Black Power

by Richard Wright

  In October of 1949, the Coussey Committee’s report was announced and Nkrumah called a monster mass meeting in Accra to study the constitutional proposals and decide to what extent they were acceptable. More than 80,000 people attended that meeting. The vast crowd objected to the three ex-officio members representing British vested interests being included in the cabinet; it protested against the suffrage age limit being set at twenty-five; it demanded a legislature composed of fully elected members instead of, as the report recommended, some being nominated and some being elected. The mass meeting advocated countrywide civil disobedience and non-co-operation if the British refused these demands.

  During the first days of January of the following year, 1950, the Government invited the leaders of the Convention People’s Party to a conference to discuss their proposals for constitutional change. The Government asked the nationalist leaders to postpone their campaign for civil disobedience until the Government had time to study what course to take. Nkrumah felt that such an attitude on the part of the Government indicated a ruse to stall for time; accordingly, twenty-four hours later, Nkrumah announced that “Positive Action” would begin.

  On the morning of January 8, 1950, a colony-wide strike paralyzed the Gold Coast: not a train ran; buses and transportation trucks stood still; only water, electricity, health, and medical services, were allowed to function. For twenty-one days, despite threats of dismissal of workers from jobs, martial law, warnings, curfews, and the full evocation of the emergency powers of the Governor, “Positive Action” and civil disobedience held away in the Gold Coast. When it became evident that such action could continue indefinitely, the Governor again ordered the arrest of Nkrumah and the leaders of the Convention People’s Party on charges of sedition. The trial lasted two months and ended with the conviction of all the leaders and their being sentenced to prison for terms varying from three months to four years.

  During 1950, elections for town councils were held in the three largest cities of the Gold Coast: Accra, Kumasi, and Cape Coast. Though in prison, the leaders of the condemned party swept the polls, gaining decisive majorities wherever they had candidates running. When general elections were announced, the imprisoned leaders organized and conducted their campaigns from their prison cells! How was that possible? It was easy in the kind of tribal brotherhood that Nkrumah had established in his organization. The black jailers assigned by the Governor to guard the prisoners became the prisoners’ messengers! They could not refuse to serve; first, they hotly wanted to see their land free of alien domination; second, they were bound by tribal loyalties to help their own brothers. Hence, the Convention People’s Party was able to put up candidates in all of the country’s constituencies. And from the leaders’ prison cells political orders scribbled on toilet paper were smuggled out to the public by the men assigned to guard the prisoners! THESE MEN WERE ALREADY FREE! BUT THEY HAD TO PROVE IT WITH SACRIFICES! Were they willing to make those sacrifices? They were.

  It was in prison that the greeting of “Freedom” was conceived and the salute of the elbow-resting-on-the-hip-and-the-right-palm-fronting-outward was invented. Nkrumah himself, while in his cell, wrote the party’s song that would eventually be sung by the newly freed nation.

  On February 8, 1951, the Convention People’s Party swept the nation, winning thirty-five out of the thirty-eight seats. The people of the Gold Coast had elected as heads of the new government men who were in prison cells and the British had a new headache on their hands.

  A few days later Nkrumah and his aides were told to dress in civilian clothes, an order that aroused their suspicions, for they thought that the British did not want the populace to see their newly elected leaders being transferred to another prison. But, no. It was freedom, an act of “grace,” as the British quaintly called it for public consumption. But, privately, when speaking to the nationalist leaders themselves, the Governor admitted: “You chaps out-organized us.” That was all. There was no mention of virtue; no talk of metaphysics; he didn’t charge the African leaders with having progressed too fast. In short, his attitude said: “Well, you proved you were men. All right, you have the government.” It was as simple as that.

  Though Nkrumah had branded the constitution as being “bogus and fraudulent,” he decided that his party would take a leading role in the new government for the following reasons: “We are going into the Government to show the world that the African can rule himself. We want the chance to fight for the political, social, and economic improvement of the country from both within and without the government.”

  This is a happy note upon which to end this story, but if I terminated my remarks here, I’d not be true to you or to the efforts of the Gold Coast Africans. Soon after he had taken over the government, Nkrumah had trouble. Some sections of the once-powerful tribes of the Ashanti and a few elements among the backward natives of the Northern Territories, incited by disgruntled political leaders, threatened secession. Self-government and freedom were proving to be a hard and lonely road, a cold and anguishing life. They suddenly longed for the father-image of the white man, for their warm and ancient days. They rebelled, rioted, shouted slogans against the new government, and called for a federal constitution that would enable them to follow their ancient folkways. Nkrumah stood firm against these new onslaughts from his own people and insisted that they march ahead. After much agitation, elections were held, in 1956, on the issue of whether there should be a strong central government or a loose federation of small local states, each with its own autonomous folkways. The idea of a strong central government, oriented towards an industrial future, won, as it should have.

  In March 1957, the Gold Coast, under the leadership of Nkrumah, assumed independent status with full responsibility for its present and future, and its name was changed to Ghana.

  Let us pause here and glance back over this story. In one sense, it is a glorious tale of men succeeding against almost impossible odds. But in another sense it is a stupid and tragic story. WHAT WAS THE FIGHT IN THE GOLD COAST ALL ABOUT? The issue was something so simple and human that one is almost ashamed to mention it. One set of men, black in color, had to organize and pledge their lives and make grievous sacrifices in order to prove to another set of men, white in color, that they were human beings! What a perversion of the energies of human life! What a reduction of human dignity comes about when men must consecrate their end-all and their be-all merely to prove that they are human beings. Suppose all of that energy had been put to embellishing the life of that country? What life-furthering gains there could have been!

  But the black men involved had no choice. To maintain their position of psychological luxury stemming from the cheap and vulgar superiority of race domination, the white British had branded the black Gold Coasters as inferior, and those black men had no choice but to accept that challenge before they could do anything else. This useless struggle of having to prove one’s humanity, which is a kind of supra racism, is the blight that the Western white man has cast upon the colored masses of Asia and Africa.

  But the struggle in the Gold Coast is not over. The European has been driven from power there, but can the African drive out of himself that religious weakness that enabled the European to enter his land so easily and remain there as master for centuries? Can the African get Africanism out of Africa? Can the African overcome his ancestor-worshiping attitudes and learn to doubt the evidence of his senses as Descartes taught the Europeans to do, and master the techniques of science and develop a spirit of objectivity?

  I can say one thing with certainty: The Gold Coast African now knows what he needs most to do. He needs to trade with the world; he needs the learning of the world; he needs the industrial disciplines and scientific facts of the world. What he does not need is bossing, white masters, racial snobbery, and the white man’s concept of what is “good” for him.

  Let us pause here and ask some pertinent questions. If the people of the Gold Coast had accepted the advice of the British, cou
ld they have won their independence so quickly and effectively? The answer is a categoric no. Only Africans, giving African solutions to African problems, could have accomplished that miracle. What politicians or academic spokesmen of the Western world would have dared, even merely imaginatively, to envisage the confounding unity of so many disparities which Nkrumah forged into so masterful a whole? None. What Nkrumah did had not only been declared impossible, unsound; but it was immoral. Why? For the simple reason that it had never been done before.

  Do you know that even scientists and academic people, too, have their mysticism, their superstition? According to their feelings, that which has never happened before must somehow be wrong; and especially is this the attitude they hold in the sphere of human relations. It is for this reason that, no matter what happens in the Gold Coast, the Africans there are stoutly determined to decide for themselves what is good or bad for them.

  The new government plans to construct a gigantic hydroelectric project by damming up rivers and creating one of the world’s largest inland lakes. The idea is to use the electric power to manufacture aluminum out of bauxite, of which there is enough to last two hundred years. What do they plan to do with the aluminum? They want to swap it for atomic piles! In short, the Gold Coast is planning to launch itself directly into the twentieth century, with its present tribal structure and all. Well, why not? Why should the people of the Gold Coast repeat the slow, costly, and stupid industrial growth of the Western world?

  Of course, the academic people have declared that that is wrong. Why? Well, it has just never happened before, so it’s wrong. I say that, as yet, the world does not know what is “right” or “wrong” in such matters. I say that Nkrumah is right to plunge ahead and experiment. If such experiments are honestly and intelligently conducted, one cannot really lose. Even if failure attends the enterprise, one will have learned something, and a few new facts about man’s life on earth will have been added to our stock of human knowledge.

  Whenever and wherever I’ve explained this problem, I’ve been deluged with questions from Western whites:

  “How can we help the Africans? Can we go to Africa and work with them? Will the Africans accept us?”

  Yes, you can work with and help the Africans, and they will accept you if you can work with them in the spirit of civil servants rather than civil masters.

  But, in my opinion, the greatest aid that any white Westerner can give Africa is by becoming a missionary right in the heart of the Western world, explaining to his own people what they have done to Africa. To those of you who fervently long to go to Africa, I say, beware. Africa is a most dangerous psychological trap. The millions of naked blacks living there in poetic dreams beckon seductively to the white misfits, the white failures, the white psychological cripples of the Western world. If you can’t adjust to the exacting conditions of life in New York, or London, or Paris, or Berlin, then go to Africa and play God to simple-minded men. Only a mentally stunted and botched white man would want to obtain that kind of cheap salvation. Every white man desiring to go to Africa ought to be subjected to a most rigorous psychoanalytic examination to determine whether he is really emotionally fit to do so. Until today, the most tenacious enemies of Africa have been emotionally deformed white men hanging like millstones about Africa’s neck.

  What Africans need, above all, is an understanding on the part of others of what has happened to them. They know now, in part, what has happened to them, but the white men who caused that catastrophe do not know it. More than techniques, which they need, more than Point Fours, which they need, more than loans and gifts, which they need and can use, Africans need a simple acknowledgment from the white West of what it did. And that terribly human gesture, to be frank—men being what they are—is about the last thing that the white West can give Africa. It’s too human a thing to ask, and, even if the West could give it, it would help the West even more than it would help Africa. For one thing, it would mean that the white man would not again, acting upon a ridiculous delusion, attempt to conquer lands in the name of a superior god or race. And that assurance would leave the newly freed African in psychological peace for a while to find himself and rebuild his shattered existence.

  Can this happen? Is the West free enough of its own fears to let these people know that they will not be resubjugated? That is the question.

  The Secret Circle that launched this revolution looked at their people through Western eyes, or they could not have pitted their puny strength against the might of Britain and the traditions of their people. Being Western, they were rightfully impatient; they wished to move ahead fast and create that world that would make them feel at home; they wanted to know that the earth upon which they lived and the men about them were not hostile. Western white men can understand these nationalist Africans if racial jealousy can be drained out of their hearts and if moral imperialism can be purged from their sensibilities.

  If my words have any weight with you, I say, when you look at these black nationalists, you are looking at yourselves in another guise. But need that fact upset you? Need it incite you to anger? In order to contemplate one’s life in an alien guise, one must have a clean heart, or else one is prone to project out upon that alien life one’s own dirt, one’s own spite, one’s own self-hate, one’s own inhibited impulses. Too long has Africa been made into a psychological garbage heap where white men dumped that part of themselves that they did not like. A free Africa will not only mean a chance of life for millions of people who have been victimized for centuries, but it will be a sign, too, that at long last the white man has grown up and has no longer any need to crucify others in order to feel normal. In sum, a free Africa presupposes a free mankind.

  But, let me repeat one word of warning: The white man injected race feeling in Africa. And the easiest, the cheapest, the most vulgar, and the least worthy road that the African can travel is to become a racist like the white man, which would mean that the African has learned his lesson too bitterly and too well. To steer clear of the foul road of racism is not left to the decision of the African; too much pressure upon him can take him down that road, and, if he goes, and if the Asians follow him, then the vile logic of racism, which the white man helped to sow in this world, will grow and bear its blighted fruit.

  We have it within our will and power to see that that does not happen.

  Would it not be better to have continents of Asians and Africans wedded to practical goals than have them arming and mobilizing to make the world accept them as men? We make the world in which we live. So far we’ve made it a racist world. But surely such a world is not worthy of man as we dream of him and want him to be.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For some of the many fragments of poems quoted in this volume I am indebted to the following authors:

  Frank Horne, Langston Hughes, Robert E. Hayden, and Margaret Walker.

  Particularly am I grateful to the editors of The Negro Caravan, Sterling Brown, Howard University; Arthur P. Davis, Virginia Union University; and Ulysses Lee, Lincoln University; for permission to quote from their most comprehensive anthology, The Negro Caravan (Dryden Press), fragments from the following authors’ poems: Frances Ellen’s Harper’s Bury Me in a Free Land; Albery A. Whitman’s Rape of Florida; George Leonard Allen’s Pilate in Modern America; Frank Home’s Nigger; Robert E. Hayden’s Gabriel; Fenton Johnson’s Tired; Claude McKay’s White Houses; and Jean Toomer’s Song of the Son.

  I also wish to express appreciation to Harcourt, Brace and Company for permission to quote from W. E. B. DuBois’s A Litany at Atlanta; to New Directions for permission to quote from Dylan Thomas’s Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines; to Viking Press for permission to quote from James Weldon Johnson’s Saint Peter Relates an Incident; to Random House for permission to quote James D. Corrothers’ At the Closed Gate of Justice; and to Harper & Brothers for permission to quote from Countee Cullen’s Heritage.

  Also Viking Press was kind enough to allow me to quote generously f
rom my own book, 12 Million Black Voices.

  To Arna Bontemps and to Melvin Tolson I am indebted for their personal permission to quote lines from Nocturne at Bethesda and Dark Symphony respectively.

  And may I take this opportunity to express publicly my thanks to Dr. Otto Klineberg for his invaluable aid, guidance, and advice in helping me to devise a questionnaire with which I armed myself upon my first foray to grapple with the Asian personality? Needless to say, the interpretations which I drew from the results of that questionnaire are mine and are not to be laid at his door.

  R. W.

  ALSO BY RICHARD WRIGHT

  A Father’s Law

  Rite of Passage

  American Hunger

  Eight Men

  The Long Dream

  Pagan Spain

  Savage Holiday

  The Outsider

  Black Boy

  Native Son

  Uncle Tom’s Children

  Copyright

  BLACK POWER. Copyright © 1954 by Richard Wright. First published in 1954 by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.