 45 46

Aimé Césaire, “Culture et Colonisation,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June–November 1956): 190. Nikhil Pal Singh situates Césaire’s analogy of the African American experience with colonialism in a chapter entitled “Decolonizing America” in Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, 174–211. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “L’Ésprit de la civilisation ou les lois de la culture négroafricaine,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June–November 1956): 51–65. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “L’Esprit,” 51. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “L’Esprit,” 51–52. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “L’Ésprit,” 60, 59. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau was a nineteenth-century aristocrat who developed a theory of white racial supremacy: Essai sur l’inegalité des races humaines (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, 1853).

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upon allowing Africans to make a contribution to civilization in equal part to European rationality. It was this ability to contribute that entitled Africans to an equal claim to citizenship rights within their national frameworks. It is important to note here that Senghor did not see a tribal identity such as Wolof as being exclusive of a larger belonging to Senegal. Nor, in turn, did he see being Senegalese as inimical to being French. He sought, instead, to frame these differences as culturally equivalent, with the capacity to co-exist within heterogeneous nation-state entities. From the transcript of the discussion, after Césaire and Senghor spoke, it is apparent that the African American delegation misread Senghor and Césaire’s papers as calls for political revolution resulting in national independence for all black peoples – that is to say, for a theory of nationstate belonging contingent upon racial and cultural homogeneity. This alienated them on two grounds, it seemed to discount their approaches to struggles against racism in the US domestic context and their understanding of their relationship to the rest of the African diaspora. Insofar as their own situation was concerned, political independence was far from the solution to racism they sought. Césaire’s references to the fight for selfdetermination in the American context reminded them of the 1928 Comintern declaration of the Black Belt as an independent nation, on the basis of an African American majority population.47 In his response to Césaire’s talk, Davis clarified, “We do not look forward to any selfdetermination in the belt if this is what Mr. Césaire had in mind.”48 Independence was all very well, Davis felt, for those living under the French and British imperial systems but the African American situation was a case apart. As Baldwin put it later, American democracy had the potential for racial equality built in, the struggle was “to make the machinery work for our benefit.”49 African American domestic activism was in the process of creating this change. The American delegation’s determination to emphasize the “perfectible” nature of the American democracy was undoubtedly connected to their anti-communist agenda. It was also, however, a manifestation of the five men’s genuine belief that regardless of historical ties to Africa, they

47

48

49

Brent Hayes Edwards, “Introduction: Césaire in 1956,” Social Text, 103 (Summer 2010): 118. John A. Davis, “Débats,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June– November 1956): 217. James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” 148.

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were first and foremost American. The term “Negro,” for Davis, was less a culturally distinct identity than a political grouping that he sought to overcome.50 Integration into the American democratic system, as far as he was concerned, would not require discarding a unique culture in exchange for rights, but establishing a legal recognition that the color of a man’s skin had no bearing upon his national belonging.51 It was this very belief in the principles of American democracy, rather than a transcendent feeling of blackness, Horace Mann Bond argued, that had brought him and his fellow delegates to the Congress in the first place. They believed that the only grounds for diasporic unity came from a shared membership in “the fraternity of the oppressed” rather than from a shared racial identity.52 What Davis, Bond, Cook and the others did not recognize, however, was that neither Césaire nor Senghor was trying to suggest there was something irreconcilable about being both black and part of Western civilization. Nor, ironically, was either man necessarily a proponent of national independence as the solution to imperialist socio-political inequality. Instead, Césaire and Senghor were arguing that American and Western attitudes had marginalized the black population in a way that needed to be remedied.53 Aware of this dissonance, both men attempted to reformulate their arguments. Senghor stated that the uniting problem for all black people was “political alienation,” but he pointed out that Césaire had diagnosed this issue rather than advocated for a Communist or a Socialist solution to resolve it.54 Insofar as he, Senghor, was concerned, “in order to . . . have an authentic culture, there is a political problem to be solved” because disenfranchisement had, as Fanon argued, meant “the destruction of cultural values, of ways of life.”55 Only once that problem was resolved could the question of genuine civilizational exchange between black Africans and the West be approached. Only then could the racially heterogeneous democratic nation-states realize their potential. In his efforts to persuade the African American delegates, Césaire took a different tack, reformulating his original comment to suggest that if the 50

51 53 54 55

John A. Davis, “The Participation of the Negro in the Democratic Process of the NAACP,” 12:15 (June–September 1957), 129–147. 52 John A. Davis, “The Participation,” 147. Bond, “Reflections, Comparative,”142. John A. Davis, “Débats,” 213; Mercer Cook and John A. Davis, “Débats,” 215. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Débats,” 219. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Débats,” 219; Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June–November 1956): 33.

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African Americans were not in a colonial situation, then they were indeed in what Senghor had referred to earlier as the colonial situation’s sequel.56 It seemed to him that the “phenomenon of racial segregation is very typically a survival, a sequel of slavery and therefore of the colonialism of the XVII and XVIII centuries.”57 As a result, Césaire thought it quite evident that the mentalities of racism and eurocentrism remained in America as elsewhere. Black culture needed to develop an alternate mentality that would overcome these innate power structures, however they manifested in individual societies. The value of doing so not only lay in an end to racism but in the development of a civilizational structure that would allow for different cultures and peoples to be treated equally. For Davis, this only aggravated his sense that Césaire was criticizing the United States because he believed the US government to be the ally of imperial interests. Expanding upon the notion of US democracy as a perfectible work in progress, Davis sought to counter Césaire’s position with the comment that “America has always taken an anticolonialist position; from George Washington down to Dwight Eisenhower, every president has taken this position.”58 This gambit opened Davis up to accusations that he was, as Du Bois had warned, toeing the US governmental line, and this further enhanced his sense of alienation. Ultimately, Césaire and Senghor did not persuade their American interlocutors. Both positions were underpinned with very different understandings of the connection between culture and politics and how these two categories comprised Western civilization. At its root, this was a fundamental disagreement about the operating mechanics of racism and imperialism within the frameworks of France and the United States and how this relationship translated to the uneven application of political rights. For Baldwin and Davis, for example, achieving citizenship rights involved the assimilation into Western civilization of previously ostracized groups. Part of this social contract was the elision of difference (otherwise put, a “color blindness”) in the face of a single, human political identity that erased sociohistorical experiences of racial and cultural difference and required fidelity to particular political values. In his piece on the Congress for Encounters, James Baldwin made it clear that he did not believe this was an option open to black peoples 56 57

Aimé Césaire, “Débats,” 225; Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Débats,” 218–219. 58 Aimé Césaire, “Débats,” 225. John A. Davis, “Débats,” 216.

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outside America, writing that “the American Negro is possibly the only man of colour who can speak of the West with any authority.”59 African Americans were “the connecting link between Africa and the West.”60 Baldwin’s analysis ignored egregiously the experiences of the black men and women who had, for example, lived and been educated in France. Further, it highlighted the way that the African American delegation saw other participants at the Congress, not as hailing from a multitude of colonial experiences and national contexts but as coming from an imagined “mysterious” Africa seeking to find freedom by throwing off the shackles of Western imperialist countries.61 Baldwin’s assertion that the African American was best qualified to speak of the West also pointed to a rigid delineation of the composition of the West and a refusal to accept racial differentiation on the basis of sociohistorical experience. It presumed the US democracy, construed as a monolithic culture that demanded integration, to be the pinnacle of Western ideals thus far. In contrast, thinkers like Senghor placed the accent on black agency and collaboration in the creation of more egalitarian political systems. Senghor believed that “we must not be assimilated, we must assimilate; that is, there must be freedom of choice, there must be freedom of assimilation.”62 This did not, as Baldwin later suggested, mean a desire to “overthrow” Western nations. On the contrary, it meant contact between civilizations that occurred on equal terms. Political freedom involved cultural authenticity, being able, as Senghor put it, to “fully express . . . Negroness” – a “Negroness” that had played an unacknowledged role in shaping the modern world.63 Achieving this freedom required understanding, as Fanon put it, that “universality resides” in the “decision to bear the burden of the reciprocal relativism of differing cultures.”64 Given these differences in understanding, it is perhaps unsurprising that these thinkers found themselves so diametrically opposed at the Congress.

59 60 61

62 64

James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” 53. James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” 53. Cf. James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” 52–60. This perspective was also born out in the few reports of the Congress that appeared in the black press: James Ivy, “First Negro Congress of Writers and Artists,” Crisis, 63 (December 1956): 593. For a more detailed exploration of this coverage, see Sarah C. Dunstan, “A Question of Allegiance: African American Intellectuals, Présence Africaine and the 1956 Congrès des ecrivains et artistes noir,” Australian Journal of American Studies, 34:1 (July 2015): 1–16. 63 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Débats,” 218. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Débats,” 218. Frantz Fanon, “Racisme et Culture,” 131.

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7.4 richard wright and the case for a secular modernity When the heated discussions drew to a close, there remained one last speaker on the Congress program: Richard Wright. As the close friend of many in the Présence Africaine group and an African American who had dwelt in both the United States and Paris, the delegates looked to Wright to play the role of intermediary.65 Wright was only too aware of this role and began by addressing the sense of cultural dissonance that had emerged between the francophone and American delegates: “where do I, an American Negro . . . stand in relation to that culture? . . . I am black and he is black; I am an American and he is French, and so, there you are. And yet there is a schism in our relationship, not political but profoundly human.”66 Wright’s answer lay in his understanding of what he called “the modernizing process.”67 He believed that Western modernity had excluded both groups through processes that were different even if they sprung from the same root. His position as an American allowed him to move between an African and Western mentality and to conceive of a third possibility combining the two experiences. The basis of his Western-ness resided not in his citizenship – however second-rate – of the United States but in his belief in the separation of Church and State.68 For Wright, the task of educated elites at this moment was to unite the rational thinkers of Europe with the rational thinkers of Asia and Africa. Precisely because education in Western countries and exposure to Western values had positioned them to have a foot in both worlds, this vanguard of elite intellectuals – regardless of their national affiliations – could ensure the propagation of enlightenment principles through the previously colonized world and thereby establish a new universality that discarded the flaws of the past. In many ways, Wright’s position echoed that of Diop, Césaire and Senghor. However, his off-the-cuff remarks alienated those who linked their activism to a particular religious doctrine, as did Diop. Wright’s critique of religion was targeted explicitly at his co-presenters. He made it clear that he believed that true decolonization meant freedom from

65 66

67 68

James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” 59. Richard Wright, “Proceedings of the 1st International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June–November 1956): 66. Richard Wright, “Proceedings,” 66. Richard Wright, “Tradition and Industrialisation,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June–November 1956): 355–369.

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religion and a cohort of Western-educated elites that believed in the secular state. Wright was furious at those present who were squandering their own liberation by re-asserting religious doctrine.69 Pointing to his Protestant upbringings and to the ways in which religion was used in the American South to legitimate racism and racial violence, Wright declared his refusal to accept “any tradition that proscribes my humanity.”70 Selfdetermination on an individual level, then, was the key to advancement.71 Henry Louis Gates Jr. has suggested persuasively that Wright’s use of the term “religion” can be read as a surrogate for culture – an argument that what Africans needed to do to modernize was to dissociate themselves from African culture.72 This reading certainly aligned with Davis’s strong belief that African progress depended on shedding traditional practices. Nevertheless, Wright did not believe, as Davis did, that the United States represented the achievement of this rupture between irrationalism and rationalism. On the contrary, he saw the moment as one ripe for effecting such a transformation. Nowhere is this clearer than in the final lines of his paper: “This conference, I feel must proceed to define the tools and the nature of finishing that job, and the strengthening of the elite. Freedom is indivisible.”73 When Wright spoke of an indivisible freedom, he was not just thinking of religious or cultural division. It had not escaped his notice that most of the conference delegates were male and that their visions of political organization and belonging were decidedly masculine: “In our struggle for freedom, against great odds, we cannot afford to ignore one half of our manpower, that is the force of black women and their effective collaboration. Black men will not be free until their women are free.” Other delegates ignored his statement. Several reports suggest a white British communist, Dorothy Brooks, was the sole woman in attendance. She may have been the only immediately visible female attendee, but Christiane Yandé Diop attended too, as did the wives of other delegates. Moreover, Diop had been responsible for the great majority of the Congress’s administrative organization. Davidson Nicol, a delegate from Sierra Leone, would later recall that she “quietly and with great effectiveness and patience” orchestrated day-to-day running of the Congress, facilitating 69 70 71 72

73

Richard Wright, “Tradition and Industrialisation,” 356. Richard Wright, “Tradition and Industrialisation,” 353. Richard Wright, “Tradition and Industrialisation,” 353. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Third World of Theory: Enlightenment’s Esau,” Critical Inquiry, 34, suppl. (Winter 2008), s191–s205; s195. Richard Wright, “Tradition and Industrialisation,” 360.

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the translation and publication of various manuscripts delegates had brought to the Congress.74 It is also clear from the letters of apology that Dorothy Brooks had been charged with contacting many of the nonAmerican anglophone members of the black diaspora.75 For a Congress that stressed the central role of disseminating ideas in effecting political change, it is ironic that the work of the women who effected the organization of this process has been so often omitted.

7.5 creating the socie´ te´ africaine de culture Although other delegates ignored Wright’s plea for the inclusion of women they agreed unanimously on the importance of the intellectual elite of Africa and Asia playing a significant role in the decolonization process. To this end, they established the Société Africaine de Culture (SAC). The preamble to SAC’s Constitution outlined its goal as being to “unite by the means of solidarity and friendship men of culture from the black world” in order to achieve “the cooperation, development and the improvement of universal culture.”76 Underpinning this goal was the belief that its achievement would promote respect for the rights of man and work for equal economic rights for each individual of every human community, regardless of their race or religion. The creation of SAC had been on Diop’s mind from the beginning. Alongside other Présence Africaine affiliates such as Jean-Paul Sartre and André Breton, Diop was a member of the Société Européene de Culture (SEC). Established in 1950, the SEC was an organization whose members hoped to use culture to address the problems the world was facing.77 In his own speech at the Congress, Diop had named SEC as inspiration for both the Congress itself 74

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Davidson Nicol, “Alioune Diop and the African Renaissance,” African Affairs (January 1979): 8. George Padmore, “Messages,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June– November 1956): 384; S. O. Biobaku, “Messages,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June–November 1956): 394–395. “Statuts de la société africaine de culture,” Organisation Internationale NonGouvernementale (ONG), AG 8 ONG1, File 143, UNESCO Archives, Paris, France. Established in 1950, SEC ran with the aim of addressing the problems the world was facing through culture. Much like those thinkers involved in Présence Africaine, those behind SEC believed that the best guarantee of the application of universal human rights was through the development of the concept of the civilization of the universal. The Italian Umberto Campagnolo, a key founder of SEC and close correspondent of Diop’s, was a particularly fervent disciple of these principles. He believed that a federalized European state and, ultimately, a federalized international structure was the best means of averting the potential crises of the Cold War.

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and for SAC.78 From 1954, SEC consulted with UNESCO and Alioune Diop hoped for a similar role for SAC.79 The organization’s founding resolutions explicitly identified SAC’s purpose as congruent with the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Right and outside the politics of national belonging. SAC aimed “to safeguard liberty of dialogue between men of all origins and of all political orientation and of all races.”80 Much like his analysis of the dynamics of politics and culture in creating change, Diop’s weapons of choice in the struggle against racism and imperialism were not unanimously accepted by attendees at the 1956 Congress. Césaire, who still believed in the possibility of achieving equality within the French Union, was very dubious about the potential of UNESCO to effect change. At the Congress, he had commented that for societies to evolve, “the call to modification must come from within and not from without.”81 As a result, he found that “the work of UNESCO, can, in the present context, only have an extremely limited value.”82 On the American side, the admixture of cultural and political concerns seemed naïve. Mercer Cook, for example, was less than impressed by his francophone colleagues, despite his long-standing friendships with Senghor and Achille, complaining to Wright, “Since my return I have heard that the American delegates impressed some as being ‘too Western, too American, too conservative.’ Perhaps our long experience in fighting prejudice has taught us that there are methods more effective than wild eyes and empty words.”83 A similar letter from Davis to Wright suggested a sense of superiority too. He told Wright he was “doing a very important job in preventing our African friends from returning to the irrationalism of primitivism, and from turning to xenophobia.” He also 78

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Alioune Diop, “Discours d’ouverture,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June– November 1956): 13. “Statuts de la société africaine de culture,” Organisation Internationale NonGouvernementale (ONG)” AG 8 ONG1, File 143, UNESCO Archives, Paris, France. “Statuts de la société africaine de culture,” Organisation Internationale NonGouvernementale (ONG),” Unesco Archives, AG 8 ONG1, File 143; Société africaine de culture, “Statuts de la Société africaine de culture,” 1956, 1, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. It is worth noting that the Catholic press praised the Congress for precisely these humanitarian goals: Jacques Howlett, “Le Premier Congrès des écrivains et artistes et la presse internationale,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 20 (June–July 1957): 111–117. Aimé Césaire, “Débats,” Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, 8-9-10 (June– November 1956): 227. Aimé Césaire, “Débats,” 227. Mercer Cook to Richard Wright, November 1, 1956, Box 96, Folder 1274, Richard Wright Papers.

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hoped that Wright could “guide them along the road to national emergence, and to a healthy evaluation of that which is best and rational in Western culture.”84 Whether this was connected to the desire to distinguish African Americans from black Africans or whether it was a function of discomfort at the different cultural and political perspectives they had been presented with at the Congress, it is difficult to say. It is certain, however, that Davis had little time for the idea that artists and creative writers might be useful in crafting change. In the same letter, he rather tactlessly lamented Wright’s choice to be a writer when he might have better served racial interests as a social scientist.85 The group behind Présence Africaine knew about the American delegates’ dissatisfaction with the Congress. The cover article for the special issue of the journal dedicated to the Congress, probably written by Diop, noted that some criticisms had been made of the hopes for political unity within the African diaspora. Acerbically, the author continued, “[W]e will not fail to appreciate the degree of absurdity of such a comment: are African Americans and Haitians supposed to, under a political plan, be motivated by the same sense of identity as those from Malagasy, Sudan and Guinea?”86 Nevertheless, three key ideas had emerged from the Congress: there are no peoples without a past, no culture without antecedent, no authentic cultural liberation without prior political liberation.87 There could, therefore, be no meaningful change to existing political situations without addressing these three points by demonstrating once and for all that white men were not the “sole bearers of civilization.”88

7.6 american cold war weaponry Despite the different perspectives upon the issue of race and the acquisition of rights that had emerged at the 1956 Congress, John Davis organized quickly an American branch of SAC. Called the American Society of African Culture, or, AMSAC, the association was funded by the same group that had sponsored his passage to Paris. One of the first pamphlets published by AMSAC justified the African American presence at the 84

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John A. Davis to Richard Wright, November 17, 1956, Box 96, Folder 1276, Richard Wright Papers. John A. Davis to Richard Wright, November 17, 1956, Box 96, Folder 1276, Richard Wright Papers. 87 “Après le Congres,” Présence Africaine, 4:11 (1956): 4. “Après le Congres,” 5. “Après le Congres,” 4–5.

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Congress, stating that “Most of the Africans had obtained their ideas of the position of the American Negro from headline incidents and from Communist propaganda.”89 The author went on to make clear that the American delegation had shown themselves to be entirely American in character – despite their fight for equality on the domestic front. Even the potentially questionable Richard Wright, it noted, had been a clear advocate for the adoption of Western Enlightenment values by the African movements for political independence and autonomy. The African Americans present at the Congress, in short, had not wasted their time. Not content with merely demonstrating that the African American delegates had portrayed America positively on the world stage, the pamphlet also characterized the Congress, and implicitly the rational American presence at the Congress, as the turning point in Aimé Césaire’s political trajectory: “One of the interesting repercussions of the Congress occurred when shortly after it was over, Aimé Césaire resigned from the French Communist Party in a public Lettre à Maurice Thorez.” Around the same time, Mercer Cook published in the Crisis an abridged translation of Césaire’s repudiation of the French Communist Party (PCF), along with James Ivy’s précis which emphasized Césaire’s virtues as a black man who conformed to the highest standards of Western civilization. In his famous letter (discussed in more detail in Chapter 6), Césaire did not renounce Marxism but criticized the PCF’s failure to address the anti-colonial struggles facing the Antillean population he represented. It was thus spurious of AMSAC to link the break from the PCF to their persuasive arguments at the Congress.90 Nevertheless, the argument convinced the Committee on Race and Caste in World Affairs (CORAC) – the new name for the CIA-funded American Information Committee on Race and Caste – that AMSAC was a worthwhile participant in the fight against communism. Soon afterward, with CORAC funding, AMSAC opened an office on East 40th Street, New York, in an area later known for housing several CIAfunded initiatives. John Davis became the Executive Director and liaison between AMSAC and CORAC, and Horace Mann Bond became the President. The membership requirements were clear and specific. Only 89

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AMSAC, “American Society for African Culture,” Pamphlet, AMSAC Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (hereafter AMSAC Papers). See, for example, Cilas Kemedjio, “Aimé Césaire’s Letter to Maurice Thorez,” Research in African Literatures, 41:1, Special Issue: Aimé Césaire, 1913–2008: Poet, Politician, Cultural Statesman (Spring 2010): 87–108.

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members of the African American community who were both part of academic circles and untarnished by the accusation of communism were asked to join. One such example was Rayford W. Logan, a social scientist and longstanding participant in the black diasporic project. While Logan did become a member of AMSAC quite soon after its establishment, he was suspicious of the appearance of interest in Africa at the very same moment that the more radical and diasporic-minded elements of the African American leadership were being curtailed. The leadership of AMSAC, Logan felt, was a concern. In his journal, he wrote, “How did John A. Davis suddenly become interested in Africa?”91 Logan was not alone in his suspicions. The celebrated African American novelist Ralph Ellison refused to participate and labeled AMSAC’s “racial approach to culture” as a “form of fakery and a backward step.” His own experiences with the State Department – in 1955 they had offered to pay the expenses for a trip to the Gold Coast if he wrote a novel about the country – led him to suspect the Department’s hand in AMSAC too.92 As we know now, Ellison’s suspicion was not unfounded. How best to approach Africa was a conundrum occupying the minds of many American politicians and bureaucrats from the State Department through to the National Security Council. Barely two months after the Présence Africaine Congress, on November 1, 1956, events in Hungary, the Suez and the Sinai prompted a reflective John Foster Dulles to announce to the National Security Council that it “had almost reached the point of deciding . . . whether we think the future lies with a policy of reasserting by force colonial control over the less-developed nations, or whether we will oppose such a course of action by every appropriate means.”93 The decision would be significant not only to the United States but to the French and to the Franco-American relationship. The resolution of Dulles’s dilemma was made clear in the United States’ refusal to support the French on Algeria in the United Nations General Assembly meeting held a few weeks afterward. Vice President Richard Nixon later characterized this decision as a coming of age in American foreign policy, noting that “[f]or the first time in American history we have shown independence 91

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Logan Diary, Entry for August 4, 1958, Box 6, DIARY, 1958–1959, 1960, Rayford W. Logan Papers, Library of Congress. For more on Ellison and his refusal to participate in propaganda initiatives, see Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2007), 312. John Foster Dulles, 302nd Meeting of the NSC, November 1, 1956, AWF NSC Series, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.

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of Anglo-French policies toward Asia and Africa.”94 There was a price. Already resentful of their reliance upon the United States for economic stability and increasingly disturbed by what was perceived as American cultural imperialism, French Prime Minister Félix Gaillard and Foreign Minister Christian Pineau saw the United States’ actions as an encroachment upon their sovereign interests.95 Unable to communicate openly with emerging African leaders from the existing French Union without further alienating the French government, the Americans were forced to use less-overt channels. The State Department attempted to cultivate Diop by awarding him a US Foreign Leader Grant to visit the United States for three months, starting in September 1957. It came just after UNESCO granted SAC consultative status, making it the first International NGO to UNESCO representing the African diaspora.96 Diop was the first African of French nationality to be offered a Foreign Leadership Programme grant. Carefully selected for his ability “to exert considerable influence among intellectuals and students in emergent African countries,” the Department of State recommended that his stay in the United States, and in particular his trip to the South, be in the company of senior figures in the African American intellectual community, race leaders from Lincoln and Howard and the NAACP.97 If the desire had been to cement Diop’s anticommunism and encourage pro-American feeling, the ploy failed spectacularly. Despite AMSAC’s organization of a series of extravagant events for Diop, he returned to France even more critical of America. He had not been blind to the continuing racial discrimination suffered by the majority

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William M. Blair, “Nixon Hails Break with Allies Policies,” New York Times, November 3, 1956, 1, 19. “(France) Agreed Draft Communique (Representatives of US and Developments in France.),” Memorandum, Herbert Hoover Jr., Under Secretary of State, to the President. March 3, 1956. 1 p. Att: Am Emb Paris, Telegram No. 3992. March 2, 1956, Papers as President of the United States, 1953–61 (Ann Whitman File), International File, France, 1956–1960(6), Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas; Memorandum, Robert D. Murphy, Dep. Under Secretary of State, to the Acting Secretary of State. March 3, 1956, 1, Papers as President of the United States, 1953–1961 (Ann Whitman File), International File, France, 1956–1960(6), Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas. It seems that this speedy acceptance was due in part to E. Franklin Frazier’s advocacy of SAC to old colleagues of his at UNESCO: Alioune Diop to Franklin Frazier, Paris le 5 Juin, 1958, Box 121–23, Folder 12, Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Centre, Howard University (hereafter Moorland-Spingarn). Amembassy Paris to Dept. of State, 7 August 1957, RG 59, Box 2153, France: 1955–59, 511.513, NACP.

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of the African American population, and he questioned the assimilationist tendencies of men such as Davis and Bond. In a letter sent to Davis after his return, Diop asked for the contact information of several African American leaders whom he wished to write to personally, outside the ambit of AMSAC, presumably to hear other perspectives.98 Davis refused outright. He also made it clear that he expected to control all of the material disseminated in America from black France.99 A letter from AMSAC secretary James Harris to Richard Wright reiterated this position: “It seems clear that Mr. Diop’s time with us . . . was not long enough to establish the kind of rapport that we are certain is a mutual desire.”100 Both Harris and Davis wanted AMSAC to operate as the direct conduit between the francophone and anglophone parts of the diaspora.101 AMSAC had one important card to play in ensuring that the alliance would be weighted in its favor: financial resources. From the beginning, Diop’s SAC had been plagued with financial problems. Enthusiastic early attempts to establish national branches in Dakar and Conakry had relied upon financial support from the Parisian-based SAC, but mounting bills eventually forced Diop to ask for financial assistance from the wealthier AMSAC. Reluctant to give a direct loan, Davis instead offered to divert funds from the Council on Race and Caste in World Affairs as a membership payment from AMSAC in exchange for more power and African American representation on the SAC executive and Présence Africaine editorial board.102 At one point, Davis even proposed that that AMSAC should control the SAC executive board proportionate to the number of states in America.103 This would result in Davis’s increased control over the international representation of African Americans. The link between Davis’s maneuvering and the agendas of the State Department and the CIA appears evident. Both bodies wished to control the way that American race relations were seen on the international stage (discussed in Chapter 6). 98

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Alioune Diop to John Davis, November 21, 1957, Information Copy circulated to St. Clair Drake, St. Clair Drake Papers, Box 11, Folder 9, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. John Davis to Alioune Diop, December 5, 1957, Box 121–23, Folder 12, Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland-Spingarn. James T. Harris to Richard Wright, March 21, 1958, Box 93, Folder 1173, Richard Wright Papers. James T. Harris to Richard Wright, March 21, 1958. John A. Davis to Richard Wright, November 18, 1957, Box 96, Folder 1276, Box 93, Folder 1173, Richard Wright Papers. John A. Davis to Roptin, on behalf of SAC, 31 Mars, 1958, AMSAC Papers.

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While Davis’s control of the purse strings did ensure that he achieved greater representation for African Americans within SAC – Mercer Cook was appointed to the executive board – it did not endear him to Diop. Diop’s letters to Davis often equated his actions with imperial tactics of domination: “We have suffered enough from the cultural oppression of Europe to hope that our Black brothers of America will not . . . give rebirth to cultural colonialism.” One of the first joint initiatives between AMSAC and SAC – an edited collection entitled Africa Seen by American Negroes – emphasized this rift. Diop made no bones about his views on the relationship between SAC and America: “We have no part in the East-West conflict . . . SAC’s duty is to avoid the influence of the massive power of both Washington and Moscow.”104 He noted that many “African intellectuals have criticized us for admitting the American Negro to SAC” because they interpreted it as “servile acceptance of American imperialism.”105 In contrast, he saw it as a recognition of the collective “memory of slavery” and the recognition of the ways that “Negroes have enriched American culture” through a “certain number of traditions and talents from African culture.”106 For all that, he was keen to make clear that including Americans did not mean they would be allowed to dominate diasporic discussions or act as agents of their country’s imperialism. More significantly still, the volume illustrated just how unrepresentative Davis’s perspective was of the African American intellectual leadership beyond AMSAC. Two articles by Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier indicated that they were dubious about the extent to which African Americans could be of any aid to the African community in the decolonization process.107 Du Bois believed simply that Western capital and Western civilization had failed the oppressed peoples of the world. Any effort by the United States to participate in decolonization should be viewed as an attempt to perpetuate power imbalances.108 For Frazier, the idea that African Americans could contribute “to the development of Africa, rests upon sentimental grounds or represents a type of wishful

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Alioune Diop, “Our AMSAC brothers” in Africa Seen by American Negroes (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1957), xii. Alioune Diop, “Our AMSAC brothers,” xi. Alioune Diop, “Our AMSAC brothers,” xi. E. Franklin Frazier, “Potential American Negro Contributions to African Social Development” in Alioune Diop (ed.), Africa Seen by American Negroes, 263–278; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Liberia, the League and the United States” in Alioune Diop (ed.), Africa Seen by American Negroes, 329–344. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Liberia, the League and the United States,” 329–344.

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thinking.”109 The experience of Jim Crow America had led to a situation in which black Africans had “outstripped the American Negro in the acquisition of industrial skills.”110 Nor did Americans possess either the financial wherewithal or the political clout and experience “which the African members of French parliament have.”111 In his introduction to the volume, Davis took umbrage at these comments and did his best to paint them as minority perspectives: “Obviously the society does not agree with Frazier’s thesis . . . Nor can we agree with Du Bois.”112 Nonetheless, their inclusion in the book indicates that Diop retained editorial control despite Davis’ best efforts. Présence Africaine offered further avenues for dissenting African Americans to air their concerns. Harold Cruse, who would later become famous for The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), penned one of his first critiques of African American intellectual leadership for the December1957–January1958 edition of the journal. Attacking the integrationist tendencies of a young Martin Luther King Jr., among others, Cruse praised the emphasis that SAC and men such as Césaire, Senghor and Diop placed upon culture: “I believe the Negro problem in the United States to be primarily a cultural question, yet it is the cultural side of the question which is the most overlooked and neglected.”113 Cruse’s analysis of the American dilemma ran contrary to Davis’s position but aligned neatly with Présence Africaine’s raison d’être. A 1957 editorial statement of the journal’s aims emphasized that the question the black world faced “went far beyond the problem of the concession of certain rights . . . it concerned a fundamental recasting of the structures of European civilisation and of African life.”114 The United States, for all its progress on race, still required a “fundamental re-casting.”115 But it was in France that the question of re-casting took center stage. The 1956 loi-cadre had granted certain important political rights without 109

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E. Franklin Frazier, “Potential American Negro Contributions to African Social Development,” 264. E. Franklin Frazier, “Potential American Negro Contributions to African Social Development,” 266. E. Franklin Frazier, “Potential American Negro Contributions to African Social Development,” 267. John Davis, “Introduction” in Alioune Diop (ed.), Africa Seen by American Negroes, 1. Harold Cruse, “An Afro-American Cultural View,” Nouvelle série, 17 (December 1957–January 1958): 43. “Presence Africaine” in Africa Seen by American Negroes, back pages. “Presence Africaine” in Africa Seen by American Negroes, back pages.

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reconfiguring the French Union.116 Legislative power remained centralized in Paris while the indigenous populations represented by men such as Senghor pushed for larger reforms and the de-centralization of power. With the specter of the Algerian War, a constant reminder of the possible consequences of failing to resolve the situation, commentators and officials across the political spectrum agreed that the French Union was on shaky ground. Achieving consensus on the solution was another matter. Some, such as the old Minister of Overseas France, Jean-Jacques Juglas, saw the potential to salvage the failing French Union through the efforts of deputies such as Senghor.117 Senghor had long been passionate about a Eurafrican France, built “with the consent of Africans” on equal grounds.118 As Senghor’s political protégée, Senegalese politician Mamadou Dia, argued in 1955, neither colonialism nor independence was a politically and economically sound decision for France or its associated African territories. For Dia, Senghor and Guinean politician Sékou Touré, this meant that “the imperialist notion of the nation-state [must] give way completely to the modern concept of the multi-national state.”119 Others, such as Antillean writer René Maran (discussed in Chapters 1 and 3), continued a long tradition of anti-imperial activism in the French Empire by advocating the full integration of overseas citizens into a unitary French Republic. Concerned that federalism would foster inequality through the unequal distribution of resources across existing territories, Maran and politicians such as the Sudanese Fily Dabo Sissoko believed that only the “individualisation of citizens” could lead to equal living standards.120 For most French politicians, the cost of such an initiative made it impossible to contemplate. The immediacy of such debates in the National Assembly over the future of the Republic was far more pressing for the French than those occurring in the US-dominated United Nations General Assembly. As a result, the US Department of Defense warned Dulles 116 117

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Frederick Cooper, Between Citizenship and Empire, 214–215. Jean-Jacques Juglas, “Faut-il reviser le Titre VIII de la Constitution?,” Union Francaise et Parlement, 60 (March 1955): 6–7. Senghor to the National Assemblée, January 17, 1952, reprinted in Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté 2: Nation et voie africaine du socialisme (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 91. Mamadou Dia, “L’Afrique noire devant le nouveau destin de l’Union française,” La Condition humaine (August 29, 1955). Paul Coste-Floret, Amadou Diop, Fily Dabo-Sissoko, Yvon Gouet, Henri Guissou, IbaZizen, Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux, René Maran, Jean Scelles and Maurice Viollette, “Un programme pour une nouvelle politique francaise outre-mer,” Union Francaise et Parlement 69 (January 1956): 5–11.

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and Eisenhower that French failures in North Africa were jeopardizing both NATO and the entire UN project because they were failing to engage with North African – primarily Algerian – concerns.121 More worrying still for the United States was the possibility that even if France retained its colonial possessions, it would not prove the bastion against communism that the United States hoped it to be.122 The quick succession of French Prime Ministers between 1955 and 1957 certainly exacerbated that concern. Despite election promises to resolve the Algerian War, Mollet’s cabinet had taken a hardline approach to Algeria, sanctioning the deployment of great numbers of troops. Their campaign of counterterrorism against the National Liberation Front had erupted into the yearlong Battle of Algiers (1956–1957). Controversies over the taxation policies Mollet implemented to pay for the military presence led to his coalition’s collapse in June 1957. It was followed by the election of the Radical Party delegate Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury for an even shorter term than Mollet’s, lasting only until November 1957. His party replaced him with Félix Gaillard. He demanded repeatedly that the United States refrain from interfering in North Africa.123 His warnings merely emphasized American fears that French political instability made it unwise to allow France to retain such a strategically valuable area.124 It was partly in reaction to this French political instability that a young John F. Kennedy gave his most famous Senatorial speech. Angrily attacking US policy in North Africa for basing its policy on the “myth of French empire,” Kennedy urged the Senate to forge stronger connections with the leaders of nationalist movements.125 This May 1957 speech foreshadowed his later support for AMSAC and his attempts to gain closer connections with North Africa through this

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“A. Africa, North, Current Trends Memorandum of Information,” V. L. Lowrance, Dep. Dir. of Intelligence. October 31, 1957, 2, Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room, Series 002866P92. “Operations Coordinating Board intelligence notes,” topics include: “France seeks purchase of 21 helicopters for use in North Africa; Syria seeks U.S. aid to establish research unit in Syria; U.S.S.R. to lend Sudan government,” Miscellaneous, March 15, 1956, Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room, Series 002866P92. See, for example, John Foster Dulles, to Secretary of State, December 16, 1957, Box 3645, RG59, NACP. John Foster Dulles to Amembassy Bonn, April 2, again April 7, 1958, Box 3646, RG59, NACP. Kennedy’s speech is reprinted in John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace (New York: Harper, 1960), 65–81.

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group. It also contributed to the French sense that the United States was hoping to usurp the French position in Africa.126 Kennedy’s concern was well placed. Following the bombing of SakietSidi-Youssef in Tunisia, the French National Assembly passed a vote of no confidence in Gaillard in March 1958. He was succeeded for a few short weeks by the Christian democratic politician, Pierre Pfimlin. Reports from the American embassy suggested that even Senghor was losing faith in the possibilities of amending the French constitution to create an egalitarian Federation.127 Less than two months later, the repercussions of the Sakiet crisis, alongside continued turmoil in Algeria and the perceived anticolonial stance of the Radical governments, prompted pro-imperial veterans of the Indochina War and the Suez Crisis to stage a coup, bringing General De Gaulle out of retirement.128 Within days of the National Assembly approving De Gaulle’s new cabinet, the State Department was inquiring about De Gaulle’s position on Black Africa. Private memoranda circulated through the Department suggested that much of Black Africa was inclined toward a Federal structure with a capital in Paris, but US officials were concerned that De Gaulle would not act fast enough to shore up this support.129 American concern regarding North Africa did not play well with a regime that had swept to power with the support of a French political elite resentful of American interventions in North Africa.130

7.7 the twin threats of american imperialism De Gaulle’s new ministry members were not alone in their anti-American platform. In the aftermath of the fall of the Fourth Republic, SAC issued a policy statement to all its sub-branches on “The Unity and Responsibility of Negro-African Culture” in July 1958. It exhibited

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“Report to the President on the Vice President’s Trip to Africa (February 28–March 21, 1957). Detailed Conclusions and Recommendations, April 5, 1957, 1, Box 3645, RG59, NACP. Amembassy Paris to the Department of State, March 31, 1958, Box 3646, RG59, NACP. See, for example, Matt Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, 169; Alfred Grosser, Affaires extérieures: La Politique de la France, 1944–1989 (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), 141; Alastair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, 1954–1962, 250. Amcongen, Dakar, French West Africa, to Department of State re: Department’s Confidential telegram 163/AF of June 3, 1958, 1, Box 3646, RG59, NACP. Matt Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, 169; Michael Harrison, “French AntiAmericanism under the Fourth Republic and the Gaullist Solution” in Denis Lacorne, Jacques Rupnik and Marie-France Toinet (eds.), The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception (London: Macmillan, 1990), 173–174.

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a fierce stance against American imperialism, a platform underpinned by the contention that Europe had become “but the economic vassal” of the United States.131 From at least 1956 writers for Présence Africaine had consistently warned of the twin threats of cultural and economic imperialism from both the United States and the Soviet Union.132 De Gaulle’s reassertion of French grandeur was an attempt to eschew this Cold War framework. De Gaulle believed that the United Nations and the question of Algeria had damaged French prestige on the international landscape, and he sought to reconfigure French-African relations by establishing the French Fifth Republic as a Communauté franco-Africaine or FrancoAfrican Community. This Community configuration offered autonomy and self-government to all French overseas territories yet retained Metropolitan control over matters pertaining to international relations, defense, the economy and resources.133 In August 1958 he told the Senegalese politician Gabriel d’Arboussier that “It is for Algeria that I create the Community,” making it clear that he believed this FrancoAfrican Community would be a more viable political configuration than the existing French Republic.134 The referendum of September 28, 1958 offered a choice: either remain part of the French Community (with the option for later independence) or become independent immediately from France. For those who remained within the Community, there were continuing distinctions between areas that were considered states in their own right and those that would continue to be territories within the Republic. Discussions in the drafting process indicate that the category

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S.A.C., “The Unite and Responsibility of Negro-African Culture,” ca. July 1958, 1, Folder entitled “Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists,” February 1958– August 29, 1958, Horace Mann Bond Papers. “Freedom and Justice,” Présence Africaine, 12 (February–March 1957), 3–5; “Le sousequipemennt et les lecons du Caire,” Présence Africaine, 17 (December 1957– January 1958): 3–8; “Independence. Securite. Paix Mondiale,” Présence Africaine, 20 (June–July 1958): 3–4. For detail on the discussions leading up to the referendum Frederick Cooper, see Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 279–325. Quoted in Charles-Robert Ageron, “Les États africains de la Communauté et la guerre d’Algérie” in Charles-Robert Ageron and Marc Michel (eds.), L’Afrique noire francaise: L’heure des indépendences (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2010), 271. Todd Shepard argues that this approach to the Algerian question was part of a longer French tendency of thinking about Algeria as part of this Franco-African grouping, a tendency that ignored FLN assertions of their territorial configuration in terms of an Arab, Islamic or Maghrebian identity: Todd Shepard, “A l’heure des ‘grands ensembles’ et la guerre de l’Algérie. L’État-Nation en question,” Monde(s): Histoires, Espaces, Relations, 1 (2012): 113–134.

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of “state” still depended on older understandings of which peoples had attained the requisite “level of civilization” to govern themselves.135 The September referendum of 1958 coincided with the dates that SAC had planned to hold its second Congress of Black Writers and Artists. The referendum put to the test many of the principles that these men and women had been fighting for and would certainly impact the citizenship status of the majority of those involved in the association. Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Alioune Diop, Richard Wright, René Maran, Jacques Rabemananjara and others circulated a petition requesting the postponement of the Congress. Sékou Touré, Lamine Guèye, Mamadou Dia and Gabriel d’Arboussier also wrote in agreement, and the Congress was postponed. John Davis was furious. He wrote to Diop, insisting that the Congress be held regardless of “the tremendous importance of the current referendum to the members of the Paris committee.”136 In part, Davis was concerned for those AMSAC members who had already taken leave and booked transport. Primarily, however, he was annoyed because he wanted the Congress to be held before Kwame Nkrumah’s “AllAfrican People’s Conference” occurred in Accra later that year. To let Nkrumah’s Conference take precedence, he felt, would incur a “great loss of prestige to SAC” and, implicitly, to AMSAC.137 Horace Mann Bond echoed Davis’s discontent in a private letter: “An additional reason may be to state that if the Society is indeed above and beyond politics, not even a national Revolution greatly matters!”138 Neither Bond nor Davis truly believed that the Society was beyond politics. Indeed, their own involvement grew out of their assertion of American democratic values. More likely their discontent resulted from their inability to influence the referendum’s outcome. AMSAC’s immediate response to the Guinean vote in the referendum bears this argument out. Guinea, led by the Marxist politician Sékou Touré, was the sole state to vote against the Community and thereby become 135

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Comité national chargé de la publication des travaux préparatoires des institutions de la Vè République, Documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’élaboration de la Constitution du 4 octobre 1958, vol. 3 (Paris: La Documentation française, 1987):183, more generally 180–189. John Davis to Members of AMSAC, copy of letter to SAC, August 25, 1958, folder entitled “Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists,” February 1958–August 29, 1958, Horace Mann Bond Papers. John Davis to Members of AMSAC, copy of letter to SAC, August 25, 1958. Horace Mann Bond to John Davis, August 26, 1958, MS411, folder entitled “Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists,” February 1958–August 29, 1958, Horace Mann Bond Papers.

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independent.139 The AMSAC executive moved quickly to congratulate Sékou Touré on his country’s independence, framing the congratulations in terms of its ramifications for the “Negro World.” They also offered AMSAC as a direct conduit to Guinean-American diplomatic relations, stating, “We hope that we may be instrumental in the near future of helping to bring to the United States representations of your great culture.”140 Touré responded graciously, acknowledging the bonds of the diaspora and praising American democracy. Severed from De Gaulle’s France, Touré could not afford to alienate any potential offers of friendship. When, the All-African People’s Conference was held in Accra, Ghana, ahead of the second Présence Africaine Congress, future African unity looked poised to fracture along the old fault lines of empire. Although Alioune Diop attended, none of the major political parties of francophone Africa were represented. In part, this was because the French Embassy had made a particular effort to clamp down on the participation of French Africans in the hope the discussion of any territories still under French control, particularly Algeria, could be prevented.141 Senghor criticized this decision, commenting that “the first result of their absence was to allow minority powers to practice demagoguery and to fish in waters all the more troubled because politicians in English-speaking countries were almost totally unaware of the political situation in French-speaking States.”142 This effect was amplified by the practice of holding Pan-African conferences in English. Insofar as Senghor was concerned, this always seemed to result in the condemnation of France and the “whitewashing of AngloSaxon colonialism.”143 Such whitewashing was antithetical to the joint goal of thinkers such as Senghor, Césaire and Diop to decolonize Western civilization. More to the point for Senghor, it overlooked the fact that French political and social culture was “more progressive 139

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See Elizabeth Schmidt, “Anticolonial Nationalism in French West Africa: What Made Guinea Unique?,” African Studies Review, 52:2 (September 2009): 1–34. AMSAC Newsletter October 30, 1958, vol. 1, No. 1, Box 121–23, Folder 12, Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland-Spingarn. Rabat to Secretary of State, April 23, 1957, Box 3645, RG59, NACP; Amembassy Paris to Department of State, August 22, 1957, Box 3645, RG59, NACP. Léopold Sédar Senghor quoted in Ernest Milcent, “M. Léopold Sédar Senghor déclare au Monde,” Le Monde, January 3, 1959, accessed in the online archives of Le Monde, October 20, 2017. Léopold Sédar Senghor, quoted in Ernest Milcent, “M. Léopold Sédar Senghor déclare au Monde.”

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and more humanistic” than Anglo-Saxon culture.144 Regardless, Kwame Nkrumah was determined to keep the conference as free as possible from American interference. John Davis and Horace Mann Bond may have been invited to represent AMSAC but they were only observers and barred from many of the key discussions. Despite this, Mercer Cook argued in a piece for Forum-Service, another Congress for Culture Freedom organ, that those African Americans there “may have indirectly exerted considerable influence.”145 Davis and Bond had been given the opportunity to meet privately with Nkrumah, alongside Alioune Diop. No transcript exists of their conversation but there is certainly no evidence to support Cook’s claims of American influence. Nkrumah was famously wary of American imperialism. Nevertheless, in a domestic context, AMSAC was growing in influence. By 1958, AMSAC’s national reach extended to links with over one hundred organizations ranging from church congregations to ethnic organizations such as the League of United Latin American citizens.146 The Society consulted and advised about Africa for, among other prominent organizations, the John Hay Whitney Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the US National Student Association.147 At the organization’s second annual Congress in June 1959, the keynote speakers included John F. Kennedy and the representative for Michigan, Charles C. Diggs Jr.148 Kennedy, recently appointed as Chairman of the new Subcommittee on African Affairs in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made his concerns very clear: “the future of Africa will seriously affect, for better or worse, the future of the United States.”149 He spoke of an Africa entering into modern times, an Africa about to fight for the freedom the United States had already won. In aid of such a battle, the United States should be willing to offer economic aid.150 Planning a trip to Africa himself in the autumn, Kennedy expected to emulate 144 145

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Léopold Sédar Senghor, Le Monde, January 3, 1959. Mercer Cook, “The New Africa Charts Its Course, but the ‘Strategy’ of Africans Remains Unclear,” Forum-Service, Congress for Cultural Freedom, Paris 1958, 3. “Partial List of Organizations with which the Committee has worked,” January 1– June 30, 1958, AMSAC Papers. “AMSAC, Program Activities 1958–9: A Summary,” 1 of 4, 13, AMSAC Papers. “Second Annual Conference Banquet, 1959: Keynote Addresses,” Sunday, June 28, 1959, AMSAC Papers. “Address by the Honourable John F. Kennedy. Senator from Massachusetts,” Summary Report of the Second Annual Conference, June 26–29, 1958, AMSAC Programs, 8, AMSAC Papers. “Address by the Honourable John F. Kennedy. Senator from Massachusetts,” 9.

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George Washington, “who declared he ‘felt irresistibly excited whenever in any country I see an oppressed people unfurl the banner of freedom.’”151 Diggs pointed to this need too, and perhaps unconsciously echoed the thinking that Locke had laid down in his essay in 1925 (discussed in Chapter 3), saying, “The American Negro should have as much interest in the development of Africa as the American Jew has in the development of Israel.”152 Perhaps more than at any previous moment in US history, African American interest in Africa converged with the nation’s geopolitical interests in the continent.

7.8 the second congress of black writers and artists, 1959 The question of diasporic solidarity was the theme of the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists. Eventually held at the end of March 1959, the Congress ran under the title of the “Unity of Negro-African Cultures.” Once again, the question of who was fit to represent the diaspora created tension between Davis and Diop. Hoping to circumvent the AMSAC monopoly on American attendees, Diop did his best to guarantee W. E. B. Du Bois’s attendance, sending both a general and a personal invitation and asking his advice about potential invitees.153 To Diop’s disappointment, Du Bois declined, but this time it was ill health and overcommitment rather than State Department restrictions that prevented him from attending. Both Diop and Davis also expended considerable efforts to persuade Wright to attend and to advocate for their positions in their ongoing disputes.154 In the years that had passed since the first Congress, Wright had distanced himself from Diop and SAC because he feared that Diop was ushering SAC toward Catholicism. When he learnt that Diop had arranged to hold the second Congress in Rome over Easter, he refused to attend, maintaining his position that progress required shedding religious irrationalism. Wright was also increasingly suspicious about the

151 152

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“Address by the Honourable John F. Kennedy. Senator from Massachusetts,” 10. “Address by the Honorable Charles C. Diggs, Jr.,: The Role of the America Negro in American-African Relations,” 11, AMSAC Papers. Alioune Diop to W. E. B. Du Bois, February 4, 1959, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers; Circular letter from Société africaine de culture to W. E. B. Du Bois, n.d. 1959, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. John A. Davis to Richard Wright, August 1, 1958, Box 93, Folder 1173, Richard Wright Papers.

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source of Davis’s funding and was simultaneously distancing himself from AMSAC as well, maintaining his career-long mantra that he wished to write the truth as he saw it rather than ally himself to a lie for the sake of his country.155 All too aware that AMSAC had no real sway over Diop, Davis had been banking upon Wright’s high standing in French African esteem and his deeper knowledge of the personalities and political platforms of those who would be attending.156 He was dismayed at Wright’s refusal to attend, and both he and Horace Mann Bond worried over the list of delegates AMSAC was sending, searching out the most “appropriate attendees.”157 Other than the original five men who had attended the first Congress, the majority of African Americans who attended the 1959 Congress were academics interested in Africa from a scholarly perspective. These included dancer and anthropologist Pearl Primus, NAACP lawyer Robert Carter, artist and author Elton Fax and Boston University Professor Adelaide Cromwell Hill. SAC President and Haitian diplomat Jean Price-Mars opened the Congress with a speech that would have reassured Davis’s sensibilities. Heralding Rome as “one of the starting points of that prodigious Western culture,” he framed the Congress as “purely cultural, because we wanted to exclude anything which might divide us from one another.”158 PriceMars’s speech was followed by a short address by the UNESCO delegate to the Congress, M. P. Lebar. Lebar explicitly connected the purview of the Congress and of SAC to the goals of UNESCO, emphasizing the depoliticized yet universal appeal of their aims.159 After these opening sallies, however, the papers delivered were anything but “purely cultural.” Alioune Diop’s presentation tackled the contemporary Cold War tensions. He argued that the period was “no doubt the era of the two power blocs” but it was also a moment in which “alliances of affinity” 155

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Despite this refusal to be embroiled with CIA intrigues, Wright was noticeably silent on the Algerian War. His anti-imperial stance was trumped by his desire to remain in France. Paris police records show that he was being monitored for any sign of revolutionary tendencies vis-à-vis the French state. A 1957 report dubbed him suitably “francophile” in political stance: APP, Séries GA, 316 Richard Wright Dossier. John A. Davis to Richard Wright, n.d., 1959, Box 96, Folder 1276, Richard Wright Papers. Bond to Davis, April 24, 1958; Davis to Bond, April 30, 1958, Folder entitled “Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, September 10, 1958–March 1959,” Horace Mann Bond Papers. Dr. Jean Price-Mars, “Reply of the President of S.A.C.,” Présence Africaine, 24–25 (February–May 1959): 40. M. P. Lebar, “Address by M.P. Lebar UNESCO Representative at the Congress,” Présence Africaine, 24–25 (February–May 1959): 43.

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took on new significance as a means of defending against those “swaying the atomic bomb over our heads like the sword of Damocles.”160 The most important task was to resist assimilation in this moment of fear and to instead “rescue possibilities of universal application from the egotism or the inadequacies of the West.”161 The task of négritude, insofar as Diop saw it, was “to restore history to its true dimensions” by accepting that the African and those of the African diaspora had just as much to contribute and had, in fact, already contributed a great deal to the modern world.162 Sékou Touré echoed his support for this thinking in the talk he had sent to be read out. In order for the “man of Africa . . . to claim the fullness of his human rights and an entire share in human rights,” Touré argued, “the cultural value of a people must be identified with the contributory value which it may represent in the development of universal civilization.”163 Touré, unlike Diop, believed that this acknowledgment would only occur when Africans achieved self-determination in the form of national independence. Frantz Fanon made a similar argument, declaring that “it is national liberation that causes the nation to be present on the scene of history. It is in the heart of national consciousness that the international consciousness is raised and invigorated.”164 By 1959, Aimé Césaire had also accepted that decolonization would involve independent statehood for many who had once been part of the French Empire. He maintained that the intellectual had a crucial role to play in ensuring that the process was a “bonne décolonisation” rather than only a sequel to colonization. Independence would mean little if a nation retained the discriminatory practices that had defined the relationship of the colonizer to the colonized.165 The intellectual “even inside a colonial society . . . is the man of culture who must enable his people to do without the apprenticeship to freedom.”166 Likewise, Jacques Rabemananjara’s analysis fleshed out a way of thinking about this role with a blistering condemnation of those who 160

161 162 163

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Alioune Diop, “Discours d’ouverture du 2ème congrès international des écrivains et des artistes noirs à Rome en 1959,” Présence Africaine, 24–25 (February–May 1959): 49. Alioune Diop, “Discours d’ouverture,” Présence Africaine, 50. Alioune Diop, “Discours d’ouverture,” Présence Africaine, 48. Sékou Touré, “The Political Leader Considered as the Representative of a Culture,” Présence Africaine, 24–25 (February–May 1959): 120. Franz Fanon, “Fondement réciproque de la culture nationale et des luttes de libération,” Présence Africaine, 24–25 (February–May 1959): 82. Aimé Césaire, “L’Homme de culture et ses responsibilités,” Présence Africaine, 24–25 (February–May 1959): 117, 119. Aimé Césaire, “L’Homme de culture et ses responsibilités,” 120.

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sought to exclude black perspectives. As Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil and Lucie Thésée had done before him in Tropiques, Rabemananjara declared that black peoples had, from an “intellectual perspective, a full if unrecognised share in the vast universe of the West.”167 They were in the same way as Mauriac or Malaparte, the real inheritors of the Greeks and Romans, the Gauls and Saxons, the Vikings and lberians. Our masters in thought are Homer and Socrates, Aristotle and Cicero, Plato and Virgil, Montaigne and Bacon, Pascal and Dante, Cervantès and Shakespeare, Racine and Camoëns, Dickens and Voltaire, Spinoza and Hegel, Nietzsche and William James, Swinburne and Kierkegaard, James Joyce and Valéry.

James Ivy agreed. His paper positioned himself as the heir to the legacy of the Western literary canon, opening with a quote from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.168 Situating his paper not just in the framework of the United States, he pointed to the experience of black peoples in the Americas to outline what it meant to be a person of color in nations that were neither colonies nor had a black majority.169 This time, Ivy was not so quick to dismiss the idea of an African identity, nor the potential significance of culture. The boundaries between the roles of culture and politics were less clear for Ivy now that he was thinking about the structural impact of racialism.

7.9 the afterlife of the two pre´ sence africaine congresses The resolutions the 1959 Congress stated that “every effort towards the personification and enrichment of national cultures . . . constitutes progress towards the universalization of values and . . . a contribution to human civilization.”170 It also meant the end of the colonial structure and those sequels to colonialism that remained embedded with racial hierarchical thinking.171 A contemporaneous meeting between Eisenhower and De 167

168

169 170

171

Jacques Rabemananjara, “The Foundations of Our Unity Arising from the Colonial Epoch,” Présence Africaine, 24–25 (February–May 1959): 81. James W. Ivy, “The Semantics of Being Negro in the Americas,” Présence Africaine, 24–25 (February–May 1959): 138. James W. Ivy, “The Semantics of Being Negro in the Americas,” 139. Deuxième Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs, “Résolutions et motions. Notre politique Culturelle,” Présence Africaine, 24–25 (385–421), 385. “Résolution générale indépendance et l’unité,” 385.

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Gaulle in Paris all too cruelly emphasized this need. Eisenhower remarked to De Gaulle that “many of these peoples were attempting to make the leap from savagery to the degree of civilization of a country like France in perhaps ten years, without realizing that it took thousands of years to develop civilization which we know.”172 What Eisenhower neglected to acknowledge was the reality that the “degree of civilization of a country like France” had been built and shaped by interaction with and the exploitation of those very people he dismissed. After the 1959 Congress, the audience and locus of Présence Africaine and SAC moved from Europe and America to francophone Africa as, one by one, the old territories of the French Empire became independent. After the Republic of Senegal was established in September 1960 and Senghor became the country’s first president, Présence Africaine opened a second headquarters in Dakar, complementing its Paris offices.173 Many francophone black intellectuals who had participated or contributed to Présence Africaine suspended their scholarly or artistic careers in order to take up roles in national administration. Somewhat ironically, AMSAC ultimately played a crucial role in facilitating the dissemination of the ideas of many of these poet-presidents and intellectuals. In October 1959, for example, Mercer Cook’s translation of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s African Socialism was published under the auspices of AMSAC, making it available not only to the American public but to the anglophone world at large for the first time. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Orphée noir (discussed in Chapter 5) was also translated by AMSAC writer Samuel Allen, and Frantz Fanon’s epochdefining The Wretched of the Earth appeared in English through AMSAC with Présence Africaine funding. These efforts did not mean the end of the AMSAC’s Cold War American agenda, however. The publication of African Socialism was timed to coincide with Senghor’s visit to the United States. Part of his tour involved a small private party at the home of Orin Lehman, a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Race and Caste.174 Two months later, in the more ostentatious setting of the Waldorf-Astoria, the Society hosted a gala reception for Sékou Touré and his wife, the 172

173 174

French President de Gaulle and Eisenhower discuss the independence of the African nations and how to prevent them from going Communist, September 23, 1959, reproduced in Declassified Documents Reference System (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2015), 6. Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writer’s Landscape, 64. “Summary Minutes, Annual Membership Meeting, AMSAC, June 26, 1960,” 4, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Box 131–23, Folder 10.

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official guests of President Eisenhower. AMSAC would continue to act as an intermediary between the United States and certain African leaders throughout the early sixties, and many of the studies it supported underpinned US decisions about Africa. President John F. Kennedy appointed AMSAC member Mercer Cook as the United States Ambassador to the old French territory of Niger in 1961 and then to Senegal in 1964. Such government connections eventually proved to be AMSAC’s downfall. In 1967, the US political magazine Ramparts revealed that that AMSAC was one of the many domestic organizations that had received CIA funding, and the organization folded shortly thereafter. Alioune and Christiane Diop’s Présence Africaine, however, still exists to this day, a tangible reminder of the fundamental and still underacknowledged role that the African diaspora played in creating Western civilization and modernity.

Epilogue

One Saturday night in August 1963, African American novelist James Baldwin sat sipping a cocktail in the Parisian nightclub, the Living Room. Baldwin was about to speak to a group of about one hundred people on the problem of civil rights in America.1 He knew that the labor activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin had planned a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to take place the following week. Although Baldwin would return in time for the March, he wanted to coordinate a protest in the city that had meant so much to African American musicians, artists and intellectuals – a city that not only symbolized the possibilities of a “colorblind” Republic but had offered the space for decades of African diasporic collaboration.2 Baldwin was not alone in wanting to support the Washington marchers from afar. Of those who came to the Living Room to hear Baldwin speak that night, jazz and blues musicians Art Simmons, Mezz Mezzrow and Memphis Slim; actors William Marshall and Anthony Quinn; Trinidadian singer Hazel Scott; and wife of the Pastor of the American Church in Paris Barbara Sargent

1

2

Estimates for the number of people present that night vary between thirty, a number presented to the American embassy, and one hundred, the testimony of one Barbara Sargent, who attended the meeting: Sargent to Fales, August 28, 1963, in Amembassy Paris to Department of State, September 17, 1963, SOC 14–1, RG 59, US National Archives, College Park (hereafter NACP). Mary Dudziak has written an excellent article positioning the March on Washington in terms of American diplomacy, which includes the efforts of Baldwin in Paris: Mary Dudziak, “The 1963 March on Washington: At Home and Abroad,” Revue française d’études américaines, 1:107 (2006): 61–76. On Baldwin’s reasons for being in Paris, see Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 275; Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Press, 1996), 266.

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were particularly enthusiastic about coordinating a protest in the French capital. Between them, they drew up a petition expressing support for the March on Washington. They believed in its goal: “not only to eradicate all racial barriers in American life but to liberate all Americans from the prison of their biases and fears.”3 Copies of the petition were printed in the international issues of the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. Although some hoped to present the signed petitions to the American embassy after a formal march through Paris, the French legislative requirements for coordinating such an event made that too difficult. Instead, on August 21, 1963, between eighty and one hundred people made their way in twos and threes across the Seine to the United States embassy.4 The petitions William Marshall, James Baldwin and Hazel Scott handed over that day were only the first of many that streamed in from American expatriates living throughout Western Europe.5 A week later, on August 28, 1963, Baldwin joined almost 300,000 men and women at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. When they reached the Lincoln Memorial, several activist leaders, including A. Philip Randolph, spoke to the crowd.6 Actor Burt Lancaster read Baldwin’s Paris petition of solidarity aloud. By far the most famous speech of the day, however, was delivered by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial: “I Have A Dream.” Drawing upon a black intellectual tradition that dated back at least to the American Revolution, King declared that the protestors had “come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” a check for “the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”7 King knew that American republican democracy was achievable for all of the nation’s citizens, regardless of race. He did not “believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of” the United States.8 The crowd roared in approval. The ideas about national belonging and citizenship that King elaborated resonated with their own understandings of the potential of the 3

4 5

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Amembassy Paris to Department of State, September 17, 1963, SOC 14–1, RG 59, 1963, NACP. Amembassy Paris to Department of State, August 21, 1963, SOC 14–1, RG 59, NACP. For more on the reactions to the petition and other international attempts to stage solidarity marches, see Mary Duziak, “The 1963 March on Washington,” 65–76. March on Washington (program) 08/28/1963; Bayard Rustin Papers: John F. Kennedy Library, National Archives and Records Administration. “I Have A Dream,” Speech by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington, 1963, 1. “I Have A Dream,” 2.

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American republican nation-state. The setting for the speech, in the nation’s capital and in front of a memorial dedicated to the President who had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, emphasized the citizenship claims King made that day.9 As I have shown, the hope that American republican democracy was perfectible permeated much of the discourse around rights, race and national belonging in African American thought between the end of World War I through to the mid-twentieth century when the March on Washington took place. So too was a belief in the possibilities of the republican form often shared by black francophone intellectuals working against racism and imperialism within the French Empire in this period. Many of the collaborations across these national lines were based on a shared hope that the republican form could be mobilized to create a political citizenship that allowed for racial and cultural differences. But by the early 1960s, many of the francophone activists and thinkers who had worked with their American counterparts since the end of World War I were no longer citizens or subjects of France. In Africa, the path to freedom had largely taken the form of national independence and the creation of new republican states. Realizing the visions of democracy and civic rights that men such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Gabriel d’Arboussier had dreamt of and fought for would prove an ongoing task fraught with difficulties. For the Antilles, which remain to this day part of Overseas France, the question of achieving rights within the framework of the French community still rested on messy notions of the equation between racial and national belonging and access to rights. Decolonization, as the solution to racism and imperialism, was (and is) not just a matter of political equality but of ideological change. Baldwin’s group of petitioners in Paris had noted this too when they had expressed their desire “to liberate all Americans from the prison of their biases and fears.”10 Common across all these contexts was the belief that the guarantee of rights in the face of difference would emanate from the sovereign power of the republican nation-state rather than from any international institutions, even where the struggle against racism and imperialism was understood in global terms. Where activists did seek to mobilize the potential of organizations such as the League of Nations and the United

9

10

Scott A. Sandage, “A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939–1963,” Journal of American History, 80:1 (June 1993): 137–138, 159. Amembassy to Department of State, September 17, 1963, SOC 14–1, RG 59, NACP.

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Nations, this strategy was pursued in tandem with nationally framed, if transnationally shaped, movements. While the struggle for rights played out differently in the respective republics of France and the United States, the movements were nonetheless related. As Harold Isaacs noted succinctly in his 1963 study of the subject, New World of Negro Americans, leading American and French government officials were anxious about the possibility of future worldwide conflict along racial lines.11 In much the same way as Lothrop Stoddard had predicted a “rising tide of color” at the close of World War I, the end of the French and British Empires in the 1950s and 1960s prompted white elites to dread racial violence. One of the fears underpinning United States foreign policy in this period was the possibility that decolonization in Africa would lead African Americans to transform their activism into open revolt. The rhetoric of Malcolm X and the later Black Power movement did little to allay these fears. Nevertheless, as other scholars have shown, African American activists certainly exploited the process of decolonization to hasten their domestic demands, but this never manifested in open revolution – or at least not in the kind of revolution that government officials feared.12 As I have charted in this book, black intellectuals from both the French and American republics worked hard to craft an ideological revolution that would allow their contributions on a national and civilizational scale to be recognized. Their intellectual labor underpinned activist movements on domestic and international levels and offered new ways of thinking about the relationship between race, rights and nation. Even as political separation from French Empire looked to be the only solution for accessing equal citizenship rights, francophone black intellectuals still underscored the ways that African and African-descended people had contributed to the French Republic and the Western world more broadly. Moreover, they and their counterparts in the United States fought to show how the legacies of racism and imperialism manifested themselves in the

11

12

Harold R. Isaacs, A New World of Negro Americans: A Study from the Centre of International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), 44. Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-colonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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political and cultural dilemmas that defined the early to mid-twentieth century. This book has charted the deep engagement of black activists with many of these key moments, from the aftermath of World War I through the Great Depression and the outbreak of World War II through the Cold War and the first few decades of decolonization. The activism and ideas of thinkers from W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Lamine Senghor and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté to Paulette and Jane Nardal, Louis T. Achille and George Padmore, and from Léon GontranDamas, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Roussy Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor to Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Alioune and Christiane Diop, have indelibly shaped our notions of America, France and the Western world. Their thought is constitutive of Western modernity and deserves to be recognized as such. In the words of Aimé Césaire, “And I tell myself Bordeaux and Nantes and Liverpool and New York and San Francisco, not an inch of this world devoid of my fingerprint.”13

13

Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to The Native Land, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, Aimé Césaire : The Collected Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 47.

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Index

A.E.F. Nouvelle, 196 Acheson, Dean, 193, 218, 219 Achille, Louis T., 20, 88, 102, 103, 104, 125, 141, 142, 212, 230, 258, 283 Africa, 128, 133 Africa for the Africans, 39 Africa Seen by American Negroes, 264 African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption, 53, 54, 55 africanité, question of, 100 Alexander, Lewis, 143 Alexander, Lillian, 62 Ali, Hadj, 63 Alien Registration Act. See The Smith Act (1940) Alizés, 230 All-African People’s Conference 1958, 270, 271 Allen, James S., 75 Allen, Samuel, 277 American Civil Liberties Union, 63 American Information Committee on Race and Caste, 244, 260 American Negro Labor Congress, 55, 56, 59, 60, 63, 73, 85 American Society of African Culture, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 267, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 277, 278 An American Dilemma:, 165 An Anthology of American Negro Literature, 95 Annamese Independence Party, 57 Anthologie nègre, 33

Aragon, Louis, 118, 119, 120, 215, 218 Art et Scolastique, 143 assimilés, discussion of, 37, 109, 169 Associated Negro Press, 139, 215 Association des Étudiants Martiniquais en France, 108, 133 Atlantic Monthly, 129 Atlantic Weekly, 21 atomic bomb, threat of, 191, 218, 275 Auerbach, Isabel. See Macy, Helen Auerbach, Sol. See Allen, James S. Baker, Josephine, 79, 98, 99 Baker, Philip, 38 Baldwin, James, 247, 251, 253, 279, 280 Baldwin, Roger, 63, 65 Baltimore Afro-American, 185 Bamako Conference 1946, 174 Bandung Conference 1955, 226, 227, 231, 240, 241, 249 Banjo, 86, 87, 98, 110, 111, 112, 119, 138 Barnett, Claude, 139 Batouala, 32, 41, 106, 107, 122 Battle of Algiers, 267 Belgium, 23, 36, 67, 147, 151 Bellegarde, Dantès, 38 Benda, Julien, 127 Benedict, Ruth, 165, 202 Benjamin, Walter, 118, 138 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 61, 103 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 146, 177 Bigger Thomas. See Native Son Bilbo, Theodore Gilmore, 29

309

310

Index

Bilé, Joseph, 72 Bissol, Léopold, 158, 170, 171 Black Metropolis, 145, 188 Bloc Démocratique Sénégalais, 198 Bloncourt, Elié, 139 Blum, Léon, 118 Boas, Franz, 90, 91, 165, 202, 204 Bolshevism, question of, 16, 37, 49, 54, 119, 213 Bond, Horace Mann, 221, 245, 252, 260, 270, 272, 274 Bourgès-Maunoury, Maurice, 267 Brasillach, Robert, 127 Brazzaville Conference 1944, 168 Breton, André, 12, 115, 118, 119, 162, 163, 164, 165, 205, 233, 250, 257 Briggs, Cyril, 53 Brooks, Dorothy, 256, 257 Brown, Sterling, 125, 138, 147, 182, 188, 227 Broyard, Anatole, 186, 187 Brussels, 34, 37, 61, 63, 64, 67, 68 Bunche, Ralph J., 79, 130, 146, 152, 155, 179, 199, 200, 201, 231 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 164, 232 Cahiers du Sud, 138, 172 Calverton, V.F., 95, 96 Campbell, Grace, 53 Campbell, James G., 155, See Double V for Victory Camus, Albert, 183, 208 Candace, Gratien, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 47, 67, 84, 100, 106, 108, 139, 140 capitalism, 55, 197, 247 Carter, Elmer, 151, 152 Catholicism, 116, 127, 135, 136, 137, 141, 142, 144, 145, 198, 229, 230, 231, 232, 246, 273 Cayton, Horace, 145, 183, 188, 211, 212, 220 Cendrars, Blaise, 33 Césaire, Aimé, 4, 8, 12, 13, 103, 121, 125, 148, 150, 153, 158, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 190, 208, 210, 223, 229, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 240, 244, 246, 249, 251, 252, 253, 255, 260, 265, 270, 275, 283 Césaire, Suzanne Roussy, 6, 12, 13, 150, 151, 158, 159, 161, 165, 276, 283

Challenge Magazine, 29 Chants d’Ombre, 172 Charpentes, 138 Chicago Defender, 56, 86, 148, 178, 185, 203, 216, 223 circulaire Linard, 14, 17, 28, 42 Clainville-Bloncourt, Max, 56, 57, 59, 63, 65, 67, 85 Clemenceau, Georges, 17, 20 code de l’indigénat, 16 Cold War, v, 6, 7, 9, 191, 192, 215, 222, 225, 227, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242, 259, 269, 274, 277, 283 Combat, 115, 158, 161, 183 Cominform, 215 Comintern, 10, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 62, 63, 73, 83, 84, 85, 118, 119, 120, 166, 251 Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 67, 70, 71, 111 Comité de Défense des Intérêts de la Race Noire, 100 Comité Mondial contre la Guerre et le Fascisme, 131 Committee on Race and Caste in World Affairs, 260 communism, 49, 54, 55, 58, 59, 61, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 82, 84, 85, 111, 115, 117, 125, 126, 142, 145, 149, 167, 188, 193, 197, 213, 214, 218, 219, 223, 225, 228, 229, 234, 239, 243, 245, 260, 261, 267 communisme primitif, 58 Congrès Mondial des Femmes contre la Guerre et le Fascisme, 132 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 243 Congress of Black Writers and Artists 1956, 237, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 253, 270, 273, 276 Cook, Mercer, 137, 139, 140, 150, 151, 172, 181, 182, 184, 188, 229, 231, 238, 245, 252, 258, 260, 264, 272, 277, 278 Cook, Vashti, 137 Corrigan, Robert F., 196, 220 Cousturier, Lucie, 112 Cox, Oliver, 228 CPUSA, 49, 50, 55, 56, 73, 75, 76, 77, 120, 146, 152, 156, 166, 198, 213, 218, 234 Crisis, 15, 19, 21, 22, 25, 31, 32, 42, 44, 56, 66, 94, 111, 116, 124, 130, 141, 144, 151, 178, 216, 244, 260, 268 Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 94

Index Crusader, 53 Cruse, Harold, 94, 265 Cullen, Countee, 31, 78, 103, 143, 188 Cummings, E. E., 119 Curtis, Helen, 36 d’Arboussier, Gabrielle, 199, 217, 218, 219, 220, 269, 270, 281 Daily Worker, 75 Damas, Léon-Gontran, 11, 13, 103, 116, 124, 125, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 149, 182, 187, 229 Danaë, Narcisse, 63, 65, 82 Dark Princess, 94 Davis, John, 244, 245, 251, 253, 256, 259, 260, 263, 265, 270 De Beauvoir, Simone, 183 De Gaulle, Charles, 153, 168, 169, 173, 197, 268, 269, 271, 277 Delafosse, Maurice, 27, 33, 34 Delavignette, Robert, 175 Delmost, Alcide, 139 Desnos, Robert, 138 Dewey, John, 93 Dia, Mamadou, 198, 266, 270 Diagne, Blaise, 15, 16, 20, 22, 23, 24, 27, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 57, 67, 80, 84, 100, 106 Dicko, Hamadoun, 246 Diderot, Denis, 127 Dieu, est-il francais?, 105 Diop, Alioune, 207, 209, 211, 230, 235, 238, 242, 244, 246, 248, 258, 259, 262, 264, 265, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274 Diop, Christiane Yandé, 209, 238, 240, 256 Diouf, Ngalandou, 139 Discourse on Colonialism, 191, 223, 232, 235 Dosseh, Robert, 231 Double V for Victory Campaign 1942, 155 Douglass, Aaron, 103 Drake, St. Clair, 145, 183, 188, 212, 220 Dreyfus Affair, 77 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre Eugène, 127 Drummond, Eric, 38 Du Bois, Nina, 62 Du Bois, W. E. B., 2, 3, 5, 8, 11, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38, 40, 42, 45, 56, 62, 66, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 84, 86, 89, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 103, 107, 113, 125, 129, 130,

311

171, 172, 177, 178, 179, 180, 191, 192, 194, 204, 205, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 223, 228, 246, 247, 248, 253, 264, 265, 273, 283 Duchène, Albert, 90 Dulles, John Foster, 261, 266 Eboué, Felix, 153 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 253, 261, 262, 267, 276, 277, 278 Él Garon, 40, 41 Eliot, T.S., 138 Ellison, Ralph, 157, 158, 167, 189, 261 Eluard, Paul, 138 Esprit, 135, 136, 137, 140, 208, 228 Ethiopia, Italian invasion of, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131 Étoile Nord-Africaine, 57, 63, 132, 133 eugenicist thinking, 32 eurocentrism, question of, 87, 101, 102, 110, 111, 137, 138, 159, 253 European Recovery Plan. See Marshall Plan evolués, discussion of, 109, 168, 169 existentialism, 150 Fanon, Frantz, 8, 13, 107, 227, 228, 233, 237, 238, 240, 252, 254, 275, 277 fascism, 8, 11, 84, 115, 120, 125, 126, 129, 131, 142, 143, 147, 148, 149, 155, 156, 190, 191, 199, 200, 218, 219 Faulkner, William, 138 Fauré, Emile, 133 Fauset, Jessie, 6, 31, 32, 35, 38, 89, 103, 106 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 213 Federation of Catholic Students, 230, 231 Finot, Louis-Jean, 104 Firmin, Antènor, 124 First World War, 16, 24, 40, 80, 97, 98, 106, 110, 126, 127, 132, 152, 168, 282 Fontaine, William, 245 Ford, James, 73, 74, 152, 272 Foreign Affairs, 129 Fort-De-France, 158 Fort-Whiteman, Lovett, 49, 55, 59, 60, 63, 85 Foucault, Michel, 11 Frazier, E. Franklin, 166, 186, 201, 202, 211, 264, 265 French Colonial Exposition, 78 French Communist Party/ Parti communiste français, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58,

312

Index

63, 66, 71, 72, 73, 76, 83, 84, 85, 118, 128, 132, 133, 146, 158, 167, 170, 174, 197, 198, 199, 219, 223, 234, 260 French Fifth Republic, 9, 240, 269 French Fourth Republic, 147, 169, 193, 214, 225, 235 French Resistance, 214 French Section of the Workers International/ Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, 50, 51, 132, 170, 171, 198, 207, 214 French Third Republic, 18, 40, 132, 143, 153, 162, 167, 173 Friedmann, George, 110, 111 Frobenius, Leo, 143, 144, 159, 232 Fulbright, 221 Gaillard, Félix, 262, 267 Garvey, Marcus, 18, 30, 31, 37, 45, 46, 47, 52, 59, 60, 92, 101, 107, 111, 112 garveyism, 37, 39, 107 gender, 5, 10, 23, 33, 102, 106, 107, 124 George, Lloyd, 16 German Armistice Commission, 154 Germany, African colonies of, 19 Germany, race relations of, 43 Gide, André, 112, 120, 172, 208, 209, 210 Gobineau, 143, 250 Gontran-Damas, Léon, 283 Gorki, Maxim, 77 Gothon-Lunion, Joseph, 55, 56 Graham, Shirley (Du Bois), 215 Gramsci, Antonio, 10 Grandeur et servitude coloniales, 81 Grant, Madison, 32, 90 Gratiant, Gilbert, 119, 123, 124, 158, 161, 162, 167 Guernut, Henri, 133 Guèye, Lamine, 171, 198, 270 Guillen, Nicolás, 124 Hadj, Messali, 133 Haiti, 21, 23, 52, 65, 67, 177, 188 Hardy, Georges, 71 Harlem, 31, 42, 44, 53, 59, 66, 86, 89, 92, 99, 101, 102, 140, 152, 157, 159, 227 Harlem Renaissance, 31, 61, 78, 85, 86, 87, 89, 92, 95, 102, 113, 125, 159 Harris, James, 263 Harrison, Hubert, 63, 99 Hazoumé, Paul, 208

Herriot, Edouard, 173, 218 Herskovits, Melville, 90, 91, 204 Hibran, René, 160 Himes, Chester, 156 Hitler, Adolf, 127, 147, 148, 149, 152, 156, 163, 170, 172, 185, 191, 205, 223, 235 Ho Chi Minh, 55 Home to Harlem, 97 hommes de couleur, discussion of, 60 horizontal solidarity, question of, 199 Hosties noires, 153, 181 Houénou, Kojo Tovalou, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 57, 58, 107, 111 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix, 174, 219, 246 Houphouët-Boigny law 1946, 171 House of Un-American Committee, 213 Howard University, 79, 104, 117, 130, 145, 201, 245, 262 Hughes, Langston, 11, 31, 86, 87, 96, 97, 102, 103, 110, 113, 119, 120, 137, 147, 148, 150, 151, 159, 163, 182, 185, 188, 189, 190, 193, 211, 212, 223 Huiswood, Otto, 53, 54, 55 Human Rights League, 133 humanism, 52, 104, 112, 122, 138, 143, 206, 207, 227, 248, 249 Humanisme Intégrale, 143 Hunt, Ida Gibbs, 20, 23, 69 Hunton, Addie, 25, 62, 66, 69 Hurston, Zora Neale, 95, 96 Huxley, Julian, 215, 218 Institut d’Ethnologie, 137, 138, 143 International Council of the Women of the Darker Races, 36 International Labor Defense, 75 International Labor Organisation, 35, 38 International League of Darker Peoples and the National Equal Rights Association, 18 International Literature, 119, 120 International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 73, 83, 84, 85 Islam, 230, 231 Ivy, James, 238, 244, 245, 260, 276 James, C.L.R., 1, 2, 4 Je Suis Partout, 125 Jeune Droite, 123 Jim Crow, 2, 152, 154, 185, 202, 265 John Reed Clubs, 120, 166

Index Johnson, Charles S., 42, 89, 91, 116 Johnson, James Weldon, 22, 29, 31, 72, 89, 106, 115, 125, 138, 159, 183, 204 Jones, Dewey, 86 Jones, Edward, 229 Journal of Negro Education, 228 Kelley, Florence, 36 Kennedy, John F., 267, 272, 278 Kierkegaard, Søren, 1, 2, 276 Kouyaté, Tiemoko Garan, 49, 70, 72, 73, 74, 82, 83, 84, 85, 112, 116, 128, 131, 133, 134, 234, 283 Ku Klux Klan, 29, 117, 148 Kultur, 92 l’affaire Montmartre, 39 L’Afrique fantôme, 136 L’Étudiant noir, 121, 123, 124, 125, 132, 137, 138, 141, 147, 158 L’Humanité, 48, 51, 76, 77, 118 L’Illustration, 81 La Condition Humaine, 199 La Dépêche Africaine, 100, 108 La Dépêche politique, 37 La Française, 132 La mise en valeur des colonies françaises, 51 La Nouvelle Critique, 199 la plus grande France, concept, 51 La Race Nègre, 71, 72, 78, 83, 112, 128 La Revue du Monde Noir, 3, 102, 111, 116, 141 La Violation d’un pays, 48 La Voix des nègres, 57, 60, 64, 65 LaFarge Jr., John, 145 Lagrosillière, Joseph, 20, 21, 24, 25, 104 Lamine Guèye laws, 171, 173, 174 Larsen, Nella, 95, 103 Lastel, Madeleine, 230 Latin Quarter, Paris, 81 latinité, question of, 100 Laval-Mussolini accord, 126, 132 Le Comité de Défense de l’Independence Nationale d’Ethiopie, 128 Le Comité Permanent Victor Schoelcher, 128 Le Cri des nègres, 77, 83, 128, 131 Le Paria, 4, 51, 52, 58 Le Populaire, 77 League against Imperialism, 11, 61, 63, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 82, 84

313

League of Nations, 10, 11, 26, 32, 35, 38, 39, 45, 63, 70, 78, 87, 92, 115, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 175, 176, 194, 281 Légitime Défense, 108, 109, 110, 118, 121, 137, 147, 158, 160 Leiris, Michel, 136, 138, 205, 206, 207, 208, 231 Lenin, 16, 49, 50, 53, 54, 82, 108, 157 Lero, Etienne, 108, 118, 142 Léro, Thélus, 158 Les Continents, 3, 41, 43, 45, 46, 57, 101, 107 Les Temps modernes, 183 Letter to Maurice Thorez, 234 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 205, 206, 249 Liberia, 21, 23, 177 Liga gegen den Imperialismus, 72, 74 Liga zur Verteidigung der Negerrasse, 72, 83 Ligue pour la défense de la race noire, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 81, 82, 112, 128, 133 Ligue universelle pour la défense de la race noire, 41, 45 Lincoln University, 221, 228, 245, 262 Literature of World Revolution, 118 Locke, Alain, 31, 32, 42, 43, 44, 78, 79, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 98, 100, 102, 103, 110, 113, 125, 137, 150, 165, 166, 210, 212, 273, 283 Logan, Rayford W., 146, 179, 192, 220, 221, 239, 261 loi de départmentalisation (1946), 246 Macy, Helen, 75 Madagascar, 51, 101, 133, 154, 162, 209 Magie noire, 99, 102, 112 Malraux, André, 120, 157, 189, 250 Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, 203 mandate system, 26, 30, 32, 39, 44, 67, 79, 87, 90, 109, 175, 239 Manifesto of the Sixty-Four Intellectuals, 127 Maran, René, 32, 33, 41, 42, 43, 46, 57, 59, 63, 71, 84, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 110, 122, 137, 170, 172, 266, 270 Marcel, Gabriel, 208 Maritain, Jacques, 135, 142, 143 Marseille, 87, 111 Marshall Plan, 193, 196, 197

314

Index

Martinique, 32, 65, 104, 109, 113, 123, 147, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 171, 228, 243 marxism, 49, 66, 68, 121, 135, 142, 150, 157, 158, 167, 187, 213, 234, 260 masculinity, 5, 25, 32, 34, 35, 43, 124, 125, 256, 260 Maugée, Aristide, 125, 159 Maurras, Charles, 127 Mauss, Marcel, 143, 205 McCarthy, Joseph, 213 McCarthyism, 243 McKay, Claude, 4, 31, 44, 53, 54, 66, 86, 87, 88, 96, 97, 110, 111, 113, 119, 120, 125, 129, 137, 138, 143, 150, 158, 159, 163, 189, 190, 191, 211, 229, 230, 235 Mein Kampf, 148 Ménil, René, 12, 108, 109, 119, 142, 150, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 167, 187, 206, 276 Messenger, 53, 55 métissage, question of, 123, 138 Métraux, Alfred, 202, 204, 205, 206 Military Intelligence Division (United States), 28 Miller, Henry, 138 Miller, Kelly, 116, 117, 145 Misère de la poèsie, 118 modernity, question of, 2, 3, 5, 13, 33, 58, 85, 87, 88, 94, 95, 99, 102, 105, 111, 115, 116, 122, 136, 140, 143, 191, 198, 207, 223, 224, 242, 255, 278, 283 Mollet, Guy, 246, 267 Monnerot, Jules-Marcel, 108, 109, 118, 142, 167 Monnerville, Gaston, 169, 171, 195, 196, 213 Montagu, Ashley, 202, 203, 204 Moore, Richard, 49, 53, 55, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 85 Morand, Paul, 99, 102, 112 Moré, Marcel, 136, 137 Mounier, Émmanuel, 135, 136, 142, 208, 210, 211, 219 Moutet, Marius, 133 Münzenberg, Willi, 61, 63 Mussolini, Benito, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 144, 147 Myrdal, Gunnar, 165, 184, 186

NAACP, 15, 19, 21, 25, 31, 34, 36, 37, 40, 45, 53, 56, 62, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 84, 85, 89, 93, 99, 115, 130, 144, 177, 178, 179, 180, 194, 216, 221, 224, 229, 243, 244, 262, 274 Nardal, Jane, 6, 98, 104, 106, 112, 116, 124, 283 Nardal, Paulette, 6, 104, 105, 106, 107, 113, 116, 124, 131, 168, 200, 206, 210, 283 National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples, 64 National Association of Colored Women, 62 National Socialism, 126, 148, 191, 223 National Urban League, 42, 63, 89, 117 Native Son, 119, 156, 157, 166 Ndaw, Ibrahima Seydou, 198 nègres, discussion of, 60 négritude, 13, 98, 104, 113, 116, 124, 125, 164, 182, 187, 188, 229, 233, 275 Nelson, William S., 44 New Deal, 113, 114, 116, 117, 145, 149, 188 New Republic, 128 New York Age, 29, 145, 178, 216 New York Amsterdam News, 151 New York Herald, 27 New York Times, 29, 203, 205, 280 Nguyen Ai Quoc. See Ho Chi Minh Nguyen The Truyen, 133 Nicol, Davidson, 256 Nietzsche, Friederich, 2, 276 Nigger Heaven, 99 Nixon, Richard, 261 Nkrumah, Kwame, 180, 270, 272 noirs, discussion of, 60 Norman, Dorothy, 184 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 267 Northern Atlantic Treaty Organization, 193 Opportunity, 3, 42, 43, 61, 89, 91, 103, 116, 117, 124, 151, 152, 154 Ottley, Roi, 130 Owen, Chandler, 31, 53 Padmore, George, 4, 49, 64, 73, 75, 76, 83, 84, 85, 130, 141, 152, 154, 180, 234, 283 paganism, 159, 232 Pan-African Congress 1919, 20, 23, 25, 26, 28, 45, 62, 180

Index Pan-African Congress 1921, 34, 37, 38 Pan-African Congress 1923, 40 Pan-African Congress 1927, 62, 66, 68, 70 Pan-African Congress 1945, 179, 180 Pan-Asian movement, 50 Pan-Islamic movements, 50 Paris Peace Conference, 18, 22, 29, 30 Parti Nationaliste d’Algérie, 133 Patterson, William, 73, 74, 75 Payot, 98 Peace Information Center, 218, 219 Peau noire, masques blancs, 107, 233 Péguy, Charles, 162 Périer, G.D., 114, 116 Perrier, Léon, 80 personalism, 135, 136, 142 Pétain, Phillippe, 153, 162 Pfimlin, Pierre, 268 Phylon, 6, 171, 229 Picasso, Pablo, 172, 215 Pickens, Minnie, 62 Pickens, William, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 74, 154 Pigments, 137 Pineau, Christian, 262 Pittsburgh Courier, 145, 151, 152, 155, 178, 203, 214, 216, 217 Poètes d’expression française 1900–1945, 182 Poincaré, Raymond, 39, 40 Pope Pius XI, 142, 144 Popular Front, 120, 125, 132, 133, 134, 146, 147, 213, 215 Portugal, 23, 67 Powell Jr, Adam Clayton, 178, 227 POWs, 154 pragmatism, 93, 94 Présence Africaine, v, 3, 20, 125, 186, 188, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 226, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 242, 243, 249, 255, 257, 259, 261, 263, 265, 269, 271, 276, 277, 278 Price-Mars, Jean, 104, 124, 274 primitivism, 22, 33, 102, 112, 143, 258 Prix Goncourt, 32, 33, 42, 122 Quatre Communes, Senegal, 4, 16, 24, 71 Quicksand, 95

315

Rabemananjara, Jacques, 2, 5, 207, 209, 249, 270, 275, 276 Race and Civilisation, 205 Radical Party, 114 Randolph, A. Phillip, 53, 74, 279, 280 Rassemblement Coloniale, 133, 134 Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, 174, 196, 197, 198, 199, 217, 219, 220 Reflections on the Jewish Question, 185, 187 Renan, Joseph Ernest, 127 René-Boisneuf, Achille, 20, 21, 24, 25, 28 Réveil, 196 Revue du monde noir, 210 Rhine scandal, 42 Rivet, Paul, 132, 143, 208 Robert, Georges, 153 Robeson, Eslanda Goode, 105 Robeson, Paul, 130, 155, 215, 216, 283 Rogers, J.A., 128, 129 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 113, 114, 116, 117, 130, 145, 146, 176 Rustin, Bayard, 279 Sabas-Quitman, Maurice, 109 Sadoual, Georges, 118 Sainville, Léonard, 123, 125, 126 Sajous, Léo, 59, 103 Saroléa, Jeanne, 36 Sarraut, Albert, 51, 52, 81, 82, 90 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 208, 210, 215, 257, 277 Sasre, Robert, 231 Satineau, Maurice, 59, 70, 84, 100, 101, 107, 110, 111 Schoelcher, Victor, 59, 101 Schomburg Library, 151 Schuyler, George, 151, 214, 215, 216 Schwarze Schande. See Rhine Scandal Scottsboro Trial, 74, 75, 117, 132, 184 Second International Congress of Revolutionary Writers, 118 Second World War, 8, 147, 149, 155, 159, 176, 188, 192, 193, 202, 207, 228 Secours Rouge International, 82 secularism, 255, 256 self-determination, 8, 9, 13, 16, 17, 18, 21, 23, 26, 30, 35, 46, 49, 50, 53, 59, 65, 67,

316

Index

69, 79, 85, 88, 100, 113, 133, 175, 200, 206, 217, 238, 245, 249, 251, 275 Senghor, Lamine, 11, 48, 49, 56, 57, 58, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 72, 85, 111, 135, 283 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 4, 13, 103, 104, 114, 115, 121, 122, 123, 124, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 142, 143, 150, 153, 155, 160, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 181, 182, 187, 188, 192, 195, 198, 199, 208, 220, 225, 229, 231, 240, 246, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 258, 265, 266, 268, 270, 271, 277, 281, 283 Service de Contrôle et d’Assistance aux Indigènes aux Colonies, 52, 58 Sévère, Victor, 139 Shepard, Clara, 88, 103, 104 Shepherd, Clara, 6 Sherrill, William, 60 Sieburg, Friederich, 105 Sissoko, Fily Dabo, 266 Smith, Ada, 132 Smith, Asbury C., 117 Socialist Party of America, 50 Société Africaine de Culture, 257, 259, 262, 263, 264, 265, 268, 270, 273, 274, 277 Société Européene de Culture, 257 Soupault, Philippe, 112 sovereignty, 5, 9, 10, 21, 22, 26, 27, 47, 60, 88, 89, 90, 99, 109, 115, 126, 129, 130, 131, 173, 175, 176, 178, 235 Soviet Union, 7, 50, 66, 68, 73, 117, 119, 193, 195, 197, 215, 217, 218, 222, 226, 227, 240, 241, 269 Spanish Civil War, 131 Stalin, Josef, 120, 156, 166 Stavisky Affair, 126 St. Jacques, Camille, 84 Stoddard, Lothrop, 32, 90, 282 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 104 suffrage, 16, 18, 21, 58, 101, 169, 173, 174, 247 Sunday Worker, 152 surrealism, 82, 108, 150, 161, 163 Survey Graphic, 93 Tam-Tam, 230 Tardieu, André, 114 The American Negro, 91 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 265 The Negro Worker, 76, 83

The New Negro (1925), 44, 89, 90, 91, 93, 98, 112 The Outsider, 191, 224 The Real Facts About Ethiopia, 129 The Smith Act (1940), 213 The World and Africa, 172 Thésée, Lucie, 162, 276 Third International/Communist International, 50 Third Period, Comintern, 73 tirailleurs sénégalais, 15, 43, 149, 168 To Secure These Rights, 1947 report, 194, 195 Toomer, Jean, 159 Touré, Sékou, 266, 270, 271, 275, 277 Toussaint L’Ouverture, 148, 153, 163 translation, 32, 47; question of, 87, 98, 106, 119 Treat, Ida, 87 Tropiques, 12, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 166, 206, 276 Truman, Harry S., 176, 177, 178, 193, 195, 213 Twice A Year, 184 Ubangi-Shari (Oubangui-Chari), 32, 195 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 104 UNESCO, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 215, 218, 235, 258, 262, 274 UNESCO Courier, 203, 205 UNESCO Statement on Race 1950, 202 UNESCO Statement on Race 1951, 204 Union des Travailleurs Nègres, 83, 128, 131, 132, 133 Union Intercoloniale, 4, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58, 63, 133 Union of African Catholic Students, 230 United Nations, 8, 10, 11, 147, 175, 176, 188, 194, 199, 200, 201, 202, 214, 221, 235, 258, 261, 266, 269, 282 United Nations Charter, 175, 177, 178, 199 United States Information Agency, 239, 243 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 18, 30, 38, 39, 45, 52, 60, 63, 101 universalism, 100, 101, 144, 145 US race relations, spread of, 28, 38 Vaillant-Couturier, Paul, 48, 87 Van Vechten, Carl, 99 Verdier, Jean, 144 vertical solidarity, question of, 199

Index Vialle, Jane, 6, 183, 195, 196, 213, 214, 215, 220 Vichnevsky, V., 118 Vichy, 153, 154, 158, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 189 vogue nègre, 33, 85, 86, 87, 88, 97, 98, 102, 106, 112 Volontés, 232 Voltaire, 127, 223, 276 Wall Street Crash, 80, 114 Washington, Booker T., 110 Weil, Simone, 80, 138 West African Student’s Union, 100 Weston, George, 60, 63 When Peoples Meet, 165 White, Walter, 29, 75, 78, 99, 156, 177, 178, 186, 204, 216, 224, 227, 229 Wibaux, Robert, 101 Wilkins, Roy, 242, 244

317

Wilson, Woodrow, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, 50, 53, 177 Wilsonian moment, question of, 3, 9, 14, 18, 30, 35, 46, 49, 53, 59, 65, 67, 88, 200 Wolof, 251 women, question of, 28, 33, 43, 69, 76, 79, 106, 124, 131, 195, 200, 256 Works Progress Administration, 145 World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, 215 World Negro Congress, failure of, 85 Wright, Richard, 1, 2, 5, 8, 12, 13, 78, 119, 125, 147, 150, 152, 156, 157, 158, 166, 167, 183, 184, 186, 188, 189, 191, 197, 198, 208, 211, 212, 224, 225, 227, 231, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 263, 270, 273, 274, 283 Yoyotte, Pierre, 108