1945 Born on a plantation in 1908, the son of a share-cropper who abandoned the family soon after his birth, Wright went through a troubled upbringing and interrupted education in Mississippi before moving to Chicago in 1927, later finding work on the Federal Writers’ Project (see 27 July). He joined the Communist party in 1933, after attending meetings at the local John Reed Club in order to make literary contacts.
Anyone familiar with Native Son (1940), in which the novel’s protagonist gets driven around Chicago by two wealthy white communist slummers, would know that Richard Wright’s feelings towards the American Communist party were a far cry from simple adulation. In real-life Chicago (and later in New York) he found race and politics often to be at cross purposes. He often felt condescended to by the whites in the party, while the blacks denounced him as a bourgeois intellectual.
Wright left the party in 1942, but didn’t make the rift public until 1944, when he published an essay over two issues of The Atlantic Monthly, in which he argued that – both home and abroad – communist persecution of its supposed opponents was more subtle and merciless than white persecution of black in the American South.
The FBI, which had long targeted Wright as a dangerous radical, added a photostat of the Atlantic essay to his file. At first the New York office considered calling him in for interview, intending to turn him as an informer against the local party, but then they changed their minds, since (as the Special Agent in Charge wrote to J. Edgar Hoover) Wright’s decision was motivated by ‘the Communist Party’s failure to be sufficiently radical and militant with respect to the advancement of the Negro’.
Hoover approved New York’s decision. ‘In view of the militant attitude of the subject toward the Negro problem … you should submit a recommendation for the preparation of a Security Index Card in this case.’1 What that meant was the FBI would continue to regard Wright as an enemy of the people.
A year later, Wright left the United States for Paris. He would never return to his native country.
1 SAC (Special Agent in Charge), New York City, to Director, FBI, 26 February 1945; John Edgar Hoover to SAC, New York, 7 May 1945. http://foia.fbi.gov/rnwright/rnwright1a.pdf, 67c.