I saw him again at the trial. It lasted less than twenty minutes. Clark,

in the same rumpled brown suit he had worn in jail, was led in. He

looked slightly drawn, but I think I was the only one of the twenty or

thirty spectators who could have known this. No one seemed to take any

interest in this fourth case on the docket. The charge was read. The

court-appointed lawyer pleaded guilty. A short, stocky man was sworn in

and gave testimony to the effect that so-many and so-many bolts of cloth

were missing over a period of months; that company detectives were put

on the trail of them, and that finally in March they had found “their

man.” Then a private detective testified; then a stock clerk. There were

no other witnesses. Clark was ordered to stand. The judge pronounced

sentence—five years in prison. Clark looked around at the spectators

then, but I could see no change in his expression. He was nudged away. I

left the courtroom.

10

Like the capacity for thought and the desire for knowledge, the

instincts for personal liberty and, within reason, power over one’s

destiny are attributes of the human mind. They are stronger in some than

in others. Where they have been weakened by catastrophe—say

long-continued planned violence, as in war; or widespread social

disorganization, as in times of great economic crises—the instincts can

be perverted, or even totally destroyed. There was danger of this

perversion (which actually developed in some countries in Europe) during

America’s great depression, when the feeling grew that only Franklin D.

Roosevelt had answers and that everything depended on him. The American

people were all but ripe to surrender their minds and the control of

their destiny.

It was the distortion or atrophy of this instinct that the Communists

hoped to find in the American Negro. They had good reason for such

hopes, and they were not loath to express it: “The especially intense

exploitation and heavy oppression to which the millions of Negroes in

America are subject make it imperative for _the Party to devote its best

energies and its maximum resources towards becoming the recognized

leader and champion ... of Negroes_.”[7] (Italics mine.) The intense

exploitation and heavy oppression were true enough. But there was

something that the Communists did not take into account; something

psychical and perhaps unworldly which even the people whom they hoped to

inveigle did not think about. It was not the Negro’s vaunted resiliency,

though this was something. Rather it was what I can think of only as the

spiritual cohesion of democracy. This cohesion is organic to the

delicately balanced ideological structure that democracy is, and it is

the attribute which makes it impossible to separate the destiny of

America from the destiny of democracy itself.

For democracy is less a form of government than it is a way of life, and

the principles—freedom, equality, justice—on which this way of life is

founded have an appeal as universal as the idea of God. And what I am

saying is that in spite of “heavy oppression” and “intense

exploitation,” the American Negro believed in the principles. It was

this belief in the principles and the impossibility of ever dissociating

them in the Negro’s mind from democracy and America that stymied the

Communists, who could not understand why the colored people’s hatred of

discrimination, segregation and all the inequities did not lead

naturally to a hatred of democracy. But it was like expecting them to

hate God because preachers are sometimes rascals.

Nor do I think that this is as abstruse and metaphysical as it sounds.

Or if it is, then it is well to remember that American democracy is

itself a metaphysic, blending as it does subjective truth (“the

inalienable rights of man”) with moral abstractions (“liberty and

justice for all”) and mystical concepts (“the will of the people”) which

admittedly cannot be achieved by all the institutions ever created by

man. It is, this democracy, “impractical.” It was this that the

Communists took cognizance of and figured on. They did it three times

between 1918 and 1942, and each time in crisis, when they thought the

material values which they wished to substitute as the goal of struggle

were enhanced by their very absence. The terms they used were purely

materialistic too, and they applied them in a context that was unbounded

by the American continent—and this was another mistake. “The American

Communist Negroes,” the Communists said, “are the historical leaders of

their comrades in Africa and to fit them for dealing the most telling

blows to world imperialism as allies of the world’s working class is

enough to justify all the time and energy that the Workers (Communist)

Party must devote to the mobilization for the revolutionary struggle of

the Negro workers in American industry.”[8]

Then they tried to extirpate the spiritual values of democracy by

extirpating Christianity. They did not carry on a full-scale campaign of

godlessness among American Negroes, but the Negro poet Langston Hughes,

who went to visit Russia as a Guest of the State, came back apparently

spiritually callous and published the poem “Goodbye, Christ,” and the

appalling fact was lost on no one. By and large, Negroes did not feel

that Christ and religion were ready for the discard, certainly not

before they had been tried. Indeed, their egalitarian aspirations had

their roots in Biblical injunction. So the purge of the priests, the

smashing of ikons, and the tearing down of the churches, which Negroes

read about in the American press, were factors in the failure of the

Communist Party to win the support of the black masses.

Add to this one other matter, and the whole story (though

oversimplified) of that failure is told. Add patriotism. In some

sophisticated Negro circles it is a matter for amused laughter that no

Negro has ever been a traitor to the United States. But the laughter

does not abrogate the fact. More perhaps than other American minorities,

Negroes have had inducements to treachery. Clark expressed it: “What has

this country ever done for me?” And of course Negroes before and since

have asked the same question. It is purely rhetorical. Clark did not

realize it, but America, its ideals, its direction, its basic spirit

(for we must again deal with abstractions) had given him a belief in the

individual worth and dignity of himself as a man. DuBois, I think, was

right when, back in his young, good days, he said, “First, this is our

country: we have worked for it, we have suffered for it, we have fought

for it ... we have reached in this land our highest modern development

and nothing, humanly speaking, can prevent us from eventually reaching

here the full stature of our manhood.... Our wrongs are still wrong

[but] we will not bargain with our loyalty.”

I am just cynical enough to add a sour note. This loyalty comes in part

from a fear of expulsion. It is a historic fear, stemming back to the

colonization movement in the seventeenth century. Recently Negroes have

seen another minority in other countries expelled, and they know it can

be done. But American Negroes have no Palestine.

I will not say that Negroes saw democracy as the highest, final product

of man’s political development, nor that they saw enough differences

between Communism and democracy to reassure them of the worth of the

latter. They did not come to that stage of intellection—and neither did

I until much later. I do not think that even the Negro Communists, so

recently in the news, with all their reputation for mental acumen, have

thought much about the real differences. For actually, of course, the

Communist doctrine, like the dogma of the most fundamental religious

sect, does not encourage thought. If it did, there probably would be

less than a villageful of Communists in the whole Western world, for it

would be seen that Communism is a falling away from the idea that the

Western world has lived by since the Middle Ages—the idea that _man_ is

the end of all human endeavor, and that mere “survival and security” are

not enough for man. But this distinction is only gross enough to explain

why Communism is the ideology of crisis; why it must seize its chance to

win men’s minds when their highest hope is only to stave off death. No,

even the intellectuals seem not to have seen this; and the other

distinctions are subtler, finer. But they are also fundamental.

First of all, Communism is revolution, a rupture of order, a break in

the evolution of Western civilization. Democracy, on the other hand, is

a way of conducting affairs so that there is some kind of harmonious

continuity in the direction of society. There may be errors and

blunders, and there are certainly lags, but the people in a democracy

are themselves so sensitive that they automatically exert a corrective

force in the way a ship’s gyroscope does. This sensitiveness is the

strength of democracy. Communism must operate within a relatively simple

but rigid structure (like the “classless society”) with a narrow

philosophic base and narrowly defined aims, so that the prestige of

authority can be enhanced to tyrannical proportions and so that the

decrees of authority can be immediately and continuously checked. There

is no margin either for error or disagreement. Democracy is a complex

way of life, lacking the utter concentration of energy in any one

direction (save in time of national emergency) that marks Communism and

that makes no allowance for opposing points of view. Communism must

drastically curtail man’s freedom in the first place, prescribe his

rights and privileges in the second, and finally it must stand

constantly ready to alienate those rights—by force, if necessary, or by

the show of force, or by the implication of force. Democracy seeks a

constant enlargement of man’s freedom. Because in modern times Communism

has seemed able to establish itself only by violence, it seems

reasonable to assume that violence is necessary to its perpetuation,

while at the same time it is more susceptible to disintegration through

violence. Under Communism, man is the slave of the state. Under

democracy, the state is the servant of man.

If all this editorializing sounds somewhat beside the point, since only

peripherally does it have to do with my Negroness, then I can only plead

that it seems to me a description of the sober facts, and that it is by

way of being an explanation to the Communists of my anti-Communism. I

should have given it to them ten years ago. They should have had it back

in 1942 when, after a ten-year layoff, the Communists came at me again

and made it necessary for me to try to achieve a certain degree of

clarity about these issues.

I had written a book called _No Day of Triumph_, and the Communists saw

advance copies of it. They liked it, though I am still puzzled why.

Perhaps it was because I did not actually condemn Communism, but, as a

matter of fact, expressed sympathy for one Mike Chowan who had long been

a Communist and who had fought with the Lincoln Battalion in Spain.

Whatever the reason, _New Masses_ first published an excerpt from my

book, without, as I remember, getting either my permission or that of

the publisher. Soon after the _New Masses_ excerpt appeared and several

weeks before publication, I began to get letters from Communists all

over the country. Some of these came from bookstore managers who told me

that they were going to push the book and who invited me to teas and to

hold autograph parties. I accepted only one of these invitations—to

speak to a group in Washington, where I had to go on other business

anyway. Later I was asked to appear on a radio program with Ella Winters

in Philadelphia, but a previous commitment interfered.

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.

After the General Assembly’s acceptance, to make the Universal

Declaration law there remained only the act of ratification by each

participating government. It was at this point that a hitch developed.

Perhaps the State Department had dismissed, even at its inception, the

work of the Commission on Human Rights as unimportant. Perhaps the State

Department was so concerned with the “practical and immediate” problems

of the cold war that it simply forgot the Declaration for two years, and

forgot, too, that the United States had taken the lead in securing the

General Assembly’s adoption of a resolution embodying the Declaration.

Perhaps there were petty and selfish political considerations. Perhaps

there was bald hypocrisy in the whole thing. I cannot give cause. I can

only declare that when, in 1950, after what seemed an unnecessarily long

delay, the matter of ratification by the United States came up, the

State Department demurred.

At first it demurred over the inclusion of Articles 22–27 of the

Declaration. But since most of these articles embody principles which

are already written into United States law or supported by immemorial

custom, the State Department’s objection to them seemed inexplicable. As

Rayford Logan, a member of the United States National Commission for

UNESCO, pointed out at the time, there is nothing revolutionary to

American principles in the statement that “Everyone ... has a right to

social security,” or in the statement that “Everyone has a right to

education,” or in the statement that “Everyone has the right to a

standard of living adequate for health.” No. The objection seemed to be

to Article 23:

“(1) Everyone has the right to work, to _free_ choice of employment, to

just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against

unemployment. (2) Everyone, _without any discrimination_, has the right

to equal pay for equal work....” (Italics mine.)

Once the Declaration was ratified, these clauses would have necessitated

the establishment of a law no different in intent from the proposed

F.E.P.C. But this is not the point that Mr. Edward W. Barrett, of the

State Department, made in stating the objection to acceptance of the

entire declaration. “Whereas,” he wrote, “a maximum degree of agreement

exists (outside the Iron Curtain) on political and civil rights, there

is no general agreement on economic and social rights. The laws and

practices of the members of the United Nations differ widely on those

rights as set forth in the Declaration.”

It does not particularly matter, I suppose, that this amounts to saying

that the United Nations had not agreed on what they obviously had agreed

on; nor that no clear and sharp distinction (such as Mr. Barrett’s

letter implies) can be drawn between political and civil rights on the

one hand and economic and social rights on the other.

It does not particularly matter because the State Department gave even

grosser expression to the “realistic” point of view that, to paraphrase,

democracy is based on compromises in which big ends are surrendered to

small goals. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

says:

“(1) Men and women of full age, _without any limitation due to race_,

nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a

family....” (Italics mine.)

Could it be that this provision was in Mr. Barrett’s mind when he wrote:

“Neither the Executive Branch nor the Congress would desire that our

Government should ratify a convention which contains obligations that

our Government and our people are unwilling or unable to honor.”?

There is a deep sickness in the American mind and spirit, and it

threatens to infect democracy itself and render it impotent as an ideal.

But not only this; the sickness also threatens to make democracy

ineffective as an instrument through which the individual can realize

his highest self and in co-operation with other selves give zest,

richness and meaning to human endeavor. For democracy is two things. It

is a political instrument: it is an ideal. As an ideal, the notion of

the world as a vast arena, where purposeless and inexplicable forces

play, and where inevitable fate renders the mind and the spirit of the

individual helpless, dissolves before it. As an ideal, it is in raw

conflict with sterile determinism and fatalism. It assumes that the only

source of human happiness or misery is human beings themselves, and its

very dogma proclaims that co-operative endeavor is the way to human

happiness. And this is sensible, for we know—and we know it

scientifically—that co-operation is the law of life. When men

co-operate, they and their enterprises prosper; peace reigns. This is

not humanistic nonsense. Authorized to speak the considered opinion of a

group of renowned scientific scholars of the Committee of Experts on

Race Problems of UNESCO, Ashley Montagu declared: “Man’s _inherent_

drives toward co-operation need but to be cultivated and intelligently

handled for this world to be turned into a Paradise on earth—when all

men will, at last, _live by the rule it is their nature to live by_—the

Golden Rule to love your neighbor as yourself.” (Italics mine.)

16

Although I am not a very religious person, I do not see how I can leave

God out of consideration in these matters. God has been made to play a

very conspicuous part in race relations in America. At one time or

another, and often at the same time, He has been the protagonist for

both sides. He has damned and blessed first one side and then the other

with truly godlike impartiality. His ultimate intentions, revealed to

inspired sages, are preserved in a thousand volumes. Anyone who reads

the literature of race cannot but be struck by the immoderate frequency

with which God is invoked, and by the painstaking consideration that is

given, even by social scientists, to race relations as a problem of

Christian ethics.

God, of course, is an implicit assumption in the thought of our age. He

is one of those beliefs so spontaneous and ineluctable and taken so much

as a matter of course that they operate with great effectiveness (though

generally on a level of subconsciousness) in our society. He is a belief

that operates just by being, like a boulder met in the path which must

be dealt with before one can proceed on his journey. God is a complex

composed entirely of simple elements—mediator, father, judge, jury,

executioner, and also love, virtue, charity—each of which generates a

very motley collection of often contradictory ideas. God is a catalyst,

and He is also a formulated doctrine inertly symbolized in the ritual

and the dogma of churches called Christian. God is the Absolute Reality,

but this does not prevent His being ostentatiously offered as the excuse

for our society’s failure to come to grips with big but relative

realities. God and the Christian religion must be reckoned with.

I do not know how long I have held both God and the Christian religion

in some doubt, though it must have been since my teens. Nor do I know

exactly how this came about. My father was (and is) very religious, of

great and clear and unbending faith. My mother was less so, but the

family went regularly to church, where we were all active, and I used

occasionally to see my mother so deeply touched by a religious feeling

that she could not keep back the tears. What inspired it in that chill

atmosphere it is impossible to say. I can only think that it came as a

result of some very personal communion with God, established perhaps by

a random thought, a word, or a certain slant of light through the yellow

and rose and purple windows. There was never any shouting or “getting

happy” among us, or in our church; none of that ecstatic abandon that

set men and women jumping and dancing and screaming in the aisles. After

the northward migration following the First World War, a few people who

may have had a natural tendency to such transports found their way to

our church, but they were frustrated by the mechanical expertness of the

uninspired sermons, the formalized prayers, and by the choirmaster’s

preference for hymns translated from fifteenth-century Latin. Never did

I hear a spiritual sung in our church, and only rarely a common-meter

Calvinist hymn.

Sometime during my teens I became aware that for most Negroes God was a

great deal more than a spirit to be worshiped on Sundays. He had a

terrifying immediacy as material provider and protector. Once a group of

us teen-agers went on a Sunday evening (our own church worshiped only in

the morning) to a mission church deep in the Bridge District where the

Negro population was concentrated. We went to mock, as some of us had

heard our parents do, at the malapropisms of the illiterate minister and

his ignorant flock, the crazy singing and shouting, and the uninhibited

behavior of members in religious ecstasy. We did not remain to pray, but

I was struck by what I saw and heard, and afterward my natural curiosity

led me to go occasionally alone. The service did not resemble, either in

ritual or content (both of which were created spontaneously), the

service to which I was used. Any member of the church could stand up and

pray. A whole evening might be given over to these impulsive outbursts.

The prayers impressed me with their concreteness, their concern for the

everyday. I heard one distraught mother, whose daughter evidently was

sitting beside her, beseech God: “Now here’s Idabelle, an’ she’s gone

and got herself bigged, an’ I’m askin’ you, God, to make the young

rascal who done it marry her. His name’s Herbie Washington, an’ he stays

on the street nex’ to me.” They prayed for bread, not in a general,

symbolic “give us this day our daily bread” sense, but for specific

bread and meat for specific occasions. “Aunt Callie Black’s laying up

there sick, Lord, an’ when I seen her, she tol’ me her mouth was

watering for some hot biscuit, an’ that’s the reason I’m asking You to

give her some hot biscuit ‘fore I go to see her again nex’ Tuesday.”

They wanted clothes and they asked for them. They wanted pitiful but

specific sums of money. They wanted protection from their real enemies.

“Lord Jesus, don’t let that mean nigger, Joe Fisher, stick me with no

knife.”

Negroes made irrational claims on God which they expected Him to fulfill

without any help from them and without any regard for the conditions

under which they could be fulfilled, and I suppose that when their

claims failed, there was some sort of psychological mechanism that

produced satisfactory excuses. It was all very simple and direct, but

God just did not work that way—not the white folk’s God I was taught to

worship.

I do not believe that this incongruity set me thinking until at the

small and rather exclusive (though public) high school I attended, a

science teacher pointed it up. He was a bitter, frustrated man, full of

self-hatred and of contempt for his race. Often staggering drunk outside

the classroom, he was said to spend his week ends in an alcoholic fog of

hatred writing scurrilous anti-Negro letters to the “people’s opinion”

column of the local paper. (Such letters did appear there with

persistent regularity.) Our science teacher was certainly no good for

us. Monday mornings were invariably void of science instruction.

“How many of you went hat-in-hand to God yesterday and asked him to get

your chemistry for you this week?” he would begin. “He won’t, and you

can take my word for that. The trouble with niggers—” what malevolent

contempt he put into the word!—“is that they look to God to do for them.

That’s why they’re like they are—not only ignorant, but stupid; not only

inferior, but debased. ‘You can take all this world, but give me Jesus,’

the song says, and that’s just what the white people have been

doing—taking the world and giving you Jesus. God, if there is a God,

which I doubt, helps those who help themselves. Now study your

chemistry!”

(How he managed to stay on with his drunkenness and his fundamental

corruption, of which everyone was aware, is not beyond my comprehension

so much as it is beyond my belief. He was one of the “big,” upper-class

mulatto families with members thriving in the professions up and down

the Eastern seaboard. They were not a powerful family, having neither

money, nor political influence, nor potent white patrons; but they had

social prestige because of their antiquity, their relatively long

tradition of freedom, their education, and their considerable infusion

of white blood. In those days the feeling was that such a family must

not be disgraced by the derelictions of one of its members. The black

sheep must be protected, if he could not be hidden, and pitied because

he could not be punished.)

Such assertions were almost daily fare. It was not hard to find support

for them. I could see that most Negroes were poor and ignorant and

inferior. Every year on the last Sunday in August one of the Negro

religious denominations held a “quarterly meeting” in my home town.

People from a half dozen states poured in the day before and roamed the

streets all night, or slept anywhere they could—on the courthouse lawn,

in the wagons and trucks that brought them, in alleys and doorways. But

on the Sunday, what excitement! What noisy exuberance! Six city blocks,

just below the main street, were inundated with the germinal tide of

their living. Preachers exhorted; food vendors shouted; choirs sang;

bands played; lost children bawled; city prostitutes pushed brazenly for

trade among the young men from the country; people prayed and went into

transports.

I do not know when I began to notice the white people. I suppose they

had always been there. But along in my fourteenth or fifteenth year, I

suddenly seemed to see them. Small phalanxes of them always seemed to be

pushing or imperiously demanding passage through the crowds that fell

away before them like grain before a scythe. The white people sneered—or

so it seemed to me—and took pictures and made derisive comments. They

looked down in laughing contempt from the windows, balconies and roofs

of the buildings that lined the street. They came, also from miles

around, to watch the show, not to be a part of it. I realized with deep

shame that what the Negroes did on this holy day made a clowns’ circus

for the whites. The Negroes’ God made fools of them. Worship and

religiosity were things to be mocked and scorned, for they stamped the

Negro as inferior.

There must have been many vague progressions of thought and many

gradations of emotion between the premise and the conclusion. However

little I was aware of them, my nerves, muscles and brain—conditioned by

a thousand random and forgotten experiences—must have prepared me to

accept the conclusion without outrage and shock. I simply rejected

religion. I rejected God. Not my instincts, but my deepest feelings

revolted compulsively—not because I was I, a sort of neutral human stuff

reacting directly to experience, but because I was Negro. It is hard to

make it clear; but there were two people sharing my physical existence

and tearing me apart. One, I suppose, was the actual self which I wanted

to protect and yet which I seemed to hate with a consuming hatred; and

the other was the ideal self which tried compulsively to shape the

actual self away from all that Negroes seemed to be. At what emotional

and psychic cost this deep emotional conflict went on within me I do not

know. It was years before I understood that what I had wanted then was

to be white.

It was also years before I made a sort of armed truce with religion and

with God. I stepped around God determinedly, gingerly, gloating that I

was free of Him and that He could not touch me. Indeed, I had to step

around Him, for He was always there. He was there, foursquare and solid,

at the very center of my father’s life. (My father habitually ends his

letters, “May the spirit of the Almighty God, whose interest is always

manifest, be with you!”) At Brown University He was in Dr. Washburn’s

sermons, and President Faunce’s chapel talks, and Professor Ducasse’s

philosophy course. He was in various people I met and felt affection

for. He was in the ineffable, tremulous sweetness of the first love I

felt; in the drowning ecstasy of the first sexual experience; in the joy

of imaginative creation. But I moved around Him warily, laughing,

mocking His pretensions, determined that He would not betray me into

Negroness. If there lingered still in the deep recesses of my real self

some consciousness of a religious spirit, then the ideal self—the

Negro-hating me—did all it could to exorcise it.

How unmitigating and long-lasting this conflict was is proved for me in

the fact that only in the last ten years have I been able to go to

church without a feeling of indulging in some senseless necromantic

ritual, and without feeling that my wanting to go—and I did many times

_want_ to go; if this seems contradictory, I cannot help it—was a mark

of inferiority, the foolish expression of a weak and senseless wish to

attain an impossible realm of being differing in its essential

nature—that is, in its reality—from anything my experience has taught me

can be attained. I do not believe in an afterlife; in otherworldliness.

The experiences of this world are too potent and too much with me. I do

not see how any Negro can believe in another world, and the religion

which has inspired him to that belief, if it has saved him, has done so

by making him content with the very degradation of his humanity that is

so abhorrent to the principles of Christianity.

But it is not alone for the reasons outlined above that I have held

religion suspect. Let us concede that the God of the Negroes has been

largely a pagan god and largely stripped of the divinest attributes,

interceding intimately and directly for man without man’s help. They

have fashioned a god to their need. But the whites also have fashioned a

god to their need, and have believed in him, and have professed to

follow him. He is a moral God, a God of truth and justice and love. I do

not wish to carry this too far, for I have no capacity for philosophic

speculation; but it seems to me that if the qualities attributed to God

represent man’s acknowledged needs, and if the principles of

Christianity represent the universal source of man’s social genius, then

he has sacrificed the fulfillment of his basic needs (or “the good

life”) to the fulfillment of desires that run counter to the purpose of

living. He has not given his religion a chance to help him effect that

far-going social transformation and evolution which should be religion’s

end. Religion has become a disembodied sort of activity, when, to be

effective, it should be a social function intimately linked up with

man’s fate on earth.

While there is almost no religion operating in race relations, there is

plenty of God. I do not say this facetiously, nor with ironic intent;

and, anyway, it has at least been implied before. There is an extensive

literature on the part God has played in race relations since the

fifteenth century. Principally God and the word of God have been used to

perpetuate the wicked idea of human inferiority. I need not go into this

farther than to point out modern man’s subtle modifications of the idea

of God and the intellectual gymnastics that have made those

modifications possible, even when, it seems to me, the environment has

not made them necessary, and even though in the fundamental concept of

the Godhead is the idea of immutability. But God has changed, and though

man himself has wrought these changes, he has declared them God’s own

changes and therefore factors, equations, and of a piece with the

mysterious and unknowable nature of God. Indeed, God’s very

supernaturalness, His mysteriousness and inscrutability (“God moves in

mysterious ways His wonders to perform,” _ergo_ “we cannot know God’s

purpose in making the black race inferior to the white,” and we cannot

“fathom the repulsion which God has given one race for another, or one

people for another”) are largely modern attributions which confound the

ancient knowledge and excuse modern sin. God was not always so.

And before the ancient concepts crashed under the onslaught of

sophistication, of scientific materialism and the new philosophies it

brought into being, Christianity had become a way of life. It had become

a way of life to be striven for because it seemed to satisfy the needs

of ordinary men. There is nothing mysterious about Christianity. Granted

that mystery reposes in the life of Christ (as, let it be said, it did

not originally repose in God)—but Christ’s life and what he is reported

to have done are one thing: what he is reported to have taught is

another. What he taught is as clear and concrete and literal as the lead

story in a good newspaper. He taught that the kingdom of heaven is here

on earth. He preached that men should love one another. He said that all

men are brothers. He sought to bind men together in one mighty

neighborhood. He was, for all the mystery surrounding him, a social

engineer with a far and cosmic vision. The present age has not denied

that he was right. Though there are those (and I among them) who reject

the traditionally perpetuated events of his life as a factual record,

his ministry remains the source of Christian religion. What has happened

is that the age, while acknowledging Christianity as the highest way of

life that man has thus far conceived, has denied the authority of God to

make man live up to Christ’s teachings. The dream of God and the reality

of Christ have become separated.

If all this seems oversimplified, then I must again plead my lack of

resources for such speculation. I do not wish to give an appearance of

simplicity to problems that have taxed the best religious philosophers

of the past six hundred years. Theology quite aside, it seems to me that

the bearing which the Christian religion should have on human relations

throughout the world and on race relations in the Western world is

simple enough and direct enough. Perhaps it sounds somewhat effete to

say now, as William James said at the turn of the century, that life

becomes tiresome and meaningless unless it is constantly refreshed by

“communion with a wider self through which saving experiences come,” but

this seems to me to be true. The Christian religion offers that

communion with “a wider self.” It offers a mature approach to

experience. Modern man’s incredible good luck in escaping the direst

consequences of conduct unlighted by luminous beliefs and uncontrolled

by moral principles is fast running out. A third world war may destroy

man altogether—if, that is, he does not destroy himself in more subtle

and tortuous ways without war. It would be foolish optimism not to

assume the possibility of this.

It is not the nobility of Christ’s life that I would urge; it is the

practicality of his injunctions. It is more a matter of being sensible

than of being “good.” What I would see joined is the battle between

reason and superstition, progress and prejudice, order and chaos,

survival and destruction.

17

Now that I come to the end of this essay I realize that I have not done

for myself all that I had hoped to do. I am not purged: I am not cured

of my sickness. Perhaps it is not of the sort that can be cured by

individual home remedies. I thought that in the writing of this essay I

could pour myself out, in the manner of a Job or a Jeremiah, or through

a kind of free recall achieve the liberation and inner peace which

seemed so desirable. But even as I wrote I discovered that the very fact

of being Negro limited the freedom to pour myself out. I discovered

depths of self-consciousness and facets of experience that I simply

could not expose and that gave me feelings of shame to recognize as my

own. Not to write out these things was cowardly, of course, but no man

can tell the whole truth about himself, and the charge of cowardice is

easier to take than the traditional, detrusive charges of “Negro”

insensitivity, emotionalism, abandonment and self-pity. Moreover, what I

had to say about myself, if it made me appear bad and unprincipled,

would be taken as typical of the whole Negro race, and I found myself

being very conscious of this as I wrote. I doubt that race-consciousness

operates in this way in the work of white writers.

I like to think that I made a clear choice between telling the whole

truth and thus saving myself (which was my avowed original intent) and

not telling the whole truth and thus protecting the Negro race against

the prejudiced opinions which the whole truth would generate. But I know

this is pure rationalization. What I have done in this regard was not

the result of voluntary decision; it was, rather, evidence of the

relentless warping by a neurotic web of coercions, by the need to feel

responsible, by the need to have, even disingenuously and even though

limited, a sense of belonging and integration.

I have never wanted to be free of this need. I have never wanted to be

isolated or alienated, for my belief is that a commitment to something

outside oneself is necessary to human and humanistic development. I

expressed it long ago in another way: “I did not want sanctuary,” I

wrote, “a soft nest protected from the hard, strengthening winds that

blow hot and cold through the world’s teeming, turbulent valley. I

wanted to face the wind. I wanted the strength to face it to come from

some inexpressibly deep well of feeling of oneness with the wind, of

belonging to something, some soul-force outside myself, bigger than

myself, but yet a part of me. Not family merely, or institution, or

race; but a people and all their topless strivings; a nation and its

million destinies.”[14]

What I wanted (and still want—for the writing of this essay has not done

it) was to loose and shake off the confining coils of race and the

racial experience so that the integration—my personal integration and

commitment—can be made to something bigger than race, and more enduring,

and truer. For race is a myth: it is artificial; and it is, I hope, at

last a dying concept. Meantime, while it lives, it is also a barrier and

a terrible, terrible burden. It is a barrier to nearly everyone, white

and black, in America. It is a burden to everyone too, but it is a

personal burden to the Negro—a burden of shame and outrage imposed on

him at the earliest moment of consciousness and never lifted till death,

and all his energies, mental, emotional, spiritual, must be held in

reserve for carrying it.

Though I could not tell it, I saw the whole truth plain, and I think

perhaps this seeing helped at least to rid me of the illusion (temporary

at best) that there is something ennobling in being able to step aside

from the struggle race imposes, and that I would find inner security in

doing so. It was a pretty and an attractive illusion. If only I were not

Negro!—that, of course, was the impossible dream-wish on which the

illusion was founded. But I know now that there is no neutrality in

being white in America, and I have at least the comfort of knowing that

some white people too suffer from the limitations and frustrations of

“whiteness.” This was brought home to me more forcefully than ever since

I began this essay. This was the meaning, really, of a newspaper story

datelined “Brundidge, Ala., June 21 (1951)”: “An angry, armed band of

white farmers shot a Negro field worker today on the false rumor that he

had kidnapped a white woman. Forrest Jones ... was wounded ... by a

shotgun blast as he returned home after taking a white child, hurt in an

automobile accident, to a doctor’s office.”

A burden on the conscience and on the soul! This is what the books by

both Southern apologists and liberals mean. This is what Lillian Smith

and Hodding Carter and Howard Odum mean. I can even believe that John

Rankin and Richard Russell and James Byrnes and Strom Thurmond signify

this in their acts and in their words, and that Theodore Bilbo signified

this too. Whiteness does not mitigate the relentless warping by the race

situation in America. White men are half-men too—sick men, and perhaps

some of them the more to be pitied because they do not know that they

are sick. Some of them—the good, lucky ones, like Lillian Smith—have

succeeded somewhat in objectifying it; but neither for them nor for me

is there a neutral ground on which to stand. Neither they nor I can

resign from the human race. The best I can hope to do is to externalize

the struggle and set it in the unconfined context of the universal

struggle for human dignity and wholeness and unity.

I must confess that, unless I have implied them all along (and this

unconsciously), I have no specific remedies for our American sickness. I

cannot say that education, in the formal sense, will cure us. Education

has failed and has become tiresome in its failures. Or perhaps it is

only that prejudice and superstition have opposed any serious attempt to

apply education as a remedy. Even though our reason, thoroughly grounded

in the scientific knowledge in which the age takes so much pride, backs

the ethic of universal brotherhood and declares that “man is a social

being who can reach his fullest development only through interaction

with his fellows,” prejudice and superstition, as the case confirms, are

stronger. Prejudice, Lillian Smith points out, declares that there are

“‘sacred and profane’ people according to criteria as infantile as skin

color and as primitive as ‘blood,’” and that there must be no

interaction between them. Superstition dissociates the fulfillment of

man’s destiny from man’s character, thereby proclaiming that the destiny

of society is unknowable and entirely out of the hands of man.

I cannot believe that laws and government are specifics. They are and

should be involved with the relationship of the individual to the group,

but they are involved only on a superficial level. Laws and government,

when controlled by the wrong men—even a minority of the wrong men—as

they frequently are in a democracy, can be perverted. Laws and

government discipline, as Talleyrand, I think it was, said, by

negatives. They say what cannot be done, but do not necessarily

encourage what should be done. They are soulless. Without them, of

course, we would have anarchy; but experience does not encourage one to

believe that with more laws and government we would have peace.

Moreover, they can be set at defiance, and the defiers can often attain

renown and rank as courageous patriots.

I would say that Christianity promises a cure for our American sickness.

But it must be made truly a way of life in which the dignity and

brotherhood of man is the first principle. Perhaps it should be divorced

from mysticism and otherworldliness—from theology. I would emphasize the

relation of man to man rather than the relation of man to God. I would

substitute the authority of Christ’s insight for the authority of all

ecclesiastical dogma. I would blazon across the earth: “Love ye one

another.”