The New Deal and communism were developing along parallel lines each was an attempt to cope with the effects of the Depression on the country and the world. In Greenwich Village, white radicals and artists included Carl van Vechten, John Reed, Max Eastman, Walter Lippman, Lincoln Steffens, and Sinclair Lewis. In Harlem, there were Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, George S. Schuyler, Paul Robeson, Jean Toomer, and Josephine Baker. In fact, there was some contact between these groups and even a constructive exchange of ideas based on an awareness of each group's difference from the other and a search for a common ideal.
In Harlem, the same ideas we hear discussed today were being discussed by the black intellectuals and politicians of those prewar years. Black nationalism, the Black Power movement, the matter of assimilation or integration these were common points of difference then as now. The great exception is that communism then played a strong role in the social state of mind and many intellectuals believed that it would solve the problems of separation.
When Richard Wright was moving from Chicago to New York, therefore, the society around him was reflecting many of his own concerns. He had done some writing already for the Communist party. But Black Boy, even with its Marxist conclusions, was a personal record with a restricted audience. Wright was conscious of this paradox when he wrote: "Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to change and transcend them."
By writing, then, an autobiography for a people whose political power was, to say the least, minimal, he intended to transform their minds as opposed to their lives and thereby give them the self-knowledge necessary for action. The book was bound to offend many blacks, as well as whites, for rather than glorifying anyone's image, it examined what it saw and was critical.
