Part 1

_“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.”_

_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._

J. Saunders Redding has also written:

TO MAKE A POET BLACK NO DAY OF TRIUMPH STRANGER AND ALONE THEY CAME IN CHAINS READING FOR WRITING (A college text with Ivan E. Taylor) AN AMERICAN IN INDIA LONESOME ROAD

_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._

ON BEING NEGRO IN AMERICA

J. Saunders Redding

_Charter Books_

_Copyright 1951 by J. Saunders Redding_ _All rights reserved_

_Bobbs-Merrill hardcover edition published September 1951_ _Charter edition published August 1962_

_This book is the complete text of the hardcover edition_

_Printed in the U.S.A._

CHARTER BOOKS _Published by_

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY, INC. _A subsidiary of_ HOWARD W. SAMS & CO., INC. _Publishers_ _Indianapolis and New York_

_Distributed by the Macfadden-Bartell Corp., Inc., 205 East 42nd Street, New York 17, New York_

EDITOR’S NOTE

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.

New York City May 12, 1962

“By the way, have I ever told you——”

“Enough of the truth?” she asked.

“There is never enough of the truth,” the Colonel said. “There is only more and more.”

—_From notes for “The Colonel and His Lady.”_

1

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 it has been for three hundred years, it would have been settled long ago. Else the gods are singularly perverse.

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:

“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.”[1]

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, _inevitably_ brings changes for the better.

2

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.

An incident illustrates.

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 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.

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 equal strength, in perfect balance, and the corporeal I, fixed in a trance at the window, oscillated between them.

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.

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.

“There’s a drunken woman lying in the back yard of a house on Eighth Street, seven-hundred block,” I said.

“You say drunk? In her own yard? Then leave her lay.”

“But there doesn’t seem to be anyone there, and she may not be drunk.”

“You said she was drunk,” the voice said. “Now what’s the story?” There was a pause. “And who’re you anyway?”

“She could freeze to death,” I said, and hung up. Thus I washed my hands of it.

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.

One can wash his hands, but the smudges and scars on the psyche are different.

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.

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 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.

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.

This is not mere error; it, too, is symptomatic of a 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 _sound_ 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 _inexorably_ conditioned by cultural complexes.” “In both the physical and cultural heritage of the South there are certain cumulative and tragic handicaps that represent _overpowering_ factors in the situation.” There are “legal and customary patterns of race relations in the South, whose _strength and age_ we recognize.”[2] The idealism of these people of good will is negated by the meanings of their own phrases.

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 some day. Not tomorrow or next year or the next year. But some day.”[3]), it promises to remain so for another century.

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.

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 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.

3

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, 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.

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.”

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, 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.

“Come on,” he said, gesturing vehemently, “we got to go.”

I resented his bursting in on me. We did not particularly care for each other anyway. “You might have knocked,” I said.

“For Christ’s sake, this is no time for the amenities!” he said. “We got to go.”

“Go where? I’m not going anywhere.”

“To the meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“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.

“What!” It must have been a yawp of horror and disbelief. The boy had sat in my class not five hours before.

“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.”

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.

“And if they come, then what?” I said.

“That’s what we’re having the meeting for. Come on.”

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.

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 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.

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.

4

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 _normal_, _natural_, _wholesome_ 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 as, say, a Christmas party—but that the principal subject of conversation is race. One grows mortally sick of it.

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.

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 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 _feeling_ her way into them.

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.

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.

5