Richard Wright and the Police
1
Toward the end of his life, after a long exile in France accompanied by intermittent harassment by American internal security agencies, Richard Wright was asked whether he felt reluctant when he had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to renew his United States passport. Wright’s reply was without anguish: “I don’t think it has caused me too much hardship. I live quite comfortably. In any case the American Negro is the most vociferous defender of the Constitution. That’s exactly what we want: enforcement of the Constitution.”1 Wright, whose reply was almost guaranteed to appear in his ever-growing FBI file, may not have had much latitude in expressing a public opinion toward the Pledge.2 But clearly, Wright thought past the interviewer’s question, and past the Pledge itself, which makes no mention of the United States Constitution. The deflection illustrates a familiar but fundamental aspect of postwar American culture: public controversy about questions of constitutionality and the role of the Supreme Court. In the postwar period the Supreme Court wrought major cultural changes long overdue in American jurisprudence, delivering such watershed decisions as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966). For Wright to have thought of constitutionality when reminded of the State Department’s requirement that he recite the Pledge, suggests that the Court, in contrast to the executive or the legislature, represented what Wright thought of as the ideal version of American power, its friendliest, or its least autocratic, incarnation. For Wright, the America to which he could pledge allegiance was a judicial America, one engaged in the process of living up to its Constitution.
Toward the end of his life, after a long exile in France accompanied by intermittent harassment by American internal security agencies, Richard Wright was asked whether he felt reluctant when he had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to renew his United States passport. Wright’s reply was without anguish: “I don’t think it has caused me too much hardship. I live quite comfortably. In any case the American Negro is the most vociferous defender of the Constitution. That’s exactly what we want: enforcement of the Constitution.”1 Wright, whose reply was almost guaranteed to appear in his ever-growing FBI file, may not have had much latitude in expressing a public opinion toward the Pledge.2 But clearly, Wright thought past the interviewer’s question, and past the Pledge itself, which makes no mention of the United States Constitution. The deflection illustrates a familiar but fundamental aspect of postwar American culture: public controversy about questions of constitutionality and the role of the Supreme Court. In the postwar period the Supreme Court wrought major cultural changes long overdue in American jurisprudence, delivering such watershed decisions as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966). For Wright to have thought of constitutionality when reminded of the State Department’s requirement that he recite the Pledge, suggests that the Court, in contrast to the executive or the legislature, represented what Wright thought of as the ideal version of American power, its friendliest, or its least autocratic, incarnation. For Wright, the America to which he could pledge allegiance was a judicial America, one engaged in the process of living up to its Constitution.2
However, when Wright imagines encounters with American law in fiction, he does not think of the highest courts. Instead, his stories are consistently preoccupied with the most intensive and widely distributed form of state power, the police. For Wright’s protagonists, the police are always the state that can be seen, and what his characters see are rampant transgressions of constitutional principle. Wright’s characters were not alone in their fear of the police. Over the course of Wright’s lifetime, progressive reforms increasingly sought to stem police lawlessness, and a major national program of review, the “Wickersham Commission,” was appointed by President Hoover in 1929 to study the problem. The copious report established that the use of violent interrogation was widespread in police stations through the United States.3 Public opinion recoiled from the thought of the rubber hose, the phone book to the head, and other forms of nonlethal torture, along with more insidious methods, including prolonged interrogation, isolation, and holding suspects without arraignment. As Yale Kamisar noted in the debate leading up to the Miranda decision:
However, when Wright imagines encounters with American law in fiction, he does not think of the highest courts. Instead, his stories are consistently preoccupied with the most intensive and widely distributed form of state power, the police. For Wright’s protagonists, the police are always the state that can be seen, and what his characters see are rampant transgressions of constitutional principle. Wright’s characters were not alone in their fear of the police. Over the course of Wright’s lifetime, progressive reforms increasingly sought to stem police lawlessness, and a major national program of review, the “Wickersham Commission,” was appointed by President Hoover in 1929 to study the problem. The copious report established that the use of violent interrogation was widespread in police stations through the United States.3 Public opinion recoiled from the thought of the rubber hose, the phone book to the head, and other forms of nonlethal torture, along with more insidious methods, including prolonged interrogation, isolation, and holding suspects without arraignment. As Yale Kamisar noted in the debate leading up to the Miranda decision:3
In the “gatehouse” of American criminal procedure—through which most defendants journey and beyond which many never get—the enemy of the state is a depersonalized “subject”…Once he enters the “mansion” the enemy of the state is repersonalized, even dignified, the public invited, and a stirring ceremony in honor of individual freedom from law enforcement celebrated.4
4
One way to think of Wright’s fiction is as preoccupied with the scene in the “gatehouse.” Rarely do Wright’s characters find their way through to the “mansion” of the upper courts despite their continual encounters with law enforcement.
One way to think of Wright’s fiction is as preoccupied with the scene in the “gatehouse.” Rarely do Wright’s characters find their way through to the “mansion” of the upper courts despite their continual encounters with law enforcement.5
As procedure in the gatehouse began to come under increasing scrutiny, it became apparent that where white suspects might be detained incommunicado and intimidated, their treatment bore little resemblance to the much more intense methods of inquisition practiced upon black suspects. The result was that when the judiciary’s inquiry into police procedure accelerated, the issue became racial as much as procedural, galvanizing support for due process standards as adjunct to, or even the focus of, the civil rights movement. Richard Wright’s fiction, which rarely concludes without bringing his characters into contact with the law, reflects the sustained attention Americans paid to criminal justice procedure during Wright’s career: Uncle Tom’s Children, published in 1938, concerns mob violence and lynching, as do some of Wright’s very earliest works, like the poem “I Have Seen Black Hands” (1934). By the time he wrote Native Son (1940), Wright’s interest had shifted: the mob which sweeps the South Side of Chicago does not come near the point of extralegal, summary violence, despite the rough handling Bigger experiences during his arrest. In part, Wright’s portrayal had to reflect that Bigger committed his crimes in the North, where procedure seems more successfully to have prevented—or masked—malfeasance.5 Nonetheless, Wright’s depiction of police in Native Son shows attention to the Court’s invocation of due process when Bigger is threatened with mob violence during his interrogation by the Chicago district attorney. Wright’s inclusion of the fleeting scene registers his attention to developments in police procedure: in February of 1940, a month before Native Son was published, the Supreme Court handed down a key decision in Chambers v. Florida, a case in which several black suspects had been held and threatened with mob violence, but not subjected to violent coercion. In a decisive step toward opening up the rights of the accused, the Court declared that the men’s confessions were void due to “psychological coercion.”6 A month later, Native Son depicted precisely the elicitation of confession through the threat of mob violence. Bigger’s interrogation was—by the time Native Son was published, if not at the moment Wright conceived the scene—newly unconstitutional.
As procedure in the gatehouse began to come under increasing scrutiny, it became apparent that where white suspects might be detained incommunicado and intimidated, their treatment bore little resemblance to the much more intense methods of inquisition practiced upon black suspects. The result was that when the judiciary’s inquiry into police procedure accelerated, the issue became racial as much as procedural, galvanizing support for due process standards as adjunct to, or even the focus of, the civil rights movement. Richard Wright’s fiction, which rarely concludes without bringing his characters into contact with the law, reflects the sustained attention Americans paid to criminal justice procedure during Wright’s career: Uncle Tom’s Children, published in 1938, concerns mob violence and lynching, as do some of Wright’s very earliest works, like the poem “I Have Seen Black Hands” (1934). By the time he wrote Native Son (1940), Wright’s interest had shifted: the mob which sweeps the South Side of Chicago does not come near the point of extralegal, summary violence, despite the rough handling Bigger experiences during his arrest. In part, Wright’s portrayal had to reflect that Bigger committed his crimes in the North, where procedure seems more successfully to have prevented—or masked—malfeasance.5 Nonetheless, Wright’s depiction of police in Native Son shows attention to the Court’s invocation of due process when Bigger is threatened with mob violence during his interrogation by the Chicago district attorney. Wright’s inclusion of the fleeting scene registers his attention to developments in police procedure: in February of 1940, a month before Native Son was published, the Supreme Court handed down a key decision in Chambers v. Florida, a case in which several black suspects had been held and threatened with mob violence, but not subjected to violent coercion. In a decisive step toward opening up the rights of the accused, the Court declared that the men’s confessions were void due to “psychological coercion.”6 A month later, Native Son depicted precisely the elicitation of confession through the threat of mob violence. Bigger’s interrogation was—by the time Native Son was published, if not at the moment Wright conceived the scene—newly unconstitutional.| 1. | Richard Wright, Conversations with Richard Wright, ed. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 241. [↩] |
| 2. | Addison Gayle documented, in Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Doubleday, 1980), the extent to which Wright’s activities overseas were monitored by the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department. In the last years of his life, Wright had persistent difficulties with the American embassy in Paris and the renewal of his passport, which was held for long periods of time. Frequently, Wright felt that he could not return to the United States because of the likelihood that he would not be permitted to leave again. [↩] |
| 3. | See Zechariah Chafee, Walter Pollak, and Carl Stern, The Third Degree: Report to the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (1931; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969). [↩] |
| 4. | Yale Kamisar, Police Interrogations and Confessions: Essays in Law and Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan University Press, 1980), 32. [↩] |
| 5. | Wadman and Allison have suggested that since institutionalized policing in the South emerged out of “slave patrols” whose primary task was the enforcement of the slave codes, there was little chance of eliminating the racism inherent in Southern policing. See their To Protect and Serve: A History of Police in America (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004). In the North, although of course racism was rampant, police organizations evolved differently. [↩] |
| 6. | Otis Stephens, The Supreme Court and Confessions of Guilt (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), 54. [↩] |