Grateful acknowledgment is made to: Dodd, Mead & Company for permission to reprint eight lines from “When Malindy Sings” from The Complete Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar; Harper & Brothers for permission to reprint the first verse of “Heritage” from Color by Countee Cullen. Copyright © 1925 by Harper & Brothers, copyright © 1953 by Ida M. Cullen.
THE COLOR CURTAIN. Copyright © 1956 by Richard Wright. First published in 1956 by World Publishing Company, New York. Epigraph from The Bridge, by Hart Crane, copyright © 1930 by Horace Liveright. Afterword copyright © 1994 by Amritjit Singh. Reprinted by arrangement with John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., New York.
WHITE MAN, LISTEN!. Copyright © 1957 by Richard Wright. Introduction copyright © 1964 by Double & Company, Inc. First published in 1957 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Introduction © 2008 by Cornel West.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
EPub Edition © April 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201837-3
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* Under the religiously toned spur of a new Indian nationalism, the reverse process is under way in India today. Thousands of Hindu Christians are being de-Christianized in popular and public ceremonies.
* Since these lines were written, elective democracy has been suspended in Indonesia and a form of “guided” democracy has been enthroned in its place.
* My italics. R.W.
* In the torrid political debates of Hindus, Chinese, Africans, and Indonesians that rage in the cafés of Paris, one hears the frequent and defiantly masochistic declaration: “China could fight a war for twenty years and lose twenty million men and still have a population of six hundred million left!”
* See The Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People.
* Here is a paradox: Nehru is as powerful as an emperor; Nkrumah is a de facto dictator; yet both men are staunch democrats and are using their vast personal power to sponsor measures that will undermine their “cult of the personality”! The key to their motives is that they seek power not for themselves, but for their people!
* In Black Power (Harper & Brothers, New York: 1954), in which the author rendered an account of the nationalistic revolution in the Gold Coast, all mention or description of this highly interesting and indigenous African political cell was deliberately withheld for fear that the politically reactionary or ideologically immature would confuse it with Russian Communism and call for the suppression of the African’s first modern bid for freedom. R. W.
Black Power Page 74
