<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<div class='tnotes covernote'>
<p class='c000'><b>Transcriber’s Note:</b></p>
<p class='c000'>The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.</p>
</div>
<p class='c001'><em>“What a self-conscious people your Negroes are!” a
recent French visitor exclaimed. He was right. The
Negro lives constantly on two planes of awareness.
Watching the telecast of a boxing match between
Ezzard Charles, the Negro who happened to be
heavyweight champion, and a white challenger, a
friend of mine said, “I don’t like Charles as a person
but I’ve got to root for him to beat this white boy—and
good.”</em></p>
<p class='c002'><em>One’s heart is sickened at the realization of the
primal energy that goes undeflected and unrefined
into the sheer business of living as a Negro in the
United States—in any one of the United States.</em></p>
<p class='c001'>J. Saunders Redding has also written:</p>
<ul class='index c003'>
<li class='c004'>TO MAKE A POET BLACK</li>
<li class='c004'>NO DAY OF TRIUMPH</li>
<li class='c004'>STRANGER AND ALONE</li>
<li class='c004'>THEY CAME IN CHAINS</li>
<li class='c004'>READING FOR WRITING (A college text with Ivan E. Taylor)</li>
<li class='c004'>AN AMERICAN IN INDIA</li>
<li class='c004'>LONESOME ROAD</li>
</ul>
<p class='c005'><em>Charter Books represent a new venture in publishing.
They offer at paperback prices a set of
modern masterworks, printed on high quality
paper with sewn bindings in hardback size
and format.</em></p>
<div class='titlepage'>
<div>
<h1 class='c006'>ON BEING NEGRO IN AMERICA</h1></div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c007'>
<div><span class='large'>J. Saunders Redding</span></div>
<div class='c003'><span class='large'><em>Charter Books</em></span></div>
</div></div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c008'>
<div><em>Copyright 1951 by J. Saunders Redding</em></div>
<div><em>All rights reserved</em></div>
<div class='c007'><em>Bobbs-Merrill hardcover edition published September 1951</em></div>
<div><em>Charter edition published August 1962</em></div>
<div class='c007'><em>This book is the complete text of the hardcover edition</em></div>
<div class='c007'><em>Printed in the U.S.A.</em></div>
<div class='c003'>CHARTER BOOKS</div>
<div><em>Published by</em></div>
</div></div>
<div class='figleft id001'>
<ANTIMG src='images/i_copyright.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' /></div>
<div class='lg-container-b'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY, INC.</div>
<div class='line'><em>A subsidiary of</em> <span class='sc'>HOWARD W. SAMS & CO., INC.</span></div>
<div class='line'><em>Publishers</em> <em>Indianapolis and New York</em></div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center'>
<div><em>Distributed by the Macfadden-Bartell Corp., Inc.,</em></div>
<div><em>205 East 42nd Street, New York 17, New York</em></div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div class='chapter'>
<h2 class='c009'>EDITOR’S NOTE</h2></div>
<p class='c010'>When it was decided to reissue J. Saunders Redding’s
famous little book in a paperback edition, we wrote
to Mr. Redding at Hampton Institute, where he
teaches English, to ask if he wished to update the book
or perhaps write a new introduction. In due course
an answer arrived from Nigeria, where Mr. Redding
is presently lecturing and traveling, telling us to go
ahead with whatever updating we would think important
to the text. We went over the book carefully.
It is true, some things have changed: Mr. Redding is
a little older, his sons have grown into young men, his
father died last year, at the age of ninety-two—but
except for those things we found that, unfortunately,
no updating was needed.</p>
<div class='lg-container-l'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>New York City</div>
<div class='line'>May 12, 1962</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c011'>“By the way, have I ever told you——”</p>
<p class='c012'>“Enough of the truth?” she asked.</p>
<p class='c012'>“There is never enough of the truth,”
the Colonel said. “There is only more and
more.”</p>
<div class='lg-container-r c013'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>—<em>From notes for</em></div>
<div class='line'><em>“The Colonel and His Lady.”</em></div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_9'>9</span>
<h2 class='c009'>1</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>This is personal. I would call it
a “document” except that the word has overtones of
something official, vested and final. But I have been
clothed with no authority to speak for others, and
what I have to say can be final only for myself. I
hasten to say this at the start, for I remember my anger
at the effrontery of one who a few years ago undertook
to speak for me and twelve million others. I concurred
with practically nothing he said. This was not
important in itself, but when one presumes to speak
for me he must reflect my mind so accurately that I
find no source of disagreement with him. To do this,
he must be either a lack-brain parrot or a god. Though
there are many lack-brains, historic and present circumstances
prove that there are no gods dealing with
the problem of race—or, as dangerous to the American
ideal and as exhausting to individual Americans as
<span class='pageno' id='Page_10'>10</span>it has been for three hundred years, it would have been
settled long ago. Else the gods are singularly perverse.</p>
<p class='c002'>There have been opportunities for complaisant gods.
Every crisis has brought an opportunity. In Revolutionary
times, even before we were a nation and the
social structure and the ways of thinking that went
with nationhood had solidified, there was splendid
scope. But no gods arrived. Again, in the awful pause
following the Civil War, when the social structure of
half the country had disintegrated and men prayed
only to be told what to think and do, no god answered.
Instead, the ready devils of positive unreason
took over and ruled for a long time. The First World
War and the Second held the potential too, but we
common men and the leaders we looked to were content
with strong indictments and feeble measures.
There was a hell-reek of baleful prophecy:</p>
<p class='c015'>“A small group of Negro agitators and another small
group of white rabble-rousers are pushing this country
closer and closer to an interracial explosion which
may make the race riots of the First World War and
its aftermath seem mild by comparison.... Unless
saner counsels prevail we may have the worst internal
clashes since Reconstruction, with hundreds, if not
thousands, killed and amicable race relations set back
for decades.”<SPAN name='r1' /><SPAN href='#f1' class='c016'><sup>[1]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c002'><span class='pageno' id='Page_11'>11</span>With such dire forebodings screaming in our ears,
we fell back on a peculiar (and American) misinterpretation
of Hegelian philosophy—that time, the flow
of history, <em>inevitably</em> brings changes for the better.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_12'>12</span>
<h2 class='c009'>2</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>I speak only for myself for another
reason also. From adolescence to death there is
something very personal about being a Negro in America.
It is like having a second ego which is as much the
conscious subject of all experience as the natural self.
It is not what the psychologists call dual personality.
It is more complex and, I think, more morbid than
that. In the state of which I speak, one receives two
distinct impacts from certain experiences and one undergoes
two distinct reactions—the one normal and
intrinsic to the natural self; the other, entirely different
but of equal force, a prodigy created by the accumulated
consciousness of Negroness.</p>
<p class='c002'>An incident illustrates.</p>
<p class='c002'>At the college in Louisville where I taught during
the depression, a white slum crawled to the western
edge of the campus. I could see its dirt, its poverty
<span class='pageno' id='Page_13'>13</span>and disease in any direction I cared to look from my
classroom window. In the littered back yards, each
with a pit toilet, snotty-nosed children with rickets
played and lank-haired women shrilled obscenities at
them all day long. I remember seeing a man only
once—an ancient, senile man bent with a monstrous
hernia. By the time autumn paled into winter the pity
I felt for the people in the slum had been safely stacked
away among other useless emotional lumber.</p>
<p class='c002'>One day as I stood by the window thinking of other
things, I gradually became aware of movement in the
yard directly below me. The college building was as
quiet as a church, for it was a Saturday when we had
no classes. There would have been no shock in seeing
a woman of the neighborhood dressed only in a ragged
slip, but a powdery snow had fallen the night before
and the day was bitter cold. When I saw the woman,
who seemed quite young, she was lurching and staggering
in the rear of the yard. A dog must have followed
her out of the house, for one stood by the open
door watching and flicking its tail dubiously. The
woman’s face was stiff and vacant, but in her efforts to
walk her body and limbs jerked convulsively in progressive
tremors. I could not tell whether she was
drunk or sick as she floundered in the snow in the yard.
Pity rose in me, but at the same time something else
also—a gloating satisfaction that she was white. Sharply
and concurrently felt, the two emotions were of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_14'>14</span>equal strength, in perfect balance, and the corporeal I,
fixed in a trance at the window, oscillated between
them.</p>
<p class='c002'>When she was within a few steps of the outhouse,
the poor woman lurched violently and pitched face
downward in the snow. Somehow utterly unable to
move, I watched her convulsive struggles for several
minutes. The dog came down the yard meanwhile,
whining piteously, and walked stiff-legged around the
white and almost naked body. The woman made a
mess in the snow and then lay still.</p>
<p class='c002'>Finally I turned irresolutely and went into the corridor.
There was the entrance door and near it the
telephone. I could have gone out and a few steps
would have brought me to the yard where the woman
lay and I could have tried to rouse someone or myself
taken her into the house. I went to the telephone and
called the police.</p>
<p class='c002'>“There’s a drunken woman lying in the back yard
of a house on Eighth Street, seven-hundred block,” I
said.</p>
<p class='c002'>“You say drunk? In her own yard? Then leave
her lay.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“But there doesn’t seem to be anyone there, and she
may not be drunk.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“You said she was drunk,” the voice said. “Now
what’s the story?” There was a pause. “And who’re
you anyway?”</p>
<p class='c002'><span class='pageno' id='Page_15'>15</span>“She could freeze to death,” I said, and hung up.
Thus I washed my hands of it.</p>
<p class='c002'>The woman was still lying there and the dog sat
quivering and whining near her when a lone policeman
arrived almost an hour later. The next morning I
read on a back page of the local paper that the woman,
aged twenty-six, had died of exposure following an
epileptic seizure suffered while alone.</p>
<p class='c002'>One can wash his hands, but the smudges and scars
on the psyche are different.</p>
<p class='c002'>I offer no excuses for my part in this wretched episode.
Excuses are unavailing. The experiences of my
Negroness, in a section where such experiences have
their utmost meaning in fear and degradation, canceled
out humaneness. How many times have I heard
Negroes mutter, when witness to some misfortune befallen
a white person, “What the hell! He’s white, isn’t
he?” What the exact psychological mechanism of this
is, I cannot say, but certainly the frustration of human
sympathy and kindness is a symptom of a dangerous
trauma. Never having been white, I do not know
whether Southern white people feel a similar reaction
to Negroes, but, considering their acts and their
words, it can hardly be judged otherwise. Actions
speak for themselves; printed words not always.</p>
<p class='c002'>For there is this about books on the “race question”
(how weary one grows of the phrase!) by Southern
whites: they have no detachment. They may seem to
<span class='pageno' id='Page_16'>16</span>have. Within what has always seemed to me a questionable
frame of reference, there may be brilliant exposition,
analysis, interpretation, and even history.
They may roar, as do the writings of David L. Cohn;
they may purr lyrically and graciously in the manner
of Archibald Rutledge and the late William Alexander
Percy; they may remonstrate and apologize with unobtrusive
erudition, as Virginius Dabney’s and Hodding
Carter’s editorials do; or they may bristle with the
flinty phraseology of Howard Odum’s scholarship—but
nearly all of them elaborate an argument that is
certainly not derived from self-knowledge and that
cannot be effective as an instrument of self-control.</p>
<p class='c002'>The reasoning in them is very subtle, not to say
metaphysical, and it runs like this: History is an imperative
creative force (from Hegel again!) and man
is its vassal. It is beyond the reach and the control of
conscience and also beyond direction and prophecy. It
created slavery, the southwestward migration, the
Civil War, Ku-Kluxism. History does not conform
to man’s will; it compels conformity, and under this
compulsion man and his society and his institutions
are shaped into what they are and into what they become
by categorical directives as potent as the word
of God. History is above moral judgment and history’s
errors are beyond redress. Man’s world is mechanistic.</p>
<p class='c002'>This is not mere error; it, too, is symptomatic of a
<span class='pageno' id='Page_17'>17</span>trauma all the more dangerous because this concept of
history is what most Southern whites believe when
they are being reasonable about the race question;
when they are writing books about it, or talking
quietly in their living rooms; or when they come together
and “gladly agree to co-operate ... in any
<em>sound</em> program aimed at the improvement of race
relations.” This reasoning, at once defensive and defiant,
expresses itself in clichés, which are the hardened
arteries through which thought flows. “The white
South is <em>inexorably</em> conditioned by cultural complexes.”
“In both the physical and cultural heritage of
the South there are certain cumulative and tragic
handicaps that represent <em>overpowering</em> factors in the
situation.” There are “legal and customary patterns of
race relations in the South, whose <em>strength and age</em> we
recognize.”<SPAN name='r2' /><SPAN href='#f2' class='c016'><sup>[2]</sup></SPAN> The idealism of these people of good
will is negated by the meanings of their own phrases.</p>
<p class='c002'>The pattern of reason these phrases express has been
the most influential factor in race relations for nearly
a hundred years. And if Hodding Carter, one of the
young Southern liberals, is representative (“The spirit
[of which these stories are symbols] is harmless
enough; a little pathetic perhaps, and naïve and provincial.
Let alone, it will, of course, wear itself out
<span class='pageno' id='Page_18'>18</span>some day. Not tomorrow or next year or the next
year. But some day.”<SPAN name='r3' /><SPAN href='#f3' class='c016'><sup>[3]</sup></SPAN>), it promises to remain so for
another century.</p>
<p class='c002'>And that thorny prospect brings me to yet another
reason for the personal slant of this essay. I do not
wish to live with the race problem for the next one
hundred years—though of course I shall not live so
long. I do not wish to die knowing that my children
and theirs to the third generation must live with it. I
have known it too long and too intimately already. It
has itself been an imperative, channelizing more of my
energies than I wished to spare through the narrow
gorge of race interest. Yet I have felt myself in no
sense a crusader. I have not been uplifted with the
compensatory afflatus of the inspired leader. Let me
be quite frank. I have done what I have, not because
I wanted to, but because, driven by a daemonic force,
I had to. The necessity has always been a galling affliction
to me and the root of my personal grievance
with American life. This should not be hard to understand.</p>
<p class='c002'>Connected with all this, of course, has been a sense
of impersonal obligation which I like to think of as
growing out of a decent regard for the common welfare.
This civic sense has not expressed itself widely
in group and racial activities and organizations, for I
<span class='pageno' id='Page_19'>19</span>am not that kind of person. If it is a fault, I am sorry
for it. I tried to be that kind of person. At one time
or another I have been a member of most of the racial
uplift groups, and am still a member of some, and
when I was in my early twenties I thought I had taken
fire from the mass and that if need be I could exhort
and harangue and make public protest with the best of
them. But I did not know myself so well then. What
I felt was merely the exuberant, youthful need for
self-losing identification. It gives me sad amusement
to recall that in those days a friend of mine used teasingly
to call me “Marcus Garvey”—a name that was
the very apotheosis of blatant race chauvinism. But I
had no real chance to be blatant—a habit, I suppose,
like any other—and no natural inclination. Nor could
I really lose myself in the mass.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_20'>20</span>
<h2 class='c009'>3</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>But the years of my twenties
were enkindling and tumultuous. The world was well
into that series of social revolutions which started, we
are told, with the First World War and is not yet
ended, and the American Negro people were a kind
of revolutionary catalytic agent in their own country.
It was their historic role, to be sure, but it had
been suspended while Negroes played a supernumerary
part in the European conflict. Americans in general
seemed not to realize what had happened in
Europe. They did not think of it as change. It was
merely an eruption which they had helped put down
and were intent on sealing off with the cement of
isolationism. But after the war American Negroes reenlivened
the spirit of revolt, and the country was
alarmed by the truculent persistence with which they
fought for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, for instance,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_21'>21</span>and by the vigor of their opposition to the confirmation
of Judge John Parker to the United States Supreme
Court, and by the inroads of Communism
among them, and by their implacable solidarity in the
Scottsboro case.</p>
<p class='c002'>How emotional the times were! What comings-together,
what incitement! Out of college just three
years at the time of the Scottsboro case in 1931, I remember
the almost weekly meetings. Especially do I
remember one at which Alice Dunbar Nelson spoke.
The widow of Paul Dunbar, a Negro poet nationally
famous at the turn of the century, Mrs. Nelson had
been one of my teachers in high school and an old
family friend. She was beautiful—tall, with ivory skin
and a head of glinting red-gold hair—and she was also
of great and irresistible charm. One thought of her
as being saturated in a serene culture, even in divinity.
I doubt that she had ever been much concerned with
the common run of Negroes, and that night as she
spoke to a large audience of all classes of a united
people, she was like a goddess come to earth—but a
goddess. In the end, with tears glistening in her eyes,
she stretched out her gloved hands and cried, “Thank
God for the Scottsboro case! It has brought us together.”</p>
<p class='c002'>It was a thing to arouse even one constitutionally insensible
to mass excitement, and I was not insensible—not
in those days. I had found that out the year before,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_22'>22</span>my second in the deep South. A student of mine
was murdered, apparently in cold blood, by a white
man or men. It happened in the late afternoon, in a
section of Atlanta some distance from the college, and
I knew nothing of it for several hours. But that night
a colleague of about my own age rushed into my dormitory
room without the usual courtesy of knocking.</p>
<p class='c002'>“Come on,” he said, gesturing vehemently, “we got
to go.”</p>
<p class='c002'>I resented his bursting in on me. We did not particularly
care for each other anyway. “You might
have knocked,” I said.</p>
<p class='c002'>“For Christ’s sake, this is no time for the amenities!”
he said. “We got to go.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“Go where? I’m not going anywhere.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“To the meeting.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“What meeting?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“My God, man, don’t you know that Dennis Hubert’s
been lynched?” His eyes blazed like fires in a
draft. He was greatly agitated.</p>
<p class='c002'>“What!” It must have been a yawp of horror and
disbelief. The boy had sat in my class not five hours
before.</p>
<p class='c002'>“Lynched by some goddamned drunken crackers.
The Negroes out in East Atlanta are getting together,
and we’re going to get together too. We’re not going
to take this lying down. Those crackers might come
out here any time.”</p>
<p class='c002'><span class='pageno' id='Page_23'>23</span>I could not follow his thinking, even after he reminded
me that a relative—either an uncle or a cousin—of
the murdered boy was on the college faculty;
but the dangerous possibilities of “those crackers”
coming bloomed in my imagination like poisonous
flowers.</p>
<p class='c002'>“And if they come, then what?” I said.</p>
<p class='c002'>“That’s what we’re having the meeting for. Come
on.”</p>
<p class='c002'>And I went. We were only a few, mostly younger
instructors, and we tried to appear disciplined and
resolute, but hysteria was abroad, and I was caught up
in it long enough to pledge to buy a gun through the
underground means we had to employ; and long
enough to be thrilled by the possession of it when it
was delivered in great secrecy the next day; and even
long enough to wish to use it on any skulking white
man that offered.</p>
<p class='c002'>The college environs and, I suppose, all the Negro
sections of the city, were like alerted camps. There
were many false alarms: cars loaded with white men
were prowling the neighborhood; another student had
been murdered; some white youths had caught a
Negro girl coming from work, stripped her of her
clothes and chased her naked through the downtown
streets. And to match these were the heroics, like
guarding the house of the college president and of the
Hubert relative who was on the faculty. Every few
<span class='pageno' id='Page_24'>24</span>days for a month Negroes held meetings, but after a
time I did not go to them any more. They came to
seem like public displays of very private emotions, in
the same unbecoming taste of those obscene religious
services in which worshipers handle snakes.</p>
<p class='c002'>One day I took my gun and the box of bullets that
came with it and rode out into the country and fired
at a dead tree. Wrapped in greased, gray flannel in a
cardboard box, the gun is still somewhere among my
possessions, but I have not seen it since.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_25'>25</span>
<h2 class='c009'>4</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>Many Negroes will deny that
the force which I have described as daemonic has
operated in their lives. If asked about it, they will take
quick offense, as if it were of the same stripe as an
unnatural sex drive which, of course, is wisely kept
secret by those who possess it. They will aver that they
live <em>normal</em>, <em>natural</em>, <em>wholesome</em> lives, even in the
South. They will point out their “normal” interests
in their professional lives and in their home lives. They
will tick off the list of their white friends. They will
say, truthfully enough, “Oh, there are ways to avoid
prejudice and segregation.” I have no quarrel with
them (nor with any others): it is simply that I do not
believe them. Having to avoid prejudice and segregation
is itself unwholesome, and the constant doing of
it is skating very close to a psychopathic edge. My
experience has been that no two or three Negroes ever
come together for anything—even so unracial a thing
<span class='pageno' id='Page_26'>26</span>as, say, a Christmas party—but that the principal subject
of conversation is race. One grows mortally sick
of it.</p>
<p class='c002'>So in a sense, partly through the writing of this
essay, I seek a purge, a catharsis, wholeness—as all of
us do perhaps unconsciously in one way or another.
I do this consciously, feeling that I owe it to myself.
I need to do it for spiritual reasons, as others need to
seek God. Indeed, this is a kind of god-seeking, or at
least an exorcism. To observe one’s own feelings,
fears, doubts, ambitions, hates; to understand their
beginnings and weigh them is to control them and to
destroy their dominance. By setting certain things
down, I hope to get rid of something that is unhealthy
in me (that is perhaps unhealthy in most Americans)
and so face the future with some tranquillity.</p>
<p class='c002'>Also, and finally, I hope this piece will stand as the
epilogue to whatever contribution I have made to
the “literature of race.” I want to get on to other
things. I do not know whether I can make this clear,
but the obligations imposed by race on the average
educated or talented Negro (if this sounds immodest,
it must) are vast and become at last onerous. I am tired
of giving up my creative initiative to these demands.
I think I am not alone. I once heard a world-famous
singer say that as beautiful as the spirituals are and
as great a challenge as they present to her artistry, she
was weary of the obligation of finding a place for them
<span class='pageno' id='Page_27'>27</span>in every program, “as if they were theme music”
wholly identifying her. She was tired of trying to
promote in others and of keeping alive in herself a race
pride that had become disingenuous and peculiar. The
spirituals belong to the world, she said, and “yet I’m
expected to sing them as if they belong only to me and
other Negroes and as if I believe my talent is most rewardingly
and truly fulfilled in singing them, and I
just don’t think it necessarily is.” As a matter of fact,
she added, she was having more and more trouble
<em>feeling</em> her way into them.</p>
<p class='c002'>I knew what she meant. She could no longer be
arrested in ethnocentric coils: she did not wish to be.
The human spirit is bigger than that.</p>
<p class='c002'>The specialization of the senses and talent and learning
(more than three fourths of the Negro Ph.D.’s
have done their doctoral dissertations on some subject
pertaining to the Negro!) that is expected of Negroes
by other members of their race and by whites is
tragic and vicious and divisive. I am tired of trying,
in deference to this expectation, to feel my way into
the particularities of response and reaction that are
supposed to be exclusively “Negro.” I am tired of
the unnatural obligation of converting such talent
and learning as I have into specialized instruments for
the promotion of a false concept called “race.” This
extended essay, then, is probably my last public comment
on the so-called American race problem.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_28'>28</span>
<h2 class='c009'>5</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>Names have been given to the
advocates and promoters of various racial policies.
There are gradualists (and they are black and white),
who feel that somehow by a process of mechanical
progression everything will work out, though to what
concrete ends they do not say. The race chauvinists
advocate a self-sustaining Negro economic, social and
cultural island, and seem to have no fear of a destructive
typhoon roaring in from the surrounding sea of
the white world. The educationists believe that intellectual
competence as indicated by the number of
Negro Phi Beta Kappas, doctors of philosophy and
various experts will win for the race the respect it
does not now receive. There are the individualists
who urge that each man work out for himself the compromises
that will bring the self-fulfillment he seeks.
Finally there are the radicals (there are no degrees of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_29'>29</span>radicalism among them) who, because they seem to see
destruction as an end and would first uproot everything,
are actually nihilists.</p>
<p class='c002'>Various racial and biracial institutions look on
themselves as representing and implementing one or
the other of these policies. The Southern Regional
Council, for instance, is gradualist. The Negro press
is chauvinist. Most Negro Greek-letter organizations
(of which there are seven national and many dozen
sectional and local) are educationist. Howard University—though
not its president—and the best-known
private Negro colleges are individualistic in
their approach. Until its demise, the National Negro
Congress was radical.</p>
<p class='c002'>But none of these is seamless, pure and undefiled.
Into each of them have seeped influences from one or
more of the others. In so far as the Southern Regional
Council believes in segregation (and that is very far
indeed), it is chauvinistic, and in as much as it sets a
premium on intellectual growth as measured by scholarly
achievement, it is also educationistic. By the very
circumstances of their founding, private Negro colleges
lean toward chauvinism, and they encourage this
tendency further by courses in “Negro” history, art,
literature, business and life. Recently, moreover,
some Negro colleges have spoken in favor of the
South’s segregated regional education plan—the private
ones for reasons not quite clear; the public ones
<span class='pageno' id='Page_30'>30</span>because only segregation will save them from extinction.
The radicals who, anyway, take the position
that radicalism is the highest, brightest star in the ideological
heavens, are very proud of the intellectual
caliber of Paul Robeson, Ben Davis, and that other
Davis, John, erstwhile president of the National
Negro Congress. The Negro press, of course, reflects
these conflicts and inconsistencies.</p>
<p class='c002'>But something more fundamental than the contradictions
accounts for the failures of these policies.
Gradualism, a habit of thought that marks interracial
activities in the South, is geared to the historic-compulsion
idea mentioned earlier. It is mostly faith
without works, thunder without God, and lengthy,
frequently fraudulent reports of “victories” as represented
in the decline of lynching and the “long step
forward” (nearly a generation in the taking) from the
Holcutt case (1932) to the Sweatt case (1950).<SPAN name='r4' /><SPAN href='#f4' class='c016'><sup>[4]</sup></SPAN> As a
principle, gradualism is very flattering to the Negro
people. It ascribes to them superhuman patience, fortitude
and humility in the face of very great social
evils. Gradualism is <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">laissez faire</span></i>—a proscription of
planning and foresight in the dynamics of society.</p>
<p class='c002'>Chauvinism is as impractical for the Negro in
America as it is fundamentally dangerous for any
<span class='pageno' id='Page_31'>31</span>people anywhere. Even if Negroes could duplicate
the social and economic machinery—and I doubt that
they could—the material resources on which their
racial island must then depend would have to come
from somewhere outside. In a constantly shrinking
world, complete independence and isolation are impossible.
And even if they were not impossible for the
Negro in America, would not the achieving of them
result in permanent relegation to secondary status?
The very numbers involved—that is, the population
ratio—would assure it. I cannot imagine the white
majority saying, “Sure, come on and set up your self-sustaining
household in a corner of my house.”</p>
<p class='c002'>There is still a great deal of race chauvinism, and
the fact should surprise no one. Negro organs of expression,
including scholarly journals, document it:
<cite>Phylon: [A] Review of Race & Culture</cite>, published
by Atlanta University; the <cite>Journal of Negro Education</cite>,
published by Howard University; the <cite>Journal
of Negro Higher Education</cite>, published by Johnson C.
Smith University; the <cite>Journal of Negro History</cite>, published
by the Association for the Study of Negro Life
and History; and a spate of lesser publications. A
purely emotional conviction informs chauvinism. It
is partly the frustrated pride that is expressed in
“Negro History Week” observances, which dichotomize
United States history, and in courses in “Negro”
literature and art, which turn out to be valiant but
<span class='pageno' id='Page_32'>32</span>thin trickles forcibly and ingenuously diverted from
the main stream of American life. Chauvinism springs
from a natural desire to find remission from the unequal
struggle between black and white, and surcease
of discrimination.</p>
<p class='c002'>The philosophy of the educationist is only superficially
different from that of the individualist. The
concepts in which they are hallowed seem only to
obscure the fact that no man is completely the master
of his fate. Only the immature fail to recognize that
individual wishes now have almost no authority in the
world. Educationists and individualists acknowledge
the existence of co-operative evils but deny the necessity
to act co-operatively against them. This is also,
it seems to me, a denial of brotherhood—a principle
which must be made to operate in increasingly wider
and wider arcs of human endeavor. Any statement of
the individualist’s ideals would sound like a throwback
to the time before theories of social compact, or
better, social contract, evolved.</p>
<p class='c002'>The contradictions and conflicts in all this go
deeper, much deeper than any short and general analysis
can indicate. They plunge their iron tentacles into
the minds of individual Negroes, raggedly fragmenting
them, scoring them into oversensitized compartments.
It is this that we must understand when we
think, for instance, of Paul Robeson; and when we
hear a Negro college president declare himself opposed
<span class='pageno' id='Page_33'>33</span>to segregation, while at the same time he urges
the state to add graduate courses to his already substandard
curriculum, so that Negro aspirants to graduate
degrees will not embarrass the state’s white university;
and when we read on page one of a Negro
paper a vilification of white women who “run after”
Negro men and on the next page an encomium of a
successful mixed marriage. This is more than simply
resiliency and accommodation, and there is more
than just Negro heart and mind involved. For the
Negro is not <em>the</em> problem <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">in toto</span></i>, nor a problem <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">in
vacuo</span></i>. His behavior, the patterns of his multiple personality,
the ebb and flow of action and counteraction
and the agonizing ruptures in his group life result from
the ill-usage to which he is subject at the hands of
American white people.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_34'>34</span>
<h2 class='c009'>6</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>Looking back now, I know that
the essence of these conflicts was distilled in my own
boyhood home. My mother, who certainly would not
have phrased it so, or even consciously thought it so,
was an individualist. She was also the perfect embodiment
of a type of Negro womanhood whose existence
is still denied by those who cling to the old abasing
habits of thought. Virtuous, educated and noted for
her beauty, she lived her short life in a firm belief that
the moral exercise of individual initiative, imagination
and will was enough to overcome the handicap of a
colored skin. I have before me now some lines she
wrote, obviously thinking of her sons.</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>And so you are a son of darker hue!</div>
<div class='line'>Think then that God sees in your face</div>
<div class='line'>A lesser image of his love and grace—</div>
<div class='line'>The ills of life all meant for you?</div>
</div>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'><span class='pageno' id='Page_35'>35</span>What light before you beckoning?</div>
<div class='line'>The iron will, the open heart and mind,</div>
<div class='line'>The hope, the wish, the thought refined—</div>
<div class='line'>These compass points for a true reckoning.</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c002'>These are not a full expression of her thought, for
there was enough of the chauvinist and enough of the
sense of reality in her to make it clear that in her
time, except in the most unusual circumstances, the
limits of progress for the Negro were within the
Negro world. Yet she spoke with pensive pride of
Howard Drew, who had been a great college athlete
and who was then a Hartford lawyer with an entirely
white clientele; and of Maria Baldwin, the Negro
principal of the very estimable Agassiz School in Cambridge,
where many Harvard professors sent their
children; and of Lillian Evans (Madame Evanti), who
sang opera for a season at La Scala; and even (though
with less pride, for the theater was still suspect in her
mind) of Bert Williams.</p>
<p class='c002'>But my father was different. He took pride in such
successes too, but it irritated him that the knowledge
of them was not more widespread. He would have
used them on the one hand as arguments against the
white-superiority theories of Lothrop Stoddard, Madison
Grant and Jerome Dowd, and on the other, as
arguments for his own theory that the Negro could
and should develop his own American culture. I saw
him brought to the verge of tears when the Brown
<span class='pageno' id='Page_36'>36</span>and Stevens Bank—“the richest and safest Negro bank
in the world”—failed back in the early 1920’s. And
this was not because he lost money in that disastrous
collapse—he didn’t—but because that failure cast dark
shadows over the prospects of a self-sustaining Negro
culture. He saw other shadows many times, but he
remained (and now in his eighty-second year remains
still in his heart, I think) a race chauvinist. For him
there was no incongruity between this and his insistence
that his sons go East to a New England
college.</p>
<p class='c002'>Through all the years of my boyhood, my father
was secretary of the Wilmington, Delaware, branch
of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People; secretary-treasurer of the Sara Ann
White Home (now the Layton Home) for Aged Colored
People; and a member of the board of the local
Negro Y.M.C.A., which he helped found. Besides, he
had certain pet, private projects, like needling the truant
officer for not making colored children go to
school, and upbraiding the police for permitting (interracial)
vice to flourish in some Negro neighborhoods,
and scolding fallen Negro women and derelict
Negro men wherever he found them. He was buoyant
and earnest and uplifted in the prosecution of these
activities. What characters were drawn to our house!
How desperate they were (I know now) in their
<span class='pageno' id='Page_37'>37</span>search for simplification and for that dignity of being
that derives only from a sense of belonging!</p>
<p class='c002'>For these—simplicity and dignity—after all are the
true things for which men strive. Unable to attain
them in the large sense, men slice life up into manipulatable
segments, institute policies of control, reduce
to some petty enslaving program and to slogans the
great purposes of life—“America for Americans,”
“For the Advancement of Colored People,” “The
True Church”—and march uneasily toward their
graves under the illusion that the particular distortion
into which they have been drawn is the straight and
narrow path to salvation.</p>
<p class='c002'>My father was like that. I think that all the Negroes I
knew in my childhood were like that. It was not altogether
their fault. It need not be pointed out that they
had almost no say in determining the basic conditions
under which they lived, and that it was this common
suffering that drew them together in the first place. But
subject to the common suffering was no mass man, but
classes and individuals, and what they endured together
they examined separately in the powerful lights
of personal and class interests and ambitions. And under
these lights the caste principle, which white society
insisted on and to which the Negroes were responding
in the first place—under these lights, the caste principle
broke down. Negroness was not itself enough.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_38'>38</span>The phrase, “We’re all Negroes together,” so often
heard as a battle cry, had only a sporadic potency.
Within the Negro group there were bitter conflicts
and grave contradictions.</p>
<p class='c002'>I remember when the tidal wave of Garveyism<SPAN name='r5' /><SPAN href='#f5' class='c016'><sup>[5]</sup></SPAN>
swept over the walls my father had been hastily building
against it. He had not had much warning. As secretary
of the Wilmington, Delaware, N.A.A.C.P., he
read—nay, studied—the <cite>Crisis</cite>, the Association’s national
organ. He knew the official line was that Marcus
Garvey was a mountebank and his outfit swindlers
preying on the poverty and ignorance of the lower
classes. “Do not,” the <cite>Crisis</cite> said, “invest in the conquest
of Africa. Do not take desperate chances in
flighty dreams.” My father knew also, with increasing
disquiet, how fast the Garvey following was growing.
But somehow he felt that only people of the slums
<em>could</em> be attracted to it, and he did not think of Wilmington
as having a real slum. Of course he was naïf
in this, for a stone’s throw east of our house began a
noisome squalor of existence that spread like thick
slime to the river. When a sturdy, hard-working citizen
(respected because he was hard-working and kept
his children in school and did not let his insurance
lapse) came bringing my father an official invitation
<span class='pageno' id='Page_39'>39</span>to join the Garveyite “line of march,” my father issued
an urgent call to the members of the N.A.A.C.P. for
a meeting.</p>
<p class='c002'>But it was too late, for suddenly the Garveyites were
upon us. They came with much shouting and blare of
bugles and a forest of flags—a black star centered in a
red field. They made speeches in the vacant lot where
carnivals used to spread their tents. They had a huge,
colorful parade, and young women, tensely sober of
mien and plain even in their uniforms, distributed
millions of streamers bearing the slogan “Back to Africa.”
My father and I stood on the cross street below
our house and watched the parade swagger by. Among
the marchers my father spotted more than one “Advancer”
(his term), even their wives and children.
They were not people of the slums. They were men
with small struggling clothes-pressing shops and restaurants,
personal servants, and what Thomas J.
Woofter, Jr., calls “black yeomen,” unlearned but
percipient. They had been dependable attendants at
meetings promising Negro uplift, and loyal though
perhaps somewhat awed members of the N.A.A.C.P.
Some of them my father had personally recruited, and
low groans of dismay escaped him when he saw them
in the line of march. I was a boy, but I remember. And
not so much because of the parade as for what happened
after.</p>
<p class='c002'>For the coming of the Garveyites shattered the defensive
<span class='pageno' id='Page_40'>40</span>bulwark around the protective community of
Negroes. The whites did not understand this at first,
nor ever fully. Accustomed as they were to thinking
of the Negro as an undifferentiated caste, they could
not be expected to. Where there had seemed to be
solidarity, there were factions. Where there had been
one leadership, now there were more. Where it had
been common to associate the force in the local Negro
world with individuals, now the mass seemed to rear
up faceless; and where no spontaneous drive had
seemed to exist, now there was a hum of self-generating
energy. The whites did not understand, but
some of them found and took an advantage.</p>
<p class='c002'>In our district which, with only a scattered thirty
per cent of the population white, was fast becoming
a ghetto, Negroes had enjoyed political control. They
had had no trouble electing one of their own to the
school board and another to the city council. The
same men had been returned to office time and again.
What they did there (and they did little) seemed not
nearly so important as just being there. They had
enormous prestige and influence among Negroes, and
they had not had to fight to keep it.</p>
<p class='c002'>But in the fall elections of that year they did. Directed
by agents from New York, the local Garveyites
put up their own candidates, chosen on class lines:
the encumbents who, in the common phrase, were
“dickties,” found their following split. The campaign
<span class='pageno' id='Page_41'>41</span>smelled of pitch and brimstone and led to street brawls
between the sadly outnumbered teen-aged children of
the encumbent faction and the Garveyites. Still the
whites understood only enough of what was happening
to give it burlesque treatment in the press. But the
agents from New York were professionals, and their
professionalism soon showed itself. They made a deal
with the white leaders in the ward. Before the Negroes
knew anything, the whites had picked their own
candidates, and while Negroes fought one another,
whites won the offices.</p>
<p class='c002'>This was a blow—but that is to put it mildly. In
our town, as elsewhere in border state and northerly
towns, the pattern of a strong, single Negro leadership
was fixed (and so, I suspect, was the pattern of a
strong, single Polish and Italian and Jewish leadership),
and now the white people were in a quandary.
The pattern had been broken; they themselves had
knocked down the stanchion that gave stability to
race relations. A bond issue was coming up, and Negro
backing was indispensable to its success. Hitherto
the white people had influenced the direction of Negro
thought through local Negro leaders. But who
were the leaders now? The white people needed
them; they felt uncomfortable and even frightened
without them; they needed to know and to control,
if possible, what the Negroes were thinking. The race
riots in Northern cities—Washington, Chester, Chicago—were
<span class='pageno' id='Page_42'>42</span>still green in memory, and Wilmington
itself had almost plunged into that civic horror. Congress
just then was drumming up a Bolshevist scare,
and Congressman James Byrnes, of South Carolina,
had called for indictments for sedition against certain
national Negro spokesmen.<SPAN name='r6' /><SPAN href='#f6' class='c016'><sup>[6]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c002'>But the Negroes were equally lost and frightened
by the immutable evidence of their own factionalism—and
frightened the more that white people knew
of it. So long as they could seem to maintain a solid
front, no matter what internal tensions actually rived
them, they felt reasonably safe. But “Now the white
people can cut us up,” my father said. “We are divided.”
It never occurred to him that the last thing in
the world the white people wanted was a divided
Negro population. Enforced segregation and the caste
system were proof that they did not. My father, who
had spent more than two thirds of his life above the
Mason-Dixon line, hated segregation, but he had developed
the ghetto-mind which made it bearable and
safe.</p>
<p class='c002'>A war of impulses was (and is, I fear) going on all
the time in both whites and Negroes. It is the symptom
of an American psychological malady. It is also
an indictment of our culture and an offense against
democracy. Many understand this now, but most do
<span class='pageno' id='Page_43'>43</span>not. Indeed, most have built sophistic bulwarks
against understanding. They do not know this, for
the many small, subtle fallacies which they abide
through force of habit lessen their sense of moral conflict
when they are faced with the great contradiction.
My father’s saying, “Don’t ever trust a white man,”
is in intent no different from the white man’s saying,
“All niggers look alike to me.” The phrases represent
the lowest common denominator in the American
race-experience. They are the essence of empiricism.
They voice experiences so debased and so bereft of
humaneness as utterly to discredit our way of life in
the eyes of the world. They deny the inspiring first
principle of democracy—that the person counts as
person, no matter what his color or creed.</p>
<p class='c002'>“Son,” my father said, the night before I went East
to college, “remember you’re a Negro. You’ll have
to do twice as much twice better than your classmates.
Before you act, think how what you do may reflect
on other Negroes. Those white people will be judging
the race by you. Don’t let the race down, son.”</p>
<p class='c002'>I have no memory of protesting this terrible burden
laid on my mind and heart. Indeed, I am sure I did
not. What my father said checked with what I had
been taught to <em>feel</em>. My father went on.</p>
<p class='c002'>“Out East you may feel it less because there’re
fewer Negroes, or for the same reason, you may feel
it more. Some say one thing, some the other. But no
<span class='pageno' id='Page_44'>44</span>matter where you go in this country, you’ll never get
away from being made to know that you are a Negro.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“Yes, sir,” I said.</p>
<p class='c002'>“We’re aliens in an alien land.” (And yet he had
fought the Garveyites’ dream of going “back to Africa”;
had applauded the deportation of Emma Goldman;
on every day of national memorial had hung out
the flag, and when the breezes of May, the suns of
July and the snows of February rent and seared it, had
bought another!) “But there’s some purpose in it,”
he went on wearily. “‘God works in mysterious
ways....’ There’s certainly some purpose. So do
your best. Remember you’re a Negro.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“I’ll remember,” I said, knowing that I would, because
I had been well and exactly taught and because
such lessons thrust deep. But feeling even then, I like
to think, the iron unfairness of it; perhaps even drawing
a sorry comfort from it, like many a Negro boy
before and since. For after all, it is a ready-made excuse.
More, it is license for us all to live in that blind,
egoistic immaturity which, even under the most
wholesome learning, we are reluctant to forego anyway.
“Twice as much twice better....”</p>
<p class='c002'>“A Negro’s just as good as anybody else,” my father
said, “but he’s always got to prove it.”</p>
<p class='c002'>Thus burdened, I went off to college.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_45'>45</span>
<h2 class='c009'>7</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>The assumptions that were
held valid in my boyhood were all wrong. So much has
been said about them that I mention them reluctantly,
but their strength is attested by the fact that many,
many still trust them. And not merely Southern
whites, and the misinformed, and the ignorant; nor
whites alone, but blacks. Hodding Carter, novelist
and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, no doubt deserves
his reputation as a Southern liberal, but only a
few months ago he wrote of “a common insistence
upon white political domination in the South,” which
is “as unbreakable as anything woven by the mind of
man,” and declared himself unalterably committed to
race segregation on the ground of preserving the
white race’s “ethnic integrity.” Somewhat earlier, the
Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture had said, “The
yellow people, the brown people and the blacks”—not
<span class='pageno' id='Page_46'>46</span>even bothering to add “people”—“are mentally
unfit for directors in our form of government.” And
in 1951 Kerr Scott, the Governor of North Carolina
(“most liberal state in the South”) echoed the Georgian.
Asked by a Negro reporter why his inaugural
promise had been fulfilled only to the extent of making
one Negro appointment, the Governor snapped,
“If I were you I’d never have asked that question. I
have given you [people] more than you can handle....
That’s why I tell you you should never have
asked that question.”</p>
<p class='c002'>So the old assumptions hold: the assumption of the
Negro’s inherent inferiority; of tragic social and cultural
consequences if segregation is broken down on
any but the most superficial levels; of Negroes preferring
segregation, and many more. They were
taken on in the first place as rationalizations by means
of which the white man tried, as Gunnar Myrdal says,
“to build a bridge of reason” between his acclaimed
equalitarian creed and his countervailing deed. Because
of this guilt-ridden adoption, they were the
more avidly loved. They were also the more furiously
drummed into the general consciousness where, reverberating
like thunder in a valley, they have rolled
out the tune to which white people and Negroes have
danced since 1900—the Negroes because they must.</p>
<p class='c002'>It is a static but a curiously hectic dance. We gyrate
through its complicated patterns with responses
<span class='pageno' id='Page_47'>47</span>as conditioned and involuntary as reflexes. In spite of
all the fervent clapping and shouting, our reactions to
the race problem are not really emotional and intellectual,
but muscular. I cannot now, as long ago I
could, believe in the moral and intellectual conviction
of the demagogues, of men like Richard Russell and
James Byrnes and Strom Thurmond; for I cannot believe
that the findings of modern science are so cabined
and confined, even in South Carolina, Georgia
and Mississippi, as to have escaped the knowledge of
these educated men. The older demagogues had this
to excuse them; they were ignorant. The younger
ones are knowing puppeteers, cynically manipulating
the strings of the past.</p>
<p class='c002'>And even the masses who respond to the strings
know better than they used to; even with them conviction
flags and cynicism takes over. The moral conviction
that it was for the social welfare that they
reserved all power to themselves no longer operates.
Power for power’s sake is now the rule, and when a
leading Georgia politician said so in a political address,
the rafters rang. “We have the power and we mean to
keep it where it belongs. If the Negroes vote wholesale,
and if the county unit system goes, we’ll have that
much less power. But it must not go. The county
unit system, which used to protect our rural population
from slick city politics, now arms us all with
power against the enemies of white supremacy.”</p>
<p class='c002'><span class='pageno' id='Page_48'>48</span>The old assumptions hold, but, worse, others have
been added to evade the knowledge that cannot now
be ignored and to make possible the conformity to the
vicious dialectic of power which rings as plangently in
America now as in the rest of the world. And the
chief of them is this—that hostility is the accepted
state in which to live. Dualism is looked on as the
natural division of absolute opposites, of enemies:
Communism and democracy, Eastern man and Western
man, native and foreign, and, most pertinent to
this argument, black and white. Not black as formerly—the
pathetically weak and erring child of nature;
nor white as formerly—the tolerant chastiser and protector,
the strong adult. But black raised by the findings
of science (and the decisions of the highest court
in the land) to close equality with white, and therefore
the enemy to white.</p>
<p class='c002'>Exaggerated? But toward truth, not away from it.
That competition, which was once confined to the
lowest economic levels and which resulted in the
legendary hatred of the poor-white masses for the
Negro and vice versa, operates on higher levels now.
It is on the level of skilled labor, as the Brotherhood
of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen knew when
they brought suit to enjoin railroads from promoting
Negro firemen (also members of the Brotherhood) to
engineers. It is on the level of education, and persons
reported to be students of the medical college of the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_49'>49</span>University of South Carolina admitted sending threatening
letters to a Negro applicant and burning a cross
on his front lawn. It is on the level of the professions,
so that a committee of the National Bar Association, a
Negro group, felt constrained to report that “as the
quality of training rises, Negro lawyers find it harder
to win admission to the bar in some Southern states.”</p>
<p class='c002'>Actually, of course, it is no longer possible to predicate
discrimination and segregation on Negro inferiority.
So long as it was possible and seemed forever
possible, the “practical-minded” found a kind of social
justification in disfranchisement, in raising economic
and cultural barriers, in the despotic paternalism which
said, “Thou shalt not.” Even <em>the</em> Negro leader, Booker
Washington, found it blameless and, indeed, good,
without ever suspecting that the tradition of <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">noblesse
oblige</span></i>, on which all this was claimed to be founded,
might someday be as ineffective as necromancy.
Segregation was order; it was control; it was the steel
and concrete casing sealing up a devastating social explosion.
It still seems so to the vast majority and their
leaders.</p>
<p class='c002'>The strongest voices in the South today say that
segregation must be kept: Governor James Byrnes in
his inaugural was not so intent on expressing his views
on foreign policy that he did not assure his listeners
of his unaltered opposition to the Fair Deal. Hodding
Carter, the liberal mentioned above, is not so liberal
<span class='pageno' id='Page_50'>50</span>that he does not see it as “tragic for the South, the
Negro, and the nation itself” if segregation is done
away with. And “only a fool,” Lillian Smith quotes
from the Atlanta <cite>Constitution</cite>, “would say the Southern
pattern of separation of the races can, or should
be overthrown.” But if segregation must be kept, it
must now be predicated on something else than Negro
inferiority.</p>
<p class='c002'>And what else is there? The cynical ideology of
power-worship, what H. A. Overstreet calls “the
fight-and-grab image,” the philosophy of hate. It is
what Hitler came to. It is the result of a pattern of
thinking desperately threatened by science and social
change.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_51'>51</span>
<h2 class='c009'>8</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>I am an integrationist. I have
been for a long time. It is not a principle that I arrived
at through intellection. Until the past few years, I did
not bring to bear on it whatever intelligence I have.
I felt my way to it, just as some men, in spite of obstructing
experience, feel their way to ideals of honesty,
sobriety and continence. Nor was the feeling
of my way wholly conscious. It was rather like the
action of one who kicks and splashes frantically to
save himself from drowning and suddenly finds that
he has reached a shelf on which he can stand in the
river bed. His objective was not the shelf, but just to
be saved. I kicked and splashed in all directions, and
suddenly there I was.</p>
<p class='c002'>I was an integrationist when the Communists
camped almost nightly on my trail in the early 1930’s
and lighted beckoning bright fires in the frightening
<span class='pageno' id='Page_52'>52</span>dark of that time. I did not believe then (any more
than now) that the moment the bars of segregation
are lifted all the white women of the South will fall
into the arms of Negro mates. Many of my acquaintances
gleefully professed to believe this and would
just as gleefully declare that Negroes lynched for rape
had been only unlucky in being caught with their
always-willing white paramours. They found substance
for this opinion in both fact and fiction, which
too loudly proclaimed the revulsive feeling of the
white female for the Negro and the inviolable purity
of white womanhood. My acquaintances believed
that Southern whites protested too much.</p>
<p class='c002'>And so, it seems, did the Communists. Or perhaps
they did not. It could have been just a line and the
carrying out of explicit directives on “How to Recruit
Negroes in the Eastern States.” It could have
been that they played expertly on what they thought
were the secret dreams of a young, green, mixed-up
and lonely man.</p>
<p class='c002'>I suppose all people suffer from these maladies, and
especially from youth, in early adulthood; but I had
more besides. I had a severe case of “Negrophophilia”
which alternately wrenched my heart with hate and
love. I was confused about the direction of my life
and extremely doubtful (as I sometimes am today) of
life’s purpose. Whether naturally or through learning,
I shrank from all but a handful of people, and some
<span class='pageno' id='Page_53'>53</span>of these were a disappointment to me, and I have no
doubt that I was a sore trial to them. I lacked social
accommodation. I have never thought tolerance admirable
as a principle either of adjustment or feeling,
and I rejected it entirely for my friends. Dogs were to
be tolerated, and crying babies, and strangers with
whom one did not have to become acquainted. My
friends were constantly not living up to my foolish
expectations; my judgments were severe. I was continually
breaking with and rejoining them, but with
no increase in understanding.</p>
<p class='c002'>I do not think I would have become a Communist
even had these deficiencies not been in me. But, certainly,
except for them, the Communists would have
had an easier time assailing my weak position on the
extreme left flank of democracy. The wrong scouts
came to reconnoiter, and they took the wrong approach.</p>
<p class='c002'>The first who came was a moist, sleazy fellow, fat
and asthmatic. I had often seen him in the little restaurant
where I took dinner. Frequently he would be
there in low-voiced conversation with various people—men
and women—when I entered. He always
sat at the round, family table back in the corner at an
angle from the door, and my glance would fall there
first. There would be beer before him (it was just
legal again) and a dish of olives and olive pits and a
plate of fried potatoes which he ate with his fingers.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_54'>54</span>Though I did not think he was aware of me, no one
could be unaware of him. Even from my table by the
window and with my back squarely toward him, I was
conscious of his presence. In lulls of dish rattling and
conversation, his wheeze could be heard all over the
tiny restaurant.</p>
<p class='c002'>One evening when I went there later than usual,
because I had waited for a cold rain to stop, and took
my place, Eric, the German waiter, told me that
“Philip” wanted to talk to me. He indicated the fat
man at the big table. There was little possibility of
Eric’s having made a mistake. The restaurant had only
a dozen tables and it catered to a limited and steady
patronage of unimportant executives, clerks and apprentices
from the jewelry manufacturies and a few
plebeian graduate students like myself. I do not remember
ever seeing another Negro there. Even
though Eric had made no mistake, I was sure that I
did not want to talk to “Philip.” But before I could
put my thoughts into words and summon the courage
to utter them, Philip was standing there. He looked
at me expressionlessly as he pulled the chair far out—to
allow for his pendulous belly—and sat down.</p>
<p class='c002'>“This rain. My friends are all late tonight,” he said.
“You’ll excuse me.” There was nothing questioning,
or tentative, or apologetic in the way he spoke. I was
acutely embarrassed. He took a piece of potato out
of the dish he had brought with him and carried it to
<span class='pageno' id='Page_55'>55</span>his mouth. It was a small, full-lipped mouth. His
hands, too, I noticed, were small and very white,
though the nails and the knuckles were dirty, in contrast
to his moist, flushed face.</p>
<p class='c002'>“What does the ‘J’ in your name represent?” he
asked. I was taken by surprise and must have shown
it, for he blew out an indulgent laugh. “You wouldn’t
think I would know your name.” This was not a
question either. “I do.” And he spoke it.</p>
<p class='c002'>The sound of it coming from a complete stranger
seemed to establish some kind of power over me. I
felt a twinge of fright even, as if I were suddenly
vulnerable in ways I knew not of.</p>
<p class='c002'>“How do you know?”</p>
<p class='c002'>He swung his head from side to side and his face
smiled at me. “I know. And I know more,” he said.
He called off items of biographical fact as if he were
reading from a file card—the year and place of my
birth, my father’s name, my brother’s name, my
schooling, an attack of scarlet fever I had had. Momentarily
I half expected him to go into an account
of monstrous crimes I had committed in some other
and unremembered character. It seems silly now, for
I know that to get such information as he had was an
easy matter, but then I felt that for some dark purpose
I could not guess a million pairs of eyes had followed
me since birth.</p>
<p class='c002'>I do not wish to play up this episode nor to dramatize
<span class='pageno' id='Page_56'>56</span>my reaction to it, for what followed was ridiculous
emotional anticlimax. Through the next talk
Philip had with me a week or so later, his efforts to
get on terms of easy familiarity dissipated my sense
of being mysteriously overpowered and exposed. I
did not respond to the first-name camaraderie. Not
knowing his last name, I avoided calling him anything.
I think my formal civility frustrated him, and I think
this is why, in a kind of desperation during the third
or fourth meeting, he pulled out a folder of very detailed
obscene photographs and handed them to me.
He laughed when he asked in pretended casualness
(for I could feel him watching me sharply) whether
I had seen anything like them before. And weren’t
they the most amusing things, and one in particular,
because he knew the girl in it—a student at the art
school. He had some “delicious” friends, he said, and
he would like me to meet them. He said that there
was one “bonnie brunette especially, from ‘way down
in Georgia—but completely, and I mean completely,
emancipated” and without prejudice. They lined up
fast enough once they were really free, he said, and
it only went to show what would happen to the race
problem all over the country were it not for the
strength and pressure of reaction. “There just
wouldn’t be any if it were left to the women.”</p>
<p class='c002'>I think Philip was running ’way ahead of his timetable.
Or, to change the figure, he had cast his net
<span class='pageno' id='Page_57'>57</span>on the wrong tide. There was not enough weight to
it in any case. I knew later that there was quite a
potential catch of assorted fish, including a young college
student who wore very thick glasses, a French-descended
politician who had considerable power in
local labor circles, and a very wealthy widow in her
late thirties. Even then the widow was contributing
generously to the cell, and some years later she became
nationally known as pro-Communist. There
were others too, but I do not know how they had been
approached, nor how many were caught. Perhaps
Philip and those who joined him in subsequent weeks
fumbled the assignment badly. At least this one got
away. The approach to my intellect is not through
my gonads.</p>
<p class='c002'>One approach perhaps is through my curiosity, and
it was curiosity that teased me into going here and
there with Philip. I wanted to see what kind of people
these were. I had listened to soapbox Communists
on the streets of New York, but they had aroused
nothing in me save vague speculations over such questions
as were bruited about in those days. What was
wrong with our government? Did the rich and powerful
think only to gain more power and reap more
benefits from the exploitation of the working class?
What should the government do? What could it do?
What was Hoover doing that he should not do, and
vice versa? I felt a certain shallow contempt for the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_58'>58</span>emotionalism, the unreasoning bitterness and the actless
anger of the soapbox radicals.</p>
<p class='c002'>I do not know whether it was because they were a
cohesive motley of white Americans, Negroes, Italians,
Portuguese and French, but I liked better the
brazen self-interest of the radical workers whom I had
seen milling about the shut-down (what an ominous
word that was!) blank-walled factories in southwest
Providence. But I could not identify myself with
them either. They talked of violence and did violence
(as once when the police tried to scatter them) in an
implacable, matter-of-fact way that repelled me. I
have never believed in violence. I have heard Negroes
advocate it. I once knew of a group of Negroes who
organized to kill a white man every time a Negro was
lynched. They called themselves the Kwick Kure
Klub, Inc., in grim parody of the Ku Klux Klan.
They were to have branches in every principal city
of the South. Though it was rumored, and is still
widely believed among Negroes, that the violent and
unsolved murder of a constable in Greene County,
Missouri, in the 1930’s was the work of the black
KKK, I think the organization never really got
started.</p>
<p class='c002'>Nor could I identify myself in more than a superficial
way with the campus group of intellectual radicals
with whom a common interest in writing brought
me into contact. They were enthusiastic and wellmeaning,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_59'>59</span>but quite innocent and harmless. They knew
considerably more about John Reed, Heywood Broun
and H. L. Mencken than about Marx, Lenin and the
deviationism of Trotsky. They knew something about
Nietzsche too, and they were learning, goggle-eyed,
something about Freud. But the German philosopher’s
“will to power” was not translated into political
terms, and Freud’s <cite>Civilization and Its Discontents</cite>,
which had only recently appeared in this country,
was simply a yardstick by which they measured their
imaginary personal gripes against smugness and conservatism.
Theirs was the rebellion of youth. They
talked a lot, but what they said was mostly brilliant
nonsense which had no more relation to the actual
destruction of the bridges over which their parents
had passed than a pyrotechnic display on a moonless
night. Only one of them became a writer—a humorist,
and a good one. His latest book now lies before
me. Sensitive, talented, some of them wealthy, they
turned out to be thoroughly conservative college professors,
investment brokers and lawyers who had no
trouble making a peace with things as they are.</p>
<p class='c002'>My problems were different from theirs. The
drives—self-preservation, anxiety, vanity, sex, the
“complete discharge of strength” Nietzsche speaks
of—were considerably modified by my Negroness.
Such an admission is embarrassing to make, but I recognized
its truth even then. Self-preservation, for instance,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_60'>60</span>was not a galvanic drive in me, nor in other
Negroes I knew. I have written elsewhere that
five of my closest acquaintances committed suicide in
a span of six red and terrible years. Pride and vanity
were excessive. Since Negroes were assumed to be
sexually immoderate, I made a show of strict asceticism,
chastising the flesh in a way most unnatural to
youth. What I did not recognize was that I was being
forced into the narrowest egocentrism; into an involvement
with self that was morbid beyond reason
and that only the lucky are able to sublimate—and this
only partially—into group concern and, with extreme
luck, wider social concern. It need not be said, and
certainly not in the way of apology, that this is not
altogether the fault of the Negro. It is the fault also
of the American life-situation—neither quite an accidental
wickedness nor a complex of impersonal coercions—over
which both the individual and the group
control of minority people is limited.</p>
<p class='c002'>The campus group of intellectual radicals broadened
me. They stimulated my reading, my imagination,
my sympathies. To the reading of James, Santayana
and DeUnamuno, to whom Professor Ducasse
had introduced me, I added Nietzsche (especially
<cite>Thus Spake Zarathustra</cite>) and Marx and much else
that I would not have come across in the ordinary
routine of my graduate study.</p>
<p class='c002'>But I was not broadened enough to take what
<span class='pageno' id='Page_61'>61</span>Philip and his circle offered. Had their offerings
stayed on the level of the first parties I attended with
Philip, matters might have been different. I can take
any amount of talk, and there ran through their
rapid-fire conversations phrases that, exploding like
firecrackers, drew my attention: “the political state”
(as distinct from the economic and social state—they
were drawing such distinctions then); “the omnicompetent
state”; “responsibility in areas of cultural autonomy.”
Of course I had ideas as to meanings, but nothing
they said really coalesced into concepts. I was
not moved either to agreement or disagreement. I simply
heard.</p>
<p class='c002'>In later meetings, however, I began to listen and
to understand, but not what it was expected I would
understand. Rather the opposite. I began to comprehend
that they talked like people who had a vested
interest in a democratic catastrophe. It was not Communism’s
strength and validity, its constructive and
health-seeking activities on which they based their
arguments: it was democracy’s weaknesses. They rejoiced
in the economic depression because they saw
in it the beginning of democracy’s total collapse. The
ideal, they said, was security <em>and</em> freedom (and I agreed
with this), but under “your system”—they were talking
directly to me and to Hakely, a young but grizzled
silversmith apprentice—“there is neither.” They
were too smart actually to make capitalism and democracy
<span class='pageno' id='Page_62'>62</span>synonymous, so I could judge only that this
equating one with the other was a deliberate effort to
confuse.</p>
<p class='c002'>And I was confused, and I showed it in childish
exasperation at the way in which they pointed out,
with a kind of glib, cold fervor, every weakness, every
failure, every instance of corruption and discrimination
and injustice, and how these affected one personally,
and especially the Negro. The inference was
plain that in the “omnicompetent state,” the “service
state” (which were equated), these things would not
be. But when I pressed for proof of their inferences,
Philip and the intellectual leaders of the cell withdrew
into taunts and challenges and were not percipient
enough to see how dangerously they threatened my
self-esteem. The idea of democracy was itself not
particularly dear to me then, but I resented the doubts
cast on my inherited assumptions about it. If anything,
I resented democracy for leaving me and itself
so defenseless; but I hated Communism for putting
me on the defensive. My anger and frustration carried
over from one meeting to the next, for though
their arguments were basically weak, I had no answers
to them. After the fifth meeting, I was certain
that I was through with the Communists and all their
works.</p>
<p class='c002'>But I did not figure on the proselyting passion of
Philip and Honey. This latter was one of the five
<span class='pageno' id='Page_63'>63</span>women in the cell whom I had seen regularly at meetings.
“Honey” was a cell nickname, and it suited only
her physical appearance. Among her colleagues at
the city hospital, where she told me she worked as
a technician, she was known as Branca. I never
learned her last name. Of foreign extraction—Austrian
or Czech, I judged—she had soft honey-blond
hair, worn in a long bob, so that when she turned or
lowered her head a wave of hair fell across her face.
It was a good face, not pretty and decorated, but well-structured
and strong, with pale yellow eyes set under
square brows. She talked a great deal in a rather
strident and insolent tone, and she laughed a lot, insolently
too. Both her laughter and her talk seemed to
come from very near the surface. Yet one felt that
she had depths. Sometimes one was as hard put to
follow the erratic train of her thought as to follow her
restless, vital movements.</p>
<p class='c002'>Philip and Honey came to my lodginghouse one
night after I had twice failed to show up at meetings.
It was embarrassing to have them come there, for my
landlady, though she had been born and had lived all
her life in New England and though she thought that
this was in itself some sort of victory or credit for a
Negro—my landlady was only less suspicious of white
people than she was of Negroes who consorted with
them. Even had they desired it, my visitors could not
have come in, so I went with them to the two untidy
<span class='pageno' id='Page_64'>64</span>rooms which Honey occupied over a delicatessen in
the oldest and a-step-from-genteel section of the city.
There were just the three of us, and over a bottle of
very sour wine, which was called dago red, they questioned
me about my absences. I told them that I had
been preparing for midyear examinations, which was
true, and anyway was I to consider myself obligated
to be present at every cell meeting?</p>
<p class='c002'>They looked at each other for a moment. Then
Honey laughed deliciously and said, “Of course not,”
and Philip laboriously wheezed an echo of this. In
cell meetings Philip was the center, but here Honey
had complete charge. She led the talk into all sorts of
trivial channels. Shifting restlessly in her chair, tossing
her head, crossing and uncrossing her legs, Honey
talked and talked. Her vitality and the wine were
exhilarating. She was profane and final in her judgments
of people. She jokingly accused Philip of trying
to bring into the cell some “profound asses,” some
“absolutely untouchable unteachables,” like a certain
Sidney she mentioned, who was positively, she said, a
“reconditioned pervert.” Oh, she was sure of it! And
Faye Hariston (this was the wealthy widow), who
“every day jumped into a barrel of peroxide,” and
who, for all her efforts at femininity, showed that she
was a “conditioned hermaphrodite.” Laughing gaily,
Honey wanted to know what Philip was doing, recruiting
people for his own pleasure? Was that what
<span class='pageno' id='Page_65'>65</span>he was making of the cell, a circle of Lesbians and libertines?</p>
<p class='c002'>Unembarrassed and unsmiling, Philip only shook his
head, and after a time Honey went on to something
else. The atmosphere was very casual, very friendly,
and I was sorry when Philip announced that he must
leave. It was my cue to go too, and I got up.</p>
<p class='c002'>There was a moment’s hesitation before Philip said,
“Oh, but I’ll be back! You wait for me here.” I
looked at Honey, but she was already reclaiming the
hat I had picked up. I thought she smiled mockingly
at Philip.</p>
<p class='c002'>What Honey and I talked about after Philip’s departure,
I do not know. In my notebook the next day
I wrote exactly what follows.</p>
<p class='c002'>“I wish I could make out a case of moral rectitude
for myself, but I cannot. What I kept thinking of last
night was all the possible consequences. When Honey
came and sat on the couch too close to me, I remembered
all I had heard about ‘parlor whores’—that
they were bold and brazen and without discrimination,
and that they were bound to be diseased. I had
never had more than a dozen words with her until
last night, so there was no affection for me. There was
only passion, and even this may not have been genuine.
I half wished it were, or that I could think it so.
My feeling was that her object was to arouse passion
in me while she kept herself out of it and under control.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_66'>66</span>She shivered and rolled her head against my shoulder
and dug her nails into my thigh, but I think that it was
all faked. I do not know what we talked about between
times, or whether we talked about anything.</p>
<p class='c002'>“But if she were outside it, I was outside it too, and
I kept thinking that Honey had some ulterior motive
and that she was trying to realize it at too high a price.
I knew that she wanted me to have sex relations with
her and I knew also that I would not, could not, dared
not. I do not think she tempted me at all, really; she
just frightened me. I did not see how anyone could go
to such a length to obtain a result that in the long run
could have almost no importance. Certainly I cannot
think myself <em>that</em> important to the Communists. And
suppose this were not her reason? Then what? Just
sex. I cannot trust a white woman that way. No matter
how willingly a white woman gives herself to a
colored man, if she is found out, she will yell rape. Last
night I pictured newspaper headlines such as I have
seen many times and I thought of them referring to
me: <span class='sc'>Black Brute</span>. I did the right thing last night,
though maybe I did it for all the wrong reasons.”</p>
<p class='c002'>I fled. Though I knew I had done the right thing, I
was ashamed to see Honey and Philip again, for I convinced
myself that I had been naïf and cowardly. I
did not go back to the little restaurant at the bottom of
the hill. Once I had a note from Philip, and once he—or
someone very like him—inquired of me from my
<span class='pageno' id='Page_67'>67</span>landlady, but I did not see him, nor Honey, nor any of
the people I used to see in the cell. I am certain that
Honey, laughing with strident insolence, spoke of me
as one of Philip’s “untouchable unteachables,” and
pretty quickly forgot me.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_68'>68</span>
<h2 class='c009'>9</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>But I did not forget Communism,
then or later. In New York the next year, 1933,
the Party was quite fashionable among my acquaintances,
some of whom took it seriously. One could be
sure that among the guests at Harlem’s middle and
upper-class social gatherings would be white people
and that these were admitted Communists or fellow
travelers at least. Some of them were said to be well
known in <i><span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">avant-garde</span></i> and esoteric circles and in the
theater but I had never heard of most of them, and I am
inclined to think that the reputations they were given
in Harlem were a kind of defense in depth against the
allegation that the only whites Negroes could mingle
with socially were peripheral people, nobodies, tramps.
The white people I met at such parties seemed average
intellectual types. I was struck by the fact that they
did not talk Communism, but gave the impression of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_69'>69</span>living on a higher and freer level than American democracy
afforded. The atmosphere they created was
easy and sophisticated, with a high sexual content of
which, it was said, nearly everyone took advantage.
No one bothered to whisper the stories of liaisons between
white women and Negro men and Negro
women and white men. They were accepted without
shock, and the actors in these little dramas seemed to
play their roles with a lack of embarrassment and even
a natural grace that fascinated me.</p>
<p class='c002'>I do not think any of the Communists I met in these
circumstances were seriously political-minded. Certainly
they were not Party workers. They did not
make speeches from flag-draped stepladders wedged
against curbings, as so many Communists were doing
daily in front of the Home Relief stations scattered
over the city. They did not rustle up meetings, nor
belong to instructional cells, nor try to indoctrinate
anyone. They were not of the “soiled shirt, sinkers
and coffee brigade.” My Negro acquaintances would
not have had them in their homes if they had been.
Communism was merely the rose under which they
pursued more pleasurable activities.</p>
<p class='c002'>There were a good many hastily printed Communist
leaflets being passed out in those days. I seemed
to get them all; I also read them. They were slanted
for the middle-class Negro—the professional, the intellectual,
the student. With only half an eye one
<span class='pageno' id='Page_70'>70</span>could see that the Party was conducting a campaign
to recruit a potential, educated Negro leadership. The
labor masses had been a disappointment to the Communists
who, anyway, employed the wrong methods
to enlist them. Negro labor was far from ready for
the proletarian revolution. It was not class struggle
but race struggle that interested them. What the Negro
labor masses wanted was to be treated as a special
case first. They wanted job security. They wanted to
be brought up to the level of white workers before
they could march in the ranks with them toward the
bigger Communist goal. Equality first, and then integration.
Besides, Negro labor had the same suspicion
of Communism that it had of socialism and trade-unionism—a
suspicion of being used rather than
helped, and used for the establishment of an order of
things that was not quite clear.</p>
<p class='c002'>So the new recruitment was to be among the class
of which I was an inconsequential representative. The
Communists were determined not to make the same
mistake twice. <cite>Equality, Land and Freedom: A Program
for Negro Liberation</cite>, issued by the League of
Struggle for Negro Rights in 1933, put it this way:
“The task that confronts the ... Party in organizing
the Negro workers and rallying them for the daily
class struggle ... side by side with the white workers is
no light one.... The Negro evinces no militant opposition
towards Communism, but he wants to know
<span class='pageno' id='Page_71'>71</span>how it can improve his social status, what bearing does
it have on the common practice of lynching, political
disfranchisement, segregation, industrial discrimination....
The Negro is revolutionary enough in a racial
sense....” In short, he is race-conscious, and this was
enough to concentrate on. In the late 1920’s and the
early 1930’s, the Communists got some good advice
from somewhere. They also took advantage of two
circumstances.</p>
<p class='c002'>The Angelo Herndon case was still bubbling and
boiling and the Scottsboro case was just reaching another
of its vociferous climaxes in 1933. The International
Labor Defense was formed in those days, and I
met William L. Patterson, its secretary. Next to James
D. Ford, the Communist Party’s Vice-Presidential
nominee in 1932, Patterson held the highest rank of
any Negro in the Party. But I was not impressed by
him. He seemed of small intellectual caliber, though
very ambitious and bold. I was more impressed by a
well-known and engaging Negro journalist. He had
just returned from Russia (and, I suppose, a period of
indoctrination) when I met him backstage at the Fourteenth
Street Theatre, where <cite>Stevedore</cite> was playing.
I can remember his saying to me, “We Negro writers
have a great opportunity and an inflexible duty to
promote the revolution that will extirpate caste, class
and race.” How flattering! “We Negro writers—”
to lump me in with Langston Hughes, Claude McKay,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_72'>72</span>Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, Countee Cullen and
himself, all of them talented, all of them well known.
He could not possibly have heard of me—I had written
and published professionally only one story at
that time. But the Negro art and literary “renaissance”
had not waned enough for those close to it to
see that it was fading, and now and then, a completely
unknown student, I basked in that artificial light like
a homeless beggar keeping himself warm over a sidewalk
grating.</p>
<p class='c002'>But Communism gave off a light of a different quality.
It had no comfort in it. As harsh and as revealing
as the light in a surgical operating room, it cast no cozy
shadow into which one could slip for those moments
of quiet reflection which seemed as necessary to me as
food and drink. Communism did not allow for the
play of individual thought and initiative. It had no
warmth in it. Or perhaps it is untrue to say this, since
intense heat and intense cold produce the same primary
reaction—a shriveling up, a drying out, until the living
thing loses its own identity and becomes one with
the heat or the cold. I saw something of this reaction
in New York and I was appalled by it. Or perhaps
this too is untrue. Perhaps what appalled me was the
realization that there were people who felt themselves
so helplessly cast out of American society and democratic
reckoning that they could suck with voracious
hunger at the cold breast of Communism. One of the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_73'>73</span>things I could not understand was the unquestioning
submission to control.</p>
<p class='c002'>I do not mean to give the impression that I met
many avowed Negro Communists. I did not—not
more than a half dozen in all. But with one of them I
had nearly seven months of close association. He had
a room next to mine in the place where I was living
and we shared a bath. He was a thief. He did not
make his living in this way. He had to do with the
stock and delivery room of a garment making firm, he
told me, and he was a minor official in a local union of
either truckers or garment makers, I do not know
which. He was a thief solely for the benefit of the
Party. That was his Party work and his duty and he
served it blindly. It was a strange work. At more or
less regular intervals he stole bolts of cloth—“suitings”
was his word—and kept them in his room until someone,
seldom the same person twice, identifying himself
by some prearranged means, made contact and relieved
him of the goods. He never knew what happened
to them ultimately.</p>
<p class='c002'>Curiously enough this was almost the only information
about himself Clark (we will call him) ever volunteered,
and of course I did not know this at first.
What I did know about Clark—but only after probing—was
that he came originally from Pennsylvania
and had been graduated from a high school in one of
the towns in that state. When the CCC agency was organized,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_74'>74</span>he applied for admission to one of the work
groups, but was rejected because high school was supposed
to have given him a vocation by means of which
he could earn a living. Caught in the depression, without
money and, I gathered, without stable family connections,
he drifted for a while—to Pittsburgh, to
Philadelphia and finally to New York. He was a
rugged-looking, stiff-faced young man of twenty-four
or twenty-five. One would never suspect from his appearance
or from his unimpassioned manner of speaking
what a steady flame of fanaticism burned in him.
He did not talk well. His voice was coarse, his tongue
slightly thick, and he had a very limited command of
the language. He spoke of this one day after we had
got to know each other fairly well.</p>
<p class='c002'>“I wish I could talk—like you,” he said. I was about
to protest that I was no model, when he added, “Or
like James Ford.” This was a complete letdown for
me. I had both seen and heard James Ford when he
was stumping the Eastern seaboard for the League of
Struggle for Negro Rights, and I did not think much
of him. He seemed basically ignorant, like a parrot
fluently repeating phrases he had been carefully
taught. His manner seemed gross.</p>
<p class='c002'>“James Ford?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“If I could talk like him, maybe I could be where
he is now,” Clark said.</p>
<p class='c002'>“And where is he?” I genuinely wanted to know.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_75'>75</span>I had heard nothing of him since his farcical campaign
as the Communist Party’s Vice-Presidential candidate.</p>
<p class='c002'>“I don’t know, but I think he’s in Russia,” Clark
said.</p>
<p class='c002'>“You want to go to Russia? But why?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“What’s this country ever done for me? What am
I here?” he asked impassively. “A nigger anybody can
spit on. In Russia I could be a man.” This too came
without anger or bitterness, and I could understand it.
He was giving idiomatic expression to a simple wish
for dignity and self-respect. One heard it so often
among Negroes that one was likely to forget the deep
wound of denial which it covered like a scab.</p>
<p class='c002'>“I know a fellow who went to Russia,” I said
brightly. “Apparently he likes it. He’s never come
back.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“He’s got the right idea. I wouldn’t come back
neither, if I ever went.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“It doesn’t appeal to me,” I said. “You’ve been
listening to the guys on the stepladder, the Reds, across
the street.”</p>
<p class='c002'>Clark gave me then a long, slow look, but there was
nothing in it that I could detect—no quickening either
of speculation or resentment. “I’m a Communist,” he
said.</p>
<p class='c002'>I laughed with surprise and embarrassment and, still
with his passive eyes on me, he said again, “I’m a Communist,”
bluntly.</p>
<p class='c002'><span class='pageno' id='Page_76'>76</span>There was nothing to say and so I kept silent, and
to keep silent with Clark was like nothing so much as
expecting to be talked to by a wall. He went to his
own room shortly. The next day when we met, I felt
a little twinge of embarrassment, but he seemed not to,
and the feeling soon passed.</p>
<p class='c002'>Though I did not know it then, I talked to Clark
for next to the last time less than a month later. He
came to my room one night, as he often did, but this
time he announced phlegmatically that he was in trouble.
He neither looked nor sounded like a man in
trouble and I could think only that he was in trouble
with a girl—though girls had never been a subject of
conversation between us.</p>
<p class='c002'>“What kind of trouble?” I inquired.</p>
<p class='c002'>I suppose Clark lacked a certain sensitiveness,
though I would not have called him callous. I do not
think it was because he did not care: it was just that
he could not estimate the effect his words had upon
others.</p>
<p class='c002'>“I’m a thief and I think they suspicion me,” he said.</p>
<p class='c002'>I must have said something like “Oh, go on,” or
“Quit kidding,” but I knew he had no sense of humor
and was quite incapable of kidding. I looked at him.
He seemed to think I had not heard him. “I’m a thief
and I think they suspicion me,” he repeated. And
when he took me to his room and showed me a flat-top
trunk half full of bolts of cloth, I believed him.</p>
<p class='c002'><span class='pageno' id='Page_77'>77</span>“But what are you going to do with this stuff? If
they suspect you and come——”</p>
<p class='c002'>“I’m going to get shut of it,” he said stoically. “I’m
going to get shut of it now in a few minutes.” He
was stuffing the bolts of cloth into two battered
valises.</p>
<p class='c002'>“What are you going to do? How are you going
to get rid of it?”</p>
<p class='c002'>This time he did not answer, but swung the valises
off the bed, brushed past me and went down the hall.</p>
<p class='c002'>The next time (and the last time) I talked with
Clark was in the Ninth Precinct jail. He was arrested
on a Saturday. On Sunday a newspaper reporter who
covered the precinct telephoned me, saying that Clark
wanted to see me. I did not like it. I was vexed by
the fear of somehow becoming involved in his trouble.
I went with reluctance. The desk sergeant, I thought,
eyed me suspiciously when I asked for Clark, but perhaps
it was just my nervousness, for he called another
officer who, taking a key, led me through some doors
and along a tier of empty cells. Clark was in the last
cell on the tier and he must have heard us coming, for
I found him standing expectantly. He smiled stiffly
when he saw me, but waited until the policeman had
gone before he spoke.</p>
<p class='c002'>“They got me,” he said.</p>
<p class='c002'>My mood was not pleasant, I’m afraid, nor talkative.
I had no wish to draw him out. If he had anything to
<span class='pageno' id='Page_78'>78</span>say to me, I thought, then he would damned well say
it without help from me. He was still smiling stiffly.</p>
<p class='c002'>“They got me,” he said again.</p>
<p class='c002'>“So I see,” I said. “Now what?”</p>
<p class='c002'>They were holding him for a preliminary hearing
on Monday, he said. Then, as if it were something
which did not concern him—as if he were speaking of
someone else who was altogether a stranger to him—he
told me of his work for the Communists as I have
related it above. I could not understand it. I stared at
him, for what he was saying sounded crazy, especially
to be coming in so calm and uninflected a voice.</p>
<p class='c002'>“But why?” I wanted to know.</p>
<p class='c002'>“It was my job,” he said, as if that explained it truly
and entirely; as if it completely satisfied the demands
of my question.</p>
<p class='c002'>“What did you send for me for? I can’t do anything
for you,” I said. “Somebody’s made a fool of
you. Let them look out for you.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“You got it all wrong,” he said, shaking his head
slowly.</p>
<p class='c002'>“You’ve got it all wrong. You’re in jail,” I said
bitingly.</p>
<p class='c002'>“But I ain’t no fool, unless doing things for a good
point is one. And I don’t want nobody to look out
for me.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“Well, if you did, somebody else would have to
do it.”</p>
<p class='c002'><span class='pageno' id='Page_79'>79</span>“What could they do? You want me to get them
in trouble?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“You mean the Communists?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“My action group,” he said. “They can’t do nothing.
They ain’t supposed to do nothing.”</p>
<p class='c002'>I stared at him with even greater intensity. “They
know and they won’t even go bail for you or get you
a lawyer?” My outraged credulity was as lost on him
as my vexation had been.</p>
<p class='c002'>“I told you,” he said.</p>
<p class='c002'>“You mean it’s supposed to be this way? You knew
that if something like this happened, your action group
wouldn’t do anything?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“I ain’t going to drag nobody else in,” he said
doggedly.</p>
<p class='c002'>“They shouldn’t have to be dragged in,” I said, and
I think I raised my voice in exasperation. “They
ought to come in.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“You wrong,” he said.</p>
<p class='c002'>“But you’re the one who’s in jail.”</p>
<p class='c002'>I could not believe that what was happening to him
could happen. Of course I had heard stories of strict
Party discipline, of orders being given to Party members
to do what no one in his right mind would do,
but I had not believed such stories, though they were
common and though they were also congruous with
the newspaper accounts of the purges that were then
taking place in Russia. I had kept my reservations.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_80'>80</span>But this business with Clark was real. He was someone
I knew, and this was happening to him.</p>
<p class='c002'>“Look,” I said, “why don’t you be sensible? Why
don’t you——”</p>
<p class='c002'>He was shaking his head before I could finish. There
seemed to be nothing I could say to arouse him to a
true recognition of the fix he was in. Perhaps at bottom
he had a martyr complex, but I could not see in him
any of the things I associated with martyrdom. There
was none of the fire, none of the dignity and nobility
I thought of as belonging in the picture. There were
not even defiance and rebellion in him—or if they
were, Clark kept them hidden beneath layers of stony
reserve that could not be penetrated. Besides, it
seemed to me that to <em>have</em> to suffer alone for a principle
made the principle suspect.</p>
<p class='c002'>And he suffered alone. I did not go to see him in
the Tombs where he was remanded after the preliminary
hearing, and on the day of his trial I searched four
papers before I found in one of them a short notice:
<span class='sc'>Negro Convicted of Theft.</span></p>
<p class='c002'>I saw him again at the trial. It lasted less than
twenty minutes. Clark, in the same rumpled brown
suit he had worn in jail, was led in. He looked slightly
drawn, but I think I was the only one of the twenty or
thirty spectators who could have known this. No
one seemed to take any interest in this fourth case on
the docket. The charge was read. The court-appointed
<span class='pageno' id='Page_81'>81</span>lawyer pleaded guilty. A short, stocky man
was sworn in and gave testimony to the effect that
so-many and so-many bolts of cloth were missing over
a period of months; that company detectives were put
on the trail of them, and that finally in March they
had found “their man.” Then a private detective
testified; then a stock clerk. There were no other witnesses.
Clark was ordered to stand. The judge pronounced
sentence—five years in prison. Clark looked
around at the spectators then, but I could see no
change in his expression. He was nudged away. I left
the courtroom.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_82'>82</span>
<h2 class='c009'>10</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>Like the capacity for thought
and the desire for knowledge, the instincts for personal
liberty and, within reason, power over one’s
destiny are attributes of the human mind. They are
stronger in some than in others. Where they have
been weakened by catastrophe—say long-continued
planned violence, as in war; or widespread social disorganization,
as in times of great economic crises—the
instincts can be perverted, or even totally destroyed.
There was danger of this perversion (which
actually developed in some countries in Europe) during
America’s great depression, when the feeling grew
that only Franklin D. Roosevelt had answers and that
everything depended on him. The American people
were all but ripe to surrender their minds and the control
of their destiny.</p>
<p class='c002'>It was the distortion or atrophy of this instinct that
<span class='pageno' id='Page_83'>83</span>the Communists hoped to find in the American Negro.
They had good reason for such hopes, and they were
not loath to express it: “The especially intense exploitation
and heavy oppression to which the millions
of Negroes in America are subject make it imperative
for <em>the Party to devote its best energies and its maximum
resources towards becoming the recognized
leader and champion ... of Negroes</em>.”<SPAN name='r7' /><SPAN href='#f7' class='c016'><sup>[7]</sup></SPAN> (Italics mine.)
The intense exploitation and heavy oppression were
true enough. But there was something that the Communists
did not take into account; something psychical
and perhaps unworldly which even the people whom
they hoped to inveigle did not think about. It was
not the Negro’s vaunted resiliency, though this was
something. Rather it was what I can think of only as
the spiritual cohesion of democracy. This cohesion
is organic to the delicately balanced ideological structure
that democracy is, and it is the attribute which
makes it impossible to separate the destiny of America
from the destiny of democracy itself.</p>
<p class='c002'>For democracy is less a form of government than
it is a way of life, and the principles—freedom, equality,
justice—on which this way of life is founded have
an appeal as universal as the idea of God. And what
I am saying is that in spite of “heavy oppression” and
“intense exploitation,” the American Negro believed
<span class='pageno' id='Page_84'>84</span>in the principles. It was this belief in the principles
and the impossibility of ever dissociating them in the
Negro’s mind from democracy and America that stymied
the Communists, who could not understand why
the colored people’s hatred of discrimination, segregation
and all the inequities did not lead naturally to a
hatred of democracy. But it was like expecting them
to hate God because preachers are sometimes rascals.</p>
<p class='c002'>Nor do I think that this is as abstruse and metaphysical
as it sounds. Or if it is, then it is well to remember
that American democracy is itself a metaphysic,
blending as it does subjective truth (“the inalienable
rights of man”) with moral abstractions (“liberty and
justice for all”) and mystical concepts (“the will of
the people”) which admittedly cannot be achieved by
all the institutions ever created by man. It is, this democracy,
“impractical.” It was this that the Communists
took cognizance of and figured on. They did
it three times between 1918 and 1942, and each time
in crisis, when they thought the material values which
they wished to substitute as the goal of struggle were
enhanced by their very absence. The terms they used
were purely materialistic too, and they applied them
in a context that was unbounded by the American
continent—and this was another mistake. “The American
Communist Negroes,” the Communists said, “are
the historical leaders of their comrades in Africa and
to fit them for dealing the most telling blows to world
<span class='pageno' id='Page_85'>85</span>imperialism as allies of the world’s working class is
enough to justify all the time and energy that the
Workers (Communist) Party must devote to the mobilization
for the revolutionary struggle of the Negro
workers in American industry.”<SPAN name='r8' /><SPAN href='#f8' class='c016'><sup>[8]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c002'>Then they tried to extirpate the spiritual values of
democracy by extirpating Christianity. They did not
carry on a full-scale campaign of godlessness among
American Negroes, but the Negro poet Langston
Hughes, who went to visit Russia as a Guest of the
State, came back apparently spiritually callous and
published the poem “Goodbye, Christ,” and the appalling
fact was lost on no one. By and large, Negroes
did not feel that Christ and religion were ready for the
discard, certainly not before they had been tried. Indeed,
their egalitarian aspirations had their roots in
Biblical injunction. So the purge of the priests, the
smashing of ikons, and the tearing down of the
churches, which Negroes read about in the American
press, were factors in the failure of the Communist
Party to win the support of the black masses.</p>
<p class='c002'>Add to this one other matter, and the whole story
(though oversimplified) of that failure is told. Add
patriotism. In some sophisticated Negro circles it is
a matter for amused laughter that no Negro has ever
been a traitor to the United States. But the laughter
<span class='pageno' id='Page_86'>86</span>does not abrogate the fact. More perhaps than other
American minorities, Negroes have had inducements
to treachery. Clark expressed it: “What has this country
ever done for me?” And of course Negroes before
and since have asked the same question. It is purely
rhetorical. Clark did not realize it, but America, its
ideals, its direction, its basic spirit (for we must again
deal with abstractions) had given him a belief in the
individual worth and dignity of himself as a man.
DuBois, I think, was right when, back in his young,
good days, he said, “First, this is our country: we have
worked for it, we have suffered for it, we have fought
for it ... we have reached in this land our highest
modern development and nothing, humanly speaking,
can prevent us from eventually reaching here the full
stature of our manhood.... Our wrongs are still
wrong [but] we will not bargain with our loyalty.”</p>
<p class='c002'>I am just cynical enough to add a sour note. This
loyalty comes in part from a fear of expulsion. It is a
historic fear, stemming back to the colonization movement
in the seventeenth century. Recently Negroes
have seen another minority in other countries expelled,
and they know it can be done. But American
Negroes have no Palestine.</p>
<p class='c002'>I will not say that Negroes saw democracy as the
highest, final product of man’s political development,
nor that they saw enough differences between Communism
and democracy to reassure them of the worth
<span class='pageno' id='Page_87'>87</span>of the latter. They did not come to that stage of intellection—and
neither did I until much later. I do not
think that even the Negro Communists, so recently in
the news, with all their reputation for mental acumen,
have thought much about the real differences. For
actually, of course, the Communist doctrine, like the
dogma of the most fundamental religious sect, does not
encourage thought. If it did, there probably would be
less than a villageful of Communists in the whole
Western world, for it would be seen that Communism
is a falling away from the idea that the Western world
has lived by since the Middle Ages—the idea that <em>man</em>
is the end of all human endeavor, and that mere “survival
and security” are not enough for man. But this
distinction is only gross enough to explain why Communism
is the ideology of crisis; why it must seize its
chance to win men’s minds when their highest hope
is only to stave off death. No, even the intellectuals
seem not to have seen this; and the other distinctions
are subtler, finer. But they are also fundamental.</p>
<p class='c002'>First of all, Communism is revolution, a rupture of
order, a break in the evolution of Western civilization.
Democracy, on the other hand, is a way of conducting
affairs so that there is some kind of harmonious continuity
in the direction of society. There may be errors
and blunders, and there are certainly lags, but the
people in a democracy are themselves so sensitive that
<span class='pageno' id='Page_88'>88</span>they automatically exert a corrective force in the way
a ship’s gyroscope does. This sensitiveness is the
strength of democracy. Communism must operate
within a relatively simple but rigid structure (like the
“classless society”) with a narrow philosophic base
and narrowly defined aims, so that the prestige of
authority can be enhanced to tyrannical proportions
and so that the decrees of authority can be immediately
and continuously checked. There is no margin
either for error or disagreement. Democracy is a complex
way of life, lacking the utter concentration of
energy in any one direction (save in time of national
emergency) that marks Communism and that makes
no allowance for opposing points of view. Communism
must drastically curtail man’s freedom in the first
place, prescribe his rights and privileges in the second,
and finally it must stand constantly ready to alienate
those rights—by force, if necessary, or by the show
of force, or by the implication of force. Democracy
seeks a constant enlargement of man’s freedom. Because
in modern times Communism has seemed able
to establish itself only by violence, it seems reasonable
to assume that violence is necessary to its perpetuation,
while at the same time it is more susceptible to disintegration
through violence. Under Communism, man
is the slave of the state. Under democracy, the state
is the servant of man.</p>
<p class='c002'>If all this editorializing sounds somewhat beside the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_89'>89</span>point, since only peripherally does it have to do with
my Negroness, then I can only plead that it seems to
me a description of the sober facts, and that it is by
way of being an explanation to the Communists of my
anti-Communism. I should have given it to them ten
years ago. They should have had it back in 1942 when,
after a ten-year layoff, the Communists came at me
again and made it necessary for me to try to achieve a
certain degree of clarity about these issues.</p>
<p class='c002'>I had written a book called <cite>No Day of Triumph</cite>,
and the Communists saw advance copies of it. They
liked it, though I am still puzzled why. Perhaps it
was because I did not actually condemn Communism,
but, as a matter of fact, expressed sympathy for one
Mike Chowan who had long been a Communist and
who had fought with the Lincoln Battalion in Spain.
Whatever the reason, <cite>New Masses</cite> first published an
excerpt from my book, without, as I remember, getting
either my permission or that of the publisher.
Soon after the <cite>New Masses</cite> excerpt appeared and several
weeks before publication, I began to get letters
from Communists all over the country. Some of these
came from bookstore managers who told me that they
were going to push the book and who invited me to
teas and to hold autograph parties. I accepted only
one of these invitations—to speak to a group in Washington,
where I had to go on other business anyway.
Later I was asked to appear on a radio program with
<span class='pageno' id='Page_90'>90</span>Ella Winters in Philadelphia, but a previous commitment
interfered.</p>
<p class='c002'>A little while after publication, I went to New
York to attend a dinner party for Carl Van Vechten.
When that was over sometime after midnight, without
quite realizing what we were in for, my wife and I
accepted an invitation to another gathering, and found
ourselves in an apartment on West 56th Street, surrounded
by a motley crowd who told me that they
were going to make <cite>No Day of Triumph</cite> a best seller.
They were going to put me, as a writer, they said, in
the same income class with Howard Fast and Richard
Wright, who, they claimed, but for them, would not
have been where they were. Toward dawn, what
seemed to be a committee of three cornered me in the
kitchenette and asked me whether I would sign a
card. I said I would have to think about it. What I
have written above is what I thought.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_91'>91</span>
<h2 class='c009'>11</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>So far as I know, no one from
the outside has ever tried to infect the Negro group
with fascism. There have been some inside the group,
but, excepting Marcus Garvey, I do not think they
were consciously fascist. Negro colleges have tended
to breed fascism—I would say a mild form of it, except
that fascism is organically hysterical and there is
no mild form of it—and I have met Negro college
presidents whose notions are provocative of suspicious
wonder and who, by the way they run “their” institutions,
seem to be convinced that the methods of democracy
are weak and decadent. Themselves, generally,
victims of a tyranny imposed from without,
they are tyrants within the academic group, and, if
given a chance, outside it too. They play the strong
man and the dictator role. They think that people and
things should be “lined up” by the superior intellects
with which they feel their positions endow them.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_92'>92</span>They have a vast contempt for faculty members whom
they regard as justly underprivileged employees perhaps
of somewhat more value than janitors but of considerably
less value than football coaches.</p>
<p class='c002'>More dangerously, this presidential contempt engulfs
students, who grow into maturity with personalities
habituated to submission and who are likely to
believe in the infallibility of the dictatorship principle.
In general, Negro-educated Negroes have never
learned to live with Freedom and this is why they are
almost totally missing from the ranks of those who
apply the privileges and the tools of democracy to the
construction of Freedom’s spacious house. Where
they have taken over as leaders of Negro communities
there rises a nauseating reek of devious and oily obsequiousness.
It is a kind of fascism in reverse.</p>
<p class='c002'>A group of Negro parents in a Virginia city wished
to equalize the facilities of the Negro school with those
of white schools. One of the things that the colored
school lacked was a cafeteria. This was particularly
noticeable because the city school board had just added
such a convenience (at a cost of $20,000) to the only
white school without it. The Negro parents went to
the principal of their own school. As an ambitious
and hard-working educator, less complacent and timeserving
than most of his type, he had ideas, and the
chief one was that the parents’ group solicit funds (he
thought $2,500 would do it!) in Negro homes,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_93'>93</span>churches, and other racial institutions. By a show of
initiative and energy, he thought, it might be brought
home to the white people that Negro citizens were
worthy of consideration.</p>
<p class='c002'>Naturally among those to whom the project was
first presented was the Negro acknowledged as the
colored community’s leader—a lawyer, graduate of
a Negro college and a white law school. The esteem
he commanded among his own people and the attention
he could get from the whites were very real.</p>
<p class='c002'>A friend of mine happened to be in the lawyer’s
office when the committee of parents went there.
Whether out of boorishness, as my friend thinks, or
because of the very human desire to prove his influence,
or because he clearly saw his duty as a leader,
the lawyer took over completely. “We’ll get in touch
with some real money,” he said. “No point in piddling
around with the colored folks’ two cents’ worth.”
Then, picking up the telephone, he called several of
his white “friends”—a peanut-produce manufacturer
(he carefully identified them between calls), a banker
and an insurance broker, among others—and explained
to them the Negro parents’ project for the school. In
ten minutes of “the most consummate fawning,” my
friend said afterward, the lawyer had solicited pledges
of more than a thousand dollars. He typed out an
identifying statement for the parents and sent them
off to collect from his white friends.</p>
<p class='c002'><span class='pageno' id='Page_94'>94</span>My friend said she watched openmouthed during
this masterly performance. “It was like being at the
theater, when you’re so struck by the skill of the star
that you don’t think of the play itself until after the
curtain falls. Or maybe it isn’t skill that strikes you.
Maybe it’s personality. I remember Katharine Cornell
in —— Well, it was exactly like that,” my friend
said, with something very like awe in her voice and
in her pale face. She recovered after the curtain had
fallen.</p>
<p class='c002'>“Mr. So-and-So,” she asked, “do you mean to tell
me you’re begging white people in this community to
give you things that everybody ought to have and that
you have as much right to as they? This is 1951!
Haven’t you heard what’s going on—the legal suits
for equalization and all?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“Oh,” the lawyer said, laughing blandly, “they
don’t want to sue. They just want a cafeteria like the
white schools have.”</p>
<p class='c002'>Thurgood Marshall, chief legal counsel of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, has said that the hardest job his staff has had
in bringing equal-education suits has been to persuade
Negro teachers and representative Negro parents to
stand as plaintiffs. They have to be bludgeoned out
of their childish faith in the short-term profits of their
minority middle-class position. They have to be
taught, with pain and patience, that democracy is a
<span class='pageno' id='Page_95'>95</span>legitimate enterprise, that its institutions must make
for their dignity, and that they cannot save themselves
without forgetting themselves in the struggle to save
the rights of man. Negro colleges are doing almost
none of this teaching.<SPAN name='r9' /><SPAN href='#f9' class='c016'><sup>[9]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c002'>What I am trying to make clear is the actual condition
of the average middle-class American Negro
mind halfway through the twentieth century. To explain
how this condition came about would involve
a good deal of history. Besides, I have already tried
to explain it in another place. The only point is that
the condition does exist, and it is not healthy. Nor can
it be cured, it seems to me, by the superficial therapy
of integration on special levels—the graduate and professional-school
level, for instance—which is now being
hailed as a cure-all. It is not. Integration on this
level is at best a victory for the method of democracy,
and method and spirit are not necessarily one. For
years upper middle-class American Negroes have been
going to graduate and professional schools with whites
without learning, and without stimulating by their
presence there, the inclusive kind of thinking that is
necessary to the fulfillment of the spirit of democracy.
Associations on such levels are as casual and random
<span class='pageno' id='Page_96'>96</span>as the flow of unchanneled waters. They do not bite
deep into idea patterns, nor thrust themselves down
into the matrix of emotion.</p>
<p class='c002'>Integration must start at much lower levels—in
kindergarten and Sunday school, in Cub Scouts and
Campfire Girls—before idea patterns are fixed and
before the matrix of emotion is stuffed with the corruption
of intolerance. Integration must be complete
and absolutely without “ifs,” “ands” and “buts.”
Eventually, of course, from these levels it would proceed
to intermarriage. But what harm then? It is not
entirely facetious to say that legal intermarriage would
only sanction and somewhat equalize the miscegenation
that has been going on in this country since 1622
when, it is said, the first child of mixed Negro-white
parentage was born in America. And to say
that intermarriage between American Negroes and
whites would increase the vitality of the American
people is biologically sound.</p>
<p class='c002'>Fortunately integration is not a political concept
(though it has been made a political issue) and is
therefore not identified with the name of a leader.
This has the advantage of depriving the opposition
of that damaging leverage of vulnerable personality
which leadership identification always provides and
which can destroy or throw into long-lasting paralysis
even the most salutary and easily defended social
concepts. If you cannot overthrow the ideas which
<span class='pageno' id='Page_97'>97</span>you fear or hate, then attack the man behind the ideas
and thus debase what he stands for. That is the history
of the struggle against ideas.</p>
<p class='c002'>But if the concept of integration has this advantage,
it has also the disadvantage of being indivisible. There
is no decalogue of integration, each item of which can
be separately assimilated and practiced. It is not a “one
thing at a time” thing, nor a “first things first” thing.
It must be assimilated all at once or killed all at once.</p>
<p class='c002'>And it is this fact, I think, that frightens Negroes
of the more stable classes. They see in integration a
breakdown of certain monopolies in education and
the professions and some business enterprises. In my
own home town, for instance, where segregation
could have been abolished twenty years ago, the Negro
owner of the only Negro theater, who was at the
same time on the city council, fought every attempt
to wipe out the practice of excluding Negroes from
white theaters, indoor sporting events, and other places
of entertainment. He could get aid and comfort from
a Negro school principal and certain Negro teachers
who were afraid that the ell would lead to the mile
and that their jobs would be thrown into an open
nonracial competition which they were not prepared,
they felt, to meet.</p>
<p class='c002'>But also integration is in conflict with all that whites
as well as Negroes have been taught to believe. It is
in conflict with all that they think of as making for
<span class='pageno' id='Page_98'>98</span>harmonious social development. Most whites are convinced
that integration is the way to social and even
biological disaster. Conviction is emotional and generally
not to be argued with. If segregationalists could
be argued with, they would not be segregationalists
in the first place. They have taken their position on
nonarguable grounds, and I think they have taken it
quite contrary to their <em>intellectual</em> understanding of
the problem central to our age. The Georgia Legislature,
in this year 1951, was very sincere when it saw
fit to pass a bill providing that no funds appropriated
for education could go to institutions that did not enforce
segregation. Only weeks later, Governor
Byrnes of South Carolina, who has been a Senator, a
Supreme Court Justice and Secretary of State, declared
that “The politicians in Washington and the
Negro agitators in North Carolina who today seek to
abolish segregation in all schools will learn that what a
carpetbag government could not do in the Reconstruction
Period cannot be done in this period.” He
then proceeded to express the view that before what
“could not be done” would be done, the public-school
system in South Carolina would be abolished.<SPAN name='r10' /><SPAN href='#f10' class='c016'><sup>[10]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c002'>This is paradox and irony. There is the obvious
irony of advocating the abolishment of the very thing
<span class='pageno' id='Page_99'>99</span>on which democracy must rest—a publicly schooled
citizenry—in order to ensure, as Byrnes implied, the
perpetuation of democracy. But the paradox goes
deeper, for if there is emotionalism in Byrnes’s words,
there is also the opposite of emotionalism. For his
words represent a deliberate and a socially dominant
response based on static concepts and ideals—the concept
of the Negro’s inherent inferiority, and the ideal
of the white “Anglo-Saxon,” predominantly Protestant
community which earns its right to Divine favor
because it contributes to Negro causes, does not deliberately
encourage the persecution of either Jews or
Catholics, and even occasionally permits itself the hazard
of proclaiming the world one.</p>
<p class='c002'>That the concept of complete integration, which
seems to me to represent the logical evolution of democratic
thinking, should be in deep conflict with the
actualities of American learning (I will not say “teaching”)
is the supreme paradox of our democracy. The
central problem of our age is that of expressing the
oneness of man. The UNESCO “Statement on Race”
makes this abundantly clear: “The unity of mankind
from both the biological and social viewpoints is the
main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is
the first requirement of modern man.” Admittedly
Americans and a goodly portion of the peoples of the
Western world believe that democracy is the frame—and
perhaps the only frame—within which unity can
<span class='pageno' id='Page_100'>100</span>be achieved and maintained. They must believe this,
else their propagandic and materialistic promotion of
it, their assiduous and even frantic efforts to “sell” it
to the rest of the world is basically an immoral and
selfish offering of the democratic experience to mankind
at the price of man’s soul. In so far as the American
people, who lead the Western world, believe that
democracy is the enduring frame of unity, then they
must flatter themselves with a belief in a great destiny.
And this is all very well, but they must also realize
that Western democratic civilization has arrived at
the point at which the path of development proper
to man and necessary to democracy is marked “Integration.”
If it is not chosen now, then the American
people must reform their wants, modify detrusively
their ideals, and deliberately dissolve those organic
bonds of principle which give the ultimate meaning
to democracy. They must stop being moved by the
symbols “the inalienable rights of man,” “the pursuit
of happiness,” “liberty” and “equality,” and enshrine,
instead of these symbols of man’s hope, those of fear—survival,
collective security. The journey down the
path of integration is not one to be put off until tomorrow.
Tomorrow is now.</p>
<p class='c002'>I do not wish to push this too far, but there can be
little doubt that integration is a practical concern
latent in our modern world. It is no preposterous
idealism offered merely in contravention of a prevailing
<span class='pageno' id='Page_101'>101</span>view and practices that are working for most men.
The simple truth is that the prevailing practices are
not working for most men. While at the same time
his conscience is disturbed by this fact, Western man
is so fixed in the once-comfortable conviction of his
own superiority that he seems powerless to change
the practices that support his conviction. This is a
fault of his adolescence. It is a cavalier unconcern for
his lack of knowledge of others. It is an inability to
understand the world society of which he is a part.
“World society” is no longer a metaphysical abstraction.
It is very real, very concrete. It is real enough
to have reduced the margin for national initiative in
the conduct of internal affairs. It is no longer possible
for the United States to keep the differences she has
made between the races—and embedded in law and
custom—without making a fundamental denial of
what she professes before the world to stand for and
to fight for, the entity of mankind.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_102'>102</span>
<h2 class='c009'>12</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>Perhaps I make too much of
this, and perhaps I am overwrought and unreasonable
about it. I must confess that there flit across my mind,
like stones skipped on the surface of water (only to
sink into it), thoughts of my sons. There are moments
when I am sentimental enough to hope that
history is a necessary progress toward better things
and that frustrations of the human spirit grow less and
less. I know better. But I have such hopes when my
sons are involved, and I am inclined to support them
intemperately.</p>
<p class='c002'>It does not serve merely to shrug one’s shoulders
and carp about the psychic traumas that bedevil American
man. At least it did not do seven years ago, when
my older son was eight and my younger not yet born.
And now that my younger is himself almost seven, it
still will not do. Argument does not exactly serve
<span class='pageno' id='Page_103'>103</span>either, although I think I argue for something eminently
sane. It is simplicity. I argue the substitution
of spontaneous, instinctive responses for the deliberate
responses based, as I have said above, on unchanging
ideas and ideals. It seems to me that the old rules—evoked
as they were out of the utmost confusion of
morality and social expedience, and deliberate ignorance—are
not only unnecessarily complicated for
modern times and people, but that they are progressively
unsuitable to modern ways of living, to the
advance of knowledge, to technology, and (surely
everyone will allow this) to one-worldness. Make the
rules simple enough and we can play the hardest game.</p>
<p class='c002'>What happened to my older son (and also to my
younger son just recently, though not in circumstances
so distressing nor in details so graphic) was that
while he was playing the game with all the exuberance
of an eight-year-old, somebody “complicated up” the
rules. I remember distinctly how it happened.</p>
<p class='c002'>For several weeks while my wife was with child
it was my unaccustomed duty to “make the marketing,”
as it is so quaintly put in the upper South. Our
market was a co-op on the highway just outside
town, in the heart of one of those neat and monotonous
residential communities that seemed to spring up
everywhere in the 1940’s. My wife loved the place.
It was convenient; its stock was excellent; and its
prices generally somewhat lower than in the chain
<span class='pageno' id='Page_104'>104</span>groceries. Besides, it had a Negro (a colleague and
friend) on its board of directors, and, as a second novel
attraction, it employed several Negroes—at least one
as clerk and another as butcher. The co-op’s atmosphere,
unlike that of the chain’s, was friendly, warm,
leisurely. My wife supposed it was because of the
neighborhood—a better-than-average middle-class
neighborhood, segregated of course, of aircraft designers,
engineers and other technological experts and
a scattering of armed-service personnel (no one lower
than a lieutenant in the Navy or a captain in the Army,
it seemed) from the various military installations close
by. As one of the charter stockholders, I was determined
to love the place too.</p>
<p class='c002'>Friday was market day. Until her condition prevented
her going, my wife’s eager companion on these
expeditions was our son. Sometime in the spring he
had struck up a friendship at the co-op and he anticipated
its weekly renewal with pleasurable excitement.
The first time I took him there I saw the revival of the
fraternity with quickened heart. My son burst
through the door ahead of me, stopped, looked down
the first aisle (fresh fruits and vegetables), ran to the
second and looked, and then suddenly let out an Indian
whoop—“Reggie!”—and got one for an answer—“Conway!”
And then I saw a handsome dark-haired,
dark-eyed boy of about Conway’s age break from the
side of a young Negro girl and come bursting up the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_105'>105</span>aisle between the high-stacked shelves of brightly
packaged foods toward my son. They stood looking at
each other for a moment, then they came together,
each with an arm around the shoulder of the other, and
exploded off to play outside among the cars until market
was made. I looked at the uniformed Negro girl
and she smiled and I smiled, and that was that.</p>
<p class='c002'>It was that way for four or five weeks—Conway
and Reggie met each other with what seemed the force
of projectiles and went skyrocketing off. Leaving the
market, I would find them outside, hot and happy
playing at some impossible game.</p>
<p class='c002'>Then one Friday, Reggie (we never learned his
last name) was not there with the Negro maid. His
guardian this time was a man—a tall, handsome person,
about forty, I judged, who in spite of the Phi
Beta Kappa key slung across his flat stomach, looked
outdoorsy and virile. The boys came together as usual
and went outside as usual, but the man’s marketing
must have been nearly done, for before I could finish
picking out the heaviest, juiciest oranges, Conway was
back with me again. “Where’s Reggie?” I asked him.
“He had to go,” he said. “His daddy was in a hurry.”
But already he was looking forward to the next week.</p>
<p class='c002'>The uniformed maid was with Reggie again the
next week, but this time when Conway let out his
customary whoop, there was no vocal answer. Reggie
turned, it seemed to me with momentary eagerness,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_106'>106</span>but there was no yell and rush. He approached very
slowly. He was smiling weakly, but that smile died
as he came. Perhaps sensing that something was wrong,
Conway himself now hesitated. “What’s the matter?”
he asked Reggie. “Come on, man, let’s go. Don’t you
want to play?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“I can’t play with you,” Reggie said.</p>
<p class='c002'>“What’s the matter, are you sick?” Conway wanted
to know.</p>
<p class='c002'>“I just can’t play with you any more,” Reggie said.</p>
<p class='c002'>Conway moved a fraction closer to me, clutched
the handle of the food cart I was pushing. The maid
stood at some distance, pretending not to watch. The
pleasant-voiced, pleasant-faced shoppers of the neighborhood
flowed around us. Other children, younger,
skittered and yelled up and down the aisles. The
compacted odors of fresh pastry, of ground coffee,
of fruits and vegetables, and the colors of all these
were as ever. But a chill was beginning to form
around my heart. Before Conway asked the next
question, I knew the answer that was coming. I did
not know the words of it, but I knew the feel—the
iron that he would not be prepared for; the corrosive
rust that it would make in his blood and that, unless I
was skillful—as my father was not—I could never
draw off. At that moment—no, before the moment
of the answer I wanted to pick Conway up and hold
him hard against me and ward off the demoralizing
<span class='pageno' id='Page_107'>107</span>blow that might be struck for a lifetime. But I could
not forfend it even by grasping my son by the hand
and walking off in another direction. I was transfixed.</p>
<p class='c002'>“Why?”</p>
<p class='c002'>Reggie scowled then, a grimace that was not really
ugly yet, because it was associated only with words
and not with feeling. That would come later, and the
word would be made flesh, and the flesh would be his
forever. Now the scowl was only imitation.</p>
<p class='c002'>“Because you’re a nigger, that’s why,” Reggie said.</p>
<p class='c002'>Conway looked at me wonderingly, not feeling
hurt, as they say a man knowing himself shot but still
without pain will look with surprise.</p>
<p class='c002'>“I’m better than you,” Reggie said, “’cause my father
said so.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“You are not,” Conway said, but I thought he
shrank a little against me.</p>
<p class='c002'>“No, son, he isn’t,” I said.</p>
<p class='c002'>“I am so, too,” Reggie said, looking at both of us.
Words were beginning to arouse emotion and link
with emotion. The sneer was no longer imitation. He
stood bearing his weight on his left foot, his hands in
the pockets of his khaki shorts, the whiteness of him
showing in a streak just below the hairline, the rest of
him—bare trunk, bare legs—tanned almost to the
color of my son.</p>
<p class='c002'>“No, son,” I said, as much to the one as to the other.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_108'>108</span>I think I felt sorry for Reggie too. I do now at any
rate, thinking back.</p>
<p class='c002'>“You are not,” Conway said, and straightened.
“My daddy says you aren’t.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“You don’t go to my school, you don’t go to my
church, you don’t go to the movies I go to. I bet you
never even seen Tim Holt,” he put in parenthetically,
“and that’s because you’re not good enough. Yah-yah!”
Reggie said. “Niggers work for us, niggers
work for us, you’re a nigger and Trixie’s a nigger and
Trixie works for us.” It was a shrilling singsong.
“Yah-yah nigger nigger, go peddle your papers, nigger!”
With this he ran off, back, I suppose, to Trixie,
who worked for him because she was a nigger.</p>
<p class='c002'>Conway did not cry, but in his eyes was the look
of a wound, and I knew how it could grow, become
infected and pump its poison to every tissue, to every
brain cell. He stayed close to me while I made market.
On the way home, he said savagely, “I hate this car!”</p>
<p class='c002'>It did not seem like any kind of entree to what I
knew I must talk about, and the sooner the better.
When what happened to him happens it makes a nasty
wound which demands immediate attention. You
want a knife to do the job quickly, deftly, cleanly, but
the only instruments in the surgery kit are words.</p>
<p class='c002'>So when I wanted to know what was wrong with
the car and why he hated it, and he said, “Why can’t
we have a good car, a new one with a radio, and a bigger
<span class='pageno' id='Page_109'>109</span>one—like Reggie’s?” I tried to explain to him
that it was wartime, that cars were scarce and prices
high, and that in order to get a new car you had to do
something a little underhanded, something that was
not much different from stealing or cheating.</p>
<p class='c002'>“Did Reggie’s father steal?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“I wouldn’t say that,” I said, “but I wouldn’t put it
past him. He’s not a good man.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“How do you know? You don’t know him, do
you?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“No,” I said, “but I don’t have to know him to
know he’s not a good man.” I put it as simply as I
could. I told him that parents are frequently reflected
in their children. I made him laugh a little by reminding
him of the time, when he was six, he had acutely
embarrassed his mother and me by telling one of our
friends, “I think you have store-bought teeth,” which
was exactly what he had heard me say about the
friend.</p>
<p class='c002'>“Those things Reggie said today, his father said to
him. That’s how I know Reggie’s father is not a good
man.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“He wasn’t telling the truth, was he?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“No,” I said, shaking my head.</p>
<p class='c002'>“I mean about him being better?”</p>
<p class='c002'>“No,” I answered.</p>
<p class='c002'>“Then why can’t I go to his school and to his
movies?”</p>
<p class='c002'><span class='pageno' id='Page_110'>110</span>This was the deeper infection, and I did not know
how to deal with it. Words were poultices to seal the
infection in. I could recall them from my own childhood
in answer to a “why?” For children are not
born with answers. Words spoken by my parents, my
teachers, my friends. Words could seal in the infection
and seal in also the self that might never break
through again except with extreme luck. But I had
no choice save to use them. I told him about prejudice.
No one has ever made the anatomy of prejudice simple
enough for children.</p>
<p class='c002'>“And the reason you don’t go to Reggie’s school,”
I remember saying, “is because there are people like
Reggie’s father.”</p>
<p class='c002'>“It’s all complicated up,” Conway answered.</p>
<p class='c002'>It was a relief to laugh at his child’s expression, but
I noticed he was not laughing, and at home some minutes
later, when I had finished storing the groceries
in the pantry, I found him pressed against his mother’s
rounded bosom crying without restraint. But
even that did not end it. “He cried it all out,” his
mother said. She was wrong.</p>
<p class='c002'>Seven years afterward, in the late spring of 1950,
we had a letter from the headmaster of Conway’s New
England preparatory school: “We have been unable
to reach him.... He seems to prefer to be alone and
will not participate even in those activities for which
he has undoubted talents. Naturally this attitude has
<span class='pageno' id='Page_111'>111</span>given us serious concern, for an important part of our
educational program is training in citizenship and co-operative
living....”</p>
<p class='c002'>Perhaps there is only a slight connection, but I
would be hard to convince.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_112'>112</span>
<h2 class='c009'>13</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>I am well aware that there is
supposed to be something reprehensible in advocating
marriage between races—enough, were I a faculty
member in a public-supported college in the South,
to bring about my dismissal for advocacy of it. In
some metaphysical corner of the white man’s mind
intermarriage is identified with immorality, biological
peculiarity and perversion. This identification is
partly a matter of conscience and, as Gunnar Myrdal
exhaustively explains, partly a matter of jealousy. The
unrestricted use of the Negro woman as sex mate and
mammy during slavery did a strange thing to the
white man’s mind. It filled it with anxiety, guilt, and
a grotesque exaggeration of the Negro male’s sexual
equipment—an equipment from which the white
male has felt compelled to protect white womanhood
ever since. In Myrdal’s words, “The necessity to ‘protect’
<span class='pageno' id='Page_113'>113</span>the white female against this fancied prowess of
the male Negro [is] a fixed constellation in the ethos”
of America.</p>
<p class='c002'>The common belief runs that the white girl who
marries a Negro is morally depraved and certainly
sexually abnormal, for no <em>normal</em> white woman could
possibly enjoy the average Negro’s savage sexual potency.
As for the white man who marries a Negro
woman, he will soon “tire of her extraordinary sensuality
and return to the safer, saner sex practices” of
his own kind. Such assertions, made by the majority
race with all the blatant insistence of an uneasy conscience,
have conditioned the Negro sufficiently to
prevent his speaking out in favor of intermarriage. But
no one has bothered to validate the declarations of
sexual incompatibility between the races with scientific
investigations. (No one, so far as I know, has
made a study, for instance, of the comparative sexuality
of the Negro American and the white American.)
That such incompatibility exists between normal individuals
of the two races is an emotion-based assumption
which finds sanction and support in statutes
prohibiting intermarriage. Such statutes seem to me
to be the most fundamental expression of the human
inequality to which the Negro is subjected. They
strike at the deepest roots of personal dignity and
self-respect. It is one thing, and a very good thing, to
be acknowledged as a first-class citizen: it is another
<span class='pageno' id='Page_114'>114</span>and a better thing to be acknowledged a first-class
human being. This is the ultimate civility.</p>
<p class='c002'>But if the assumption of sexual incompatibility is
based in emotion, the beliefs about miscegenation are
founded on pure mythology. The myths about Negro-white
blood mixture are a curious interweaving
of the biological, the moral and the social. The myths
are contradictory enough to be mutually exclusive,
but emotionalism absorbs the contradictions. In the
first place, quite contrary to all other blood-group
designations, in America anyone having a single drop
of Negro blood is classed as a Negro. In as much as
this practice was thought to place a restraint on interracial
concubinage (though during slavery its real
purpose was to increase the number of human chattels),
it once had a kind of left-handed moral sanction.
Since that time it has become a national habit
and is solidified by law in the Southern states. It has
engendered beliefs as irrational and as inexplicable as
nightmares.</p>
<p class='c002'>White men have won libel suits for mistakenly being
called Negro, yet there is a strong belief among
the majority of whites that for the Negro to have
white blood is to adulterate his highest and best potentials.
But the matter is even crazier than that, for
another belief is simultaneously held: only Negroes
with white blood begin to approach the white man’s
biological, mental and moral standards. At the same
<span class='pageno' id='Page_115'>115</span>time that the Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr., was setting
forth in his best-selling novel (<cite>The Leopard’s Spots</cite>)
and his smash-hit drama (<cite>The Clansman</cite>) the proposition
that the offspring of mixed parentage were degenerate,
crafty, vicious and depraved, the superior
attainments of Booker T. Washington were being
accounted for by the fact that his father was white.
The kind, gentle, loyal Negro mammies were always
pure black; but all the colored tarts that ever lured
white men to Lethean beds were “high yaller.”</p>
<p class='c002'>The term “half white,” forever loosely used, covers
all degrees of blood mixture and all kinds of contrarieties.
If there were rationality in the matter, then in
keeping with the implication of the dominance of
Negro blood over white blood in the accepted definition
of Negro, the term would be “half black.” It
makes no kind of sense that “half white” should mean
an endowment of all the criminal tendencies <em>and</em> a
prodigy like Philippa Schuyler (whose mother is
white) and Walter White (who is more than a quarter
white) and the novelist Frank Yerby (who is perhaps
an eighth) and Ralph Bunche (who is a thirty-second).
It makes no kind of sense that an intelligent
white woman on first seeing Paul Robeson, whose
reputation was international and then unsmirched,
should remark to her companion, “Why, I expected
him to be black! I thought, you know, if they had
white blood they generally turned out badly.”</p>
<p class='c002'><span class='pageno' id='Page_116'>116</span>If that were the case, at least ten million of the fourteen
million American Negroes would be bad ones.
And if all those who have a drop of Negro blood confessed
to it, there would be uncountable numbers
more. For the fact is that many miscegenates pass over
into the white race every day. A conservative estimate
is that four million Negroes, with all their spermatozoa
and ova, genes and chromosomes, have been absorbed
into the white American blood stream in the last two
decades. They have left scarcely a trace. Negroes
throw up a protective wall of silence around individual
passing. Thus it is well known among colored people
that a certain famous moving picture star is the daughter
of a Negro woman. The white but not the Negro
public was shocked four or five years ago when a
prominent New York lawyer made a courtroom confession
of his tarbrushed parentage in order to clear
himself for a share in a rich bequest. Many “white”
people eminent in public life, in industry, in government,
and the arts are known by Negroes to be Negro.</p>
<p class='c002'>And if there were truth in the myths, passing would
be all but impossible. The black blood would tell in
real life as it is so frequently made to do in fiction. Industrialists
and other employers would detect it in
absenteeism, gold-bricking and general shiftlessness.
Psychologists would spot it by behavior indexes—unmodulated
speech, flashy clothes and other forms
of exhibitionism. Physiologists would detect it in the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_117'>117</span>shape and tincture of the fingernails and in the thickness
of the skull. Anatomists would see it in “the curious
heel structure” (which was supposed to account
for the speed of Jesse Owens, Ralph Metcalfe, <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">et al.</span></i>!)
of the Negro male and in the peculiar “ovoid shape of
the [Negro] female’s buttocks.”<SPAN name='r11' /><SPAN href='#f11' class='c016'><sup>[11]</sup></SPAN> Psychiatrists would
mark it in overt aggressive tendencies, or in other
forms of emotional infantilism, or in a total absence of
emotional response. And everyone would detect it in
the “rusty,” “acrid,” “unbearable” odor that Negroes
give off.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_118'>118</span>
<h2 class='c009'>14</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>While I am in a petulant mood,
let me say that I am race-conscious enough to be
shocked and irritated frequently by what even professed
white friends do not know, on both the personal
and historical level, about Negroes. There is a glaring
case in point.</p>
<p class='c002'>During her husband’s administration, Mrs. Eleanor
Roosevelt became acquainted with a black, bosomy
and intensely dynamic woman named Mrs. Mary McLeod
Bethune. The Negro woman was then Deputy
Administrator of NYA, and through her the President’s
wife, a sincere and fearless woman, got closely
involved with the race problem. The white South
fretted over the spectacle of Mrs. Roosevelt being
shepherded through the intricate mazes of racial and
interracial affairs. It was alleged (and the South, as
did Negroes everywhere, took it for truth) that Mrs.
Bethune, through Mrs. Roosevelt, had special rights
<span class='pageno' id='Page_119'>119</span>to the President’s ear. She certainly seemed to have
such rights to the ear of F.D.R.’s wife. More than
one photograph shows the two women in earnest conversation
in what seem to be intimate circumstances.</p>
<p class='c002'>Mrs. Bethune is very much alive. She is frequently
mentioned and pictured in the colored press. She is
ex-president of the National Federation of Colored
Women. She took a dominant part in a conference on
old age at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington in 1950.
She spoke at perhaps a half dozen major college commencements
in 1951. But in her book <cite>This I Remember</cite>,
written in 1949, Mrs. Roosevelt, after words of
heartening warmth for the black woman, refers to her
as “the late [dead, deceased!] Mrs. Mary McLeod
Bethune.” Mrs. Roosevelt’s reputation (earned at
the cost of great personal criticism) for knowledge
about and interest in Negroes, for liberalism, for social
intelligence and tact is as a broad pen stroke underscoring
the pattern of false belief and cavalier know-nothing-about-the-Negro
attitude to which the majority
conforms. Yet even she could make this error!</p>
<p class='c002'>As an ideal, of course, I am all for the deletion of
racial designations in newspaper stories and the like.
But the ideal is nowhere near attainment. It seems that
it is still a general practice in newsrooms in a large part
of the country to specify race when Negroes are involved
in crime, and it is still usual to omit, except from
feature stories and special articles, racial designation in
<span class='pageno' id='Page_120'>120</span>news copy that would reflect credit on the colored
people. When Ralph Bunche stepped in as mediator of
the Jewish-Arab dispute, the fact that he was an American
Negro first broke in the foreign press. In spite of
hundreds of front-page news stories from competent
war correspondents, it is even now not generally
known that the 24th Infantry, which fought so hard
and bought with its life (it was almost totally destroyed)
the time General MacArthur needed in the
early fighting in Korea, was a Negro outfit in the segregated
United States Army.</p>
<p class='c002'>Personally, as matters stand, I would settle for something
less than the ideal. Seldom does one see the minority-group
designations “Italian,” “Greek,” “Jewish,”
“Irish,” and the like attached to crime stories involving
persons of these groups. But neither, it is
replied, do you see them attached to other stories.
True, and this is all very well. It is a matter of nomenclature.
Negro names being what they generally are—as
indigenous to America as “hot dog,” or as unmistakably
Anglo-Saxon-derived as “Gudger”—Ralph
Bunche and Charles Drew, William Hastie and
George Dows Cannon might belong to any Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant or Catholic. But no one of reading
intelligence would mistake Bernard Baruch or Sholem
Asch as of other than Jewish heritage, or Fiorello LaGuardia
and Vincent Impellitteri as of other than Italian
ancestry, or George Skouras as of other than
<span class='pageno' id='Page_121'>121</span>Greek, or Roosevelt and Vanderbilt as other than
Dutch, or William Cardinal O’Connell as other than
Irish. We make these associations automatically, and
there passes into the communal intelligence some
sense of the contributions these groups make to American
life. On the other hand, diffused throughout our
national life and thought is the fallacy that the Negro
has contributed nothing substantial.</p>
<p class='c002'>Not to know the Negro on the group and historical
level is to rob him of his pride and of his rightful
share in the American heritage. He cannot claim what
is his, except in an intorted and psychologically unhealthy
way. The Negro on the lower levels saves
himself from complete madness by following a pattern
of neurotic expression that is patent in his lazy-lipped
and mumbling speech, in his gay-bird dress, and in his
prowlike walk. The Negro on the upper level turns
back upon himself with a voracity of egocentrism that
bewilders the casual observer. “What a self-conscious
people your Negroes are!” a recent French visitor exclaimed.
He was right. The Negro lives constantly
on two planes of awareness. Watching the telecast of
a boxing match between Ezzard Charles, the Negro
who happened to be heavyweight champion, and a
white challenger, a friend of mine said, “I don’t like
Charles as a person [one level] but I’ve got to root
for him to beat this white boy—and good [second
level].”</p>
<p class='c002'><span class='pageno' id='Page_122'>122</span>One’s heart is sickened at the realization of the primal
energy that goes undeflected and unrefined into
the sheer business of living as a Negro in the United
States—in any one of the United States. Negroness is
a kind of superconsciousness that directs thinking,
that dictates action, and that perverts the expression of
instinctual drives which are salutary and humanitarian—the
civic drive, for instance, so that in general
Negroes are cynically indifferent to politics; the societal
drive, so that ordinarily the Negro’s concern is
only with himself as an individual; and even the sex
and love drive, so that many Negroes suffer sexual
maladjustments and many a Negro couple refuse to
bear children who will “inevitably grow up under a
burden of obloquy and shame that would daunt and
degrade a race of angels.” It is impossible to believe
with Lillian Smith that the psychological damage
caused by the race situation in America is greater to
whites than to Negroes. “Every one of us knows,” an
internationally known Negro said recently, “that
there is no ‘normal’ American Negro.” Public asylums
for the mentally deranged offer a telling statistic.
Though Negroes are something less than ten per cent
of the country’s population, they are eleven per cent
of the total population of public institutions for the
insane.</p>
<p class='c002'>Compulsively dissociated from the American tradition,
the Negro on the upper level has had to maintain
<span class='pageno' id='Page_123'>123</span>the pretense of possessing what he is in fact denied. He
has had no choice but this. He has not been free to
realize his ideals or to strive to be what the American
tradition has made him wish to be. Paul Lawrence
Dunbar, probably the most popular American poet at
the turn of the century, did not wish to write “jingles
in a broken tongue,” but he was Negro and as a Negro
he had to write dialect or else have no hearing as a
poet. James Weldon Johnson did not wish to compose
those “darky” lyrics and “coon songs” for Williams
and Walker’s and his own brother Rosamond’s shows—nor
did Williams and Walker and Rosamond Johnson
wish to sing them and caper to them. But how else
were they to find outlets for their creative urges, when
all of the more congenial and less particularized were
dammed up against them? DuBois had ideas for a
career other than the one he was compelled to follow.
“Had it not been for the race problem early thrust
upon me and enveloping me,” he wrote in <cite>Dusk of
Dawn</cite>, “I should have probably been an unquestioning
worshiper at the shrine of the social order and economic
development into which I was born.... What
was wrong was that I and people like me and thousands
of others who might have my ability and aspiration,
were refused permission to be a part of this world. It
was as though moving on a rushing express, my main
thought was as to the relations I had to other passengers
on the express, and not to its rate of speed and its destination....
<span class='pageno' id='Page_124'>124</span>My attention from the first was focused ...
upon the problem of the admission of my people into
the freedom of democracy.”<SPAN name='r12' /><SPAN href='#f12' class='c016'><sup>[12]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c002'>The dissociation of the Negro from the American
tradition and the lack of knowledge of the Negro on
the historical level are certainly in part the fault of
social commentators and historians and social scholars.
The historians particularly have been guilty of almost
complete silence, like William A. Dunning; or of
faulty investigation, like James Ford Rhodes; or of
misinterpretation of the facts, like Ulrich Philips
and W. E. Woodward; or of propaganda, like William
E. Dodd and Jesse Carpenter; or of frank and
determined anti-Negro bias, like dozens, major and
minor, including Claude Bowers, James Truslow
Adams, and John W. Burgess—the last of whom, by
his prestige as a faculty member at Columbia University,
gave scholarly sanction to prejudice. He wrote
as follows:</p>
<p class='c002'>“The claim that there is nothing in the color of the
skin from the point of view of political ethics is a
great sophism. A black skin means membership in a
race of men which has never of itself succeeded in
subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore, created
any civilization of any kind. To put such a race
of men in possession of a ‘state’ government in a system
<span class='pageno' id='Page_125'>125</span>of federal government is to trust them with the
development of political and legal civilization upon the
most important subjects of human life.... There is
something natural in the subordination of an inferior
race to a superior race, even to the point of the enslavement
of the inferior race.... It is the white man’s
mission, his duty and his right, to hold the reins of
political power in his own hands for the civilization of
the world and the welfare of mankind.”<SPAN name='r13' /><SPAN href='#f13' class='c016'><sup>[13]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c002'>Ignorance and willful distortion of the facts of
American life and history in regard to the Negro’s role
have set the Negro scholar what up to now has been a
thankless task. In pure self-defense he has had to try
to set the record straight. The first Negro professional
writer in America, William Wells Brown, was primarily
a historian. Negro scholars have written thousands
of dissertations, theses, monographs, articles,
essays and books in a gigantic effort to correct the
multiple injuries done the race by white writers. Five
great collections—at Howard, Hampton, Fisk, Yale,
and the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library—house
thousands of volumes and hundreds of
magazine and newspaper files, but few except Negroes
bother to disturb their dust. Whites show little interest
in this Negroana. They seem to feel that they do
not need to know about the Negro; they seem to feel
<span class='pageno' id='Page_126'>126</span>that the basic truths about him were established long
ago. Even the primary source material on him whom
white America calls the greatest Negro American,
him whom they have enshrined in the Hall of Fame
and about whom they have written ten million words—even
the primary source material on Booker Washington—some
twenty thousand letters and other papers—remain
scarcely touched and certainly unexplored
in the Library of Congress, though the Harvard
University Press published an erudite and “definitive
biography” of the man in 1949.</p>
<p class='c002'>Negro writers remain generally unrepresented in
anthologies of American literature, though in the light
of the cultural history of America, the slave biographies
(and there are some “literary” ones among them)
are at least as important as anything Seba Smith,
Charles Augustus Davis, John P. Kennedy and William
Gilmore Simms ever wrote. Paul Lawrence Dunbar
was a better poet, and, in the opinion of William
Dean Howells, a more popular poet and, by the
very standard of indigenousness which some anthologists
claim to follow, a more important poet than
James Whitcomb Riley. James Weldon Johnson and
Claude McKay enjoyed international reputations as
writers, but they are absent from the best-known
American anthologies. Richard Wright has been
translated into a dozen languages, including the Chinese,
and is rated by Europeans with Steinbeck, Hemingway
<span class='pageno' id='Page_127'>127</span>and Faulkner, but American anthologies
neglect him. Gwendolyn Brooks has won the Pulitzer
prize for poetry, which is more than Jesse Stuart and
William Carlos Williams have done, but her work is
not in the collections of American writing.</p>
<p class='c002'>Nor is the most representative work by whites who
have written about Negroes with some regard for justice
and truth. Editors use Faulkner’s “A Rose for
Emily,” “The Bear” and chapters from <cite>Sartoris</cite> and
<cite>Told by an Idiot</cite>, but not “Evening Sun Go Down,” or
excerpts from <cite>Light in August</cite> and <cite>Intruder in the
Dust</cite>. Chapters from <cite>Huckleberry Finn</cite> are used, but
not those which show Nigger Jim to be much like
other human beings, nor those which excoriate the institution
of slavery and express Huck’s hatred of it.
George W. Cable is generally represented by selections
from <cite>Old Creole Days</cite> and innocuous passages
from <cite>The Grandissimes</cite>, but never by <cite>Madame Delphine</cite>
(certainly one of his best books), <cite>The Silent
South</cite> or <cite>The Negro Question</cite>.</p>
<p class='c002'>The result of this arrogant neglect has been to
render American cultural history less effective as an
instrument of diagnosis and evaluation. What we have
as history reflects little credit upon American historians
as scholars. Their work makes pleasant reading
and inflates the national ego, but it does not tell those
sometimes hard and shameful truths that might now be
helpful for the world to know. What Lillian Smith
<span class='pageno' id='Page_128'>128</span>calls “the old conspiracy of silence” needs to be
broken, and the “maze of fantasy and falsehood that
[has] little resemblance to the actual world” needs to
be dissolved. The psychopathic resistance to self-knowledge
that the American mind has developed
must be broken down. What we have got to know are
the things that actually happened—and are still happening—in
America. With these things clear before
us, perhaps we can use our knowledge and experience
for the guidance of mankind.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_129'>129</span>
<h2 class='c009'>15</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>But there are limits to what
even knowledge can accomplish, as any psychologist
will tell you. Knowledge alone is not enough to redeem
life from folly and to save men from despair. If
it ever was, it is no longer valid to assume that learning’s
supreme glory is in the safeguarding of humanity,
the dispelling of prejudice, and the achieving of those
moral values that are said to have inspired men of other
ages. Perhaps I am deeply pessimistic, but I simply
cannot believe that if only people knew enough of the
what, the why and the how, all would be right with
the world. Knowledge does not ensure moral behavior;
it all too willingly puts itself at the service of
despotism and inhumanity. I suppose that what is
lacking in our modern learning and among our modern
learned is a sense that morality is the product of
human experience—that it comes, anciently out of a
<span class='pageno' id='Page_130'>130</span>wisdom we have forgotten, from a realization of the
character of human life.</p>
<p class='c002'>Certainly the moralistic approach to human relations
in general and to race relations in particular in
America has failed so consistently that one mentions
this approach with embarrassment and reluctance. It is
considered namby-pamby, pusillanimous, Uncle-Tomish.
Few, even of the ministers of the gospel, appeal
to nobility and virtue and goodness any more, except
as these qualities seem disingenuously to be connected
with “practical concerns.” We no longer think
of great men as being great in those virtuous qualities
to which former and simpler ages subscribed. Those
moral excellencies—love, honor, truth—seem to many
ordinary people “a long way removed from our normal
affairs.” Great men today are “practical-minded,”
“realistic” and “public-spirited,” and none of these
attributes, I take it, is necessarily virtuous. To be trite
about it, any one of them can cover a multitude of
evils. The realistic attitude has been the excuse for
innumerable travesties of human rights; in the name
of public spirit heinous crimes have been committed
against the dignity of man; and too many politicians
and diplomats have made practical-mindedness the inviolable
sanction for the suppression of the worthy
ambitions of the powerless.</p>
<p class='c002'>It must be, for instance, the operation of these
qualities that is leading to the continuing farce that
<span class='pageno' id='Page_131'>131</span>American men are making of UNESCO’s Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. They are making a
farce of both its purpose and its content. Everyone
knows—or certainly everyone should know—what
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is. It is a
document so clearly and simply expressive of what is
in the hearts and minds of the men of the masses that,
indeed, a man of the masses might easily have written
it. In 1946, the representatives of eighteen national
governments—members of the United Nations—began
work on the framing of a statement that would,
as Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “establish standards
for human rights and freedom the world over,” so that
the recognition of these rights and freedoms “might
become one of the corner-stones on which peace could
eventually be based.” Two years later the Commission
on Human Rights presented its declaration to the
General Assembly of the United Nations. Forty-eight
governments voted to accept it. What they voted to
accept is stated in the preamble:</p>
<p class='c002'>“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and
of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of
the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice
and peace in the world,</p>
<p class='c002'>“Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights
have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged
the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world
in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech
<span class='pageno' id='Page_132'>132</span>and belief and freedom from fear and want has been
proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common
people....</p>
<p class='c002'>“Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have
in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental
human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human
person and in the equal rights of men and women and
have determined to promote social progress and better
standards of life in larger freedom....”</p>
<p class='c002'>This was fine and hopeful, and, indeed, the more so
that the Declaration was born of the Charter of the
United Nations. The Charter is no blueprint for an
abstract world. It sets a premium on maturity, of
course; but also it sets a premium on respect for
reality.</p>
<p class='c002'>After the General Assembly’s acceptance, to make
the Universal Declaration law there remained only
the act of ratification by each participating government.
It was at this point that a hitch developed. Perhaps
the State Department had dismissed, even at its
inception, the work of the Commission on Human
Rights as unimportant. Perhaps the State Department
was so concerned with the “practical and immediate”
problems of the cold war that it simply forgot the
Declaration for two years, and forgot, too, that the
United States had taken the lead in securing the General
Assembly’s adoption of a resolution embodying
the Declaration. Perhaps there were petty and selfish
<span class='pageno' id='Page_133'>133</span>political considerations. Perhaps there was bald
hypocrisy in the whole thing. I cannot give cause. I
can only declare that when, in 1950, after what
seemed an unnecessarily long delay, the matter of
ratification by the United States came up, the State
Department demurred.</p>
<p class='c002'>At first it demurred over the inclusion of Articles
22–27 of the Declaration. But since most of these
articles embody principles which are already written
into United States law or supported by immemorial
custom, the State Department’s objection to them
seemed inexplicable. As Rayford Logan, a member of
the United States National Commission for UNESCO,
pointed out at the time, there is nothing revolutionary
to American principles in the statement that “Everyone ... has a right to social security,” or in the statement
that “Everyone has a right to education,” or in
the statement that “Everyone has the right to a standard
of living adequate for health.” No. The objection
seemed to be to Article 23:</p>
<p class='c002'>“(1) Everyone has the right to work, to <em>free</em> choice
of employment, to just and favorable conditions of
work and to protection against unemployment. (2)
Everyone, <em>without any discrimination</em>, has the right to
equal pay for equal work....” (Italics mine.)</p>
<p class='c002'>Once the Declaration was ratified, these clauses
would have necessitated the establishment of a law no
different in intent from the proposed F.E.P.C. But
<span class='pageno' id='Page_134'>134</span>this is not the point that Mr. Edward W. Barrett, of
the State Department, made in stating the objection to
acceptance of the entire declaration. “Whereas,” he
wrote, “a maximum degree of agreement exists (outside
the Iron Curtain) on political and civil rights,
there is no general agreement on economic and social
rights. The laws and practices of the members of the
United Nations differ widely on those rights as set
forth in the Declaration.”</p>
<p class='c002'>It does not particularly matter, I suppose, that this
amounts to saying that the United Nations had not
agreed on what they obviously had agreed on; nor that
no clear and sharp distinction (such as Mr. Barrett’s
letter implies) can be drawn between political and
civil rights on the one hand and economic and social
rights on the other.</p>
<p class='c002'>It does not particularly matter because the State Department
gave even grosser expression to the “realistic”
point of view that, to paraphrase, democracy is based
on compromises in which big ends are surrendered to
small goals. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights says:</p>
<p class='c002'>“(1) Men and women of full age, <em>without any limitation
due to race</em>, nationality or religion, have the
right to marry and to found a family....” (Italics
mine.)</p>
<p class='c002'>Could it be that this provision was in Mr. Barrett’s
mind when he wrote: “Neither the Executive Branch
<span class='pageno' id='Page_135'>135</span>nor the Congress would desire that our Government
should ratify a convention which contains obligations
that our Government and our people are unwilling or
unable to honor.”?</p>
<p class='c010'>There is a deep sickness in the American mind and
spirit, and it threatens to infect democracy itself and
render it impotent as an ideal. But not only this; the
sickness also threatens to make democracy ineffective
as an instrument through which the individual can
realize his highest self and in co-operation with other
selves give zest, richness and meaning to human endeavor.
For democracy is two things. It is a political
instrument: it is an ideal. As an ideal, the notion of the
world as a vast arena, where purposeless and inexplicable
forces play, and where inevitable fate renders the
mind and the spirit of the individual helpless, dissolves
before it. As an ideal, it is in raw conflict with sterile
determinism and fatalism. It assumes that the only
source of human happiness or misery is human beings
themselves, and its very dogma proclaims that co-operative
endeavor is the way to human happiness.
And this is sensible, for we know—and we know it
scientifically—that co-operation is the law of life.
When men co-operate, they and their enterprises
prosper; peace reigns. This is not humanistic nonsense.
Authorized to speak the considered opinion of a group
<span class='pageno' id='Page_136'>136</span>of renowned scientific scholars of the Committee of
Experts on Race Problems of UNESCO, Ashley
Montagu declared: “Man’s <em>inherent</em> drives toward co-operation
need but to be cultivated and intelligently
handled for this world to be turned into a Paradise on
earth—when all men will, at last, <em>live by the rule it is
their nature to live by</em>—the Golden Rule to love your
neighbor as yourself.” (Italics mine.)</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_137'>137</span>
<h2 class='c009'>16</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>Although I am not a very
religious person, I do not see how I can leave God out
of consideration in these matters. God has been made
to play a very conspicuous part in race relations in
America. At one time or another, and often at the
same time, He has been the protagonist for both sides.
He has damned and blessed first one side and then the
other with truly godlike impartiality. His ultimate
intentions, revealed to inspired sages, are preserved in
a thousand volumes. Anyone who reads the literature
of race cannot but be struck by the immoderate frequency
with which God is invoked, and by the painstaking
consideration that is given, even by social scientists,
to race relations as a problem of Christian ethics.</p>
<p class='c002'>God, of course, is an implicit assumption in the
thought of our age. He is one of those beliefs so spontaneous
and ineluctable and taken so much as a matter
<span class='pageno' id='Page_138'>138</span>of course that they operate with great effectiveness
(though generally on a level of subconsciousness) in
our society. He is a belief that operates just by being,
like a boulder met in the path which must be dealt
with before one can proceed on his journey. God is a
complex composed entirely of simple elements—mediator,
father, judge, jury, executioner, and also love,
virtue, charity—each of which generates a very motley
collection of often contradictory ideas. God is a
catalyst, and He is also a formulated doctrine inertly
symbolized in the ritual and the dogma of churches
called Christian. God is the Absolute Reality, but this
does not prevent His being ostentatiously offered as
the excuse for our society’s failure to come to grips
with big but relative realities. God and the Christian
religion must be reckoned with.</p>
<p class='c002'>I do not know how long I have held both God and
the Christian religion in some doubt, though it must
have been since my teens. Nor do I know exactly how
this came about. My father was (and is) very religious,
of great and clear and unbending faith. My
mother was less so, but the family went regularly to
church, where we were all active, and I used occasionally
to see my mother so deeply touched by a
religious feeling that she could not keep back the tears.
What inspired it in that chill atmosphere it is impossible
to say. I can only think that it came as a result of
some very personal communion with God, established
<span class='pageno' id='Page_139'>139</span>perhaps by a random thought, a word, or a certain
slant of light through the yellow and rose and purple
windows. There was never any shouting or “getting
happy” among us, or in our church; none of that
ecstatic abandon that set men and women jumping
and dancing and screaming in the aisles. After the
northward migration following the First World War,
a few people who may have had a natural tendency to
such transports found their way to our church, but
they were frustrated by the mechanical expertness of
the uninspired sermons, the formalized prayers, and
by the choirmaster’s preference for hymns translated
from fifteenth-century Latin. Never did I hear a
spiritual sung in our church, and only rarely a common-meter
Calvinist hymn.</p>
<p class='c002'>Sometime during my teens I became aware that for
most Negroes God was a great deal more than a spirit
to be worshiped on Sundays. He had a terrifying
immediacy as material provider and protector. Once
a group of us teen-agers went on a Sunday evening
(our own church worshiped only in the morning) to
a mission church deep in the Bridge District where the
Negro population was concentrated. We went to
mock, as some of us had heard our parents do, at the
malapropisms of the illiterate minister and his ignorant
flock, the crazy singing and shouting, and the uninhibited
behavior of members in religious ecstasy. We
did not remain to pray, but I was struck by what I
<span class='pageno' id='Page_140'>140</span>saw and heard, and afterward my natural curiosity led
me to go occasionally alone. The service did not resemble,
either in ritual or content (both of which were
created spontaneously), the service to which I was
used. Any member of the church could stand up and
pray. A whole evening might be given over to these
impulsive outbursts. The prayers impressed me with
their concreteness, their concern for the everyday. I
heard one distraught mother, whose daughter evidently
was sitting beside her, beseech God: “Now here’s
Idabelle, an’ she’s gone and got herself bigged, an’ I’m
askin’ you, God, to make the young rascal who done it
marry her. His name’s Herbie Washington, an’ he
stays on the street nex’ to me.” They prayed for
bread, not in a general, symbolic “give us this day our
daily bread” sense, but for specific bread and meat
for specific occasions. “Aunt Callie Black’s laying up
there sick, Lord, an’ when I seen her, she tol’ me her
mouth was watering for some hot biscuit, an’ that’s the
reason I’m asking You to give her some hot biscuit
‘fore I go to see her again nex’ Tuesday.” They
wanted clothes and they asked for them. They wanted
pitiful but specific sums of money. They wanted protection
from their real enemies. “Lord Jesus, don’t
let that mean nigger, Joe Fisher, stick me with no
knife.”</p>
<p class='c002'>Negroes made irrational claims on God which they
expected Him to fulfill without any help from them
<span class='pageno' id='Page_141'>141</span>and without any regard for the conditions under
which they could be fulfilled, and I suppose that
when their claims failed, there was some sort of psychological
mechanism that produced satisfactory excuses.
It was all very simple and direct, but God just
did not work that way—not the white folk’s God I
was taught to worship.</p>
<p class='c002'>I do not believe that this incongruity set me thinking
until at the small and rather exclusive (though public)
high school I attended, a science teacher pointed
it up. He was a bitter, frustrated man, full of self-hatred
and of contempt for his race. Often staggering
drunk outside the classroom, he was said to spend his
week ends in an alcoholic fog of hatred writing scurrilous
anti-Negro letters to the “people’s opinion”
column of the local paper. (Such letters did appear
there with persistent regularity.) Our science teacher
was certainly no good for us. Monday mornings were
invariably void of science instruction.</p>
<p class='c002'>“How many of you went hat-in-hand to God yesterday
and asked him to get your chemistry for you
this week?” he would begin. “He won’t, and you
can take my word for that. The trouble with niggers—”
what malevolent contempt he put into the
word!—“is that they look to God to do for them.
That’s why they’re like they are—not only ignorant,
but stupid; not only inferior, but debased. ‘You can
take all this world, but give me Jesus,’ the song says,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_142'>142</span>and that’s just what the white people have been doing—taking
the world and giving you Jesus. God, if
there is a God, which I doubt, helps those who help
themselves. Now study your chemistry!”</p>
<p class='c002'>(How he managed to stay on with his drunkenness
and his fundamental corruption, of which everyone
was aware, is not beyond my comprehension so much
as it is beyond my belief. He was one of the “big,”
upper-class mulatto families with members thriving in
the professions up and down the Eastern seaboard.
They were not a powerful family, having neither
money, nor political influence, nor potent white
patrons; but they had social prestige because of their
antiquity, their relatively long tradition of freedom,
their education, and their considerable infusion of
white blood. In those days the feeling was that such a
family must not be disgraced by the derelictions of one
of its members. The black sheep must be protected,
if he could not be hidden, and pitied because he could
not be punished.)</p>
<p class='c002'>Such assertions were almost daily fare. It was not
hard to find support for them. I could see that most
Negroes were poor and ignorant and inferior. Every
year on the last Sunday in August one of the Negro
religious denominations held a “quarterly meeting” in
my home town. People from a half dozen states
poured in the day before and roamed the streets all
night, or slept anywhere they could—on the courthouse
<span class='pageno' id='Page_143'>143</span>lawn, in the wagons and trucks that brought
them, in alleys and doorways. But on the Sunday,
what excitement! What noisy exuberance! Six city
blocks, just below the main street, were inundated
with the germinal tide of their living. Preachers exhorted;
food vendors shouted; choirs sang; bands
played; lost children bawled; city prostitutes pushed
brazenly for trade among the young men from the
country; people prayed and went into transports.</p>
<p class='c002'>I do not know when I began to notice the white
people. I suppose they had always been there. But
along in my fourteenth or fifteenth year, I suddenly
seemed to see them. Small phalanxes of them always
seemed to be pushing or imperiously demanding passage
through the crowds that fell away before them
like grain before a scythe. The white people sneered—or
so it seemed to me—and took pictures and made
derisive comments. They looked down in laughing
contempt from the windows, balconies and roofs of
the buildings that lined the street. They came, also
from miles around, to watch the show, not to be a
part of it. I realized with deep shame that what the
Negroes did on this holy day made a clowns’ circus
for the whites. The Negroes’ God made fools of
them. Worship and religiosity were things to be
mocked and scorned, for they stamped the Negro as
inferior.</p>
<p class='c002'>There must have been many vague progressions of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_144'>144</span>thought and many gradations of emotion between the
premise and the conclusion. However little I was
aware of them, my nerves, muscles and brain—conditioned
by a thousand random and forgotten experiences—must
have prepared me to accept the conclusion
without outrage and shock. I simply rejected
religion. I rejected God. Not my instincts, but my
deepest feelings revolted compulsively—not because
I was I, a sort of neutral human stuff reacting directly
to experience, but because I was Negro. It is hard to
make it clear; but there were two people sharing my
physical existence and tearing me apart. One, I suppose,
was the actual self which I wanted to protect
and yet which I seemed to hate with a consuming
hatred; and the other was the ideal self which tried
compulsively to shape the actual self away from all
that Negroes seemed to be. At what emotional and
psychic cost this deep emotional conflict went on
within me I do not know. It was years before I understood
that what I had wanted then was to be white.</p>
<p class='c002'>It was also years before I made a sort of armed truce
with religion and with God. I stepped around God
determinedly, gingerly, gloating that I was free of
Him and that He could not touch me. Indeed, I had
to step around Him, for He was always there. He
was there, foursquare and solid, at the very center of
my father’s life. (My father habitually ends his letters,
“May the spirit of the Almighty God, whose interest
<span class='pageno' id='Page_145'>145</span>is always manifest, be with you!”) At Brown University
He was in Dr. Washburn’s sermons, and President
Faunce’s chapel talks, and Professor Ducasse’s philosophy
course. He was in various people I met and felt
affection for. He was in the ineffable, tremulous
sweetness of the first love I felt; in the drowning
ecstasy of the first sexual experience; in the joy of
imaginative creation. But I moved around Him
warily, laughing, mocking His pretensions, determined
that He would not betray me into Negroness.
If there lingered still in the deep recesses of my real self
some consciousness of a religious spirit, then the ideal
self—the Negro-hating me—did all it could to exorcise
it.</p>
<p class='c002'>How unmitigating and long-lasting this conflict was
is proved for me in the fact that only in the last ten
years have I been able to go to church without a feeling
of indulging in some senseless necromantic ritual,
and without feeling that my wanting to go—and I did
many times <em>want</em> to go; if this seems contradictory, I
cannot help it—was a mark of inferiority, the foolish
expression of a weak and senseless wish to attain an
impossible realm of being differing in its essential
nature—that is, in its reality—from anything my experience
has taught me can be attained. I do not
believe in an afterlife; in otherworldliness. The experiences
of this world are too potent and too much with
me. I do not see how any Negro can believe in another
<span class='pageno' id='Page_146'>146</span>world, and the religion which has inspired him to that
belief, if it has saved him, has done so by making him
content with the very degradation of his humanity
that is so abhorrent to the principles of Christianity.</p>
<p class='c002'>But it is not alone for the reasons outlined above
that I have held religion suspect. Let us concede that
the God of the Negroes has been largely a pagan god
and largely stripped of the divinest attributes, interceding
intimately and directly for man without man’s
help. They have fashioned a god to their need. But
the whites also have fashioned a god to their need, and
have believed in him, and have professed to follow
him. He is a moral God, a God of truth and justice
and love. I do not wish to carry this too far, for I have
no capacity for philosophic speculation; but it seems
to me that if the qualities attributed to God represent
man’s acknowledged needs, and if the principles of
Christianity represent the universal source of man’s
social genius, then he has sacrificed the fulfillment of
his basic needs (or “the good life”) to the fulfillment
of desires that run counter to the purpose of living.
He has not given his religion a chance to help him
effect that far-going social transformation and evolution
which should be religion’s end. Religion has become
a disembodied sort of activity, when, to be
effective, it should be a social function intimately
linked up with man’s fate on earth.</p>
<p class='c002'>While there is almost no religion operating in race
<span class='pageno' id='Page_147'>147</span>relations, there is plenty of God. I do not say this facetiously,
nor with ironic intent; and, anyway, it has at
least been implied before. There is an extensive literature
on the part God has played in race relations since
the fifteenth century. Principally God and the word
of God have been used to perpetuate the wicked idea
of human inferiority. I need not go into this farther
than to point out modern man’s subtle modifications
of the idea of God and the intellectual gymnastics that
have made those modifications possible, even when, it
seems to me, the environment has not made them
necessary, and even though in the fundamental concept
of the Godhead is the idea of immutability. But
God has changed, and though man himself has
wrought these changes, he has declared them God’s
own changes and therefore factors, equations, and of a
piece with the mysterious and unknowable nature of
God. Indeed, God’s very supernaturalness, His mysteriousness
and inscrutability (“God moves in mysterious
ways His wonders to perform,” <i><span lang="la" xml:lang="la">ergo</span></i> “we cannot
know God’s purpose in making the black race inferior
to the white,” and we cannot “fathom the repulsion
which God has given one race for another, or one
people for another”) are largely modern attributions
which confound the ancient knowledge and excuse
modern sin. God was not always so.</p>
<p class='c002'>And before the ancient concepts crashed under the
onslaught of sophistication, of scientific materialism
<span class='pageno' id='Page_148'>148</span>and the new philosophies it brought into being, Christianity
had become a way of life. It had become a way
of life to be striven for because it seemed to satisfy the
needs of ordinary men. There is nothing mysterious
about Christianity. Granted that mystery reposes in
the life of Christ (as, let it be said, it did not originally
repose in God)—but Christ’s life and what he is
reported to have done are one thing: what he is reported
to have taught is another. What he taught is as
clear and concrete and literal as the lead story in a good
newspaper. He taught that the kingdom of heaven is
here on earth. He preached that men should love one
another. He said that all men are brothers. He sought
to bind men together in one mighty neighborhood.
He was, for all the mystery surrounding him, a social
engineer with a far and cosmic vision. The present
age has not denied that he was right. Though there are
those (and I among them) who reject the traditionally
perpetuated events of his life as a factual record, his
ministry remains the source of Christian religion.
What has happened is that the age, while acknowledging
Christianity as the highest way of life that man has
thus far conceived, has denied the authority of God to
make man live up to Christ’s teachings. The dream
of God and the reality of Christ have become separated.</p>
<p class='c002'>If all this seems oversimplified, then I must again
plead my lack of resources for such speculation. I do
<span class='pageno' id='Page_149'>149</span>not wish to give an appearance of simplicity to problems
that have taxed the best religious philosophers of
the past six hundred years. Theology quite aside, it
seems to me that the bearing which the Christian
religion should have on human relations throughout
the world and on race relations in the Western world
is simple enough and direct enough. Perhaps it sounds
somewhat effete to say now, as William James said at
the turn of the century, that life becomes tiresome and
meaningless unless it is constantly refreshed by “communion
with a wider self through which saving experiences
come,” but this seems to me to be true. The
Christian religion offers that communion with “a
wider self.” It offers a mature approach to experience.
Modern man’s incredible good luck in escaping the
direst consequences of conduct unlighted by luminous
beliefs and uncontrolled by moral principles is fast
running out. A third world war may destroy man
altogether—if, that is, he does not destroy himself in
more subtle and tortuous ways without war. It would
be foolish optimism not to assume the possibility of
this.</p>
<p class='c002'>It is not the nobility of Christ’s life that I would
urge; it is the practicality of his injunctions. It is more
a matter of being sensible than of being “good.” What
I would see joined is the battle between reason and
superstition, progress and prejudice, order and chaos,
survival and destruction.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_150'>150</span>
<h2 class='c009'>17</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c014'>Now that I come to the end of
this essay I realize that I have not done for myself all
that I had hoped to do. I am not purged: I am not
cured of my sickness. Perhaps it is not of the sort that
can be cured by individual home remedies. I thought
that in the writing of this essay I could pour myself
out, in the manner of a Job or a Jeremiah, or through a
kind of free recall achieve the liberation and inner
peace which seemed so desirable. But even as I wrote I
discovered that the very fact of being Negro limited
the freedom to pour myself out. I discovered depths
of self-consciousness and facets of experience that I
simply could not expose and that gave me feelings of
shame to recognize as my own. Not to write out these
things was cowardly, of course, but no man can tell
the whole truth about himself, and the charge of
cowardice is easier to take than the traditional, detrusive
<span class='pageno' id='Page_151'>151</span>charges of “Negro” insensitivity, emotionalism,
abandonment and self-pity. Moreover, what I had to
say about myself, if it made me appear bad and unprincipled,
would be taken as typical of the whole Negro
race, and I found myself being very conscious of this
as I wrote. I doubt that race-consciousness operates in
this way in the work of white writers.</p>
<p class='c002'>I like to think that I made a clear choice between
telling the whole truth and thus saving myself (which
was my avowed original intent) and not telling the
whole truth and thus protecting the Negro race
against the prejudiced opinions which the whole truth
would generate. But I know this is pure rationalization.
What I have done in this regard was not the
result of voluntary decision; it was, rather, evidence
of the relentless warping by a neurotic web of coercions,
by the need to feel responsible, by the need to
have, even disingenuously and even though limited, a
sense of belonging and integration.</p>
<p class='c002'>I have never wanted to be free of this need. I have
never wanted to be isolated or alienated, for my belief
is that a commitment to something outside oneself is
necessary to human and humanistic development. I
expressed it long ago in another way: “I did not want
sanctuary,” I wrote, “a soft nest protected from the
hard, strengthening winds that blow hot and cold
through the world’s teeming, turbulent valley. I
wanted to face the wind. I wanted the strength to face
<span class='pageno' id='Page_152'>152</span>it to come from some inexpressibly deep well of feeling
of oneness with the wind, of belonging to something,
some soul-force outside myself, bigger than
myself, but yet a part of me. Not family merely, or
institution, or race; but a people and all their topless
strivings; a nation and its million destinies.”<SPAN name='r14' /><SPAN href='#f14' class='c016'><sup>[14]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c002'>What I wanted (and still want—for the writing of
this essay has not done it) was to loose and shake off
the confining coils of race and the racial experience so
that the integration—my personal integration and
commitment—can be made to something bigger than
race, and more enduring, and truer. For race is a
myth: it is artificial; and it is, I hope, at last a dying
concept. Meantime, while it lives, it is also a barrier
and a terrible, terrible burden. It is a barrier to nearly
everyone, white and black, in America. It is a burden
to everyone too, but it is a personal burden to the
Negro—a burden of shame and outrage imposed on
him at the earliest moment of consciousness and never
lifted till death, and all his energies, mental, emotional,
spiritual, must be held in reserve for carrying it.</p>
<p class='c002'>Though I could not tell it, I saw the whole truth
plain, and I think perhaps this seeing helped at least to
rid me of the illusion (temporary at best) that there
is something ennobling in being able to step aside from
<span class='pageno' id='Page_153'>153</span>the struggle race imposes, and that I would find inner
security in doing so. It was a pretty and an attractive
illusion. If only I were not Negro!—that, of course,
was the impossible dream-wish on which the illusion
was founded. But I know now that there is no neutrality
in being white in America, and I have at least the
comfort of knowing that some white people too
suffer from the limitations and frustrations of “whiteness.”
This was brought home to me more forcefully
than ever since I began this essay. This was the meaning,
really, of a newspaper story datelined “Brundidge,
Ala., June 21 (1951)”: “An angry, armed band of
white farmers shot a Negro field worker today on the
false rumor that he had kidnapped a white woman.
Forrest Jones ... was wounded ... by a shotgun blast
as he returned home after taking a white child, hurt in
an automobile accident, to a doctor’s office.”</p>
<p class='c002'>A burden on the conscience and on the soul! This
is what the books by both Southern apologists and
liberals mean. This is what Lillian Smith and Hodding
Carter and Howard Odum mean. I can even
believe that John Rankin and Richard Russell and
James Byrnes and Strom Thurmond signify this in
their acts and in their words, and that Theodore Bilbo
signified this too. Whiteness does not mitigate the
relentless warping by the race situation in America.
White men are half-men too—sick men, and perhaps
<span class='pageno' id='Page_154'>154</span>some of them the more to be pitied because they do
not know that they are sick. Some of them—the good,
lucky ones, like Lillian Smith—have succeeded somewhat
in objectifying it; but neither for them nor for
me is there a neutral ground on which to stand.
Neither they nor I can resign from the human race.
The best I can hope to do is to externalize the struggle
and set it in the unconfined context of the universal
struggle for human dignity and wholeness and unity.</p>
<p class='c010'>I must confess that, unless I have implied them all
along (and this unconsciously), I have no specific
remedies for our American sickness. I cannot say that
education, in the formal sense, will cure us. Education
has failed and has become tiresome in its failures. Or
perhaps it is only that prejudice and superstition have
opposed any serious attempt to apply education as a
remedy. Even though our reason, thoroughly
grounded in the scientific knowledge in which the age
takes so much pride, backs the ethic of universal
brotherhood and declares that “man is a social being
who can reach his fullest development only through
interaction with his fellows,” prejudice and superstition,
as the case confirms, are stronger. Prejudice,
Lillian Smith points out, declares that there are
“‘sacred and profane’ people according to criteria as
<span class='pageno' id='Page_155'>155</span>infantile as skin color and as primitive as ‘blood,’” and
that there must be no interaction between them.
Superstition dissociates the fulfillment of man’s destiny
from man’s character, thereby proclaiming that the
destiny of society is unknowable and entirely out of
the hands of man.</p>
<p class='c002'>I cannot believe that laws and government are specifics.
They are and should be involved with the
relationship of the individual to the group, but they
are involved only on a superficial level. Laws and
government, when controlled by the wrong men—even
a minority of the wrong men—as they frequently
are in a democracy, can be perverted. Laws and government
discipline, as Talleyrand, I think it was, said,
by negatives. They say what cannot be done, but do
not necessarily encourage what should be done. They
are soulless. Without them, of course, we would have
anarchy; but experience does not encourage one to
believe that with more laws and government we would
have peace. Moreover, they can be set at defiance, and
the defiers can often attain renown and rank as
courageous patriots.</p>
<p class='c002'>I would say that Christianity promises a cure for
our American sickness. But it must be made truly a
way of life in which the dignity and brotherhood of
man is the first principle. Perhaps it should be
divorced from mysticism and otherworldliness—from
<span class='pageno' id='Page_156'>156</span>theology. I would emphasize the relation of man to
man rather than the relation of man to God. I would
substitute the authority of Christ’s insight for the
authority of all ecclesiastical dogma. I would blazon
across the earth: “Love ye one another.”</p>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c003'>
<div>THE END</div>
</div></div>
<hr class='c018' />
<div class='footnote' id='f1'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r1'>1</SPAN>. Virginius Dabney, “Nearer and Nearer the Precipice,” <cite>The Atlantic
Monthly</cite> (January 1943).</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f2'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r2'>2</SPAN>. From the <cite>Atlanta Manifesto</cite> issued by white Southern citizens in
1944. Italics mine.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f3'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r3'>3</SPAN>. From <cite>Southern Legacy</cite>.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f4'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r4'>4</SPAN>. The courts denied Holcutt, a North Carolina Negro, the right to
enroll in the State University. The courts upheld Sweatt’s suit for the
same right in Texas.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f5'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r5'>5</SPAN>. Marcus Garvey was a West Indian Negro who aroused a considerable
interest, and organized a great following, back in the 1920’s,
around the slogan “Back to Africa.”</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f6'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r6'>6</SPAN>. See his speech to Congress on August 24, 1919.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f7'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r7'>7</SPAN>. Jay Lovestone, “The Sixth World Congress of the Communist International,”
<cite>Communist</cite>, VII, No. 11; Nov. 1928, pp. 673–674.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f8'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r8'>8</SPAN>. William F. Dunne, “Negroes in American Industries,” <cite>Workers
Monthly</cite>, IV, No. 6; Apr. 1925.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f9'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r9'>9</SPAN>. Nor, it seems, are white colleges. Gordon Allport’s study “Is Intergroup
Education Possible?” (<cite>Harvard Educational Review</cite>, Vol. 15,
No. 2), indicates that white college graduates, though more democratic
than white high-school graduates, are not enough so to ensure the survival
of democracy.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f10'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r10'>10</SPAN>. The quotations are from an Associated Press dispatch in the <cite>New
York Times</cite> dated Columbia, S. C., January 24, 1951, and printed in the
paper on January 25, 1951.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f11'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r11'>11</SPAN>. Quoted from John H. Van Evrie’s <cite>White Supremacy and Negro
Subordination; or, Negroes a Subordinate Race</cite> (1867).</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f12'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r12'>12</SPAN>. W. E. B. DuBois, <cite>Dusk of Dawn</cite> (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Company, 1940), pp. 27–28. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f13'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r13'>13</SPAN>. John W. Burgess, <cite>Reconstruction and the Constitution</cite> (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), p. 133. Reprinted by permission
of the publishers.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f14'>
<p class='c002'><SPAN href='#r14'>14</SPAN>. J. Saunders Redding, <cite>No Day of Triumph</cite> (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1942), p. 43. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.</p>
</div>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c007' /></div>
<div class='tnotes'>
<div class='section ph2'>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c008'>
<div>TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<ol class='ol_1 c003'>
<li>Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
</li>
<li>Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
</li>
</ol></div>
<SPAN name="endofbook"></SPAN>
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