Black Boy Chapter Summary & Analysis - Chapter 19 Summary

Chapter 19 Summary

Following through on his plan to help Negroes know what the Communist Party was about, Richard begins writing biographical sketches of Negro Communists. The seriousness with which Richard approaches his involvement with the Party is shattered when he attends his first meeting with an all-Negro unit he decides to join.

Listening to him talk, the unit members brand him as bourgeois intellectual who "talks like a book." Yet, again, Richard is cautioned, this time by his Party Unit members to be careful about reading and warned that reading them could seriously "confuse" him.

Richard begins work as the publicity director with Federal Negro Theatre, a part of the government's welfare program but is attacked as an Uncle Tom. He requests and receives a transfer to another job.

As the Communist Party makes plans to disband the John Reed Clubs Richard's efforts to use his writing to help blacks understand the...
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