48 Million Black Voices

 48 MILLION BLACK VOICES

Four years before Richard Wright published 12 Million Black Voices, he proposed that the "relationship between reality and the artistic image is not always direct and simple," primarily because our idea about historical periods is not "a  carbon copy of reality. Image and emotion possess a logic of their own."

("Blueprint for Negro Writing", Section 9 ). In the introduction for the 2002 Thunder's Mouth Press reprint, David Bradley suggested Wright's fluid response to photographic images and his passionate prose endow the book  with "a lyrical power, an impressionistic rather than logical structure a power of a type different than that achieved in any of the work he was able to publish in the forties" (xviii).  Nevertheless, one can discern a logical structure in Wright's folk history, a logic imposed by Wright's historical consciousness regarding  American cultures.  As Wright informed readers in his introduction for Black Metropolis  (1945), edited by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, the purpose of specialized historical analysis is not to shock but to depict the environment from which shocking facts spring.  For Drake and Cayton "to have presented them otherwise would have been to negate the humanity of the American Negro" (xix).  Wright admitted that the scientific statement Black Metropolis made about the urban African American in Chicago was indebted to the work of  Robert E. Park, Robert Redfield, and Louis Writh, that from that work he drew meanings for 12 Million Black Voices (xviii), a panoptical visual and textual survey of rural and urban Black lives.

 

After eighty years, 12 Million Black Voices is a blueprint for speaking about the 48 million (+) Black voices of 2021.  Adjustments must be made to deal with technological sophistication in the use of photographs and the hidden dimensions of American social change between 1941 and now.  One cannot now exclude as Wright did "those areas of Negro life which comprise the so-called 'talented tenth,' or the isolated islands of mulatto leadership…or the growing and influential Negro middle-class professional and business men of the North who have….formed a liaison corps between the whites and the blacks" ( Foreword 5).  One can still argue, however, that Blacks "who have lifted themselves, through personal strength talent or luck, above the lives of their fellow-blacks….are but fleeting exceptions to that vast, tragic school that swims below in the depths, against the current, silently and heavily, struggling against the waves of vicissitudes that spell a common fate"(5). Tragedy prevails.  It would be perversely naïve to think a morally responsible "liaison corps" is operative, excluding the social force of relationships among the coded colors red, brown, black, and yellow.  There has been progress, but the sinister nature of progress warrants sustained critiques.

 

As one reads or re-reads 12 Million Black Voices for the purpose of making good choices about needs to be said about 48 million lives, it is prudent to scrutinize the not-always-apparent complexity of Wright's book and other photo-texts  of the period, to never forget that physical and metaphorical  "lynching"  yet obtains in American society.  Wright was and continues to be an extraordinary sage to whom humanity should listen.

 

 

 

 

 

12 Million Black Voices tempered the happy   investment of watching Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers in the 1941 film "Sun Valley Serenade"  with a quite different portrayal of African American lives in FSA images from  such photographers as jack Delano,  Dorthea Lange, Marian Post, and Russell Lee.  Then as now, the imaging of American  lives illuminated ideological and political investments. Visual comparison of Wright's book with James Agee's critically acclaimed  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) teaches us important lessons about social justice, the black/white binary, inclusion and exclusion,  and artistic bravery in pursuing a modicum of a truth  Of cotton farming, Agee could write ---

"It is the one crop and labor which is in no possible way useful as it stands to the tenant's living; it is among all these the one which must and can be turned into money; it is among all these the one in which the landowner is most interested; and it is among all these the one of which the tenant can hope for least, and can be surest that he is being cheated, and is always to be cheated."

Boston: Mariner Books, 2001, page 288.

Of the same crop, Wright more sharply observed

"Cotton is a drug, and for three hundred years we taken it to kill the pain of hunger; but it does not ease out suffering.  Most people take morphine out choice; we take cotton because we must.  For years longer than we remember, cotton has been our companion; we travel down the plantation road with debt holding our left hand, with credit holding our right, and ahead of us looms the grave, the final and simple end."

12 Million Black Voices. New York: The Viking Press, 1941, page 59.

Wright knew Queen Cotton more intimately than Agee; he read the character of La Belle Dame sans Merci accurately; eighty years ago,  Wright and Agee published  signals that warn us  still about  systemic patterns of daily life  in 2021.

LISTEN!!!!LISTEN!!!!LISTEN!!!!

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 10, 2021

 

 

48 MILLION BLACK VOICES

Four years before Richard Wright published 12 Million Black Voices, he proposed that the "relationship between reality and the artistic image is not always direct and simple," primarily because our idea about historical periods is not "a  carbon copy of reality. Image and emotion possess a logic of their own."

("Blueprint for Negro Writing", Section 9 ). In the introduction for the 2002 Thunder's Mouth Press reprint, David Bradley suggested Wright's fluid response to photographic images and his passionate prose endow the book  with "a lyrical power, an impressionistic rather than logical structure a power of a type different than that achieved in any of the work he was able to publish in the forties" (xviii).  Nevertheless, one can discern a logical structure in Wright's folk history, a logic imposed by Wright's historical consciousness regarding  American cultures.  As Wright informed readers in his introduction for Black Metropolis  (1945), edited by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, the purpose of specialized historical analysis is not to shock but to depict the environment from which shocking facts spring.  For Drake and Cayton "to have presented them otherwise would have been to negate the humanity of the American Negro" (xix).  Wright admitted that the scientific statement Black Metropolis made about the urban African American in Chicago was indebted to the work of  Robert E. Park, Robert Redfield, and Louis Writh, that from that work he drew meanings for 12 Million Black Voices (xviii), a panoptical visual and textual survey of rural and urban Black lives.

 

After eighty years, 12 Million Black Voices is a blueprint for speaking about the 48 million (+) Black voices of 2021.  Adjustments must be made to deal with technological sophistication in the use of photographs and the hidden dimensions of American social change between 1941 and now.  One cannot now exclude as Wright did "those areas of Negro life which comprise the so-called 'talented tenth,' or the isolated islands of mulatto leadership…or the growing and influential Negro middle-class professional and business men of the North who have….formed a liaison corps between the whites and the blacks" ( Foreword 5).  One can still argue, however, that Blacks "who have lifted themselves, through personal strength talent or luck, above the lives of their fellow-blacks….are but fleeting exceptions to that vast, tragic school that swims below in the depths, against the current, silently and heavily, struggling against the waves of vicissitudes that spell a common fate"(5). Tragedy prevails.  It would be perversely naïve to think a morally responsible "liaison corps" is operative, excluding the social force of relationships among the coded colors red, brown, black, and yellow.  There has been progress, but the sinister nature of progress warrants sustained critiques.

 

As one reads or re-reads 12 Million Black Voices for the purpose of making good choices about needs to be said about 48 million lives, it is prudent to scrutinize the not-always-apparent complexity of Wright's book and other photo-texts  of the period, to never forget that physical and metaphorical  "lynching"  yet obtains in American society.  Wright was and continues to be an extraordinary sage to whom humanity should listen.

 

 

 

 

 

12 Million Black Voices tempered the happy   investment of watching Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers in the 1941 film "Sun Valley Serenade"  with a quite different portrayal of African American lives in FSA images from  such photographers as jack Delano,  Dorthea Lange, Marian Post, and Russell Lee.  Then as now, the imaging of American  lives illuminated ideological and political investments. Visual comparison of Wright's book with James Agee's critically acclaimed  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) teaches us important lessons about social justice, the black/white binary, inclusion and exclusion,  and artistic bravery in pursuing a modicum of a truth  Of cotton farming, Agee could write ---

"It is the one crop and labor which is in no possible way useful as it stands to the tenant's living; it is among all these the one which must and can be turned into money; it is among all these the one in which the landowner is most interested; and it is among all these the one of which the tenant can hope for least, and can be surest that he is being cheated, and is always to be cheated."

Boston: Mariner Books, 2001, page 288.

Of the same crop, Wright more sharply observed

"Cotton is a drug, and for three hundred years we taken it to kill the pain of hunger; but it does not ease out suffering.  Most people take morphine out choice; we take cotton because we must.  For years longer than we remember, cotton has been our companion; we travel down the plantation road with debt holding our left hand, with credit holding our right, and ahead of us looms the grave, the final and simple end."

12 Million Black Voices. New York: The Viking Press, 1941, page 59.

Wright knew Queen Cotton more intimately than Agee; he read the character of La Belle Dame sans Merci accurately; eighty years ago,  Wright and Agee published  signals that warn us  still about  systemic patterns of daily life  in 2021.

LISTEN!!!!LISTEN!!!!LISTEN!!!!

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 10, 2021