The battle for the civil rights of Afro-descendant Americans in post-war Italy

The problem of racial segregation in the United States was already known in Italy during the first half of the 20th century but it became a topic of political discussion especially after the Second World War. The role of some committed Italian writers, such as Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini and Italo Calvino, was very relevant. At the end of the 1940s capital novels such as Wright’s Black Boy (1947) were translated in Italy, as well as anthologies (Letteratura dei negri d’America, 1946) and volumes dedicated to music and poetry by black American authors. In a letter sent to Lionello Venturi in January 1950, Ettore Sottsass reported that at the time Fernanda Pivano was already busy writing a history of black Americans (Lo zio Tom è morto) that would only be published, posthumously, in 2015.
A first-hand account of the battle for civil rights can be found in Calvino’s American diaries. In March 1960, he met Martin Luther King in Montgomery and attended one of the first demonstrations of his movement: “This is a day I will not forget as long as I live”. In Optimist in America, the great writer returned to that shocking moment, in which he had seen and breathed the violence of the segregationists, emphasizing the desire for commitment that that experience had conveyed to him: “The battle of the Negroes of the South is no longer a distant and foreign fact, but something in which I feel involved, and not in the generic way in which anyone who is not an avowed reactionary is sympathetic to the battle for human rights. But what has changed? Didn’t I know everything before? It has changed in this: that I have seen, that I know their faces, each other’s faces, their attitudes, and now I can no longer disregard them, those hustles and bustles of theirs over there, which will continue for who knows how many more years, are now my business too”.

Italo Calvino’s meeting with Martin Luther King
Montgomery, Alabama 6 March 1960
“This is a day I will not forget as long as I live. I saw what racism is, mass racism, accepted as one of the fundamental rules of society. I witnessed one of the first incidents of mass struggle of the blacks in the South; and it was a defeat. I don’t know if you know that after decades of total immobility, demonstrations by black people began right here, in the worst segregationist state, some of them even victorious, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, a Baptist Church minister and advocate of nonviolence. That is why I have come here to Montgomery, since the day before yesterday, but I did not expect to be here in these crucial days of struggle.
[…] A pawing of horses and the scene is invaded by cowboys with CD armbands, Civil Defence, a local militia of law-and-order volunteers, armed with sticks and revolvers … the blacks stay in the church singing their hymns….the white hooliganism is increasingly menacing […]. The most admirable are the black girls, they come down in twos and threes, and those rascals spit on the ground in front of their feet, they stand in the middle of the pavement forcing them to zigzag, they shout and trip, and the black girls keep talking to each other, they never move so as to show that they want to avoid them, they never change their ways when they see them in front of them, as if they were accustomed to these scenes from birth.
[…] As soon as I arrived in Montgomery in the hottest of circumstances, I heard on Friday night that King was in town and I was immediately taken to see him. He is a very solid and capable guy, he even looks a bit like Bourghiba physically, with his little moustache […] they are politicians whose only weapon is the pulpit and even nonviolence does not have a mystical atmosphere around it: it is the only possible form of struggle and they use it with the controlled political skill that the extreme harshness of the conditions have taught them”.(taken from I. Calvino, Eremita a Parigi. Pagine autobiografiche, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milan 1994, pp. 128-134)

Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino on Richard Wright’s Black Boy
In May 1947, during a radio broadcast, Cesare Pavese commented on Wright’s autobiographical novel, published in 1945 and in ’47 translated into Italian by Bruno Fonzi for the publisher Bompiani:
“Is there anyone among us, any white person who has not seen hunger and racial terror in the face, who can swear that tomorrow these specters will not rise again? This is the message, the truest word of Black Boy. The authentic and suffered fruit of human suffering and adventure, which concerns us all, in a lucid and dramatic language searches beneath our encrustations of rhetoric and pride for the virile capacity to look things in the face and rethink the ancient admonition that every man is our neighbour”.
(Cesare Pavese, Richard Wright, in La letteratura americana e altri saggi, Turin, Einaudi, 2020, p. 169)
In the same year, Italo Calvino published a review of the book in the newspaper l’Unità of 8 May 1947:
“[…] the greatest interest of this modern and far more resolute Uncle Tom’s Cabin is in the formation of a moral person, in the construction of his own morality, more serious than all the others that gradually present themselves to the protagonist, from Puritan resignation to individual compromise. The criticism of the overpowering world of the whites is never separated from an equally severe criticism of the weaknesses, the naivety of the blacks […]”.
(Italo Calvino, Ragazzo negro di Richard Wright (review), in Italo Calvino, Saggi. 1945-1985, edited by M. Barenghi, Mondadori, Milan 1995, pp. 1463-1465).