Floating Facts on a Sea of Emotion

Richard Wright’s journalism has been largely unexamined by Wright scholars. He has never been studied as a literary journalist and rarely placed in an African American tradition of journalism. William Dow’s chapter focuses on works that best reveal Wright as a heretofore unrecognized literary journalist: 12 Million Black Voices (1940) and a selection of his exile writings: Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, (1954), The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957). It demonstrates the usefulness of literary journalistic forms to Wright as an African American writer and global humanitarian. This chapter also shows how Wright, while advancing his aesthetic aims, repurposed traditional journalism in order to promote a political solidarity with oppressed people around the world.