The New Yorker:

In May, 1965, Langston Hughes invited Paule Marshall, a younger, less famous, but no less brilliant writer, to accompany him and William Melvin Kelley on a cultural tour of Europe sponsored by the State Department. Hughes, Marshall, and Kelley—black writers who espoused the everyday beauty and worthiness of their communities—would have likely disagreed with the political ideologies of the sponsors of their expedition, but the trio also had reasons to hope that acting as emissaries could do some good. John F. Kennedy was dead, but Martin Luther King, Jr., was yet alive. Movement leaders and cultural figures, including Marshall herself, were putting steady pressure on President Lyndon B. Johnson to reinforce the Civil Rights Act by signing the Voting Rights Act. Progress hung in a precarious balance, but if you squinted you might be able to see a brighter future ahead.

Marshall, an early Vietnam War protester and an active member of Northern organizations that supported the civil-rights movement in the South, was nervous when the group went to a pre-tour State Department briefing in Washington, D.C. A civil servant presented Marshall with a thick dossier listing the details of her activist history, then quickly set the file aside. It was an unsubtle reminder of the government’s surveillance capabilities, and perhaps a veiled threat to insure that Marshall tamped down her more radical inclinations while on tour. However intimidating it may have been, the dossier didn’t preclude Marshall from participating. “The fact that I would be openly critical of its policies could well serve as proof that the country was truly a democracy committed to respecting the First Amendment rights of even its most vocal detractors,” Marshall recalls in her memoir. “Thus, Washington might well come out the winner every time I opened my mouth.”

In 1965, there was no Twitter from which the President hurled threats and insults at American citizens, no cable news network dedicated to providing a platform for noxious propaganda and debunked conspiracy theories. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson was not declaring himself above every law, check, balance, and critique. And the government, while far from living up to its highest creeds, was not broadcasting a dangerous, pugilistic counter-narrative as Hughes, Marshall, and Kelley traversed the European continent. It was a simpler time to be a cultural worker called upon by one’s country to share one’s view of the country.

This past fall, I was approached by a cultural-affairs specialist at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin about doing a multicity tour through Germany in celebration of Black History Month. Marshall was on my mind as I accepted. The European tour changed Marshall’s writing life by deepening her friendship with Hughes and broadening her perspective, if not her readership. Mine wouldn’t be a tour of the Continent, and I would be alone, but the plan felt glamorous and sufficiently ambitious: Berlin, Leipzig, Halle, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Bonn in just nine days. I was on a fiction fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, and I was not ready to come home, where I, like many other independent writers and artists, have to navigate an exploitative health-care system for coverage; where I argue with people whom I’ve known and loved for a long time about the immorality of using the word “illegal” to describe a child; where I spend many moviegoing experiences on edge for fear that I might be machine-gunned before the credits roll. I agreed to participate in the tour not only in order to extend my time away from these now quotidian American conditions but also hoping that I could do some good. A mistake. My brain was working with an outdated system of norms.

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