From the United States, the keenest observer of the conference was Richard Wright, the black novelist and journalist. The former communist and author of Native Son wrote an entire book on his experience there, which went on to influence much anticolonial and antiracist thought. Once he found out about “a meeting of almost all of the human race living in the main geopolitical center of gravity of the Earth,” a conference of “the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race,” he wrote, he had to go and document it.66
