Part 2

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 radicalism among them) who, because they seem to see destruction as an end and would first uproot everything, are actually nihilists.

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.

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 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.

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).[4] 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 _laissez faire_—a proscription of planning and foresight in the dynamics of society.

Chauvinism is as impractical for the Negro in America as it is fundamentally dangerous for any 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.”

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: _Phylon: [A] Review of Race & Culture_, published by Atlanta University; the _Journal of Negro Education_, published by Howard University; the _Journal of Negro Higher Education_, published by Johnson C. Smith University; the _Journal of Negro History_, 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 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.

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.

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 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 _the_ problem _in toto_, nor a problem _in vacuo_. 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.

6

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.

And so you are a son of darker hue! Think then that God sees in your face A lesser image of his love and grace— The ills of life all meant for you?

What light before you beckoning? The iron will, the open heart and mind, The hope, the wish, the thought refined— These compass points for a true reckoning.

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.

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 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.

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 search for simplification and for that dignity of being that derives only from a sense of belonging!

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.

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. 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.

I remember when the tidal wave of Garveyism[5] 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 _Crisis_, 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 _Crisis_ 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 _could_ 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 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.

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.

For the coming of the Garveyites shattered the defensive 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.[6]

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.

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 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.

“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.”

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 _feel_. My father went on.

“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 matter where you go in this country, you’ll never get away from being made to know that you are a Negro.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“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.”

“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....”

“A Negro’s just as good as anybody else,” my father said, “but he’s always got to prove it.”

Thus burdened, I went off to college.

7

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 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.”

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.