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handwritten note with magazine clippping 23 April 1968 Dear Jack arrow pointing to clipping about Dickie Wright - in a Jesuit magazine.

   Also an enclosure about the embattled syndicalists (IWW) in my Area.
   These are exciting times.  They used to TALK about "1 Big UNION...
    NOW it's 1 Big Reunion!  Shirley Temple is 40.  Avery Brundage is 80.

hold on! Joe Diggles (60)

America handwritten note: JESUIT magazine / April 27, 1968 Richard Wright By Constance Webb Putnam. 443p. $8.95

Although Gertrude Stein once told Richard Wright: "You and I are the only two geniuses of this era," Wright did not wrest from his genius such books as italicized: Native Son and italicized: The Outsider without vast mental and spiritual suffering. Certainly William Faulkner guessed as much when, after reading italicized: Black Boy, he urged Wright not to stay too close to the memory of his own grief.

   Readers aware of the autobiographical content of Wright's works could claim awareness of that grief, but only now has Constance Webb made its magnitude visible.  Her biography was begun, with Wright's full co-operation, in 1945.  Since his death in 1960 his heirs and associates have given her full access to cherished papers and memories.  The whole story is here.  It is more than the biography of one man, however; it emblemizes the plight of the Negro race in modern America.
   There were the early Southern years -- a broken home, an animal-like existence as a sensitive nature was repelled by the humiliations  of second-class citizenship, the ever-present need to wear a mask of stupidity in an environment where literacy could lead to lynching  Wright fled to Chicago where, grateful for anyone's interest in him, he became a Communist.  Presently he saw, however, that there were forces and depths in his own tradition that communism did not take into account.  Christianity was not mere escapism.  Through it the black mass in America had kept its dignity.  In its images, symbols and attitudes the American Negro had found the "highest crystallization of his will to live."  Although in these views he anticipated the era of Martin Luther King, his own nature was too turbulent to be won to nonviolence.  For Gandhi it might work, but it was alien to the traditions of the West.
  Because he deplored the "dehumanized image which Americans carried of the Negro," Wright was branded a dealer in extremes both by whites, who believed the lot of Negroes in America was rapidly improving, and by Negroes, shocked at the brutality of his Negro protagonists.  Yet everywhere he went in America the shame of racism haunted him.  Waitresses in white restaurants salted his coffee; officialdom fingered his books suspiciously and even the fabric of his suits; underlined in ink:  his four-year-old daughter was denied access to a ladies room in a New York department store;  he was harassed when he bought a new home, challenged even when he examined produce at a fruit stand.  He was appalled to realize that though a Negro had perfected the blood bank technique, the American Red Cross refused Negro blood.  "There's no democracy for the black man in America," he decided.  "We're all scared all the time."
   He left America for France.  He traveled in Africa.  Yet those who thought that in a new milieu he would make a human gain were misled.  In Africa he saw that though the whites were gone, Negro consciousness remained what it was.  He prized the restiveness of Americans.  He love English so much he could not learn French.  He was an uneasy exile.  If Russia moved across Europe, he expected to be liquidated for his repudiation of communism.  England barred his entry.  Americans said he had lost touch because he did not think the problems of race in America were near amicable solution.  Perplexed, alone, he died in Paris at 52, his heart shattered by an anguish that he, as one of that class that he called "the tragic elite," could no longer bear.   When his wife came to view his corpse, she saw someone had put a spray of flowers in his hands.  She took them away, recalling perhaps the Smoky Mountains song:  "When we're dead and in our caskets,/ They always slip some lilies in our hand./  Won't you give me flowers while I'm living?"    JOHN J. MC ALEER