Abstract
The transformation in the self-image of American blacks between 1903, when The Souls of Black Folk appeared, and the 1963 March on Washington is one of the most inspiring episodes in all of history. Early twentieth century black America was a ravaged continent, rural, protoliterate and impoverished, still dominated by lords and masters, whether plantation-owners and ex-confederates, internal despots such as Booker T. Washington, or Northern patrons, “philanthropists,” and political mentors. A few years before The Souls of Black Folk appeared, when some black college students in Alabama accidentally wandered into a white railroad car, their black college president, William H. Council, called them into his office with the words, “You all have ruined me,” and then, weeping, handed his resignation to the white board of trustees.1 By way of contrast, similarly situated black college students launched the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South in the 1950s. Facing down intimidation, jail, and lynching, their actions culminated in the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.
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Notes
Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 2.
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Paul Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001) p. 6.
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Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977) p. 114.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988) pp. 170–216.
Jean Toomer, “Negro Psychology in The Emperor Jones,” In Robert B. Jones (ed.), Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996) p. 6.
Werner Sollors, “Jean Toomer’s Cane: Modernism and Race in Interwar America,” In Geneviève Fabre and Michael Feith (eds), Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001) p. 20.
Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (New York: Lippincott, 1939).
Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” In John F. Callahan (ed.), Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: Modern Library, 1995) pp. 128–133, discussing Wright’s Black Boy.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “My Evolving Program,” quoted in Claudia Tate, Psycho-analysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 51.
Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969) p. 55.
I am following here Abdul R. Janmohamed in Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah, Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives (New York: Amistad, 1993).
Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper Collins, 1945) p. 284.
Richard Wright, The Long Dream (Chatham, NJ: Chatham, 1958) p. 165.
Wright, Black Boy, pp. 271–272; Margaret Walker, Richard Wright: Demonic Genius (New York: Warner, 1988) p. 41.
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1945) Introduction.
Quoted in Donald Gibson, Five Black Writers (New York: New York University Press, 1970), pp. 24–25.
Arthur Koestler et al., The God that Failed (New York: Bantam Books, 1949, 1958) p. 118.
Mark Naison, The Communists in Harlem (New York: Grove Press, 1984) p. 211.
Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001) pp. 136–137.
E. Fuller Torrey, Freudian Fraud (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) pp. 35–37.
Irving Howe, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” In Irving Howe (ed.), A World More Attractive (Freeport, NewYork, Horizon Press, 1970, original publication 1963), pp. 98–122.
Horace R.Cayton, “The Search for Richard Wright,” (1969), Box 4, Cayton Collection, Chicago Public Library.
Horace R. Cayton, Long Old Road (New York, NY: Trident Press, 1965) p. 260. See also Horace R. Cayton, “Personal Experience of Race Relations,” unpublished 1967 paper, Box 3, Cayton Collection, Chicago Public Library.
Ralph Ellison to Richard Wright, July 22, 1945 quoted in Michel Fabre, “Richard Wright, French Existentialism and the Outsider,” quoted in Yoshinobu Hakutani, Critical Essays on Richard Wright (Boston, MA: GK Hall, 1982) p. 184.
Richard Wright, White Man, Listen (New York: Doubleday, 1957) p. 36.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (New York, NY: Russell and Russell, 1965) pp. 327–329.
Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) Vol. 3, p. 730.
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© 2009 Eli Zaretsky
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Zaretsky, E. (2009). Beyond the Blues: Richard Wright, Psychoanalysis, and the Modern Idea of Culture. In: Damousi, J., Plotkin, M.B. (eds) The Transnational Unconscious. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582705_3
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