Chapter III: Part 3

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 _No Day of Triumph_ 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.

11

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. 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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

“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?”

“Oh,” the lawyer said, laughing blandly, “they don’t want to sue. They just want a cafeteria like the white schools have.”

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 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.[9]

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 as the flow of unchanneled waters. They do not bite deep into idea patterns, nor thrust themselves down into the matrix of emotion.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 _intellectual_ 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.[10]

This is paradox and irony. There is the obvious irony of advocating the abolishment of the very thing 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.

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 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.

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 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.

12

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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, 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?”

“I can’t play with you,” Reggie said.

“What’s the matter, are you sick?” Conway wanted to know.

“I just can’t play with you any more,” Reggie said.

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 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.

“Why?”

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.

“Because you’re a nigger, that’s why,” Reggie said.

Conway looked at me wonderingly, not feeling hurt, as they say a man knowing himself shot but still without pain will look with surprise.

“I’m better than you,” Reggie said, “’cause my father said so.”

“You are not,” Conway said, but I thought he shrank a little against me.

“No, son, he isn’t,” I said.

“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.

“No, son,” I said, as much to the one as to the other. I think I felt sorry for Reggie too. I do now at any rate, thinking back.

“You are not,” Conway said, and straightened. “My daddy says you aren’t.”

“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.

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!”

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.

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 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.

“Did Reggie’s father steal?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I said, “but I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s not a good man.”

“How do you know? You don’t know him, do you?”

“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.

“Those things Reggie said today, his father said to him. That’s how I know Reggie’s father is not a good man.”

“He wasn’t telling the truth, was he?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“I mean about him being better?”

“No,” I answered.

“Then why can’t I go to his school and to his movies?”

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.

“And the reason you don’t go to Reggie’s school,” I remember saying, “is because there are people like Reggie’s father.”

“It’s all complicated up,” Conway answered.

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.

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 given us serious concern, for an important part of our educational program is training in citizenship and co-operative living....”

Perhaps there is only a slight connection, but I would be hard to convince.

13

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’ the white female against this fancied prowess of the male Negro [is] a fixed constellation in the ethos” of America.

The common belief runs that the white girl who marries a Negro is morally depraved and certainly sexually abnormal, for no _normal_ 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 and a better thing to be acknowledged a first-class human being. This is the ultimate civility.

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.

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 time that the Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr., was setting forth in his best-selling novel (_The Leopard’s Spots_) and his smash-hit drama (_The Clansman_) 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.”

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 _and_ 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.”

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.

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 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, _et al._!) of the Negro male and in the peculiar “ovoid shape of the [Negro] female’s buttocks.”[11] 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.

14

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.

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 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.

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 _This I Remember_, 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!

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 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.

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 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.

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].”

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.

Compulsively dissociated from the American tradition, the Negro on the upper level has had to maintain 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 _Dusk of Dawn_, “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.... My attention from the first was focused ... upon the problem of the admission of my people into the freedom of democracy.”[12]

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:

“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 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.”[13]

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 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.

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 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.

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 _Sartoris_ and _Told by an Idiot_, but not “Evening Sun Go Down,” or excerpts from _Light in August_ and _Intruder in the Dust_. Chapters from _Huckleberry Finn_ 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 _Old Creole Days_ and innocuous passages from _The Grandissimes_, but never by _Madame Delphine_ (certainly one of his best books), _The Silent South_ or _The Negro Question_.

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 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.

15

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 wisdom we have forgotten, from a realization of the character of human life.

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.

It must be, for instance, the operation of these qualities that is leading to the continuing farce that 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:

“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,

“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 and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people....

“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....”

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.