US agencies harassed Richard Wright in a pattern resembling a personal vendetta

Evidence

Fabre published the following letter from Wright to Margit de Sabloniere on 30 March 1960: “You must not worry about my being in danger … I am not exactly unknown here and I have personal friends in the de Gaulle cabinet itself. Of course, I don’t want anything to happen to me, but if it does, my friends will know exactly where it comes from. If I tell you these things, it is to let you know what happens. So far as the Americans are concerned, I’m worse than a Communist, for my work falls like a shadow across their policy in Asia and Africa. That’s the problem; they’ve asked me time and again to work for them: but I’d die first… . But they try to divert me with all kinds of foolish tricks.” Fabre, op. cit., p. 509. The files that Gayle has seen confirm Wright’s assertions, even beyond Fabre’s expectations: “Although he exaggerated the extent and intent of some attacks, I believe that many were expressly designed to make him lose his sense of reality. Whether caused by personal jealousy, political intrigue or racial malevolence, the desire to harm Wright was indisputable.” Ibid., pp. 524–25. Seven years later, Gayle was more equivocal: “The temptation to draw conclusions in line with those who believe that the FBI and the CIA were directly involved in Wright’s sudden death are great. To do so, however, based upon the facts of the documents, would be wrong. I did not find, nor did I expect to find, evidence to support this assertion, held by a great many of the writer’s friends. What I found was a pattern of harassment by agencies of the United States Government, resembling at times a personal vendetta more so than an intelligence-gathering investigation” (my emphasis). Gayle, op. cit., p. xv. Gayle, however, believes that there is something amiss in the documents: “The role of the State Department, however, is another matter, for it was here that the seeming vendetta occurred. The only document that supposedly originated with the State Department casts Wright in an unfavorable position. Documents filtered through the State Department to the FBI show an inordinate amount of activity on the part of the Foreign Service during the last months of Wright’s life. Most of the documents are heavily deleted, so their content is difficult to comprehend clearly. Whether there is any connection between this activity and Wright’s death may be known only if the deleted sections of the documents are released.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2466

Categorization

• QUESTION: Whether the State Department’s heavy document deletions connect to Wright’s death remains an open question worth chasing.
• XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of US state surveillance of Black radical intellectuals in the Cold War era.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2466