On Being Negro in America

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...

_“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 o...

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 provi...

It is a static but a curiously hectic dance. We gyrate through its complicated patterns with responses as conditioned and involuntary as reflexes. In spite of all the fervent cl...

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 mere...

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 mech...

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 th...

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 univers...

Nor, it seems, are white colleges. Gordon Allport’s study “Is Intergroup Education Possible?” (_Harvard Educational Review_, Vol. 15, No. 2), indicates that white college gradua...