The American Algerians
 

08-19-2019

By Roger Berkowitz

It is well known that Richard Wright found in Paris the freedom he  never found as a black man in America. Maybe less well  known is that that James Baldwin, in his essay, “Alas, Poor Richard,”  accused Wright, as Adam Shatz observes, “of celebrating Paris as a “city of refuge” while remaining silent about France’s oppressive treatment of its colonial subjects.” Even  less well known is a story told by Adam Shatz, about another black American exile in Paris, “a long-forgotten writer three years Baldwin’s junior, William Gardner Smith, a Philadelphian who moved to Paris in 1951 and died there, in 1974, at the age of forty-seven, of cancer.”

In an essay about Gardner Smith that serves  also as a review of his recently republished novel The Stone Face, Shatz argues that  it is Gardner Smith who came to fully understand  that freedom for black Americans was first and foremost a revolution from the inside. Black America’s revolution, he suggested, had been fueled not only by oppression but by the enlarged perspective and imaginative freedom that displacement and exile had afforded. When  Gardner Smith returned to the United States in 1967, he recognized a revolutionary shift amongst the black youth. 

“He marvelled at the confidence exhibited by young black people, their fearlessness in confronting white supremacy, even “the way they moved, the way they acted.” But “the real change, the real revolution, was inside,” he wrote. “These black youths with whom I talked from coast to coast were much more different from most people of my generation than we were from the generation of our fathers.”

What had triggered this cultural revolution among young black Americans, he argued, was the Second World War, when black soldiers like himself were “uprooted from their tenant farms and ghettos and hurled across an ocean to do battle with white and yellow men in the name of freedom, democracy, and equality. The war opened up new horizons. Many black Americans came alive for the first time in the ruins of Berlin, the coffeehouses of Tokyo, the homes of Frenchmen or Italians. Members of a victorious army, they found respect and consideration for the first time—but from the former enemy!”

The activists in the Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee (sncc) and the Black Power movement, as Gardner Smith saw it, were the spiritual children of these men. Black America’s revolution, he suggested, had been fuelled not only by oppression but by the enlarged perspective and imaginative freedom that displacement and exile had afforded. 

Adam Shatz will  be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center Annual Fall Conference “Racism and Antisemitism” taking place Oct. 10-11 at Bard College. Registration is now open.