This excerpt from “Death in Paris (1960),” which appears in Keenan Norris’s Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings, revisits the final years of Richard Wright’s life in Paris, placing his political evolution in the context of Cold War surveillance and Black literary dissent. Though Wright had renounced the Communist Party, he remained a target of U.S. government harassment. His sudden death in Paris raised suspicions that still haunt his legacy. Former U.S. President and another Chicago son, Barack Obama, appears not only as a historical counterpoint but as a symbolic heir—his life shaped by the very generation of politically active Black artists and thinkers that Wright represented.
In his latter years, long after having denounced Communist dogma and having reoriented his politics around a steadfast, take-no-prisoners anti-Communist line, Wright would find himself the subject of CIA and FBI surveillance, manipulation, harassment, and investigation. Though he was no longer even an American resident, but instead had made his home in Paris, the feds were following him.
In early November 1960, a few months before Barack Obama Jr. came breathing into the world, Richard Wright strode on stage before an audience at the American Church on the Quai D’Orsay and proceeded to deliver a rambling jeremiad: In America, Wright proclaimed, with more than a little experience to back his charges, black writers lived in a “nightmarish jungle.” The US government itself was the culprit, systematically silencing those who spoke out in protest of discrimination and racial injustice. Overseas, in his adopted Paris home and elsewhere, that same American government spied on black writers and fabricated revolutionary fronts to co-opt the energies of the aggrieved. “I’d say that most revolutionary movements in the Western world are government-sponsored,” he told the gathered crowd. “They are launched by agents provocateurs to organise the discontented so that the Government can keep an eye on them.”
[Wright biographer Hazel] Rowley cites the Congress for Cultural Freedom as just such an outfit, set up by the CIA with the express purpose of using Wright as an unwitting propagandist. Hugh Wilford, historian and author of The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, asserts that the American Society of African Culture, which Wright had ironically helped to create, was one of these CIA-embedded front groups. While Wilford declines to weigh in on the final mysterious chapter of Wright’s life, he does stake out his forthright claim that many Black organisations were infiltrated by the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s.
Wright died suddenly, the day November 28, the year 1960, the official cause: myocardial infarction, a heart attack. Wright had had no history of heart trouble, though he had had more than his share of serious illness, most notably a long battle with amoebic dysentery, apparently contracted during his travels in Asia and Africa. Rowley speculates that, based on the toxicity of bismuth, the drug that Wright was taking to ease his stomach pain, and by late 1960 he was probably suffering from acute liver poisoning. He was laid up for half of November with a high fever. He was diagnosed with grippe. Still, many of Wright’s associates, as well as Wright’s daughter Julia, believed Wright the victim of foul play. Many years later, in 1991, [pioneering Black political cartoonist] Ollie Harrington said that he’d never met a Black person who didn’t believe Wright the victim of an assassination.
Rowley reports that an hour after being admitted to the Eugene Gibez clinic with complaints of severe stomach pains, Wright received the unannounced visitation of a mysterious woman. Some said her to be a Hungarian woman who gave Wright a deadly injection; others claimed she was a “prostitute friend.” Some time (sic) after the strange visitor, at 9 p.m., Wright was consulted by a hospital nurse, who found him in good spirits. Two hours later, she found him dead in his hospital bed.
In our era, where cynical, ill-intentioned conspiracy theories abound, it is tempting to embrace mainstream dismissal of the notion that Wright might have been murdered. But the possibility should not be so easily discounted, given the predatory nature of the American surveillance state in Wright’s day. As systems of surveillance metastasise to more and more egregious degrees in our time, we should, if anything, take more seriously the possibility that Wright did not meet a natural end.
(From “Death in Paris (1960),” Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings. Copyright © 2022 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved.)
